Once Craved. Blake Pierce

Holbrook said. “This is the smallest of the artificial lakes. It’s stocked with fish, and it’s a popular recreation spot, but the public areas are on the other side of the lake. The body was discovered by a couple of teenagers stoned on pot. I’ll show you where.”

      Holbrook led them off the road to a stone ridge overlooking the lake.

      “The kids were right where we’re standing,” he said. He pointed down to the edge of the lake. “They looked down there and saw it. They said that it just looked like a dark shape in the water.”

      “What time of day were the kids here?” Riley asked.

      “A little earlier than it is right now,” Holbrook said. “They had cut school and gotten stoned.”

      Riley took in the whole scene. The sun was low, and the tops of the red rock cliffs across the lake were ablaze with light. There were a couple of boats out on the water. The sheer drop from the ridge down to the water wasn’t far – a mere ten feet, maybe.

      Holbrook pointed to a place nearby where the slope wasn’t as steep.

      “The kids climbed down over there to get a closer look,” he said. “That’s when they found out what it really was.”

      Poor kids, Riley thought. It had been some two decades since she’d tried marijuana back in college. Even so, she could well imagine the heightened horror of making such a discovery while under the influence.

      “Do you want to climb down there for a closer look?” Bill asked Riley.

      “No, it’s a good view from here,” Riley said.

      Her gut told her that she was right where she needed to be. After all, the killer surely hadn’t lugged the body down the same slope where the kids had gone down.

      No, she thought. He stood right here.

      It even looked like the sparse vegetation was still broken down a little where she was standing.

      She took a few breaths, trying to slip into his point of view. He’d undoubtedly come here at night. But was it a clear night or a cloudy one? Well, in Arizona at this time of year, the chances were that the night was clear. And she recalled that the moon would have been bright about a week ago. In the starlight and moonlight, he could have seen what he was doing pretty well – possibly even without a flashlight.

      She imagined him putting the body down right here. But then what had he done next? Obviously he had rolled the body off the ledge. It had fallen straight down into the shallow water.

      But something about this scenario struck Riley as wrong. She wondered again, as she had on the plane, how he could have been so careless.

      True, from up here on the ledge, he probably couldn’t have seen that the body hadn’t sunk very far. The kids had described the bag as “a dark shape in the water.” From this height, the submerged bag had likely been invisible even on a bright night. He’d assumed that the body had sunk, as newly dead bodies do in fresh water, especially when weighted down with stones.

      But why did he suppose that the water was deep right here?

      She peered down into the clear water. In the late afternoon light, she could easily see the submerged ledge where the body had landed. It was a small horizontal area, nothing more than the top of a boulder. Around it, the water was black and deep.

      She looked around the lake. Sheer cliffs jutted up everywhere out of the water. She could see that Nimbo Lake had been a deep canyon before the dam had filled it with water. She saw only a few places where one could walk along the shoreline. The cliff sides dropped straight down into the depths.

      To her right and left, Riley saw ridges that were similar to the one where they were standing, rising to about the same height. The water beneath those cliffs was dark, showing no signs of the kind of ledge that lay below right here.

      She felt a tingle of comprehension.

      “He’s done this before,” she told Bill and Holbrook. “There’s another body in this lake.”

*

      On the helicopter ride back to the FBI Phoenix Division headquarters, Holbrook said, “So you think this is a serial case after all?”

      “Yes, I do,” Riley said.

      Holbrook said, “I wasn’t positive. Mostly I was eager to get someone good on the case. But what did you see that made up your mind?”

      “There are other ledges that look just like the one he pushed this body over,” she explained. “He used one of those other drop-offs before, and that body sank just like it was supposed to. But maybe he couldn’t find the same spot this time. Or maybe he thought this was the same spot. Anyway, he expected the same result this time. He was wrong.”

      Bill said, “I told you she’d find something there.”

      “Divers will need to search this lake,” Riley added.

      “That will take some doing,” Holbrook said.

      “It’s got to be done anyway. There’s another body down there somewhere. You can count on it. I don’t know how long it’s been there, but it’s there.”

      She paused, mentally assessing what all this said about the killer’s personality. He was competent and capable. This wasn’t a pathetic loser, like Eugene Fisk. He was more like Peterson, the killer who had captured and tormented both her and April. He was shrewd and poised, and he thoroughly enjoyed killing – a sociopath rather than a psychopath. Above all else, he was confident.

      Maybe too confident for his own good, Riley thought.

      It might well prove to be his downfall.

      She said, “The guy we’re looking for isn’t some criminal lowlife. My guess is he’s an ordinary citizen, reasonably well-educated, maybe with a wife and family. Nobody who knows him thinks he’s a killer.”

      Riley watched Holbrook’s face as they talked. Although she now knew something about the case she hadn’t known before, Holbrook still struck her as utterly impenetrable.

      The helicopter circled over the FBI building. Twilight had fallen and the area below was well lighted.

      “Look there,” Bill said, pointing out the window.

      Riley looked down where he pointed. She was surprised to see that from here the rock garden looked like a gigantic fingerprint. It spread out beneath them like a welcome sign. Some offbeat landscaper had decided that this image arranged out of stone was better suited for the new FBI building than a planted garden would have been. Hundreds of substantial stones had been carefully placed in curving rows to create the ridged illusion.

      “Wow,” Riley said to Bill. “Whose fingerprint do you suppose they used? Someone legendary, I guess. Dillinger, maybe?”

      “Or maybe John Wayne Gacy. Or Jeffrey Dahmer.”

      Riley thought it a strange spectacle. On the ground, no one would ever guess that the arrangement of stones was anything more than a meaningless maze.

      It struck her almost as a sign and a warning. This case was going to demand that she view things from a new and unsettling perspective. She was about to probe regions of darkness that not even she had imagined.

      Chapter Nine

      The man enjoyed watching streetwalkers. He liked how they grouped on the corner and pranced up and down the sidewalks, mostly in pairs. He found them to be much feistier than call girls and escorts, prone to easily losing their temper.

      For example, right now, he saw one cursing a bunch of uncouth young guys in a slow-moving vehicle for taking her picture. The man didn’t blame her one bit. After all, she was here to do business, not to serve as scenery.

      Where’s their respect? he thought with a smirk. Kids these days.

      Now the guys were laughing at her and yelling obscenities. But they couldn’t match her colorful retorts, some of them in Spanish. He liked her style.

      He was slumming tonight,