Already Gone (A Laura Frost FBI Suspense Thriller—Book 1) Read online

  CHAPTER TEN

  Laura spotted the sheriff easily: a tall, older man in a tan uniform, awkwardly holding a sign with FROST/LAVOIE printed on it in block capitals. He stood out from the crowd, both because of his appearance and because of the way he was nervously checking his watch—like he couldn’t spare a single moment more before they got started on the case.

  “I’m glad you folks are here,” he said, walking them toward the exit after the necessary introductions. He swept his formal uniform cap off his head to reveal a bushy crop of gray hair. He’d called himself Sheriff Lonsdale—no first name. Of course, he’d already known both of theirs. “We’re a little on edge, as you might imagine. Seems a high possibility that we’ll see another one tonight. We’re much in need of the help.”

  “We’ll do whatever we can,” Nate assured him, keeping up easily with his long strides as the sheriff rushed them out to the parking lot. Still feeling a little dazed and distracted, Laura forced herself to walk faster to catch up with them.

  “You’ve had two bodies in two nights, is that right?” Laura asked. It was always good to check the information provided in the briefing. Everything could have already changed while they were in the air.

  “That’s right.” The sheriff gestured to a parking space not far away, where a black vehicle marked with a gold flash and the word “SHERIFF” across the side waited.

  “Then let’s try and prevent another from happening,” Laura said grimly. “I don’t think we should waste any time, given that it’s getting to be late in the afternoon already. Can we head straight to the latest crime scene?”

  “Absolutely,” the sheriff said, unlocking the car and opening the trunk. “We can put your bags in here; I’ll have someone come and take them to a motel for you.”

  Laura climbed into the back while Nate joined the sheriff in the front. It was less a comment on who was superior to who, and more about space; Nate being a good seven inches taller than her meant he needed the leg room. She didn’t begrudge him it, either. It was better to stay back and avoid the worst of the small talk.

  “Have there been any developments in the last couple of hours?” Nate asked, as the sheriff put the car into gear and backed out of the lot.

  “Nothing special,” the sheriff said, sighing. “We’ve been doing our best. Still waiting on forensics reports for the second victim, but the first one came back. Preliminary, at least.”

  “Any evidence we can work with?”

  “Not yet.” From her position in the backseat, Laura could see the sheriff’s mouth reflected in the rearview mirror; when he wasn’t speaking, it settled into a thin, hard line. “They’ll run further tests, but we’re not seeing anything usable. No fingerprints other than the victim’s and her roommate’s. No unidentified hair follicles or bits of fabric or skin under the fingernails—nothing we’d want to see in a case like this.”

  “Like this?” Laura asked, her ears perking up. Understanding how the police on the ground were seeing the case was essential. Not only would it possibly help inform their own impression of it, but there was also the factor of internal bias. If they’d decided already the case was going one way, Laura and Nate needed to make sure that it was the right decision. Otherwise, they could all end up blind to other facts that didn’t support their working theory.

  “Strangers,” the sheriff said, glancing at her in the mirror. Laura caught a glimpse of his eyes as he moved his head. They were flintlike, gray, just like the straggling remains of hair on his head. “As far as we can see, there’s no link between the two women. So our working theory is this was done by strangers.”

  Laura made a mental note of that, but said nothing. It had been the same conclusion they’d drawn on the plane, but that didn’t mean it was true. After all, there were countless ways that people could interact—particularly in this internet age. The two women might have commented on the same thread on a forum and the killer was in there too. It could be as tenuous as that. Really, properly checking for connections wasn’t a simple job that could be completed in less than twenty-four hours.

  Right now, it was looking likely that the murders were committed by a stranger. That didn’t make it definite.

  The cruiser wound down wide streets that looked as though they could have been almost anywhere in the US. Standard block formations, trees at intersections, Starbucks and McDonald’s and mom-and-pop stores that were few and far between. The buildings were tall and stately, solid rectangles that had been around for long enough to witness boom and bust over and over. City life was going on all around them as they drove. People walking to and from work, kids coming home from school, moms with strollers running errands.

  It always struck Laura how removed they were from normal life. How odd it was that normal life was bustling around these crime scenes, which always had a kind of pallor over them. Like there was one tiny point in the world where time had stopped, and everything was slow and somber, but the rest was unaffected.

  When you spent years interacting with others only at these places, these other worlds, you started to forget what it was like to go back to reality. Adding in her visions, Laura hadn’t felt like she was anywhere close to touching normal for a long time. The drink had been the only thing that helped with that.

  Until it had robbed her of everything else she’d still had, and left her only with that isolated feeling, that morbid existence of lurching from murder scene to murder scene.

  “This is it,” Sheriff Lonsdale said, snapping Laura’s attention to the windows on the other side of the car. They were coming up on a small apartment block, a converted home with three stories and a small porch. It looked boxed in, next to two much larger blocks that dwarfed it, leaving it constantly in the shade.

  There was a section of police tape across the entrance, and a deputy standing guard to the side of the building to ensure no one could creep around the back. Laura was already taking off her seatbelt as the car pulled up to the curb, ready to jump out and hit the ground running on the investigation.

  Two hours in a plane and then the car journey meant that standing up and breathing fresh air felt good. Well, as fresh as you could get in a city. Laura stretched her arms above her head on the sidewalk, shaking out the kinks.

  “The body’s been taken to the morgue, I presume?” Nate said, sliding on a pair of sunglasses against the bright sun. Laura had been wearing hers since they got off the plane. It was a habit of hers, so that when she needed to wear them because of her headaches it wasn’t so obvious.

  “It has,” the sheriff confirmed. “But we’ve preserved the rest of the scene for you to examine.”

  As they followed him up the short steps onto the porch, Laura felt a prickling feeling on the back of her neck. It only seemed to intensify as they walked inside the building and to another interior door, presumably leading to the first-floor apartment.

  What was that?

  It dawned on her as the sheriff led them upstairs and through a second-floor door into the victim’s home. It was déjà vu. She felt as though she’d been here before.

  She felt that way, but she couldn’t have been. She’d never even been to Albany until now. How could she know this place? How could she have known to look for the peeled-back edge of the wallpaper by the kitchen door if she hadn’t already known it was there?

  Laura was silent as she stepped through the apartment, slipping on a pair of gloves so she would be free to touch anything she saw. The kitchen was ahead, she knew that. There was a fridge just a little too close to the cupboards. She stepped through and there it was: just how she had expected.

  How was it that she knew all of this?

  It was like she had seen it on TV, though of course that wasn’t the case.

  “This is where she was found,” Sheriff Lonsdale said, startling her as he appeared right behind her. “She was lying right there, beside the table. Looks like the phone was just long enough to reach.

  Laura nodded, looking down at the cor
d. The handset was still lying on the floor where it had been extricated from the victim’s neck. There was no blood, not much sign of a struggle. The only free-standing furniture in the whole kitchen was the fridge and the table, and they didn’t appear to have been affected.

  There was a microwaveable tray of congealed mac and cheese sitting on the table, a dirty fork lying beside it. Yes, Laura thought. The mac and cheese was familiar too.

  “Do you have the pictures?” Laura asked. There hadn’t been any included with the briefing. She’d assumed that was because the local police photographer hadn’t been able to finish his images in time for the printout.

  “Here.” The sheriff pulled out a folder from under his arm and extricated several printed shots, handing them to her. Laura held one of them, a full-body shot, up in the air until it aligned with the view in front of her.

  “She was holding the phone,” Laura said, loud for Nate’s benefit. He had come back into the hall behind them, but there was nowhere near enough room for all three of them to look through the doorway.

  “Yes, she actually managed to make a call to nine-one-one before she was killed,” the sheriff said. “Unfortunately, he strangled her with the phone cord while she was still on the line. We do have the recording. Would you like to hear that?”

  Laura considered it. “Does he say anything? Make any identifiable noises?”

  “No.”

  “Anything relevant from her?”

  “No, she barely makes a noise at all, apart from the choking. Just says that someone’s broken in, and that’s all we got.”

  Laura shook her head. “Then I don’t want to hear it until I have to. We hit a dead end, then we’ll listen. But it doesn’t sound like it’s going to be much use, and this case is dark enough already without audio of the moment of her death.” She glanced back at Nate to check he was on board with it, but his expression was open and it didn’t change. Laura was no sadist, and no masochist either. She didn’t think it would be good for either of them, hearing that. Not until it was necessary.

  She just hoped it wasn’t going to become necessary.

  “All right, what else?” Nate asked. “She had the cord around her neck still?”

  “Yes, it’s as though he just dropped her to the ground and left her there,” the sheriff said. He leaned over Laura’s shoulder to point at several areas on the image; she tried not to be too obvious as she flinched back away from his touch. She’d seen enough hovering death today. If she was going to be having visions, she needed them to be focused on the case—not on whether the sheriff was likely to stub his toe on his way to bed tonight. “We think he strangled her from behind, possibly as she was trying to get away from him. He would have used the cord to bring her up short, then used her own body weight and his to keep the cord tight. Medical examiner is telling us that he probably lifted her off her feet, into the air, judging by the impressions on her throat.”

  “The act of killing is enough,” Laura mused. “He kills her, then drops her. She’s no longer any use to him.”

  “So, we’re not looking at a sexually motived crime,” Nate said. “Anything taken?”

  “Not a robbery either,” the sheriff confirmed. “Other than the smashed bedroom window, and this phone off the hook in here, it’s like no one ever came in. Come and look at this.”

  They turned as a unit, Nate and Laura both following the sheriff into the bedroom. The space was no less cramped in here; there was only just enough room for one person to walk around all three sides of the bed, with the headboard close to the window. One wall of the room was packed with a dresser, a small table holding an alarm clock, and a makeshift wardrobe rack hanging free.

  The sheriff pointed carefully at the alarm clock, making sure they were watching before he lifted it up. Around the clock, a ring of grime and discoloration made the cleaner patch underneath it stand out starkly.

  “That’s how you know nothing else is missing,” Laura said, nodding. She glanced around the rest of the space. The gaping hole where the window had once been and the debris of the shards all over the bed seemed to tell the rest of the story eloquently enough. She leaned over, her eyes scanning the covers, the windowsill. There was no sign of any kind of shoe print.

  “He got in over the fire escape?” Nate asked, nodding at the window.

  “Oh, yes.” The sheriff nodded. He leaned toward the hole, pointing outward. “It’s fixed to the side of the building, just here. Not a direct route, but all he would need to do would be to swing out from the fire escape and smash through the glass feet first. Or using something to smash it—a stone or anything, really—and then swing himself through. We believe he left the same way, as the front door was still locked.”

  “I suppose a witness statement is too much to hope for?” Nate said.

  The sheriff grinned at that. “Unfortunately,” he said. “It was late in the evening, and the back of the property has no external lighting. Anyway, from what forensics are saying, it’s likely he wore a hat or a mask. So an eyewitness report wouldn’t necessarily do us much good at this stage.”

  Laura nodded, glancing around one last time. She stepped back without saying anything, heading back to the kitchen. She need to get some idea of what had happened here. A vision, maybe. Something that would give her another piece of the puzzle. She couldn’t see the past, but she might be able to see a clue, something that they would otherwise miss. A new homeowner finding an ID card that had slipped underneath the carpet years later, during renovation. That kind of thing could happen.

  She glanced behind to check that the sheriff and Nate were still occupied in looking over the bedroom, and quickly slipped her hand out of one of her gloves. She laid it on the wall by the doorframe, a spot that the killer was unlikely to have touched. Something that wouldn’t compromise future evidence. Then she tried to concentrate, to focus in. She smelled the tang of the mac and cheese, sitting and spoiling out on the counter. She heard the low murmur of Nate’s and the sheriff’s voices, but also the hum of the fridge, the rush of traffic on the street outside. She felt the smooth surface of the plastered wall, cool under her fingers.

  The pulse of pressure between her eyes was light this time, not a full-blown headache. That was something of a bad sign; the harsher the pain, the more urgent the vision, Laura knew. This was sometime in the future. She felt it building up and willed it to come quicker, to pour over her like a wave—

  Laura was viewing the scene from the same doorway, but above, hovering somewhere near the ceiling. The door had been removed at some point. The table and fridge were gone, and the stove had been stripped out. The other cupboards hung rotten.

  There was graffiti on the walls, and a strong smell rising to her nose. Urine, smoke. Laura wrinkled her eyes and tried to squint. The picture was so unclear, like she was watching through dirty water. It swirled around her, leaving her unable to see the whole scene at once.

  She listened but heard nothing, only the traffic on the street outside. Then something: yes! She found herself drawn closer to it, the vision taking her just where she had wanted to go, down, down to the floor level, to a pile of trash heaped in a corner—

  And a rat shot out of it, running toward her with some morsel clamped in its jaws, a bit of old vegetable matter that was long past decay, right at her…

  Laura blinked and opened her eyes on the kitchen again, whole and still a crime scene. She took a breath against the flash of the headache that sent her roiling, then slipped her glove back on. The pain wasn’t bad at all; she could handle it. That must have been years from now.

  No one wanted to live in an apartment where someone was murdered after a break-in, she figured. All too easy for it to happen to the next tenant as well. This place would fall into disrepair in the future, and if there were any lingering clues, there would be no one to find them.

  It didn’t tell her anything useful. Sometimes the visions were like that. She couldn’t control them, except by creating the optimal
conditions for them to come. That meant putting herself more into the path of the killer. If she got connected to him strongly enough, she might be able to see his next move—like she had with the scumbag who kidnapped Amy.

  Once she was close enough to crossing his path, touching anything could trigger it—her gun, Nate’s gun, her own arm if they were going to end up directly linked. But for now, she was getting nothing. Even the sense of déjà vu she’d felt was gone. Maybe it had her imagination, or some lingering shadow of the vision of the broken apartment that she’d been about to have. It wasn’t as though she always understood why her visions came, or how they worked. Maybe she was starting to feel them before they came now, too.

  Either way, one thing was clear. They needed to get closer. She wasn’t going to get any useful visions until they did.

  “We should talk to the victim’s relatives next,” Laura said, turning to join Nate again. “What was her name? Caroline?”

  “Good plan,” Nate said, looking to the sheriff. “You good to drive us over there?”

  “Sure thing.” The sheriff nodded. “We’ve got one of our boys down there right now, sitting with them and providing some comfort, you know the drill. I’ll give him a call to expect us and we’ll be on our way.”

  Laura glanced around one more time and then nodded firmly, gesturing for Nate to head to the door first. They were done here, and the quicker they moved on, the better. There was, after all, the possibility that someone else could die tonight.

  And going to talk to Caroline’s family would be the first step toward a vision that might help her stop that from happening.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Laura stood by as Nate knocked loudly on the door, staring up and waiting for it to open. There was always that awkward moment between knocking and being answered. When you weren’t sure if you were just waiting outside an empty house. When you tried to rearrange your face to something that would be friendly and open, and then hold it until someone got there.