Me, Myself and Why? by Davidson MaryJanice

Author:Davidson, MaryJanice [Davidson, MaryJanice]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Romance
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2010-09-28T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

Two men, one woman. The triple-victim pattern was like that in Minot, in Des Moines, in Pierre, and now here. All stabbed with what the coroner thought was a good-sized fillet knife—something to do the job quickly, something easy to keep sharp. Something not out of place in the average kitchen. (You want to lose all interest in cooking? Visit a kitchen-based crime scene. I promise you’ll have to do it only once.) No other bruises on the bodies; they weren’t beaten or dragged. They just showed up dead.

Profiling the victims had been an exercise in mind-numbing futility. They were all different ages and races. ThreeFer had killed busboys and physicians; men and women; an alcoholic and a marathon runner, for heaven’s sake. Tox screens always came back negative, except for booze—and not every time, either. Some of the victims had been seriously impaired, some stone-cold sober. BACs came back anywhere from 0.0 to 0.11.

Because we had been unable to find commonality in the victims, we were nowhere on our profile. Until we figured out the connections the victims had to ThreeFer, we had more crime scenes to look forward to—a distressing thought, to put it mildly.

Shoot, we didn’t even know when the victims had been taken. Time of death could be deduced, but some of the victims had spent half a day or more with their killer—and some of them hadn’t even been reported missing before the body showed up. About the only thing we’d been able to figure was that ThreeFer was taking each victim one at a time, then dumping three bodies sometime later.

The bodies were always dumped somewhere semipublic (lab advised they were all killed elsewhere, and dumped where a civilian would find them and call a cop—and never in a neighborhood where a civilian would find them and not bother), and these were no exception; they were in an alley, easily visible from the sidewalk. Yes, about the only thing we could be completely sure of was that the victims had been killed elsewhere, then discarded with another awful verse.

The verses! Another puzzle, another frustrating clue that no one could figure. ThreeFer left an excerpt from a Shakespearean sonnet at each crime scene.

Pierre:

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,/So do our minutes hasten to their end;/Each changing place with that which goes before/In sequent toil all forwards do contend.

Des Moines:

Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly?/Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy:/Why lov’st thou that which thou receiv’st not gladly,/Or else receiv’st with pleasure thine annoy?

Minot:

For thou art so possessed with murd’rous hate/That ’gainst thy self thou stick’st not to conspire,/Seeking that beauteous roof to ruinate/Which to repair should be thy chief desire.

And here, in Minneapolis, courtesy of Officer Rivers’s iPod:

Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck,/And yet methinks I have astronomy;/But not to tell of good or evil luck,/Of plagues, of dearths, or season’s quality.

“Oh, fuck me till I cry.” George sighed. He disliked Shakespeare. Me,

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