beam rose to the ceiling and moved in a slow circle before stopping in the center of the room directly over the congealed puddle. “This was where she was hung up. On one of these.”
A series of iron eyelets, thick as a male’s thumb, were set in rows in the ceiling’s heavy beams. It was hard to imagine what they had been used for. Maybe as part of a dyeing system for fabric?
“Was it by ropes?” Boone asked. “How she was hung up, I mean.”
“A meat hook.” The Brother got down onto his haunches and looked around, his lamp illuminating the Jello-like blood too many times for Boone’s comfort. “Boy . . . if she wasn’t dead before he hung her up, she did not last long.”
“Him?” Boone tried to cough the tightness in his throat away. “I thought you said we shouldn’t draw conclusions.”
“Fair enough, you caught me. But statistically, the vast majority of serial killers are male. And the ritual nature of these killings, with the females strung up, throats slashed, all of them bleeding out here at the club, is a clear pattern. The killer finds what they’re looking for and does what they have to with the victims out of sight down here.”
Boone coughed into his fist again. “What exactly did he do to her?”
“I didn’t show you the pictures, did I?” The Brother held his phone out behind him on an arm stretch. “They’re in the camera section.”
Boone swallowed hard as he took the unit and went into photographs. When he called up the first of . . .
“Oh . . . fuck,” he breathed.
One terrible image, after another . . . after another. There seemed to be an endless number of them—and abruptly, the smell of the rotten, moldy earth, and the cold pool of blood, and the idea that someone had lost their life right down here where he was made him dizzy.
“Excuse me for a moment.”
The polite words were spoken fast, and he didn’t wait for an acknowledgment. His body moved before he was aware of his brain ordering his legs to lift his feet so he could back away. When he hit the door opposite the one that was open, he coughed a couple more times and turned the phone screen into his leg. Dropping his head, he breathed through his mouth and felt the world spin—
The smell of fresh air in the springtime, of delicate flowers, of . . . sunshine . . . had him lifting his eyes.
Down by the stairwell’s door, a figure was standing still as a statue and focused on him. And in spite of the black hooded robe that covered the head and draped down to the feet, he knew it was a female.
And that scent of hers. It went in through his nose and didn’t stop there. Somewhere along the neuropathways of his mind, or maybe it was in his very veins, what started as a thing he smelled became a fullbody sensory experience.
Like touch.
Like . . . a caress.
Straightening, he took a step forward. And another. Sure as if she were calling his name and he were powerless to resist the entreaty. But before he made it very far, she disappeared back through the stairwell’s door quick as a gasp.
Desperate not to lose her, he took off in her wake, his stride nothing short of a bolt. By the time he got to where she had been standing, the distorted steel panel was easing into its poor-fit position against its jambs, and he yanked the weight open. Following that springtime scent, he jumped up the steps three at a time and broke out into the club proper.
She must have been going at a dead run, he thought. To have gotten up those landings that fast.
Boone looked around to assess whether she’d gone all the way out of the building or was trying to get lost in the crowd. If the latter was her goal? Mission accomplished. There were too many people dressed in black with too many cloaks covering their heads—
There she was. Heading for the exit. Fast.
Shoving humans out of the way, Boone didn’t care if he created chaos—and unlike her, his big body couldn’t bob and weave through the tight squeezes between the men and women. By the time he ran through where the coat check was, she was out the door, her scent already beginning to fade.
Out in the cold, he barraged past the bouncers and looked left and right—