I'll Be Watching You. Tracy Montoya
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made a point to keep his focus steady on the contusions on Janie Sanchez’s neck. It seemed like another violation to look at the rest of her body while having this discussion.
“Dammit, Cardenas, it has to be a copycat.”
He jerked his head up in surprise—his tough-as-nails partner never let her emotions show. Not like that—imposing her own interpretation on a crime scene because she couldn’t bear to think of the alternative.
She didn’t meet his eye, instead rising from the ground. Squaring her shoulders, she came back to herself and started barking orders. She swept from the room, and everyone else hustled to comply with her commands, obviously relieved to have something to occupy their too-busy minds.
As Daniel rose, Lockwood approached him.
“Up until 1905, it was legal in China to execute someone for a capital offense by lingchi , or the ‘death of a thousand cuts,’” Lockwood murmured as he, too, stared down at the body.
Daniel knew what he was talking about. The ancient form of capital punishment was reportedly as gruesome as the name suggested, with the executioner inflicting multiple nonlethal cuts all over the victim’s body, prolonging death until said victim finally expired from his cumulative wounds.
“Janie Sanchez died of a thousand cuts,” Lockwood continued. “Borkowski might want to insist it’s a copycat, but I don’t know…I’ve never seen another man who did that to his victims.”
Chapter One
Hustling out the door on her way to work, Adriana Torres caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of her eye that stopped her in her tracks. Her keys fell out of her suddenly slack grip, jangling loudly as they hit the ground.
A nasty-looking hunting knife protruded from her home’s siding. Pinned to the wood by the sharply gleaming steel was a folded slip of paper. She didn’t need to read its contents to know that the message would be very concise and very disturbing.
“Nice.”
Some people’s neighbors said good morning to each other as they started their day. Hers jabbed knives into her house. And por el amor de Dios, what had her house ever done to them?
Rolling her eyes heavenward and muttering a brief prayer for patience in Spanish, Addy grabbed hold of the handle, giving it a good tug. When it didn’t come out on the first try, she dropped her tote back on her front stoop with a thud and tried again with both hands until the knife chunked free.
She didn’t bother to glance around her quiet street, figuring it was hardly worth it to muster up the energy to be annoyed anymore. As one of the neighborhood dogs started up a faraway, staccato bark, she examined the latest addition to her growing collection of cutlery. It felt heavier and looked a little more expensive than usual.
Whatever. Maybe the idiot who’d put it there thought that spending more money would be scarier. As if.
Purposefully adopting a bored expression, just in case the nasty little twerp was watching, she picked up her keys and dropped them back into her purse. She’d always hated the thought of living in a wealthy gated community, but at times like this the idea had its attractions.
Pushing the door back open with one hip, she kicked at the slip of paper that had fallen to the ground after she’d freed the knife holding it. It fluttered inside the house, and she picked up her tote and followed suit. Without bothering to pick the paper up, she headed for the phone in her kitchen. She dialed the familiar number without glancing at the list of her favorite contacts stuck to the fridge.
“Borkowski,” came a woman’s curt response.
“Hey, Liz, it’s me.” Addy leaned against the counter, a frisson of annoyance tracking up her spine as she contemplated being late to work because of a stupid prank…again. But while she and Liz both knew that none of the teenage troublemakers who lived on her block was going to slink forward and confess, she’d promised her friend she would call each and every time someone stabbed her house. “Got another note.”
“Same deal as last time?”
Addy tossed the knife on the counter. “If by that you mean, one large, ugly knife that left yet another large, ugly hole in my siding, yes. Every time Halloween comes around, it’s the prank du jour.”
Liz swore softly—which was very uncharacteristic of her—and for the first time, Addy realized that the usual sounds she heard in the background when she called Liz at the station—papers shuffling, phones ringing—weren’t present. Instead, it sounded like Liz was outside.
“Is this a bad time?” Addy asked. “You out and about doing your cop thing?”
“No, no,” said Liz, sounding somewhat preoccupied despite her denial. “I’m at a scene, but this is important.”
“After seven of these notes since…” She let her voice trail off, not wanting to think about the event that had divided her life into before and since. “I don’t think it’s all that important, Liz. The sky hasn’t fallen yet.”
The first threat had also come in October, exactly a year after the love of Addy’s life, Monterey Police Detective James Brentwood, had been killed in the line of duty while hunting a prolific serial killer—a serial killer who was now dead, thank you very much. But a bestselling book about the case had made her little corner of the city rather notorious, since the killer known as The Surgeon had drowned just a few yards away from Addy’s home in an FBI-Monterey PD undercover operation.
And suddenly the kids in her neighborhood had found it amusing to leave notes on her door, pretending to be the resurrected killer of her beloved fiancé by mimicking his favorite way of terrorizing his intended victims.
Sometimes you just had to wonder what was wrong with people.
The first time, the message had terrified her beyond belief, coming on the grim anniversary as it had. Then, more notes came, and they were always the same—someone would leave a cheap knife embedded in her wooden door, along with a childishly scrawled note saying he was “coming for” her.
So she’d bought a security system and a steel front door, and the notes kept coming, until there had been so many, all they sparked in her was contempt. If someone was really out to get her, she figured they’d have done something by now, rather than simply continuing to write about it. And on one occasion, she’d seen a suspiciously gangly, teenager-looking shadow lurking about her front door when another note had appeared, which had led her and the police to believe that she was merely the target of a few young pranksters in the area with tragically inept parents.
“I’m sorry, Addy,” Liz said, breaking a silence that had stretched out for too long. It seemed as if all of her conversations did that, in the four years since James had died. “This has to be so hard on you, especially now.”
Especially now. October again. The month when she’d lost James.
Addy picked at a hangnail as she watched the cold waves of the Pacific Ocean crash spectacularly against the jagged black rocks that lined the shore outside her window. Four years. She’d gotten to the point where she could handle being left behind most days, where the intense, indescribable grief she’d felt at losing him was just a dull memory, hanging in the background of her everyday activities—always there, but something she could live with. Like Liz lived with it, although she and James had just been work partners and friends.
And then sometimes, out of the blue, it sucker-punched Addy in the stomach, leaving her gasping for air and wondering whether she’d even be able to function into the next hour, much less the next decade. And all the ones that would come after.
Too long. Too long to be without him.
She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, trying to pull herself together enough to finish the conversation, so she could hang up, call in sick and scream into her pillow until she fell into an exhausted sleep, the way she’d done too many times to count. Unfair.
Unfair-unfair-unfair-unfair-unfair….