“Neither of the others was buried,” Dixon pointed out. “Let alone displayed like this one.”

Their victim’s head was entirely above ground, propped up on a stone the size of a loaf of bread. Staged for maximum shock value. This was something new: the body left in a very public park, off the beaten path, but definitely in a place where it would be found.

“It’s risky,” Mendez said. “Maybe he wants attention. I think we’ve got a serial killer on our hands.”

Dixon took a step toward him, scowling. “I don’t want to hear those words coming out of your mouth again outside my office.”

“But this vic makes three. I can reach out to Quantico now.”

“Yeah, that’s what we need,” Farman said. “Some Feeb strutting around like the cock of the walk. Who the hell cares if this creep wet his pants when he was ten? What good is that? They’ll send some hotshot who just wants to be on the news to tell the world he’s a genius and we’re a bunch of stupid hicks.”

Dixon glanced over his shoulder at the crowd still gathered on the other side of the crime scene tape. “Nobody says shit about this crime possibly being connected to any other. Nobody says anything about the eyes and mouth being glued shut. Nobody mentions the letters F-B-I.”

Mendez felt the word “but” lodge in his throat like a chicken bone.

“I’m sending the body to LA County,” Dixon announced, his stark blue eyes on the victim. “We need a coroner who isn’t an undertaker by day.”

“They’ve got bodies stacked on top of each other down there,” Farman said.

“I can reach out to some people. We can get priority.”

“Sheriff, if this guy has killed three, he’ll kill four, five, six,” Mendez said, keeping his voice down. “How many women did Bundy kill? He confessed to thirty. Some people think the number was closer to a hundred. Do we have to wait for some more women to die before—”

“Don’t piss me off, Detective,” Dixon warned. “The first thing we need to do is find out who this young woman was. She was somebody’s daughter.”

Mendez shut his mouth and reflected on that. Tonight some family was missing a daughter. If they even realized she was gone, they would still have hope she could be found. They would still have the dread of uncertainty. In a day or two or ten—when this corpse was finally identified and given a name—their hope would become despair. The uncertainty would be over, replaced by the stone-cold fact that someone had taken her life away from them, brutally and without mercy.

And that someone was still out there, very probably hunting for his next victim.

Chapter 6

6