The Fifth Angel Read online

  Finished, Amanda smiled doubtfully at herself in the mirror and went back downstairs to cook her oatmeal. The rich aroma of the cereal mixed pleasantly with the smells of spring that drifted in through the kitchen window on a warm breeze. Amanda breathed deep and sighed, considering the next three days. This was exactly what she needed, no travel, no late nights. Instead she would live the life of a normal suburban mother. It was a reprieve from the grind of her latest case.

  The children stirred upstairs.

  She heard Parker thump his way to the bathroom and flick on the screeching shower. Just as the cereal was ready, they all began to appear. Her nine-year-old son, Teddy, wandered into the kitchen. Teddy had the round red face of his father with Amanda’s hair. He was oblivious to her, tousle-headed, wearing just his pajama bottoms and playing an electronic Gameboy. His little sister, Glenda, wasn’t far behind him. She, on the other hand, was already dressed in a pink jumper. She had pulled her own brown hair into pigtails and tied them off with two pink hairbands.

  “Hi, Mommy,” she said, her voice nearly chirping. “You’re going to come with me to Brownies today after school, right?”

  “Good morning, sweetheart,” Amanda said, kissing her daughter. “Yes I am.

  “And what about you?” she asked her son. “Don’t I get a good morning from you?”

  “Oh, hi, Mom,” Teddy said without lifting his head.

  “Did you do your homework last night?” Amanda asked.

  “Maybe,’’ he said. Not even looking her in the eye.

  She watched his face.

  “Why does it matter?” he asked.

  A thick lump grew in her throat. “You have to do well in school,” she said.

  “What was I supposed to do last night?” he asked.

  She didn’t know. “Wasn’t it that science project?” she said. “That thing you were doing with worms and electricity?’’

  “Electricity kills worms, Mom. That was two different assignments and about four months ago.’’

  “What’s this about electric worms?” Parker said in his booming southern drawl. He had burst into the kitchen still working on his necktie. He was flush with the raw cheerfulness that had attracted Amanda to him so many years ago. Now it grated on her, but she let him kiss her cheek and hug her from behind.

  Amanda even leaned back into him. Parker was a big man, heavyset and solid like a bear despite a stomach that was beginning to get away from him. She thought it would be good for the kids to see them that way, and she squeezed his thick hand while she stirred the pot. It troubled her to show him affection for appearance’ sake. She wanted to mean it. She wanted this moment to touch her deep down. She concentrated on the sun’s warmth, the smells of the kitchen, and the comfortable sound of a family.

  But before she could really feel it, the phone rang.

  Amanda turned and looked at it on the wall. She looked questioningly at Parker, who scowled in turn. It kept ringing until he finally said, “Well, aren’t you going to answer it? It’s not for me.”

  “Me neither,” Teddy piped in.

  Glenda grinned and stuck out her tongue at her older brother as Amanda finally picked up the phone.

  “He got another one.”

  It was Marco Rivolaggio, assistant special agent in charge, her nominal boss and sometimes partner.

  “Where?” she asked.

  “Just outside Atlanta,” he said. “Fourteen years old.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Amanda looked involuntarily at her own little girl. Her stomach plunged and she swallowed the wash of bile. The bubble was burst.

  “This time the body is fresh,” Marco said. “Some guy pulled over on the side of the highway last night into one of those rest areas. He wandered into the bushes to do his business and found her. From what they’re saying, it sounds like it might have happened late yesterday.”

  “Then he’s still close by.”

  “According to your theory,” Marco said, “he shouldn’t be far. There’s a flight from National at eight-fifteen . . .”

  Amanda looked at the clock on the wall, trying not to let Parker’s scowl rattle her. Sometimes he acted like he were ten.

  “I’ll be on it,” she said. “Let me get a bag together and I’ll call you from the car.”

  She hung up and braced herself before turning to face her family.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “But what about Brownies?” Glenda said.

  Amanda felt desperate. She looked at Parker. He pursed his lips and shook his head as if he wouldn’t help.

  “Parker?” she said, trying not to let it sound like she was pleading.

  “Oh, I know,” he said, his features softening. “Drink water on the flight. Helps with the headache.’’

  Glenda absently twisted her spoon in the cereal, her head down like her brother’s.

  Parker watched her, took a breath, and said, “Your mother is an important lady. She’ll be back soon.’’

  Amanda heard her daughter’s soft acceptance as she bounded up the stairs. Minutes later, Amanda was dressed in a navy blue linen skirt and jacket with an eggshell blouse and flat shoes. She kissed Teddy on the head, then stopped in front of Glenda and knelt down.

  “Honey, I’m really sorry about Brownies.” She looked up into her daughter’s eyes. “Are you okay?”

  Glenda lifted her head toward her father. He nodded. Her lower lip curled a little and she nodded, too.

  “I’m the star of the week,” she said. Her little voice was quiet. “I get to go first in everything we do.”

  “Well,” Amanda said, “you’ll be a great star.”

  She kissed Glenda again, then stood up to kiss Parker.

  “Here,” he said gently, handing her a napkin off the table.

  “For what?” she asked.

  “You’ve . . .” he said. “There’s something in your eye.”

  Amanda took the napkin, looked at the clock, and rushed out the door. She called ahead to the airport to arrange clearance with the airline for her gun then dialed up Marco, who said he needed to call her back. That was fine. It gave her time to think. She forced her mind away from the spoiled plans at home.

  There was nothing she could do. She thought of Parker’s words about her being important. It wasn’t that. It was her job. Her job was important. Her plans with the kids were a cool fog, forgotten in the midday heat. She was fully focused now on the case she’d been working for the past ten months.

  During the last five years, since Glenda had turned two, Amanda had established herself as one of the FBI’s preeminent investigators of serial killers. Her colleagues were almost exclusively male, mostly in their forties and fifties. Amanda knew why she was part of that elite group. She wasn’t conceited, but it was an objective fact that her IQ had enabled her to go through college with a double major in just three years at the top of her class. She’d finished her master’s in one. But beyond being highly intelligent, she soon found as an agent that she had something you couldn’t learn from books, something she was more proud of than her intellect. She had instincts.

  To date every case she’d been assigned she had also solved. It had gotten so that it was no longer an embarrassment for even her male chauvinistic counterparts to call her in for an opinion. She was quickly developing a reputation. This case, however, was proving to be her most difficult. It was also the most horrifying.

  The victims were young. Amanda couldn’t even think to herself about what happened to them. She had to block that out. With other killers, she had been able to consider the victims with the detachment of a medical examiner. But not these. These were too young, too mutilated. Oh, she had seen the bodies and the detailed autopsy reports. But she’d take the information and plug it into her mental profile formula, then never think about them again. She just couldn’t, not if she wanted to stop him. The hatred would be too much of a distraction.

  Her cell phone rang. It was Marco. He wa
s busy helping coordinate with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation as well as the state police. They were covering every hotel, motel, and campground within a twenty-mile radius. It was no small task, but absolutely essential.

  “And they all know to be low-key?” Amanda asked.

  “Of course,” Marco said impatiently.

  She couldn’t help herself. This was the break they’d been waiting for. Usually they didn’t find his victims for weeks. But the pattern of gruesome details, reminiscent of a horror film, had given Amanda the impression that the killer was watching the stories unfold on television. That meant, in order to glean the full impact of the media sensation, he had to remain local.

  Although the crimes were being documented superficially on the national level, the morbid details, the hysterical interviews with family and friends, were available in their entirety only on the local news. The other thing that supported her theory was the fact that each new body was being found closer and closer to civilization, as if their man was becoming more and more impatient to see his work stirring up horror in the news.

  Based on that theory, Amanda had every hotel, motel, and campground in the vicinity of the last crime scene outside Nashville heavily canvassed for clues. The maneuver had paid off at a roadside motel just seven miles from the place the body was found. Although the killer was gone by then, they had a record of a man who’d stayed in the hotel from around the time of the crime until just three days after the body was discovered. The room had been curiously soiled by the stench of cats, whose fur and excrement were everywhere. More important, they then found minute traces of the victim’s blood on the mirror over the bathroom sink, presumably from when he’d washed up after the crime, and Amanda’s theory was elevated one step closer to fact.

  The killer had registered at the motel in the name of Bob Oswald, but no one believed that was his name. He’d paid for the room with cash. No one had yet found a witness who could even give them a description of the car he’d driven, let alone a plate number. For that matter, none of the motel employees or guests could be quite sure he’d even had a car, although Amanda knew he must’ve. Descriptions of the man were vague. He had straight blond hair, a beard and mustache. He was so slick in the commission of his crimes that it sometimes seemed he must have an accomplice. But that was impossible. Serial killers by definition were loners.

  Oswald had been killing at an alarming clip. The trail stretched back almost three years. In the first year there were only three murders; in the second, six. During the last twelve months he had doubled his efforts. It was an exponential pattern that wasn’t unheard of with serial killers. Often this kind of spiral pattern ended in the killer’s own suicide.

  Amanda bit her lip. That couldn’t come too soon. In the meantime this deranged monster was snapping up children at random, destroying lives, families, and communities. Amanda knew that he was close and, if they were careful, they just might be able to catch him before he could strike again.

  But in her mind, mashed with the details of autopsies and police reports, was her daughter’s smiling face. And the smell of oatmeal.

  CHAPTER 4

  After a long ride on the airport’s underground tram and searching for her bag, Amanda emerged into the burning Georgia sun. Marco was waiting curbside in a dark Crown Vic. His hands were on the wheel.

  His thin dark hair, wavy and slick with gel, was plastered flat on his tan head. He had the nose and chin of a predatory bird. His small dark eyes were now covered by a pair of Ray•Ban sunglasses. He wore a sedate blue tie and gray pin-striped single-breasted suit. His wife had left him five years ago, ran off with his brother of all things. He never talked about it.

  Amanda looked at him and smiled despite the implacable look of disgust that had been stamped on his face. She liked Marco. He seemed to understand her more than most. She tossed her bag in back and slid onto the front seat. Marco put the car in gear and bolted from the curb before he even began to speak.

  “They’ve got him,” he said.

  Amanda let out a long stream of air.

  Marco shot her a glance and swerved crazily around a rental car shuttle bus before punching the accelerator. He raced up the median of the freeway ramp past a long line of crawling cars. One frustrated driver who saw what they were up to pulled out so they couldn’t pass. Marco leaned on the horn and began to flash his headlights on and off. But instead of moving out of the way, the man braked to a stop, got out of his little foreign car, and flipped them his middle finger.

  Marco threw the Crown Vic into park and jumped out. He had his badge out and in the man’s face in less than two seconds.

  “Get your ass out of the way or you’ll spend the next week in jail, you dumb son-of-a-bitch!” Marco screamed, waving his badge. His tan face was now a shade of purple.

  The man’s eyes widened and he jumped back in his car to move aside.

  Once they were on their way, Marco said calmly, “It’s only about twenty minutes from here, in a little roadside motel just off I-Seventy-five outside a little town called Jackson.”

  “Does he know we’re onto him?”

  Marco shook his head and replied, “I don’t think so. A plainclothes detective from the GBI was the one who found him, a blond-haired man with a beard, average height and build, and check this . . .

  “Yesterday the woman at the desk remembered seeing a pornographic magazine sticking out of his bag. Then she saw him dragging a young girl kicking and screaming like a wet cat into his unit sometime in the afternoon. She called the room, but everything was quiet and the man said the girl was his daughter, so the woman at the desk didn’t think anything of it.”

  Marco glanced at Amanda again.

  Her skin began to tingle and her stomach, which had nothing in it, gave a little roll.

  They rode mostly in silence after that. Occasionally Marco would get an update over the radio as to the various personnel that began to arrive. The GBI had a Tactical Response Team in Atlanta. They were the first to get there and quickly surrounded the motel. Marco talked with their commanding officer and instructed him to have everyone stand by until they got there.

  Doing just over a hundred miles an hour, they reached the exit in eighteen minutes. After that, they fell into a speeding convoy of state police, all racing toward the scene with their lights flashing, but no sirens on. They raced right through the little town of Jackson, and soon after they saw the 1950s-style motel. It was a long low row of rooms set off the road in a cluster of tall straight pines. The place had been painted turquoise years ago. The clapboard siding was now chipped and faded. The hand-painted wooden sign hanging from a rusted post out by the road was pink and orange.

  Amanda and Marco had just hopped out of their car when a TV truck from Atlanta mounted with a satellite dish raced up behind everything and swerved to a stop in the dusty gravel lot, almost tipping over.

  “Get them back!” Marco yelled to a cluster of troopers.

  The GBI captain turned to Marco and Amanda and said, “We’ve got every corner covered. We think he’s sleeping in there. There hasn’t been a sign of any kind of movement. We’re ready to go in.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Amanda surveyed the scene. Snipers with flak jackets were everywhere. Some rested flat black high-powered rifles across the hoods of police cars. Others braced automatic weapons—MP-5s with glossy hundred-round clips—against tree trunks or tires. Each gun was trained on the last unit of the run-down motel.

  The sun beat down through the dust, and Amanda dabbed at the thin line of sweat on her upper lip with the back of her hand. The look in the captain’s eyes disturbed her. He had the wide-eyed rolling glaze of a racehorse about to burst from the gates. They all did. Someone was going to get killed.

  Amanda knew that word of a crime like this, the abominable details, would spread quickly through a unit of cops. Every man with a gun had in his mind the image of the mutilated body of the girl that had been found only hours before on the side of
the road. This motel was now surrounded by a platoon of men looking for even the hint of an excuse.

  “I want these men to put their weapons down,” she said.

  The captain, a big corpulent man in his midforties with a dark brush cut and a tall gray hat, sneered, then chuckled and said, “I can’t see us doing that, ma’am.”

  “I’m not your ma’am,” Amanda said with her eyes trained on the motel. “You get these men’s fingers off their triggers or you’re going to find yourself handing out parking tickets in Dunwoody.’’

  The captain’s mouth fell open and he narrowed his eyes.

  “Do what she says,” Marco said with quiet authority. “We don’t want this man killed.”

  The captain’s face was now contorted with rage. “This man,” he hissed through gritted teeth, “just dismembered a little girl who was on her way to the church choir. This man is armed and dangerous, and doesn’t deserve to take another goddamn breath of life.”

  Amanda drew her gun and turned to Marco. “If one of these men shoots me, I want you to make sure you prosecute this good old boy for murder.” With that, she left the two men standing behind the captain’s car and walked across the dusty lot toward the hotel with her compact Heckler & Koch USP 40 in both hands. She felt she knew this man, Oswald, for lack of a better name. She had studied him for ten months now. She had been right about where he would be and she felt confident she was right about everything else, too.

  He wouldn’t have a gun. He used knives and work tools to commit his crimes. And even in light of the atrocities he had committed, she didn’t want him gunned down, although she certainly understood why others might. No matter what he’d done, Amanda wanted him to have a trial. That’s what separated her and the officers and agents she worked with from the men she hunted. That’s what held her together.