Incarnate Read online

“No?” Zack gently nudged Tim toward processing. “Then I’m sure your dirty fingerprints won’t be all over those cases. Right hand, please.” Tim looked down to see they were standing over a inking pad and a pristine fingerprint card.

  Zack rolled Tim’s index finger so hard in the ink that he almost bent the digit backward, breaking it.

  Sometimes, being the bad cop had its perks.

  TWELVE

  On the way home from work, Kim made a snap decision to drive by the Wilcoxes’ house. After Zack left, she’d finished her rounds, then spent a few minutes online reviewing Izzi’s parents’ tearful pleas for help from anyone who might have information on what had become of her. Their Facebook pages were full of photos of their daughter and loving messages. Though Izzi may have made some questionable life choices, it was clear that she loved her family. The many pictures on her Instagram account of her with her parents, her dog, her cousins . . . all of these spoke of a bond that might have been strained but was not broken.

  It was nearly dark when Kim arrived at the two-story brick house, letting her car idle across the street. The house was well maintained, surrounded by neatly trimmed hedges and pots of flowers. In the driveway of the Wilcoxes’ house, a large golden retriever was on its hind legs, trying to reach something in the garbage bin. As Kim watched, a pretty brunette woman in jeans and a pink sweater came out of the house and stood on the front porch with her hands on her hips. Kim recognized her from the online photographs as Jen Wilcox, Isabel’s mother.

  “Cupcake! Stop that right now!” When the dog growled at her, she added, “Don’t you talk to me that way, you cheeky slag!”

  Kim sat up straight. Slag . . . the same odd word choice that the Izzi alter had used when she raged against Kim in her office.

  As she watched, Jen Wilcox pushed her hair out of her eyes and flipped it over her shoulder . . . a perfect imitation of the gesture Scarlett had made when she was under the influence of the Izzi alter.

  As Mrs. Wilcox struggled to get her dog to drop the chicken carcass it had managed to snag from the bin, Kim drove away slowly, lost in thought.

  Izzi was her mother’s daughter, it seemed. Used the same expressions. The same gestures.

  She could barely believe what she was considering. That her father’s hypothesis might actually be true . . . that it might truly be Isabel inside Scarlett, not an alter imitating her in order to cause trouble. That Scarlett was, somehow, harboring a dead soul. But there was no way Scarlett could have perfected Izzi’s speech and mannerisms unless she’d studied the girl intently and practiced until she could pass them off as her own. And when would she possibly have done that? There wasn’t a known connection between the two girls.

  Kim drove through town as darkness fell, watching lights come on in the houses, wondering whether it was possible to prove this crazy theory, or if she was doomed to ridicule if she even brought it up. Either way, one thing was for sure: She and Zack Trainor couldn’t both be right about Scarlett. Scarlett was either inhabited by something—someone—and struggling to stay in control, or she was the most inscrutable psychopathic liar Kim had ever encountered. Whether it was Kim or Zack, one of them was making a terrible mistake . . . but what would it take to figure out which?

  THIRTEEN

  Zack was just getting to work the next morning, dawn breaking over the tall pines that rose above the town, when a call coming over the scanner caught his attention. The caller identified himself as a security guard down at the docks.

  Near the end of his shift, he’d found a badly decomposed body floating next to the pier.

  “Shit,” Zack muttered, reaching for his jacket, as Jeannette, the overnight dispatcher, assured the caller that an officer was on his way.

  Since most of Jarvis was still in bed, Zack made it to the docks in no time at all. The coroner, who served the entire county and lived half an hour outside the town, was on his way. A tripod light had been set up on the dock in the early dawn, and Zack could see two figures standing there together.

  He headed onto the dock, squinting to make out the two men illuminated in beams of early morning sun.

  “Mr. Kanga?” he called. “Detective Trainor.”

  Close up, he could see that Kanga was well suited for his job. Short but powerfully built, he would make an imposing deterrent to the kind of petty mischief that tended to plague the area.

  Kanga shook hands and introduced the other man, Fred Smetts, who looked vaguely familiar. Zack soon remembered why: Smetts, who held the town docks contract, had once sponsored a Little League team that Zack had played on. His handsome, craggy face hadn’t changed much in the last fifteen years.

  “Nice to see you again,” Zack said.

  “I still remember that no-hitter you pitched against the Tornadoes,” Smetts replied. “Nasty slider for a twelve-year-old.”

  Kanga must have called his boss right after calling the police. Together, all three men peered down into the water.

  “It’s, uh, right there,” Smetts said almost apologetically, pointing to a patch of sodden fabric floating near the water’s surface. Closer examination revealed that the fabric was actually a shirt. The dark shape underneath was the body, bobbing near the surface.

  As Zack peered closer, he made out a pale line trailing from the dark shape through the water to emerge next to the dock: a rope had been looped around the body’s waist, tethering it to one of the cleats.

  Zack knelt down on the rough wood of the dock and dipped his hand into the cool water, reaching for the rope. He pulled gently, and as the body slowly floated closer, he saw that there was a good reason the rope hadn’t been looped around its neck . . . the body was missing its head.

  “Sorry about the rope,” Kanga said hastily. “I meant no disrespect. I didn’t want it to float away.”

  “We didn’t want to disturb anything until you got here,” Smetts added.

  The older man was avoiding looking at the body. It was bloated from the water, and large patches of skin and flesh were missing where small fish had eaten away at it. The edges of the neck wound were jagged and distorted. “You did well,” he told both men. Zack knew the emotional damage a sight like this could have on an innocent psyche and he always tried to help mitigate that damage. Kanga nodded his thanks; Smetts looked like he was trying not to vomit.

  Now that he’d confirmed that there was indeed a body, he radioed Jeannette to call for the CSI team; soon the dock would be swarming with investigators and equipment. “How’d you notice it, anyway?” he asked Kanga.

  “I check down there for kids, couple times a night,” Kanga said, glancing at his boss. “Some of them like to get down there in skiffs or what have you, get up to things.”

  “So you were doing your routine check . . . ?”

  “And I saw it. Figured right away it was a body, kind of distinctive shape, you know. Tried to pull it in, just in case it was, uh, not dead, but . . .”

  “Do you mind giving me a hand with this?” Zack asked, crouching down and pulling on the line. “If you’d rather, I can wait for backup.”

  “Nah, I’ll help,” Kanga said, while Smetts stepped back.

  It took both of them to wrangle the waterlogged body up onto the dock, its limbs flopping uselessly and drenching them in the process. As they pulled, it became evident that the reason the legs hadn’t been visible from the surface was that one ankle had been tied to an object to weigh it down—what looked like a giant metal comb, rusted and tangled with seaweed. The other ankle was lacerated to the bone, the muscle and tendons grotesquely exposed.

  Once the body was laid out on its back, the damaged ankle askew and the metal object dripping in the sun, Zack was able to estimate that it belonged to a young woman, approximately five feet four inches tall, had her head still been attached. Scavengers—likely crabs and shrimp—had nibbled away flesh in patches, and the skin was pale and swollen. But there was enough left of the body for Zack to conclude that it could belong to Isabel Wilcox.

/>   “Now that’s a damn shame,” Kanga said, while Smetts stared resolutely out over the water.

  “Gonna be a long morning,” Zack said, feeling sorry for Smetts. The man had the decency to come out—Zack could at least do him the favor of excusing him from the worst of it. “Any chance you could brew some coffee, sir?”

  Smetts scuttled gratefully off to the dock offices. For the next hour Zack pitched in, running interference with the returning fishermen and keeping bystanders off the dock, while the CSI team secured the scene. Holt arrived, followed soon after by the coroner, Marty Volp. By then the sun was fully up, the town bathed in glittering morning brilliance.

  After his examination, Volp came to stand with Holt and Zack, peeling off his gloves. He pulled a wax-paper-wrapped roast beef sandwich from his pocket. “You guys mind?” he asked.

  “Uh, no,” Zack said. The idea of eating anything after spending the morning with a decomposing, headless body turned his stomach.

  “Go right ahead,” Holt said politely. “So—what do we think about her head?”

  “MIA,” Volp said cheerfully. “But it could have been severed with the same bear trap that weighted her down. Which, by the way, could have been responsible for the injuries to her leg.”

  “Wait, what bear trap?”

  “You’ve never seen one of those?” Volp asked.

  Zack squinted at the metal weight tied to the victim’s leg. Sure enough, at the corners were the rusted-out remains of the bolts that had once connected the brutal teeth to the rest of the contraption. Zack had never been a hunter—Holt had always taught him that guns were tools best left to law enforcement—but he’d spotted the enormous, almost medieval-looking traps in outdoors supply stores, and it was easy to imagine the sharp teeth snapping shut on the pale, tender skin of a young girl.

  Zack winced. He had a fairly strong constitution and had seen a lot during his time on the police force, but the idea of the device severing Isabel Wilcox’s head from her body was a little too much, even for him.

  “Body’s been in the water for a couple of weeks,” Volp went on, talking around a big bite of sandwich. “Small crabs ate away the fingers, and you kind of need those buggers to get prints. Got a partial tattoo on the back of her neck, but can’t see all of it due to the decapitation.”

  Zack flipped through his notebook, finding the pages from the interviews he’d conducted with Isabel’s parents. “She had a butterfly tattoo on the nape of her neck. Think that could be a butterfly . . . ?”

  “Eh, I guess. Adipocere and bloating makes it tough to tell.”

  Zack swallowed and jammed his notebook back in his pocket. “Well,” he said to Holt, “the only bright side here is now we have confirmation of foul play. We can call Scarlett back in, maybe trip her up on her story.”

  Holt raised his eyebrows. “You still like the Hascall girl for this, Zack?”

  “I realize a decap murder and body dump don’t really line up,” Zack conceded. Typically, female killers were not as violent in their methods as men; there was also the matter of the considerable physical strength that would have been required to transport the body, and Scarlett was even smaller than Isabel. “But she’s already proven she’s violent. She had a history with Brad. A pretty twisted one, considering her age and background. So yeah, I still think she could be good for it.”

  “Well now, that’d be something you don’t see every day. Young girl like that, doing something like this,” Volp said, crumpling the wax paper and stuffing it into his pocket.

  “You never know,” Holt said thoughtfully. “About a dozen years back, I helped out with a case in Valdez. Teenage girl was killed, body mutilated, letters cut into the skin with a butter knife, postmortem.”

  “I vaguely remember that,” Zack said.

  Holt snorted. “You were so green at the time, I didn’t let you near it.”

  “Letters?” Volp asked.

  “The ABC’s. Girl who did it was eight. Stabbed her oldest sister in the head in her sleep. Because her sister ate the last Pudding Pop in the freezer. Used a butter knife because the little girl said that her mom and dad wouldn’t let her touch a steak knife . . . too dangerous.”

  Volp shook his head. “No shit.” He shook his head again while licking the juice from his rare roast beef sandwich off his fingers. “Some people . . .”

  * * *

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, ZACK pulled up behind Holt’s SUV in front of the Hascalls’ house. Peter Hascall was just coming out the door, checking his watch and carrying his lunch pail. When he saw the officers, his face fell.

  “What now?”

  “We’d like to talk to Scarlett.”

  “You’re serious? Again? You don’t think you’ve dragged her through enough yet?”

  “Come on, Pete,” Holt said calmly. “We’ll be fair. You know we will. But we have to follow procedures here, and there’s some new developments we need to talk to her about.”

  Peter glared at them for a moment before finally dropping his gaze. His shoulders drooped in defeat. “I’ll take you up,” he said. “But please, remember, she’s just nineteen years old. Anyway, I doubt she’s even awake yet.”

  Zack and Holt followed Hascall into the house. It smelled of fresh coffee and laundry detergent, and the living room had been recently vacuumed and dusted. Zack scanned the house for Scarlett’s presence. Now that he had a real suspect for this case, he wasn’t going to let anything get in the way of a full interrogation.

  “Daddy? What’s going on?” Scarlett’s younger sister wandered out of the kitchen, a Diet Coke in her hand. Hascall went to her, murmuring something in her ear and wrapping an arm around his daughter.

  Holt nodded to Zack, and hung back with the Hascalls while Zack took the stairs to the second floor two at a time, reaching for his handcuffs. Yet door after door opened to no Scarlett. Finally, at the end of the hall, he reached Scarlett’s bedroom. Slowly, he twisted the knob, and then moved quickly into the room—

  But nobody was inside. Instead, all Zack could see were the rays of sunlight streaming through Scarlett’s window, which was wedged wide open—wide enough for Scarlett to have disappeared through it without anyone in her family knowing she’d gone.

  FOURTEEN

  Kim was assembling a lunch of a peanut butter and honey sandwich, raisins, and shortbread cookies. She’d exchanged a few more e-mails with her father about Scarlett’s case, and it had made her nostalgic for the lunches he used to pack for her to take to school. Besides, Kim couldn’t endure another dry turkey sandwich from the cafeteria. She was just putting the sandwich in her backpack when someone knocked on the door of her apartment. She glanced at the clock and frowned. It was a quarter to ten in the morning, an unusual time for visitors, unless her elderly neighbor needed help getting her windows open again.

  But when she opened the door, Kyle was standing there. “Well, this is a nice surprise,” she said. “Sweet of you to visit, but I was headed your way.”

  “You’re not scheduled until noon,” Kyle said.

  Kim’s smile faltered. “Couldn’t wait that long to see me?” she tried, hopefully.

  “We need to talk.”

  Kim stepped aside to let him into the apartment. “You just went from a guy about to get laid to an ex-boyfriend I tell pathetic stories about.”

  “This is serious, Kim.” Kyle took a breath and jammed his hands in the pockets of his coat. “They found Isabel Wilcox’s body this morning. She was murdered.”

  Kim gasped. “No—”

  “They pulled her out of the bay, apparently. And there’s a rumor going around that she was decapitated.”

  “The bay,” Kim echoed. “Shit.” She remembered the session with the Izzi alter in the Hascalls’ living room when bloody water had trickled and then flowed from her mouth. I’m in the bay, she’d moaned, words that made no sense at the time.

  Could the Izzi alter have actually been reporting on her own death? Was this the confirmation Kim was lo
oking for? Or was it proof that Zack was right, and Scarlett was more dangerous than Kim had realized?

  “Yes, she was found in the bay,” Kyle said. “What are you not telling me, Kim? Do you know something about this?”

  Kim scrabbled for a plausible explanation for her reaction and came up only with the story about Scarlett coughing up the water during therapy, which she grudgingly admitted to Kyle as he scowled disapprovingly.

  “God damn it, Kim,” Kyle said. “When were you going to tell me?”

  Kim turned away, trying to compose herself. She went into the kitchen to get a glass of water, buying herself time. Kyle followed her. “What else haven’t you told me?”

  She didn’t answer, trying to think of a way to explain things that wouldn’t sound like she’d directly violated their agreement.

  “Please, tell me you followed hospital policy,” Kyle said, a dangerous edge to his voice.

  “I used a treatment technique that has had some success elsewhere,” she hedged.

  “Kim—”

  “Okay—I hypnotized her. But it was in a safe environment. I used reasonable precautions.” She didn’t add that the “safe environment” was Scarlett’s own house, which Kim had visited without Kyle’s permission.

  “You hypnotized Scarlett,” he repeated in disbelief, as she ran the tap, filling a glass. “Knowing it was against hospital rules.”

  “Stupid hospital rules,” Kim corrected. Then, she desperately tried to change the subject. “Did you know it’s a rule, an actual law, in Juneau that you can’t bring a pet turtle into a barbershop?” She earned an angry stare from Kyle. “Really. It’s on the books. Well, it says you can’t bring any animal . . . not just turtles . . .”

  Kim’s story sputtered to a stop as she finally took a drink, unable to meet his eyes. Hypnotizing Scarlett had been the right thing to do, the only thing she could think of to help her patient. But she was digging herself into a deeper and deeper hole with Kyle. After all, he’d already warned her that the case reflected on both of them.