Dead By Morning

DEAD BY MORNING

“Do you think you can put together a profile with what little information we have?” Maleah asked.

“I’m going to try,” Derek said. “The Copycat Carver has gone to a great deal of trouble to copy Jerome Browning’s MO and yet he deliberately sent the pieces of flesh he removed from the victims’ bodies to you instead of hiding them away somewhere the way Browning did. Why?”

“The reason he didn’t stick to Browning’s MO was because he wanted to send me a message.”

“Very good reasoning. We’ve agreed that for some reason, it’s important to the copycat for you to be personally involved in this case. That’s why he chose Browning to emulate.”

“Because Browning killed Noah Laborde, my former boyfriend. But the question is why me? If Nic or Griff is the real target, then . . .” She paused for a full minute. “Could it really be that simple? Is he making me jump through hoops simply because he can and he wants Nic to know he can control her best friend?”

“It’s definitely what Griff thinks and it does make a crazy kind of sense. If tormenting Nic and Griff is his objective, then he’s punishing them for some reason. He’s going to strike again and again, possibly getting closer and closer to his ultimate target with each kill, eventually discarding the Carver’s MO.”

“If that’s the case, then what are the odds that he’ll try to kill me before he moves on to Nic and Griff . . .”

DEAD By MORNING

BEVERLY BARTON

To Beth Bange Bynon,

in memory of her husband Colby

“I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears of all my life.”

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Prologue

With the patience and precision of a surgeon, he sliced into his victim’s upper arm and carefully lifted the triangular piece of flesh. After placing the small chunk in a cubbyhole of the sectioned plastic cooler he had brought with him, he returned to the job at hand. One by one, he cut out more triangles from the dead man’s arms and legs and then carefully stored them in the container.

“I always used a new scalpel and then tossed it afterward.”

He had purchased disposable scalpels online. They came ten to a pack, with plastic handles and individually wrapped and sterilized high carbon steel blades. Cost didn’t matter. He always spent whatever necessary to accomplish the job. But the scalpels were one of the least expensive tools he had ever used—less than a dollar each. And the little blades did double duty, first to slit the neck and then to make the intricate carvings.

He hummed as he worked, a mundane little ditty that he had heard somewhere years ago.

He took pride in his kills. He never did less than his best.

“I wanted the kill to be clean, quick, and relatively painless. The sweetest pleasure is in those few seconds of initial horror they experience. I prefer psychological torture to physical torture.”

Whether or not the death was quick and painless didn’t matter to him one way or the other. He was not opposed to making a victim suffer and had on occasion used both physical and psychological torture, but not with these particular people.

“It’s such a quiet way to kill a person. With their trachea severed, they can’t scream.”

His preference was not the up-close-and-personal. He preferred killing from a distance. A quick, clean shot to the head, if death was the only agenda. However, he always did whatever was necessary to accomplish his goals. That’s why this kill, like the three before it and the ones that would come after it, required him to get his hands dirty.

With his task completed and the four triangles carved from each arm and each leg now stored neatly in the cooler, he lifted the old man by his broad shoulders and dragged him along the bank of the river.

“I never left them where I killed them. I would move the body, usually near a river or lake or stream. I even dragged a woman from her bedroom outside to her pool. There is something peaceful about water, don’t you think?”

He had been forced to leave the first body in her apartment, but he had taken her into the bathroom and filled the tub. Not exactly a river or even a pool, but under the circumstances, it had been as close as he could get her to water. As luck would have it, he had been able to drag the second victim from the back porch, where he had slit her throat, to the river nearby. He had dumped the third victim in a shallow streambed located on the man’s property.

“I always struck after midnight. Never before. I wanted the body to be found in the morning. There is something beautiful about the morning sunlight caressing a corpse.”

In his opinion, there was nothing beautiful about a corpse, neither in the dark nor in the full light of day. As a general rule, the time of day—or night—was inconsequential, unless there was a reason for specific timing. But he was following a sequence of events with these murders, somewhat like following a road map to reach a specific destination. Each step in the procedure was a necessity. The exact time of death was not important—as long as the person was dead by morning.

“I had a special upright freezer where I kept my carvings.”

He never kept trophies. He didn’t want or need any.

The souvenirs from these kills were not for him. They were for someone else. Someone who would appreciate their significance.

Chapter 1

Maleah hated weddings and wedding receptions.