Too Close (A Morgan Stark FBI Suspense Thriller—Book 2)

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER TWO

Morgan followed Danielle out of the hospital to where her SUV was parked. The humidity hit him like a solid wall of damp air. Both of them removed their suit jackets immediately and Danielle blasted the black SUV’s air conditioner at peak capacity. It barely made a dent.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Danielle asked him as she steered them through DC traffic.

“Not especially.” Morgan looked down at his hands. He needed time to think about the Board’s decision and his feelings about it. “Want to tell me about this case?”

“Not especially.” Danielle flashed him a grin, and then shook her head. “I’d rather have you come at it fresh without any preconceptions.”

“Okay, then. How about them Nats?” he asked.

Danielle snorted. “I don’t think either of us are very adept at small talk.”

“True that.” The silence was companionable, easy. His heart rate, however, increased with anticipation as they neared the FBI building. These days, running and the thought of helping investigate cases for the FBI seemed to be the only things that could do that. He’d barely broken a sweat during that morning’s hearing on the fate of his professional life, but his hands got clammy as he walked with Danielle through the lobby of the FBI building, nearly bouncing on his toes as they went.

“Morning, Agent Hernandez. Nice to see you again, Dr. Stark,” Marilynn Roderick, the security guard, said as she produced a Visitor’s badge for Morgan and waved them both through. She’d been a whole lot less friendly the first time Morgan had tried to get through that turnstile. Now he was at least a semi-familiar face and he knew that Marilynn would be 100 percent behind anything that Danielle wanted.

“We’ll need to get you a permanent one of those,” Danielle said, indicating his badge as she pushed the button for the elevator.

A grin twitched at the edge of Morgan’s lips that he stilled, his excitement at being a more permanent part of Danielle’s team was countered by his awareness that someone must have lost their life for him to be called in. The sensation was familiar. It had been what he’d felt for most of his life in medicine. He loved what he did. Nailing a difficult diagnosis had been challenging and exciting, but for it to get to him meant that someone had been suffering and usually for some time. He loved solving the intellectual puzzle but tried to always keep in mind that it was a means to an end. The point was to help someone, not to entertain himself.

They got off on the fifth floor and Morgan matched his stride with Danielle’s as they walked down the hall. She waved her badge in front of the RFID reader and they entered the bullpen. Several agents looked up as they went through. Danielle acknowledged them with a nod or a wave. Morgan could feel their gazes on his back as they continued through.

“Is there something stuck to my shoe?” he leaned down to ask Danielle in a quiet voice.

She shot him a questioning look.

“If looks were lasers, I’d have more than a few holes in my back.”

“They’re probably wondering what you’re doing here.” Danielle continued down the hall without a backwards glance.

Morgan wondered too, but he knew Danielle wouldn’t have asked him to consult if she hadn’t had a reason. Danielle went past the room they’d used before. “We’re in the big conference room this time,” she explained, pushing open a door at the end of the hall.

Not only was the room bigger than the one they’d used to track the killer they’d caught only a few weeks ago, it also had more people in it. Two agents — a Black woman and a white man — tacked photos onto two whiteboards, adding notes beside them.

“Henry, Divinia,” Danielle said. “I’d like you to meet Dr. Morgan Stark. He’ll be working as a consultant on this case with us.”

Morgan shook both their hands.

“Heard about what you did on the Georgetown Hospital murders case,” Divinia said. “Pleasure to be working with you, sir.”

Her handshake was firm. She wore her straightened hair pulled back into a bun. Her black pantsuit looked like an exact replica of Danielle’s.

“Sir,” Henry also shook Morgan’s hand. “Looking forward to hearing what you have to say about this new case.”

Henry’s suit was charcoal gray and single-breasted with a pinstripe. His blond hair was cut in a crew cut fade. He had that preppy look that could have easily gotten him cast as the bad guy in a teen movie from the eighties.

“Good to meet you both,” Morgan said.

Danielle gestured for him to sit down at the table in the center of the room. “Show us what you’ve got,” she said.

The two younger agents exchanged a glance and then Divinia stood next to the whiteboard on the left.

“Our first victim is Kimberly Samson.” Divinia gestured up at a photo of a smiling young woman with blonde hair cut in a short spiky style that accentuated her high cheekbones and large blue eyes. She reminded Morgan a little of Ashley. “Thirty-two-year-old white female living alone in a small rental house in Ivy City. Single. Worked as a marketing manager for Astute Insurance.”

Divinia tapped a pushpin that had been put into the Ivy City neighborhood on a map that was on the whiteboard. Then she pulled another set of photos out of a folder and tacked them to the board. “On Sunday night of last week, someone bashed in a back window and entered the home. It appears that Kimberly was running for her cell phone that she’d left charging in her bedroom when her assailant caught up to her.”

Morgan was used to blood and gore. It was part of being a doctor, but he physically recoiled at what he saw in the crime scene photos once Divinia backed away. Someone had beaten the woman beyond recognition. The contrast between the smiling photo at the top of the board and what was left of Kimberly Samson was jarring. The fact that she had resembled Ashley in life made his stomach turn.

“Cause of death will likely be blunt force trauma. The body was discovered by a friend from work who was concerned when Ms. Samson didn’t show up for an important meeting and wasn’t answering her phone. Nothing of value was taken from the home, including the eighty dollars found in the victim’s wallet.” Divinia paused to tack up a few more photos showing a big screen television set and a computer. “Her cell phone, however, was destroyed.”

Another photo went up. This one of a phone that had been smashed to bits. Divinia sat down and Henry stood.

“Our second victim was Angelica McNally.” Henry pointed to the second whiteboard, where a photo of another white woman smiled down at them. This one had long brown hair. While both women were white, there wasn’t a lot of resemblance between them. “Ms. McNally, a twenty-eight-year-old white woman, was attacked last night in a parking lot in the H Street Corridor.” He tapped the second pushpin on the map. “She was an administrative assistant at a consulting firm.”

This time, Morgan had braced himself for the crime scene photos. They were every bit as brutal as the ones of Kimberly Samson, but he didn’t flinch outwardly. Inwardly, he was repulsed. How could one human being do this to another? Kimberly lay sprawled across a gravel lot, bloodied and broken, the contents of her purse scattered around her.

Henry tapped a small square in one photo. “Her wallet was recovered at the scene. It had forty-two dollars in it. As far as we can tell, nothing was taken from the wallet or from her vehicle, which was parked nearby with its driver’s side door open.” Henry pulled another photo from his folder. “Her cell phone was also smashed.”

Morgan stood up and walked to the whiteboards to get a better look at the photos. He shook his head at the wreckage of these two bodies. How angry would you have to be to do that to another human being? For a second, he imagined what each of those women must have gone through in the last minutes of their lives. The pain. The fear. He grabbed onto the back of a chair to steady himself.

Still, why was he here? Neither woman’s name nor profile photo rang a bell with him. Neither were healthcare workers. There wasn’t any obvious connection to him.

“Was there blood or tissue from anyone else at the scenes?” he asked. Maybe the medical link had to do with the perpetrator, the unsub as Danielle would undoubtedly call him. Maybe they’d found something in evidence left at the scene that he could help them interpret.

“Not at Ms. Samson’s,” Divinia said. “The forensic unit is still processing the other scene. With it being a public parking lot, there’s likely going to be a number of other samples, but we won’t know if any of them could belong to the perpetrator. At least not until we have a suspect to match them to.”

So that wasn’t it. Morgan stepped closer to the photographs. Someone had gone much further than necessary to kill here. There was rage behind what had been done to these two women. Their faces were nearly obliterated. It was personal.

“Any connection between the two women?” he asked.

“Not that we’ve found as of yet,” Henry said, walking over to stand next to Morgan. “We’re still looking, though. Right now, we’re waiting on a subpoena for their phone and email records. If necessary, we’ll get a warrant. I’m hoping their providers will cooperate, given the circumstances.”

“What’s with the map?” Morgan frowned at the two pushpins, trying to figure out what significance they might have.

Henry leaned back against the table, arms crossed over his chest. “We’re trying to get a handle on where he’s striking geographically. If we can figure out his comfort zone, it might give us some clues as to where he lives or works. He’ll have wanted to strike in an area that he’s familiar with, so he knows where and when to kill and how to get away without witnesses, but he won’t want it to be too close to his home or work. It’s another pattern to examine that might bear fruit.”

Interesting. There was so much to learn about how to look at a crime or at a criminal. Maybe that was what he liked. A new frontier to challenge him. Morgan stepped even closer to the photos, turning off his emotions, blocking out his natural inclination to empathy. It would only get in the way at the moment. He had to step back, as he would if he was trying to make a diagnosis at the hospital. He went back and forth between the two women. Both had some kind of discoloration around their collarbones. At first, he thought it was a shadow on Kimberly Samson, but it was too big a coincidence for both of them to have the exact same shadow.

“What is that on their chests?” he asked, pointing to the area he was looking at.

Danielle looked over at Henry with her eyebrows raised. He held his hands in front of himself and took a couple of steps back.

“What?” Morgan asked. Some kind of silent communication had happened there that had to do with him, he suspected.

Danielle stepped up and stood next to him. “It’s why I called you in. Both women have a similar kind of rash on their chests. It’s the only connection we’ve found between the two of them beyond the similarity in the MOs. If the connection between them is something medical, well, I couldn’t think of a better person to call in to help us sort it out.”

Morgan glanced over at Henry, whose face was studiously blank. He’d hazard a guess that Henry hadn’t been too keen on having Morgan called in and had questioned his superior officer about it. Feeling like he’d just passed some test that he hadn’t known he was taking, Morgan turned to Danielle. “I’d like to see the bodies in person.”

“I’m not sure what good that would do.” She turned away from the photos. “There’s not a lot recognizable left of them.”

“I know, but if there is something else, some other small detail that might help, I’m not going to get it from looking at these photos. I need to see them and examine them in person.” He didn’t remind her that it was a small detail that only he had noticed on a victim’s body that had been the first step in unraveling their previous case. A scraped knee. That had been the one little detail that no one else had thought was important that had started them on the path of finding a murderer. From the pensive look on Danielle’s face, he didn’t have to remind her of that.

She nodded. “I’ll make a call.”