Read Once Craved (a Riley Paige Mystery--Book #3) Online
Authors: Blake Pierce
Once Craved (a Riley Paige Mystery--Book #3)
O
N C E C R A V E D
(A
RILEY PAIGE MYSTERY—BOOK 3)
B
L A K E P I E R C E
Blake
Pierce
Blake Pierce is
author of the bestselling RILEY PAGE mystery series, which include the mystery
suspense thrillers ONCE GONE (book #1), ONCE TAKEN (book #2) and ONCE CRAVED
(#3). Blake Pierce is also the author of the MACKENZIE WHITE mystery series.
ONCE GONE (book #1),
which has over 100 five star reviews, is available as a
free download on Amazon!
An avid reader and
lifelong fan of the mystery and thriller genres, Blake loves to hear from you,
so please feel free to visit
www.blakepierceauthor.com
to learn more and stay in touch.
Copyright
© 2016 by Blake Pierce. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S.
Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced,
distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database
or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the author. This ebook is
licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or
given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another
person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading
this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only,
then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the
hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product
of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Jacket image Copyright
GongTo
, used under license from
Shutterstock.com.
BOOKS
BY BLAKE PIERCE
RILEY
PAIGE MYSTERY SERIES
ONCE
GONE (Book #1)
ONCE
TAKEN (Book #2)
ONCE
CRAVED (Book #3)
MACKENZIE
WHITE MYSTERY SERIES
BEFORE
HE KILLS (Book #1)
Janine thought she
saw something dark in the water down near the shoreline. It was big and black,
and it seemed to move a little in the gently lapping water.
She took a hit off
the marijuana pipe and handed it back to her boyfriend. Could that be a really
big fish? Or some other kind of creature?
Janine shook herself
a little, telling herself not to let her imagination run away with her. Getting
scared would ruin her high. Nimbo Lake was a huge artificial reservoir stocked
for fishing just like lots of other Arizona lakes. There’d never been tales of
Nessie monsters around here.
She heard Colby say,
“Wow, the lake’s on fire!”
Janine turned to
look at her boyfriend. His freckled face and red hair glowed in the late
afternoon sunlight. He had just taken a hit off the pipe and was staring across
the water with an expression of idiotic awe.
Janine giggled. “You’re
just lit, dude,” she said. “In every way.”
“Yeah, so is the
lake,” Colby said.
Janine turned and
looked out over Nimbo Lake. Even though her own high hadn’t quite kicked in
yet, the sight was stunning. The late afternoon sun set the canyon wall ablaze
in reds and golds. The water reflected the colors like a big smooth mirror.
She remembered that
nimbo
was Spanish for halo. The name totally fit.
She took back the
pipe and inhaled deeply, feeling the welcome burn down her throat. She’d be
good and high any minute now. It was going to be fun.
Still, what
was
that black shape down in the water?
Just a trick of
the light,
Janine told herself.
Whatever it was, it
was best to ignore it, not get creeped out by it, or scared. Everything else
was so perfect. This was their favorite spot, hers and Colby’s—so beautiful,
tucked into one of the coves on the lake, away from the campgrounds, away from
everything, everybody.
She and Colby
usually came here on weekends, but today they had cut school and just taken
off. The late summer weather was too good to pass up. It was way cooler and
nicer up here than back in Phoenix. Colby’s old car was parked off the dirt
road behind them.
As she looked out
over the lake, the buzz came on—the feeling of a really great impending high.
The lake seemed almost too intensely gorgeous to look at. So she looked at
Colby. He looked intensely gorgeous too. She grabbed hold of him and kissed
him. He kissed her back. He tasted fabulous. Everything about him looked and
felt fabulous.
She pulled her lips
away from his and looked into his eyes and said breathlessly, “Nimbo means
halo, did you know that?”
“Wow,” he said. “Wow.”
He sounded like that
was the most amazing thing he’d ever heard in his life. He looked and sounded
so funny, saying that, like it was religious or something. Janine started to
laugh, and Colby laughed too. In another couple of seconds, they were
completely tangled up in each other’s arms, groping and pawing.
Janine managed to
disentangle herself.
“What’s the matter?”
Colby asked.
“Nothing,” Janine
said.
In a flash, she
pulled off her halter top. Colby’s eyes widened.
“What are you doing?”
he asked.
“What do you think I’m
doing?”
She began to
struggle with his T-shirt, trying to pull it off of him.
“Wait a minute,”
Colby said. “Right here?”
“Why not right here?
It’s better than the back seat of your car. Nobody’s looking.”
“But maybe a boat …”
Janine laughed. “If
there’s a boat, so what? Who cares?”
Colby was
cooperating now, helping her get him out of his T-shirt. They were both clumsy
with excitement, which only added to the thrill. Janine couldn’t imagine why
they hadn’t done this here before. It wasn’t like this was the first time they’d
smoked pot here.
But Janine kept
picturing that shape down in the water. It was
something
, and until she
knew what it was, it would keep nagging at her and ruin everything.
Panting, she rose to
her feet.
“Come on,” she said.
“Let’s go check something.”
“What?” Colby asked.
“I dunno. Just come
on.”
She took Colby’s
hand and they stumbled down the rough slope toward the shore. Janine’s buzz was
starting to turn sour now. She hated when that happened. The sooner she found
out that this whole thing was harmless, the sooner she could get back to
feeling good.
Still, she was
starting to wish her high hadn’t come on so fast and so strong.
With every step, the
object came into clearer view. It was made out of black plastic, and here and
there bubbles of it broke through the water’s surface. And there was something
small and white right alongside of it.
Just a yard away
from the water, Janine could see that it was a big black garbage bag. It was open
at the end, and out of the opening poked the shape of a hand, unnaturally pale.
A mannequin,
maybe,
Janine
thought.
She bent down toward
the water to get a closer look. The fingernails were painted garishly red in
contrast to the paleness. A terrible realization ripped through Janine’s body
like an electrical current.
The hand was real.
It was a woman’s hand. The bag contained a dead body.
Janine started
screaming. She heard Colby scream too.
And she knew that
they wouldn’t be able to stop screaming for a long time.
Riley knew that the
slides she was about to show would shock her FBI Academy students. Some of them
probably weren’t going to be able to take it. She scanned the eager young faces
watching her from the half-circle of tiered desks.
Let’s see how
they react,
she
thought.
This could be important for them.
Of course, Riley
knew that in the whole range of criminal offenses, serial murder was rare.
Still, these young people had to learn everything there was to learn. They
aspired to be FBI field agents and they’d soon find that most local law
officers had no experience with serial cases. And Special Agent Riley Paige was
an authority on serial murder.
She clicked the
remote. The first images to appear on the large flat-screen were anything but
violent. They were five charcoal portraits of women, ranging in age from young
to middle age. All the women were attractive and smiling, and the portraits had
been done with skill and loving artistry.
As Riley clicked,
she said, “These five drawings were made eight years ago by an artist named
Derrick Caldwell. Every summer, he made lots of money drawing portraits of
tourists on the Dunes Beach Boardwalk here in Virginia. These women were among
his very last clients.”
After the last of
the five portraits, Riley clicked again. The next photograph was a hideous
image of an open chest freezer filled with dismembered female body parts. She
heard her students gasp.
“This is what became
of those women,” Riley said. “While he was drawing them, Derrick Caldwell
became convinced, to use his own words, that they ‘were too beautiful to live.’
So he stalked them one by one, killed them, dismembered them, and kept them in
his freezer.”
Riley clicked again,
and the images that came up next were more shocking still. They were
photographs taken by the medical examiner’s team after they’d reassembled the
bodies.
Riley said, “Caldwell actually ‘shuffled’ the body parts, so that the women were dehumanized beyond
recognition.”
Riley turned toward
the classroom. One male student was rushing toward the exit, clutching his
stomach. Others looked on the verge of throwing up. A few were in tears. Only a
handful appeared to be unperturbed.
Paradoxically, Riley
felt pretty sure that the unruffled students would be the ones who wouldn’t
survive academy training. To them, these were just pictures, not real at all.
They wouldn’t be able to handle true horror whenever they had to face it
firsthand. They wouldn’t be able to handle the personal aftershocks, the
post-traumatic stress that they could suffer. Visions of a flaming torch still
slipped into her consciousness from time to time, but her PTSD was decreasing.
She was healing. But she was sure that anybody first had to feel something
before they could recover from it.
“And now,” Riley
said, “I’m going to make a couple of statements, and you’re going to tell me if
they’re myth or fact. Here’s the first. ‘Most serial murderers kill for sexual
reasons.’ Myth or fact?”
Hands shot up among
the students. Riley pointed to an especially eager-looking student in the first
row.
“Fact?” the student
asked.
“Yes, fact,” Riley
said. “Although there can be other reasons, a sexual component is the most
frequent. This can take various forms, sometimes rather bizarre. Derrick
Caldwell is a classic example. The medical examiner determined that he
committed acts of necrophilia on the victims before he dismembered them.”
Riley saw that most
of her students were typing notes into their laptops. She continued, “Now here’s
another statement. ‘Serial killers inflict increasing violence on their victims
as they continue to kill.’”
Hands went up again.
This time Riley pointed to a student a few rows back.
“Fact?” the student
said.
“Myth,” Riley said. “Although
I’ve certainly seen some exceptions, most cases show no such change over time.
Derrick Caldwell’s level of violence stayed consistent while he was killing.
But he was reckless, hardly an evil mastermind. He got greedy. He took his
victims within a period of a month and a half. By drawing that kind of
attention, he made his capture all but inevitable.”
She glanced at the
clock and saw that her hour was up.
“That’s all for
today,” she said. “But there are many mistaken assumptions about serial killers
and a lot of myths still circulate. The Behavioral Analysis Unit has collected
and analyzed the data, and I have worked serial cases in locations all over the
country. We still have a lot of information to cover.”
The class broke up,
and Riley started packing up her materials to go home. Three or four students
clustered around her desk to ask questions.
A male student
asked, “Agent Paige, weren’t you involved in the Derrick Caldwell case?”
“Yes, I was,” Riley
said. “That’s a story for another time.”
It was also a story
that she wasn’t eager to tell, but she didn’t say so.
A young woman asked,
“Was Caldwell ever executed for his crimes?”
“Not yet,” Riley
said.
Trying not to be
rude, Riley brushed past the students toward the exit. Caldwell’s impending
execution wasn’t something she felt comfortable discussing. The truth was, she
expected it to be scheduled for any day now. As his principal captor, she had a
standing invitation to witness his death. She hadn’t decided yet whether or not
she’d go.
Riley felt good as
she walked out of the building into a pleasant September afternoon. She was,
after all, still on leave.
She’d suffered from
PTSD ever since a maniacal killer had held her captive. She’d escaped and
eventually taken down her tormentor. But she hadn’t gone on leave even then.
She’d continued straight on to finish another case. It was a grisly business in
Upstate New York that had ended with the killer committing suicide right in
front of her by slashing his own throat.
That moment still
haunted her. When her supervisor, Brent Meredith, approached her with another
case, she’d declined to accept it. At Meredith’s suggestion, she’d agreed to
teach a class at the Quantico FBI Academy instead.
As she got into her
car and started to drive home, Riley thought about what a wise choice it had
been. Finally, her life had a sense of peace, of calm.
And yet, as she
drove, a creeping, familiar feeling began to set in, one that made her heart
begin to pound in the middle of a clear blue day. It was a heightened sense of
anticipation, she realized, of something ominous to come.
And try as she might
to envision herself in this calm forever, she knew, she just knew, it wouldn’t
last.