Waiting

Crivaro seemed to be being deliberately cryptic.

When he parked the car along a street with houses on one side and an open field on the other, she saw that a couple of police cars and an official van were pulled up nearby.

Before they left the car, Crivaro wagged his finger and said to her …

“Now remember the goddamn rules. Don’t touch anything. And don’t speak unless you’re spoken to. You’re only here to observe the rest of us at work.”

Riley nodded. But something in Crivaro’s voice made her suspect that he expected something a little more from her than just watching quietly.

She wished she knew what that something might be.

Riley and Crivaro got out of the car and walked into the field. It was scattered with lots of debris, as if some kind of big public event had taken place here recently.

Other people, some wearing police uniforms, were standing near a stand of trees and bushes. A wide area around them was cordoned off with yellow police tape.

As Riley and Crivaro approached the group, she realized that the bushes had concealed something on the ground.

Riley gasped at what she saw.

Nausea swelled up in her throat again.

Lying on the ground was a dead circus clown.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Riley felt so dizzy that she thought she might faint.

She managed to stay on her feet, but then she worried that she was going to throw up, like she had back at the apartment.

This can’t be real, she thought.

This has to be a nightmare.

The cops and other people were standing around a body that was in a full clown outfit. The suit was puffy and brightly colored with huge pompoms as buttons. A pair of outsized shoes completed the attire.

The stark white face had a bizarre painted smile, a bright red nose, and exaggerated eyes and eyebrows. A huge red wig framed the face. A canvas tarp was bunched up next to the body.

It dawned on Riley that the body was actually a woman.

Now that her head was clearing, she noticed a distinct and unpleasant odor in the air. As she looked around the area, she doubted that the smell was from the body—or at least not much of it. Trash was strewn everywhere. The morning sun was bringing out the odor of various kinds of human residue.

A man wearing a white jacket was kneeling beside the body, studying it carefully. Crivaro introduced him as Victor Dahl, the DC medical examiner.

Crivaro shook his head and said to Dahl, “This is even weirder than I’d expected.”

Rising to his feet, Dahl said, “Yeah, weird. And it’s just like the last victim.”

Riley thought …

The last victim?

Had another clown been killed before this one?

“I just got briefed a little while ago,” Crivaro said to Dahl and the cops. “Maybe you folks can fill in my trainee here on what this is all about. I’m maybe not fully up to speed on this case myself.”

Dahl looked at Riley and hesitated for a moment. Riley wondered if she looked as sick as she felt. But then the medical examiner began to explain.

“Saturday morning, a body was found in the alley behind a movie theater. The victim was a young woman named Margo Birch—and she was dressed and made up pretty much like this victim. The cops figured it was a weird murder, but one of a kind. Then this corpse turned up last night. Another young woman all painted up and dressed this way.”

It hit Riley then. This wasn’t an actual clown. This was an ordinary young woman dressed up as a clown. Two such women had been bizarrely dressed and made up and murdered.

Crivaro added, “And that’s when it became an FBI case, and we got called in.”

“That’s right,” Dahl said, looking around the debris-strewn field. “There was a carnival here for a few days. It moved out on Saturday. That’s where all this junk came from—the field hasn’t been cleaned up yet. Late last night some neighborhood guy came out here with a metal detector, looking for coins that might have gotten dropped during the carnival. He found the body, which was covered by that tarp at the time.”

Riley turned to see that Crivaro was watching her closely.

Was he just making sure she was minding her own business?

Or was he monitoring her reactions?

She asked, “Has this woman been identified?”

One of the cops said, “Not yet.”

Crivaro added, “We’re focused on one particular missing person’s report. Yesterday morning a professional photographer named Janet Davis was reported missing. She’d been taking pictures at Lady Bird Johnson Park the night before. The cops are wondering if this might be her. Agent McCune is paying her husband a visit right now. Maybe he can help us make an ID.”

Riley heard sounds of vehicles stopping nearby in the street. She looked and saw that a couple of TV news vans had pulled up.

“Damn,” one of the cops said. “We’d managed to keep the clown angle about the other murder quiet until now. Should we cover her back up?”

Crivaro let out a growl of annoyance as a news crew poured out of one of the vans with a camera and a boom mic. The crew hurried out onto the field.

“It’s too late for that,” he said. “They’ve already seen the victim.”

As other media vehicles approached, Crivaro and the ME mobilized the cops to try to keep the reporters as far back from the police tape as they could.

Meanwhile, Riley looked at the victim and wondered …

How did she die?

There was no one to ask at the moment. Everybody was busy dealing with the reporters, who were noisily asking questions.

Riley carefully stooped over the body, telling herself …

Don’t touch anything.

Riley saw that the victim’s eyes and mouth were open. She’d seen that same terrified expression before.