Page 10 of Pose for Me
Walking in a slow circle, I make small changes to his pose, ensuring he’s perfect for Agent Bauer.
“I think this will show him how invincible I am,” I mutter to the corpse.
I smile at the three words I added. There will be no denying that this is his present,mymessage tohim.
I wonder what he’ll think of it. I wonder if he’ll tell the news that he taunted me a little too much, and now there’s blood on his hands. After all, I planned to do what Jacob said and cool out for a while, but I’ve never been the type to back down from a challenge.
What happens next is up to Agent Bauer.
Five
Lane
Tension hasmy shoulders tight as I stare down at the sketch in my hands.
I provoked The Poser, and they did the opposite of what I wanted. I wanted them to slip up and make a mistake. I wanted them to not plan their next kill thoroughly and get caught in the act, their victim still alive. Traumatized, maybe, but still alive. That’s not what happened.
We got the call an hour ago that a body was dumped at a construction site. The victim is dressed in black pants and a white shirt, a sock on one foot. Blood forms a halo around his head and saturates his shirt. His eyes are open, fear frozen on his face.
The sledgehammer used to end his life is lying beside him, placed there deliberately, I’m sure.
I want to ball up the thick sketch paper in my hands that I fished from the victim’s pocket, but I can’t ruin it, just in case there is DNA evidence on it. There won’t be, as none of the sketches left behind have had so much as a partial print on them, but it’s worth trying. We have to check every time, on the off chance we get a hit.
But I doubt we will. The Poser was just a methodical with him as they were with the other victims.
This victim is for me. I know he is.
For the first time, The Poser has left a message that wasn’t only the body and the sketch.
On the drawing, written in thick, bold block are three words:
COME GET ME.
Bristling,I fold the sketch and hand it to a crime scene tech, who places it in a Ziploc bag to be taken back to the field office for analysis.
Brock and our supervisory special agent, or SSA, step up to me, Brock looking like he’d rather be anywhere but in my shoes. My SSA’s face is red, his expression saying we’ll have words.
“Bauer,” SSA Fisher barks. “My office, as soon as you finish up here.”
Without waiting for acknowledgement, he walks over to the body and starts his own examination while Brock and I canvass the scene.
This is it for me. I don’t think I’ll be fired, but I’ll be taken off field duty and forbidden from talking to the press. We have press liaisons for a reason, and they never would have said what I did to that news reporter. They would have been tactful, so no one was in danger.
Even though I don’t want to admit it to myself, this death is my fault. I’m the reason our victim was killed so mercilessly and dumped like garbage for some innocent construction workers to find.
This will be on my conscience for years.
A few hours later, we finish at the crime scene and head back to our field office.
“I’m sorry,” Brock says, gripping the steering wheel tightly. “I tried to tell Fisher that?—”
I hold up my hand to stop his apology. “It’s all good. I accept responsibility for what I did. You saw that message. In the three years we’ve been hunting The Poser, they’ve never written anything. The one time they do is after I taunted them on the news. Whatever Fisher does, I deserve it.”
Brock looks defeated but simply nods.
When we get back to the field office, I head straight for Fisher’s office. He lays into me, chewing me out for close to fifteen minutes, his face a puce color the entire time. I don’t try to defend my actions or excuse what I did. There’s no excusing it, so I simply listen and answer when prompted.
Pulling in a long breath after his tirade, Fisher says, “What do you have to say for yourself?”
