Precipice
It was 3:20 AM.
Dean Carter stared blearily at his alarm clock. He had no idea what had awoken him. Beside him, his wife, Tessa, moaned something incoherently and turned over, helpfully kneeing him in the back on the way.
The phone rang again, loudly, insistently, like an auger into his brain.
"You gonna get that?" Tessa mumbled through a wad of sheets.
Carter flopped over and grabbed the headset just as it began to jangle again.
He clamped it to his ear right as he fell back into his pillow. "Nwaah?" he managed, then croaked, much more clearly, "Dr. Carter's not even remotely an office."
The voice on the other end was one he knew well - Dave Rigsby was the local sheriff, who often had Carter consult on various things, even when it turned out to be completely unnecessary. "Dean, it's Alice," Dave's voice told him. "You need to come in."
"What? Now?" Carter asked. "It's three in the goddamn morning."
"Yes, now," Dave said simply.
Even in his bleary state Carter picked up on something in Dave's voice that wasn't quite right, and he sat bolt upright. "What's wrong?" he asked, suddenly not tired at all. "Is she all right?"
"Look, man, you'd better just come in," Dave said.
Carter didn't even bother to respond to this, and simply hung up and jumped out of bed, pulling on some proper clothes as quickly as possible.
"Dean?" Tessa asked, now sitting up as well. "What's wrong?"
"I don't know," he told her. "Alice..." Carter shook his head blankly and ran for it.
On the way into the sheriff's office, Carter expected the worst. He ran through every possible worst he could think of. Alice had been arrested. She was missing. Dead. Maimed. Found something. Arrested. Dead.
It was worse.
She was dead.
"Dead," Carter repeated in a hoarse whisper, and collapsed into the nearest chair. This turned out to be a plastic kiddie chair, and he collapsed a bit further down than expected as a result.
"Collins found her half-buried in the woods behind his barn," Dave said. "I'm sorry, man. I..." he trailed off, clearly not knowing what to say himself.
One of the deputies, Deputy Row, looked on uncertainly as well. None of the others were in.
"Dead," Carter repeated again. Alice was his daughter, their only child, sometimes the only glue that had held his marriage together. Dead? He couldn't figure it. It made no sense. She'd just been in town for the summer, about to start her second year of college.
Dave patted Carter uncertainly on the shoulder. "She was a real jewel. World doesn't seem right where someone would murder her," he said.
"Murder?" Carter asked blankly. He jumped off the colourful too-small chair. "Where is she? I need to see her."
Dave shook his head. "She's still out where Collins found her, man, until the coroners can bring her in. You don't want to see that."
Carter looked at him pleadingly, and finally Dave just sighed. "You're the shrink. I dunno what happens when you gotta go shrinking yourself."
Her face was pristine, expression almost dreamy, looking overall almost like she might have been asleep, but it was the only thing about her that did. Though her body was mostly buried in leaves, the rigid pose was evident, limbs straight and splayed, perfectly symmetrical. A hand stuck out, grasping, dark and crusted.
Alice.
Two of the other deputies were nearby with Collins. They'd set up a floodlight.
Carter just stopped and stared.
"Was this how they found her?" Carter whispered.
"Hey, was this how you found her?" Dave yelled after the others.
"Yeah, yeah," Collins said, nodding. He looked a bit freaked out was well. "Well, mostly," he amended. "I mean, she was... she was naked, man."
"What did they do?" Carter asked, still rather quietly.
"Ah, man, you brought him here?" Collins said. "That's his daughter!"
"It was," Carter whispered.
"How exactly did you find her?" Dave asked Collins levelly, drawing Carter back away as well.
"Oh, well," Collins said, "as I was just telling your fine deputies here, rather like that." He indicated toward Alice's body. "'Cept naked, right? Hands and feet covered in blood, last year's leaves like they'd been scooped out underneath her. Like she'd been framed. In leaves."
Dave gave him a surprised look.
"Framed?" one of the deputies, Nellis, asked. She had a notebook in hand and was writing in it again. This was new.
Collins nodded. "I ain't no shrink and that wasn't no fucking artwork, but yeah, yeah, that was what it looked like," he said, and shuddered. "Framed, man."
Carter fell to his knees by Alice's head, reaching out to touch her hair, before he stopped himself at the last minute. "There's a bow in her hair. She never wore bows. Never could manage much of anything in her hair."
"Does that mean something?" Dave asked uncertainly.
"It all does," Carter whispered. "Every damn thing. The leaves, the blood. The pose. Why Alice? Why here?"
"Look, man, you don't want to work on this case," Dave said. "It's Alice..."
"Exactly," Carter said loudly.
The coroners did their thing. It helped, living in the shadow of a decently large city. Once everyone woke up and hauled in everyone else, there were resources at hand.
The report summed up that Alice had been bound, raped, and finally strangled. There was no sign of drugs. The blood was pig's blood.
Carter stared at her, the body pulled out in its drawer, so clean, so still, as he had so many others in the past. But before it had always been other people's children, not his own. After Alice had been born, he had always dreaded this every time he saw another. That one day it would be his own.
This had been why he'd left the FBIC. He couldn't face that nightmare.
And now here he was. Facing it.
"See anything?" Dave asked. He hadn't wanted to bring Carter along, of course, but Carter had insisted with all the quiet force of a broken tree. This is what he did. He could do it now.
Dave hadn't even tried to point out that it'd been the better part of twenty years since Carter had touched an actual murder.
"She struggled," Carter said, indicating her wrists. "And look, he must have cut her clothing off with a scissors. You can see marks along the leg where it would have run against her jeans, because she just kept struggling." He stared for a moment, then askd, "Did anyone find the clothing?"
"Not a sign," Dave said.
"He's done this before," Carter said.
"What, a serial? I think we'd know, man. A serial killer in the area stands out," Dave said.
"This is too specific for it to be a first time," Carter told him. "A ritual this well-developed takes time. Also it's not actually that easy to strangle someone, but he got it and he got it right. One go. There'd be more bruising otherwise."
"Oh," Dave said, peering at it. To him it just looked... like bruising. Like someone had been strangled. "Can you tell what he might have used?"
"Something with a lot of friction. Wrapped it around twice and pulled it tight. Rubber tubing, maybe?"
"So we need to find the others," Dave mused. "Same methods, pig's blood, all that? Sounds like an FBIC job, all right."
"Maybe," Carter agreed. "Strangulations, similar dumping style. They'll be messier. Tell us more."
"You're going to kill this perp," Dave said.
Carter gave him a dead look.
Dave sighed. "I know I would," he said.
