The Perfect Liar (Last Stand 5)

"She's so cold, so calculating. I don't think I've ever run up against anyone like her before."

He glanced at the clock. It was only ten, but he was already getting tired. He typically woke early, worked hard and played hard, too. But his usual physical activity was easier on him than what he'd been through this past week. It didn't help that he'd gotten so little sleep last night. "We need to talk to this Mark guy."

Ava leaned closer to the screen. "Look at her smile. It's almost exuberant, as if she holds all the power in the relationship with the person taking the picture and she knows it."

"Mark took the picture, didn't he?"

"I assume so."

"That's another reason we should talk to him."

"But wil a necrophiliac be any more credible than Kalyna?" she asked. "He has his own secrets to hide."

"He's already been outed for what he is, so he might not be as defensive. And being a necrophiliac doesn't necessarily make him a murderer."

"True. Especially when it comes to the hitchhiker, Sarah," she said.

"We have no proof she even existed. And if she did exist, and she's stil missing, they cremated her body so we won't be able to prove that she's dead."

Avoiding a second glimpse of Kalyna's picture, Luke sat across from Ava, facing the back of her laptop instead. "It wouldn't be hard to get rid of ashes."

Ava nodded. "They were in the perfect situation to be able to dispose of a body without leaving a trace."

"True. But Kalyna could be trying to send us scrambling off in the wrong direction. We know how clever she is."

She leaned back. "I say we ask Jonathan to do some checking, see if he can come up with a missing person from New Mexico named Sarah."

Luke rubbed his chin. "Tatiana said Sarah was about fourteen. Is that enough for your investigator to go on? When did this girl supposedly die?"

"Mark worked for the Harters when Kalyna was sixteen and seventeen. That means Sarah most likely went missing right around then, unless she was a runaway who'd already been out on her own for a while."

"At fourteen, I doubt it," he said.

"Not many kids run away younger than that," she agreed.

"But it's been a decade. That won't make tracing her very easy."

"Jonathan's good," she assured him. "The best. But it'd help if we could get some more information from Mark."

Luke stretched out his legs. "He should be motivated to provide any details he can now that Kalyna's pointing the finger at him."

Ava started typing.

"What are you doing?" Luke asked.

"Looking up necrophilia on Wikipedia. This is my first experience with it."

He waited until she stopped keying in information and began to read.

"What does it say?"

She summarized it for him. "That most necrophiliacs act out of a desire to 'possess an unresisting and unrejecting partner.'"

"So it's about having power, being in control."

"Like a lot of crimes. And it generally stems from low self-esteem, as one might guess." She paused as she read more, then spoke again. "This is interesting."

"What?"

"In ancient Egypt, they used to leave the dead bodies of beautiful women out to decompose for three or four days before delivering them to the embalmers--to discourage sexual interest." She looked at him around her computer screen. "Who would've thought any civilization would have to resort to such drastic measures?"

"Apparently, mental disorders haven't changed a whole lot over the centuries."

"Thanks to the media, we just hear more about them," she agreed.

Since that picture of Kalyna was gone, he moved to the chair beside hers. "So when do we call Mark? Tomorrow?"

"Why wait?"

"We know he works at the cemetery, but he won't be there at ten o'clock on a Sunday night, wil he?"

"People Search wil have his home number."

"It's that easy to come up with his personal information?"

"He might be listed in the phone book, but we'l get a lot more with People Search," she said. "Like his birth date."

"We should be able to get his approximate age from Tati," he murmured.

Fifteen minutes later, she had a number for a Mark Cannaby in Mesa, Arizona. And Luke was certain they had the right Mark. According to his birth date, which was listed as Ava had promised, he was thirty-seven, exactly the age Tatiana had told them when they called her.

A quick check with MapQuest showed that his address was less than three miles from the mortuary.

"I'd offer to let you get on an extension, but all I have is my cell phone," Ava told him.

"I'l lean close," he said, and she dialed.

Mark answered on the first ring. "Hello?"

"Mark? This is Ava Bixby from The Last Stand, a victims' charity in Sacramento, California."

"Why are you calling me?" The suspicion in his voice made him come across as nervous, defensive, maybe even paranoid.

"Tatiana Harter said we should talk to you about a girl named Sarah,"

Ava told him.

"I didn't kil her!" he shouted. "I swear it. That was Kalyna. It was all Kalyna."

"What would Kalyna want with a girl two or three years younger, Mark?"

"She told me she wanted to try a three-way. That was her big fantasy."

Ava glanced at Luke. That sounded like Kalyna. "Where did she meet her?"

"She saw her out front. The mortuary's on a busy road. Sarah was hitchhiking to Tucson. Kalyna convinced her she'd feed her and give her a bed for the night. But she gagged her, tied her up and hid her in the garden shed."

"Wasn't she afraid her father might find out what she'd done?"

"I was the one who kept the grounds. Mr. Harter never went back there. He spent all his time in the mortuary, embalming and selling caskets.

But I was nervous about it. I kept telling Kalyna she should let her go, but she wouldn't hear of it. She kept saying, 'When we're done.'"

"How long was Sarah there?"

"Three or four days."

Ava was gripping the phone so tightly her knuckles were turning white. "It ended in murder?"

"Yes."

"How do you know?"

"I..." His voice faltered. "I helped dispose of the body."

Her eyes troubled, Ava glanced at Luke, and he nodded to encourage her. "That's pretty gruesome, Mark."

Mark said nothing.