I saw two obvious gunshot wounds: one to the neck and another to the side of her chest. Then I forced myself to look past the mom to the child in his car seat.
The baby boy had a glaze of pink candy on his lips and on the fingers of his right hand. The rear window was spattered with blood. The child had been shot through the temple at close range.
Conklin was right.
The baby’s death was no accident. In fact, the shot was so precise, the kid could have been the prime target.
I hoped that the little boy hadn’t realized what was happening.
I hoped he hadn’t had time to be afraid.
Chapter 9
“WHAT DO YOU make of this, Linds?”
Conklin called to my attention the vivid red letters printed on the windshield. I stared, riveted by the sight. This is what Jacobi had been talking about when he’d said that the crime scene had “‘psycho’ written all over it.”
He hadn’t said it was written in lipstick.
The letters “WCF” meant nothing to me, except the fact that only wacko killers deliberately leave a signature. It reminded me of cases I’d caught where the killer had signed his crimes. And it brought back the bad old days when the Backstreet Killer had terrified San Francisco in the ’90s, a murderer who took eight innocent lives, left signatures and notes for the police, and was never caught. A chill went down the back of my neck.
“Those shopping bags in the rear,” I said to Conklin. “Were they looted?” I was hoping.
My partner shook his head no and said, “Looks like a hundred bucks in the victim’s wallet. This wasn’t a robbery. This was an execution. Two of them.”
Questions were flooding my mind. Why hadn’t gunshots been reported? Why had the killer targeted these people? Was it random or personal? Why had he killed a child?