by Robb T White
Highways were good places to mentally unwind. The miles ticked by five miles under the speed limit while he enjoyed the parade of dismal humanity passing him: parents with kids in gleaming SUVs, business suits with Bluetooth headsets clamped on heads, teenagers with earbuds, blissfully Facebooking or texting away, the occasional bearded sort in a clapped-out F-150 or rust-bucket Silverado, truck drivers in big rigs and oil tankers hogging one lane or the other.
So many people in motion, he thought, all of them going nowhere like mobile sheep. One of his favorite fantasies while driving was to imagine something like the big California quake taking out a slab of pavement over a gulf and all the metallic herd plummeting to their deaths. The idea came from a long drive around the Cold Spring Canyon Bridge near Santa Barbara. He imagined one car after the other fleeing the chaos following the Big One, all those suburbanites fleeing the inner-city mob, only to tumble into the steep gorge, brakes squealing, truckers hitting air brakes too late, flying off into the abyss, screaming inside their flying coffins. He could hold the fantasy until the entire valley below filled with twisted metal and broken bodies until it reached the very surface of the bridge. If he could split the atom, he’d put a nuclear bomb in every city he passed through.
Why not? It was a way of doing God’s work.
Chapter 5
JADE DROVE THE 650 miles from Chicago to Fayetteville in a little over eleven hours. She hoped to get a couple hours’ sleep before she had to present herself to the field office. More importantly, she wanted to be there in time for the autopsies, scheduled for late morning. A busy day ahead, not much sack time, and between the cans of Red Bull and energy bars to ward off the soporific effects of the long drive, she was beginning to feel double-teamed from menstrual cramping and the abuse her GI tract had to absorb. She no longer doubted why truck drivers had serious back problems.
Given her traveling assignment, she knew to keep a fresh set of clothing and toiletries in a suitcase in the trunk.
The orange glow of sodium arc lights was fading when she pulled into a Ramada; some minutes for transacting the business of a room with a sleepy teenaged clerk in the lobby, and then—thank you, Jesus—a long, hot shower to cleanse the body and ease muscle fatigue. Feeling better, she phoned the front desk for a wake-up call and hoped to drift into a black, dreamless sleep for once.
Ever since she could remember as a young girl chatting with friends about dreams, she knew she had dreams, but she did not recall them except rarely when she slid reluctantly from sleep into full wakefulness like walking into a theater during the final minutes of a film. Mostly they were dull—no talking trees. She found it amusing that grown-ups pored through their dreams like amateur psychoanalysts sifting for hidden gold to explain why they were afraid of lightning or dogs. She made her classmates snicker in a dull lit class once when she provided an oral and very deadpan exegesis of a poem by that New England spinster about a pink worm tied to a bed post that grew fat overnight.
Leave me alone, Emily, she muttered to the ceiling fan. I’m sorry about that …
SAC Darrell Gilker was a slender man who looked good in a suit but his tousled ginger hair ruined the effect. He had the remnants of a Texas twang, but she heard something else in there, too, a patois of Cajun.
He introduced her to the others in the office, all men, and assigned her a temporary carrel with computer and databases access. He was friendly, a little condescending like most of the ADICs and SACs she knew over the years. She declined his offer to have one of his agents drive her to the medical examiner’s office; the crow’s feet around his blue eyes deepened for an instant and then relaxed. He had a good face, not a kind one, but one that people would respond to and carried as comfortably as his suit. Gilker was a specialist in interrogation. Jade had a high regard for good interrogators, and it always struck her as remarkable that the FBI cultivated so few good ones or relegated the good ones to other tasks. Street cops knew the value of a good ‘box man’ to work a suspect around Miranda for a confession.
The M.E. was cracking open the sternum of the second victim discovered in the river when she arrived, be-gowned, bootied, and masked for the event. Jade suppressed annoyance at missing the starting time. The M.E. nodded to her briefly from his position at the middle table, where he maintained a running discourse into the hanging mic. He used the en bloc method for detaching and pulling out the organs and separating them on the table.
Jade knew that autopsies revealed how inexact the science of medicine is. One third of death certificates are inaccurate and missed commonplace diagnoses. On the next table, an assistant pathologist set the plastic bags of organs inside the chest cavity and began sewing up the flaps. He had not yet sewn the scalp over the skull where the top had been neatly sawed. Pathologists, taxidermists, morticians—they all developed their own little tricks in the art of dealing with the dead.
On the far table lay the biggest victims. Supervisor Gilker gave her a thin file of the basics so far. Coy Eugene Burchess was the only victim not entirely submerged in the water. The bodies of the others were in the water long enough to roll face down in a typical drowning pose. The current was strong but slowed by a bend where their gear was located so they drifted about seventy yards downriver to the opposite shore. A partially submerged log halted one victim, whereas Crawford’s corpse floated into a stand of cattails. The license for his conceal-carry .22 Walther was in the tackle box but no gun was found. A universal Velcro holster was attached to his hip. Cadaver flies had found the exposed flesh within an hour and the bodies had to be washed of maggot eggs after the preliminary sight inspection.
She would have to wait until the examiner completed his exam of the body of Duane Crawford before she could ask her questions. She was lucky, however, because he was both thorough and exact in his answers. It wasn’t possible to tell the order of their deaths, body maggots notwithstanding, but water in the lungs clinched two for death by drowning.
The audacity of the attack was remarkable and suggested accomplices. Fishermen gave each other space the way bowlers extend courtesy to the bowler in the next lane, but the assumption you could straddle a man, hold his head under water until he drowned, without fear of another fisherman or hiker or canoeist coming onto the scene in the middle of the murder, suggested a capacity for discipline extraordinarily cold; then consider the killer repeated it two more times. The probable time of day and the fact that all three victims were found within a hundred yards of one another, within sight of vacationer cabins and numerous hiking trails, added a psychological dimension to the crimes.
Burchess, however, was the interesting one, not just for his physical size. While the examiner was weighing the brain of Donald Hugheart, she lifted a corner of the white surgical cloth covering his face. Both eyeballs were missing.
The state police and Gilker’s agent, Peter Grandbois, was handling the victimology for each victim today, and she would know soon enough what parameters were involved and from that she would know what theories were obtained and which could be discarded; for one thing, it didn’t fit with the so-called Smiley Face murders in several respects. Gilker had dispatched one agent to the spot where the smiley face on the tree trunk was discovered. She asked Gilker to have the agent or a park ranger send a snap to her cell right away. The agent would remove a portion of the stump and bring it in for spectrographic testing of the paint.
‘I’ll answer questions now, Miss…?’
She turned to the examiner and smiled. ‘Special Agent Hui, Doctor…?’
‘Peaspanen,’ he said. ‘I imagine you’re a little curious about our friend on the far table with the missing eyes, but please be patient a while longer and I’ll try to satisfy you about him.’
‘Of course, Doctor, I apologize for getting ahead of myself,’ she said. He’d glimpsed her lifting the cloth. Some pathologists considered this as handling the merchandise without permission.
Peaspanen approached her and smiled. ‘I didn’t put that cloth ov
er his head, I assure you. This isn’t the sort of work you get into if you’re squeamish. He had it on when he arrived. I asked one of the EMTs if they were going for a Shroud of Turin effect. He told me a cop threw up when the missing eyes were noticed.’
‘May I ask if the eyes were recovered?’
‘Yes—and no,’ the pathologist said. ‘One of them was in his mouth. I have a hunch we’ll find the other one lodged in his throat, but we’ll see.’
‘Was that the cause of death?’
‘Whether it contributed to the cause of death remains to be seen—no pun intended. Meanwhile, I have a couple items of interest for you regarding the other two.’
He placed a small steel ball into her latex-gloved hand. ‘Do you know what this is?’
‘A ball bearing,’ she said.
‘Thirty-caliber steel shot, to be precise. Some hunters take deer with them. You can outfit them with quivers for arrows, laser sighting, the accoutrement of the well-dressed Arkansas woodsman. Who needs a gun, right? We used them for marbles when I was a kid.’
‘Where was it?’
‘I took one out of his head,’ the doctor replied. ‘Mr. Hugheart over there, which my able assistant is struggling all alone to get into the body bag behind you, had one just like it embedded in his head. A hunter’s slingshot will do the trick as well as a bullet fired from a gun.’
‘Were they both struck in the same place?’
‘No,’ the M.E. replied, ‘different places. That one, Hugheart, was hit in the temple, left side. Just missed the temporal lobe and almost penetrated the corpus callosum.’
‘Is that significant?’ Jade asked him.
Peaspanen smiled again. ‘You should be impressed. That ball went through the scalp, periosteum, skull bone, two layers of dura mater, and still had enough velocity to penetrate the arachnoid mater. That part is like a track switch on railroad tracks. It controls communications between the hemispheres, which includes tasking the motor, sensory, and language functions. But if you’re asking me whether the killer was trying to disable him, not kill him, it’s a moot point.’
‘Why, Doctor?’
‘The energy it sent into his brain would have been identical to a bullet fired into it with the difference that that ball churned more meat in its path forward. Either way, you’ll drop right where you’re standing.’
‘But you said two drowned,’ Jade reminded him.
‘We got water out of their lungs. They were alive, unconscious but breathing.’
‘Did the killer force their heads under water after they were immobilized?’
‘That’s a toss-up, Agent Hui. Ask your killer when you find him. I’m just the sawbones around here.’
‘What about—’ She opened her file for the other name—‘Crawford, Duane?’
‘Mr. Crawford’s head shot was less severe than his companion’s but still a knockout blow. He’d have had lifelong repercussions if he’d survived. The projectile—assuming the same kind of steel ball—hit squarely where the cerebellum is located, right here.’
He touched his own hindbrain with a latex finger. ‘It didn’t penetrate the skull but skipped off into the water after burrowing through the scalp, creating a neat little wound channel.’
‘I know head wounds bleed, Doctor,’ Jade said. ‘Could he have bled out in the river?’
‘Eventually, but between blood loss and the absorption of water into the lungs, it was a race to see which killed him first. The human head isn’t exactly a tourniquet-friendly place so unless you’re carrying around a high-tech syringe packet with sponge pellets to plunge into the wound hole, water’s going to win.’
Jade’s sense of basic anatomy prompted her to ask the doctor whether that shot might have been deliberately aimed for that region as opposed to a head strike, given the fact that the cerebellum controlled respiration and heart rate.
Jade wondered about the eye removal, some fixation or fantasy at work. ‘Doctor, anything I can use, psychologically speaking?’
‘Again, I must demur. A dead body talks, Agent Hui, but it doesn’t chatter. There’s something called mucus fishing syndrome where people will pick at their own eyes, convinced there’s string in them they have to remove. Now, if you’ll allow me, I’ll get to our final victim and you’ll have everything I know in short order about the causes of death.’
‘Thank you, Dr. Peaspanen.’
Doctors, worse egoists than their natural enemy, tort lawyers.
Jade’s extended family tossed up its share of lawyers, academics, and medical professionals. She’d earned the ‘black sheep’ title when it was clear she had no intention of actually practicing what her law diploma said she could to make money.
She knew the value of stillness in an age of cell phone zombies and social media. She was aware of motion between the two pathologists as they worked on the body of Coy Burchess. The younger assistant at one point backed away from the body when an escape of intestinal discharge filled the room with the odor of rancid meat. She steeled herself against the putrid effluvia filling up the room with a twitch of nostrils and resumed concentrating on the details of the case. Her killer was nothing ordinary. Who takes a slingshot to a riverbank and calmly executes three friends fishing?
The FBI talked about, rather than taught, the importance of empathetic thinking in its Quantico seminars, important for victims of crime, of course, but especially for assessing the mindset of the criminal, whether bomber or axe murderer. Jade once considered a transfer to the Behavioral Sciences and its celebrated VICAP program, but she deemed it too remote from the thrill of the chase and never applied. More than one of her instructors approached her to see if she would consider a profiling when it was evident she had a gift in that direction. She was most effective, she thought, whenever she could retreat inward and reconstruct the crime from the perp’s eyes. Little things, but the insignificant often bloomed into a general picture of what occurred before the crime was committed. For Jade, it was before the blood spilled that excited her. As an investigator, she was meticulous but not a detail fanatic. She believed, once you started to assemble the pieces of a crime puzzle with mere logic, an inescapable flaw will ceaselessly worm its way into your thinking and you wind up fighting confirmation bias every step of the way.
Knee-deep in the Buffalo River, she watched Hugheart cast his lure in an eddy where a brown trout circled it with caution; she half-turns to spot the killer nonchalant in his approach from the shoreline, brazen in the open under a scorching day in late summer, but then, why not? Even if he had his weapon in his hand, a casual observer would think he was hunting small game or snakes. The pathologist was certain the weapon had to be a slingshot and she agreed. Even a monster .410 Mexican shotgun doesn’t shoot a single ball bearing. She sees the killer reach into his pocket for the projectile he intends to send into the head of his first victim …
Dr. Peaspanen was hanging up his smock and removing his face mask. She stepped out of her reverie and waited for him to peel off the gloves. She did the same with hers and tossed them into a blue plastic barrel marked Hazardous Waste Only.
The pathologist was a tall man with thinning hair and an asymmetrical face. He cocked his head birdlike at Jade and began a recitation, part English, part medical jargon. She waited for him to finish. Laconic, then building to a summation, he chose his words precisely.
‘He choked to death,’ he told her. ‘The eyeball was lodged in the upper esophageal sphincter. Compression marks on the skin right over the strap muscles of the neck indicate he struggled, grabbed for his throat while thrashing about, or someone gripped him and held him down to keep him from swallowing his eye.’
She thought that last part a bit Grand Guignol as a theory.
Reading her expression, Peaspanen said, ‘I’ll go with that for the time being. Three homicides, you’re welcome.’
‘I thought you didn’t want to be pressed to play detective, Dr. Peaspanen?’
‘This was too tempting, Agent
Hui. A man with his eyes removed, you kidding me? No medical examiner could resist taking a flyer at that one. He was alive while his eyes were being removed. No obvious disturbance of the eyelids, but the six surrounding eye muscles show tearing. I can’t imagine his last moments on earth were very pleasant ones.’
‘What instrument did he use to remove the eyeballs?’
The pathologist held up his hands and wiggled his thumbs at her. ‘As best I can tell, he pulled them out with his thumbs. No scraping along the orbital bone. He didn’t just yank the entire eyeball, but he got the optic nerve and some of the extraocular muscles. You have any idea how much force that would take?’
‘No, but it suggests a lot of rage to me, Doctor,’ she replied.
‘Rage—or luck. The eyeball isn’t glass, it’s pulp, and the sclera is slippery as egg yolk. He knew enough not to smash the cornea into the retina. He wasn’t clawing at it in a frenzy. He was extracting it with care, using his thumbs as surgical tools. I wouldn’t want to meet that guy in a dark alley. By the way, his right index finger was fractured at both the distal and middle phalanxes. He’d have had a honey of a swan neck deformity if he’d lived.’
‘If you’re right, and the two burn marks on Burchess’s neck were from a Taser, how close was the killer standing to his victim?’
‘Assuming, again, those are Taser burns, and he didn’t have to lunge for his victim’s neck, your killer could have been standing this close.’ He took another step toward Jade and loomed over her. ‘What are you thinking?’
‘I’m thinking Burchess recognized his killer, perhaps too late,’ she said. ‘The gun hasn’t turned up—maybe it will in a later search or someone will stumble on it in the weeds.’
