by Robb T White
His curses rang out in the empty hallway with the slamming of the door in his face.
Outside he smoked a cigarette and looked up at the lighted windows where the party went on, no doubt his little tirade brushed away and he himself dismissed as insignificant, a boor. His father would hear of it, he was sure.
Wöissell found he no longer cared—about anything. The degree he kept missing for one credit here or an elective there, like the brass ring of the carousel, was continually eluding his grasp. He was a dupe of the American caste system, a child born of privilege.
Now he considered himself a Dalit with a higher mission in life: pure meanness might not suffice as a mission statement but he considered himself a work in progress. Within eleven months, he had killed his first man, someone he didn’t know except by reputation, a rich patron of the university. He burned him alive in his Maserati. It was still an open case, he knew; he always looked forward to the next anniversary issue of the murder in the paper.
Chapter 7
‘MRS. BURCHESS—EVIE—DID YOUR HUSBAND say anything to you about why they went to that spot on the Buffalo River?’
‘Look, I told them state cops and everybody else everything I knew,’ Evie complained. ‘Coy didn’t ask me could he go. He told me he was goin’ fishing with Buddy and Donnie that weekend. Coming home late Sunday, he said. That’s all I know.’
‘You said your husband didn’t have any enemies—are you sure there wasn’t someone?’
‘Look,’ she said, and brushed a lock of hair off her face, ‘I don’t know. He might could piss somebody off real easy. Coy had him a temper, no doubt about it. Most people knew better than to aggravate him.’
She was pretty, even in a late pregnancy, Jade realized, despite the hardscrabble existence she and her wayward husband lived (former husband, she corrected herself). Despite the black roots showing through the dye job and frazzled look when Jade arrived on her doorstep.
Food stains on her maternity blouse, crumbs and dishes with grease congealing on plates stacked high in the tiny kitchen. The trailer was a mess: clothes discarded helter-skelter, glasses and empty beer bottles occupying every flat surface. Pizza boxes stacked near the refrigerator.
‘When you asked the judge to lift the restraining order—’ Jade began.
‘I told you, that’s old history,’ Evie said. ‘That don’t mean shit. You need to find that crazy fucker. My God.’
‘Just a few more questions, Evie.’
‘Hurry the fuck up.’
Jade wanted to pity the woman. What Evie saw when they pulled the sheet back in the morgue would have dropped anyone to the floor. Peaspanen had thoughtfully stitched the lids closed to cover the gaping holes. Evie’s future was a bleak future: single mother, no job or income, a trailer mortgaged to the hilt. But still … Jade thought some of the grief was feigned.
‘Evie, you said he worked extra shifts to help out with hospital bills for the baby you’re expecting. His time cards at the factory don’t show any overtime. Is there anything you can tell me about that?’
‘You mean was my husband cheating on me and coming home lying? Yeah, he was. Do you think I’m stupid?’
Jade waited for the tears but nothing came. Instead Evie lit another cigarette from the one still burning in the ashtray.
‘I can’t smell another woman on my husband. Your next question is who, and I don’t know and don’t give a shit. Now, kindly get the fuck out of my house.’
Jade looked back at the trailer and the woman glaring at her from the kitchen window, one hand parting the sheers. The first and second noble truths of Buddha—dukkha, suffering. Life is suffering and suffering is caused by attachment. Evie didn’t strike her as a widow who would vie for the honor of throwing herself on her husband’s funeral pyre.
The state cops who took over the case from the locals were good. The file on Coy Burchess was thorough. His scrapes with the law were minor. Nothing to indicate he had enemies. Eye gouging is as personal as it gets. Plenty of people at work came forward to speak against him, especially the night-shift foreman: ‘Coy was a slacker,’ he said. She suspected there was more to it. Burchess was a menacing presence on the factory floor and especially the breakroom where he held court surrounded by his two lackeys. But enemies? Nothing warranted by small dope busts, a pair of drunk-and-disorderlies, possession of stolen property (a fourwheeler)—but no connections to organized crime. A major from CID in Little Rock was already touting drug cartel revenge, but so far nothing at all had turned up to indicate narcotraffickers except for the grisly nature of Burchess’s murder.
She wished she could have gotten to Evie before the cops and Fayetteville agents put her through the emotional wringer with their questions. Protocol said not to interject herself into the forefront of the investigation. This triple homicide defied comparison, even to unsolved crimes from the past like the Redhead Murders from the late seventies, early eighties, involving murdered and dumped prostitutes and hitchhikers in Arkansas, Tennessee, and other states.
She had forty minutes to get back to the police station for the next briefing. It was already a de facto task force with CID leading, local cops backing them up, and FBI along for the ride and making their resources available as evidence came forward. She didn’t like cursing, but the word clusterfuck was heard often enough from other agents and officers in the field when investigations grew too big for their britches and everybody got in one another’s way.
The conference room had a single table with plenty of plastic chairs with chrome legs but most of the men in the room seemed comfortable standing around, some near the coffee pot, or beside the boards, one for writing in colored chalk, the other a corkboard for pinning items.
A Lieutenant Stevens in a white shirt, rolled up to his forearms, holding a Styrofoam coffee cup, made introductions around the room. He began with the crime scene and moved on to victimology. An officer named Hake wrote on one board or pinned a photo as cued by his lieutenant.
Copies of Dr. Peaspanen’s preliminary autopsy reports lay in neat stacks on a folding table. She had called for it before leaving for her interview with Evie Burchess and was told by the assistant pathologist they’d been faxed over to the precinct.
Lt. Stevens was capable and efficient. He didn’t waste time and focused the group to the right places in the copies of the paperwork handed out: incident report with the reporting officer’s summary, the park ranger’s initial report based on the man who first stumbled on Burchess’s body, the M.E.’s prelim reports on causes of death, and photos of the victims including mug shots of all three from past arrests. He never used the term serial killer. The papers would exploit the lurid killings anyway, he implied, and it was important to keep back certain details.
‘You mean the gouging out of the eyes, Lieutenant?’
‘For the time being, yes,’ Stevens said. ‘Little Rock FBI is running mutilation homicides through their database. We did the same but too many people have seen the body by now.’
Stevens assigned teams and duties for each. Hake would coordinate with the teams so there wouldn’t be duplication and everybody could keep up with the progress by including copies in the ‘murder book’ to be left in the conference room. Jade’s DVR taped news coverage of the Buffalo River Murders and so far, none of the dailies between Fayetteville and Little Rock mentioned the smiley face. The cop who turned it up in a grid search of the riverbank was muzzled.
‘If any of you officers have worked an outdoor crime scene, you know what problems they present,’ Stevens concluded. ‘This one covers a big area between Burchess’s body and Duane Crawford—his body drifted farthest—so we don’t know what else we might locate out there. The terrain is rough ground, some hiking trails intersecting the shoreline, and sandy stone near the water. Maggot activity on Burchess was increasing so we decided to take the body in after it was pronounced instead of keeping a light on it overnight.’
‘Any chance Burchess’s gun will turn up?’
a cop from the first team asked.
‘Always a chance,’ Stevens said. ‘Let’s hope he’s dumb enough to take it to a pawn shop or it turns up at another crime scene. But from what we know of the crime scene, I’d say there’s a zero-point-shit chance of that.’
All the prints on the tackle box belonged to Burchess. The same with the other two victims. No boot prints, footprints of any kind. As for tire tracks, without a description of the killer or his vehicle, there wasn’t any point in looking.
Stevens introduced a forensics computer technician who reported on the laptop from the Burchess trailer. Evie and her husband shared a computer, separate passwords.
He explained to the detectives the differences between persistent data, stored on a local hard drive and preserved when the computer is turned off, and volatile data, stored in memory, or existing in transit, and therefore lost when the computer loses power or is turned off. Volatile data resides in registries, cache, and RAM—random access memory—which Jade recalled from her Quantico forensics classes; the point being, the expert insisted, volatile data is ephemeral, and therefore it’s essential an investigator knows reliable ways to capture it.
Stevens, aware the direction was getting too technical, interjected, ‘John, tell us what you found on the computers rather than in it, if you would.’
‘It seems the husband and wife had completely different interests,’ he said, ‘she looked up divorce lawyers, female orgasm, eHarmony, whereas he seemed primarily interested in gun and fishing sites as well as a huge number of porn sites like Dr. Tuber and YouPorn.’
Stevens allowed for the expected snickers around the room.
‘All right, John, thank you.’
John took his cue to bow out. ‘It’s all in the handouts if you want to see the complete list.’
Two teams were assigned to Crawford and Hugheart. Burchess, even in death the alpha male, warranted a pair of teams for himself. The Burchess team leader, a female detective, was assigned to brief the lieutenant every morning. Murder generated reports and updates before the body had cooled on the table. Jade had her own reports to write, the standard 302s of a field investigation.
‘A couple more things,’ Stevens said. ‘I don’t want to see anything like “eyeball gouger” referenced in anybody’s report. We’ll hold the lid down on that as long as we can.’
‘What about the smiley face?’
‘That, too,’ Stevens said. ‘Timmy.’
Hake stepped to the front of the room, holding an object wrapped in a dish towel. He removed it with a flourish like a parlor magician, and exposed a rounded chunk of wood with the crude etching of the smiley face on its surface.
‘Special Agent Hui, would you come forward, please?’
Jade walked to the nearer board and stood in front of it and scanned the room. Some smirks, some looked interested. Male cops saw their female colleagues as secretaries with guns, although it was changing. Similarly, the male camaraderie of the Bureau was cracking under pressure to move more women toward the levers of power. But there, the dinosaurs like Carson who still mumbled about working with ‘split-tails,’ ‘skirts,’ and ‘breast-feds’. What men rarely saw when they noticed her small stature and petite shape was the fact that she possessed the lightness and strength of bamboo.
‘The sliced portion of wood you see is nothing to indicate that the murders are part of the Smiley Face murders you all have no doubt heard of. There is no established distance between scenes of drowning victims and the presence of a smiley face to use as a criterion. Graffiti is everywhere. It could, however, be something the real killer left behind as a distraction—or a macabre joke. It’s also possible he or they, as it is not yet conclusive that the killer acted alone, might be thumbing his nose at the police.’
Someone to her left asked, ‘How can you say for sure this is not the work of genuine Smiley Face killers?’
She decided to take the question seriously. ‘There are suspicious circumstances in three of the killings attributed to this theoretical group, which I do not believe exists. None of our three victims were leaving a bar alone late at night, as is the pattern detected in the presumptive Smiley Face incidents. Accidental drownings are the established causes of death in all but a miniscule fraction of the so-called Smiley Face murders. Suicide is suspected in some of those cases.’
She paused to look around the room once more before resuming.
‘Intoxicated people and drownings, as a rule, are not uncommon, but homicide by drowning is extremely rare. None of our three for the profiles of those victims are in any remarkable extent beyond their racial classification. Those victims were well-adjusted, socially normal, high-achieving males. Our three fall well below the norm in every respect beyond binge-drinking, which, again, in our victims’ respect is not occasional but a common occurrence noted by the field interviews in the files. Burchess, in particular, seems to have nothing in common with those males as he is the principal object of this killer’s focus.’
She hoped she hadn’t cemented her place in the investigation as the oddball chasing an urban myth. Time would tell.
She wasn’t so lucky. Another detective from the other side of the room asked if the Smiley Face was identical to ones she had investigated.
‘No,’ she responded, albeit too sharply, ‘there are significant differences among those photographed across a dozen states. Some are carvings, some done in Day-Glo spray paint, many, like the one found at this crime scene but at a considerable distance, let’s remember, was done in a common blue acrylic paint and unless it’s carbon-dated, it can’t be determined how long it had been there—some random hiker could have done it a day or two before the murders.’
He wasn’t letting her off easy, and it made her think of Brookins back in Chicago. ‘But wouldn’t the drawing itself—I mean, using a latex glove—wouldn’t that suggest planning or deliberate intent?’
She was forced to pause while some jokes circulated about the room—mainly about mobile proctology services among the hiking community.
‘It doesn’t go beyond suggesting the deliberate intent by some person unknown, not our killer at all, to draw a smiley face on a tree stump for lack of better things to do with his time and to do so without getting paint on the finger,’ she replied evenly.
My God, she wondered, did any of these cops ever hear of Occam’s Razor? She was tempted to mention that a recent in-house magazine to all Walmart employees in the world went out featuring a giant yellow smiley face on the front cover.
It didn’t end there, however, and she stifled a groan. The female detective mentioned the ‘devil’s ears’ attached to some of those Midwestern faces.
‘Those differences are another reason to abandon this angle,’ she said.
‘Looks more like a big ole hog’s ears,’ said a big cop up front named Jones.
‘Agent Hui, can you absolutely dismiss that possible connection?’
‘Yes, we should. The so-called Smiley Face killers are posited as a group, for one thing, and there’s no forensic evidence to suggest more than one killer is involved here.’
Mercifully, the remainder of the briefing covered other forensic details. The incident report mentioned weather and ambient weather temperatures, water temperature at the site, who entered the crime scene, such as witnesses, EMTs, cops, the park ranger stationed near Mountain Home and what times.
Her stomach protested the steady diet of bad coffee and MSG-laden snacks she had been living on since her arrival. It was time for a decent meal somewhere. The heat had solidified to a heavy wet blanket and last night’s heat lightning was no relief or harbinger of rain—just a display of nature’s power to enchant. She had opened the thick motel drapes and watched the lacy fingers of light paint the bellies of clouds crimson and magenta until sleep closed her eyes.
‘Any chance I can talk you into a meal?’
She was about to open her car door to let the heat out when she heard him. It was the Fayetteville agent Gilker
had sent over. She had to smother her initial feeling because he failed to ask her if she wanted a copy of the pathology report, a breach of courtesy if not professionalism.
Maybe my feminism is showing, she thought.
‘I could be talked into sharing a meal,’ she said.
‘Great,’ he said. ‘I’m Peter, by the way. Pete Grandbois.’
‘I remember,’ she said. ‘You’re from Louisiana? I hope I’m not being rude.’
‘Not at all. Louisiana, born and bred. Sorry we didn’t get a chance to chat at the office before this, but I’ve been busier than a two-headed dog in a meat market.’
‘I suspect Gilker might be afraid I’ll corrupt the office with my Smiley Face occultism.’
He laughed. ‘It sounded more to me in there as if you were trying to scrape that shit off your shoes. Hope I’m not being rude now.’
‘The colorful colloquialism aside, Pete, you didn’t exactly answer my question.’
‘Let’s say he and I agree to disagree on a variety of things and let it go at that,’ he said.
He kept it light-hearted rather than a sub rosa complaint about his current boss. He was a dark Caucasian, very Cajun in his speech patterns with that curious notch at the ends of his sentences. His family, he told her, were swamp people originally back in the eighteenth century—dug into Terrebonne and Lafourche Parishes. Pete’s grandfather up and moved to Bossier Parish during the Depression. Pete Grandbois had the handsome man’s confidence around women; she was reminded of her own inferiority in that regard. All her life she’d used her brains to compete with self-assured men like Grandbois who did effortlessly what she struggled to master.
‘Where would you like to go? I’m a stranger here.’
‘I know a place. The Catfish Hole. Great hush puppies. How about if I drive us?’
