Mounted

by E. H. Reinhard

  I gave a quick signal to Beth and rounded the corner, my gun out before me. I saw the left side of the room first with a closed door. Then my eyes shot right, to the backs of a couch and a lounge chair. Above the back of the chair, brown hair stuck up. Next to the chair was a rocks glass sitting next to a decanter of booze. The man’s right hand, sticking out from the sleeve of a suit jacket, was wrapped around his drink. My eyes rose to a television mounted offset of center on the wall. Directly to the left of the television was the mantel of a fireplace and above it, a woman’s mounted head, which had a waxy shine. Her hands, also mounted, held a golden microphone. I glanced farther right to see a glass sliding door that I figured to be the walkout. The seated man, presumably William David, was the only person in sight.

  “Hands up where I can see them,” I said, taking another step into the room.

  Beth came to my shoulder, her weapon out before her. A moment later, I heard Duffield’s footsteps coming down the stairs.

  “Ninety-four percent. And you came before I said it was time.” He took his right hand from his drink.

  “Put your hands in the air!” Beth shouted.

  Duffield appeared between Beth and me, his gun trained on William David. I jerked my head at Duffield to keep eyes on the room with the closed door at our backs. I wanted his gun off our suspect, who had just killed two of his agents. Duffield walked backward toward the door and out of my peripheral vision.

  “Well, I suppose,” William David said.

  He leaned forward in the chair, stood and turned to face us.

  His hair was parted on the left side, with not a single follicle out of place—the top was longer than the sides, which were mostly gray. A thick brown mustache sat on his upper lip, the rest of his face shaved clean. He appeared to be wearing makeup. His gray suit was pressed, with a blue handkerchief coming from the breast pocket. The tie hanging around his neck and lying against his white dress shirt matched the handkerchief’s color. The high back of the chair that he had sat in blocked our view of his hands.

  “Hands!” I shouted and motioned them up with the barrel of my gun.

  He brought up his left hand, holding a cell phone, which he brought to his eye level. “Ninety-eight percent,” he said.

  “Drop the phone!” Beth ordered. “Other hand in the air! Walk around the chair slowly and drop to your knees!”

  Sergeant Grainger and two additional officers came from the stairwell, guns drawn.

  William David’s eyes didn’t leave the screen of his phone, and he didn’t obey my command. A moment later, he tossed the phone to the couch and looked down at whatever was in his right hand.

  Beth took a step farther to her right. “Gun!” she shouted.

  He lifted his arm to take aim at us. I fired twice, as did Beth. William David stumbled backward and hit the wall next to the fireplace with a thump. The impact sent him back toward us off the wall, and he dropped to the ground, the couch blocking my view of him. I kept my gun on where he’d dropped and heard him making noise. A second later, his head came into view as he used the couch to push himself back to his feet.

  He took a wobbling step backward, swayed, and got his footing. He looked straight ahead, at the gap between Beth and me—no one was there. It was almost as if he was staring into a camera.

  “And this is William Allen David,” he said, “signing off.”

  In a single motion, he lifted the gun, placed it in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. I heard Beth shout the word no just as the shot echoed through the lower level of the house. A spray of red hit the back wall of the room, coating the television and the woman’s mount hanging above the fireplace. His body fell backward, and his right arm flailed above his head to knock the mount from the wall. William David dropped to the ground. Pink mist hung in the air.

  We rushed around the couch and chair—I one way, Beth the other. Duffield came from his spot at the back of the room and took a position at the rear of the couch. All of our guns aimed down toward the place William David had landed. I was first around.

  I stared at him. He lay against a stack of logs in a bin to the right of the fireplace. The cheek of the mounted woman’s head rested against his thigh. His right arm had come to rest in a position around the mount that almost made him look as though he was clutching it. I crouched at the man’s side and looked him in his open eyes as I checked for a pulse—nothing. I holstered my weapon. The sound of footsteps pounding the stairs echoed through the lower level of the house. I looked over to see Duffield pointing to the other rooms that needed to be cleared.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  We waited outside of the house for the forensics team to give us the go-ahead to reenter and have a look around. Duffield, Beth, and I watched as one of the coroners and his assistant wheeled the bodies of Agents Collette and Tolman from the kitchen to a black van that had been pulled up near the side of the house.

  None of us spoke a word. The deaths of the agents were the first I’d personally encountered while working with the Bureau. A few minutes later, the bodies were loaded, and the van pulled down the driveway, made a left, and disappeared from view. The local PD kept a presence on the scene but had been pushed back to handling traffic out front. I imagined a few local reporters and journalists had radios to their ears, waiting on any police radio transmissions regarding the case—a number of news vans had gathered farther down the road.

  A man in a set of white coveralls came from the side of the home toward us. He dropped his hood from his head and pulled off the respirator covering his face—it was Witting from the forensics unit. “We’re going to need a hazmat team in here to remove some of this stuff. Did you guys see everything in there?”

  “There is a room or two in the basement that the locals cleared that we didn’t see,” I said. “I heard them talking and have a pretty good idea of what the rooms contain.”

  “Its hands down the worst thing that I’ve ever laid eyes on,” Witting said. He let out a long breath. “I can give you guys a walk-through room-by-room and show you what we found.”

  I nodded.

  We followed Witting back around the house in the direction he’d come from and entered the lower level of the home through the walkout patio doors. He stopped just inside the doorway and motioned to a large gray plastic box. “Gloves for hands, wraps for shoes. You’ll want both, but I’ll do my best to guide you away from anything you don’t want to be in contact with.”

  We walked over, gloved up, and covered our shoes.

  “You guys were a witness to what transpired there?” Witting motioned to where William David had taken his own life.

  “Correct,” I said.

  “Let’s start over here, then.” Witting waved us to the doorway just off the main room.

  We approached, and Witting stepped into the room a few feet. Duffield, Beth, and I gathered in the doorway for a look inside.

  At my shoulder, Beth placed the sleeve of her blazer over her mouth and nose. The room was a small den with wood-paneled walls. The room smelled of decay. A single sofa sat against the left wall, above it, a single mounted head. Its waxy finish made me believe that it was more than likely the second-to-last victim that I’d seen photos of—Courtney Mouser. The right wall had a chair in the corner and a small table with a couple of books on it. The floor was littered with broken mounts of heads and hands. Decaying gray flesh hung from the bone, along with what looked like bits of clay still attached to the skulls.

  “Geez,” I said.

  Beth took her sleeve from her face. “Looks to be four women on the floor, judging by what I can see here.”

  “That’s the count in here,” Witting said. “Aside from the one on the wall, we have four skulls, four mounts, eight hands. Looks like some of them were destroyed with that hammer there.” He pointed to one of the mounts, which had a hammer embedded in it.

  “What can you tell us about the mounts themselves?” I asked.

  “Well, there is a skull and some spine
underneath each. The skulls are clean and empty, meaning the brains and flesh had been removed prior to what you see here. Boiled, probably. We found some what I believe to be cooked brain matter upstairs.” Witting paused as if waiting for a comment, but no one said anything. He continued, “The hands look like they were put into position with wire, prior to being dunked into wax and painted. There are a couple damaged ones that I had a look at. They are decomposing pretty bad under that wax. I doubt we’ll be able to get any kind of prints from them. We have some clay molded to the bone of the skulls. The hair and facial skin look like they have been both glued and stitched on. That’s all that I can really tell you just from the few minutes that I had in here. Obviously, I’ll create a full write-up on everything back at the lab.”

  Witting motioned us out the doorway so he could exit the room.

  “That it down here?” Duffield asked.

  “We haven’t even scratched the surface.” Witting walked toward the wall nearest the stairwell that led up to the main level. He passed the stairwell and walked to an open doorway leading to another part of the basement.

  We followed. I had a good idea what the room, cleared by the local law enforcement was—William David’s kill room. In our brief time in the house, I’d yet to see the room that had the white cinderblock background in the photos—the room where he killed and decapitated the women.

  “I’m going to have you watch your step, walking in.” Witting pointed down. “Lots of blood in here, so try not to make contact with anything.”

  I was the first behind Witting entering the room. Bloody footprints covered a plastic-lined floor, but Witting’s body blocked my view of the rest of the room. Then he moved to the left, and I got my first look. Blood-spattered plastic covered the entire floor and hung from the ceiling of every wall aside from a gap at the back wall of white cinderblock. Restraints hung from the ceiling near the gap in the plastic. In the center of the room was a large table, also covered in plastic. A naked, headless, and handless body lay on the table’s surface. A blood-covered yellow reciprocating saw lay across the corpse’s midsection. Behind the corpse were two men in head-to-toe clean suits—more of Witting’s team having a look at another mounted head that seemed to be discarded in the corner of the room.

  Beth groaned.

  “I’ll take you over to the woman on the table for a look in a second,” Witting said. “There’s more to see over here.” He motioned to an open doorway off to the left and started in that direction.

  Beth, Duffield, and I followed.

  A smell filled my nose and began to grow in power with each step forward—the stink was that of an outhouse. I tried to limit my breathing. Witting stopped before entering the room. The plastic covering the wall near the door hung over something a couple of feet up from the ground. I looked back over my shoulder at the far wall, which looked the same.

  Witting pulled the plastic back, exposing a chest freezer. “There’s another two on the other side of the room as well. Same contents,” he said.

  Witting lifted the freezer’s lid. I glanced inside to see two headless and handless female bodies stacked on top of each other. The skin color of the women was a pale blue—frozen solid.

  “We have a count of six in the freezers,” Witting said. “The one on the table makes seven.”

  “We only had six missing women,” Beth said. “Erin Cooper-Connelly would make seven if he actually had her.”

  “My hunch,” I said, “she’s the one on the table and the one that was above the fireplace.”

  “If she went missing in California, how did she end up here?” Beth asked.

  “He may have gone and gotten her,” Duffield said. “Kept her here while he perfected what he was doing.”

  “Hold that thought for a second.” Witting closed the freezer lid and walked through the doorway into the next room. Beth, Duffield, and I followed Witting into the small room. The stink in the air increased.

  Directly in front of us was a washer and dryer. To the right, tucked back into the corner of the room was a large cage, much larger than something for a house pet. A padlock lay on the floor next to it. I took in the seafoam-green cage. Each bar was steel bar stock an inch around. The edges and corners of the cage were double that in thickness. The cage stood three feet high by five feet long. Inside the cage were some stained blankets in a ball—they looked wet. I imagined the smell was coming from inside of the cage.

  “No reason to have a cage like that unless you’re keeping something in it that you don’t want to get out,” Witting said. “Probably from a zoo or something.”

  “Cooper-Connelly, perhaps,” Duffield said.

  “If that’s the case, he would have had to have her in there for what, a month, two months?” I asked. “When did she go missing?”

  “A month and a half or so ago.” Duffield said.

  “The thought of that is just terrifying,” Beth said. “Think about it—you have whatever was going on in the next room happening while you’re locked in a cage in here.”

  “Well, it looks like he was trying to limit the sound coming from here or into here,” Witting said. “The walls are covered with acoustic foam.”

  “If he had her in here for months, it was probably to keep her quiet.” I felt myself getting light-headed—the tiny breaths I was taking to limit the smells coming into my airways were beginning to take their toll. “Anything else of interest in here?”

  Witting shook his head and started for the door. “I’ll show you the woman,” he said.

  We left the laundry room and walked back into the plastic-lined room.

  “Watch your steps,” Witting said.

  I followed him toward the body, with Duffield and Beth following, being sure to watch my step as to not place a foot into a puddle of half-coagulated blood. I stood near the woman’s foot, and Beth and Duffield came to my back.

  “This woman died today. Looks like a knife wound to the heart.” Witting pointed to the area above her left breast. “Which is the same with the bodies that we have in the freezers.”

  “We have a knife that probably matches up over here,” one of Witting’s guys said.

  “Bag and tag,” Witting said. He turned his attention back to us. “I’d say she was killed here.” Witting walked to the small gap in the plastic on the wall. “We have restraints mounted into the floor and these here hanging from the I-beam. This pool of blood here is fairly fresh, and I have a blood trail from it back to the table. Guessing he carried her over there before he began with the saw.”

  I stood quiet for a moment, thinking about how the murders of these women had played out—how when he took what he wanted from their bodies, he prepared them in his work area upstairs.

  “Do you think we can match up the cut marks from the saw? Place body with proper head and hands?” Duffield asked.

  “I would think we should be able to,” Witting said.

  “It will help with getting complete remains back to the families,” I said. “I suppose we could still get some DNA, but that depends as well. The saw marks might be our best way to match them up.”

  Witting nodded in agreement. “We’ll make sure everything that matches stays together. Did you guys need to see the rooms upstairs? There’s a bedroom that I’m sure will hold some interest for you.”

  “We saw it while we were clearing the home,” I said. “Little workstations lining the walls.”

  “That would be the room I speak of,” Witting said.

  “It would have been good to get a heads-up before seeing any of this,” a voice said at our backs.

  I turned to see Aaron Koechner, the lead from the Louisville office’s tech unit standing in the doorway, looking in. “Local PD showed me in through the back patio door there.” He bobbed his head in that direction.

  “Yeah, Aaron,” Duffield said. “The phone is on the couch. We haven’t touched it.” Duffield started toward Aaron at the door.

  Beth and I followed. Witting stayed w
ith his team in the room.

  “You said that he was uploading something?” Aaron asked.

  “That’s what he said, yes,” Duffield said.

  We walked across the main room toward the couch.

  “The phone is on the cushion there,” Duffield said.

  Aaron took a pair of gloves from his back pocket and pulled them over his hands. Looking at the couch, he leaned over and picked up the phone. He turned his back toward the fireplace. “I saw all of that over there once. I don’t need to see it again, if possible.” He held the phone in one hand and clicked on the screen. “No issues if I just dive into this phone here to see what he was doing?”

  “That’s why you’re here,” Duffield said.

  “Sure. No screen lock,” Aaron said. “That’s a good start for us.” He clicked at the phone’s screen. “It looks like he uploaded a video. I have it here. Let’s see what it was.” Aaron clicked on the screen and placed the cell phone on the edge of the couch back so it would stand on its own and we could all watch.

  The recording started. William David was standing directly between his television and the head mounted on the wall. He held the gold microphone in his left hand near his mouth. In his right hand was a television remote. He introduced himself and his coanchor, Erin Cooper-Connelly. He held the microphone up to her mouth. No sound came from the recording. Then the remote control came into frame as he played a clip and called the action of the sports highlights. He introduced the next clip, a local basketball game. He placed the mic in one hand beneath the mounted head of the woman and crossed his arms over his chest. The recording was silent. William David took the microphone from the hand on the mount and called the next sports clip—golf. He replaced the mic in her hand and repeated the process of the odd back-and-forth over and over. Finally, William took the mic, walked closer to the camera, and said, “I’m William Allen David”—he turned and pointed at the mounted head—“and that is Erin Cooper-Connelly. Enjoy your sports, America.”