by Jeff Miller
The principal shook her head. “Larry, this is bigger than a state championship.”
“It’s just not fair. This year, of all years. You know . . .” He howled, then sighed, and then, seemingly sapped of his anger, asked meekly, “Can I at least get my things out of my office?”
“I’ll go with him,” Dagny said.
As they passed through the halls of the school, the mass of students parted to each side. No one spoke or made much noise at all. Even the lockers seemed to open gingerly; footsteps barely patted the floor. Whispers were too hushed to discern. Dagny felt the eyes of the students fix upon her. Maybe they were looking for answers or assurance or relief. The best she could do for them was project competence. She noticed that there were no Hispanic kids in the hallways, and she couldn’t blame them for staying home.
“Everything is weird today,” the coach muttered.
“Get used to it,” she replied.
When they got to the gymnasium, two tall men with closely cropped hair guarded the door. If they hadn’t been special agents, they would have played them in the movies. Dagny flashed her creds. It wasn’t necessary—they knew who she was—but a protocol had been established, and it would be followed. One of the agents opened the door, and a chill escaped. That was good—it meant the refrigeration units were doing their job. She led the coach into the gymnasium.
A hundred rectangular folding tables were arranged in neat rows across the gymnasium’s two basketball courts. Each table was numbered, as indicated by hanging, laminated cards. Nearly half of the tables were covered in bodies in various stages of decomposition, ranging from funeral-ready to near-zombie to half-skeletal. A dozen Bureau technicians were tending to the bodies—documenting conditions, lifting skin cells, and the like. Members of the Disaster Squad were lifting prints. Others were taking delivery of the latest arrivals from the silo at a sorting station near the rear door. Victor was with them, giving instructions and taking an inventory. Dagny caught his gaze, and he smiled at her. She held up a finger to let him know she’d catch up with him in a minute.
Next to the sorting station were eight tables pushed together and covered with loose body parts and appendages that could not yet be assigned to a body. When the coach saw this, his entire body heaved, and he threw up into his right hand. Dagny grabbed a plastic bin from a stack of them and handed it to him. “Try not to drip. We’ve got a lot of people working here.”
He let the vomit fall into the bin. “I’m sorry,” he said.
She escorted him into the locker room, and he washed his hands. “You understand now that this is bigger than a championship?”
“Yes.”
They went to his office, where he filled a box with papers and artifacts, and then she escorted him, his box, and his puke-filled bin out of the gym. She wandered the halls until she found a vending machine. It was filled with assorted multigrain chips and hand fruits—not a candy bar or Doritos bag in the bunch. Thank you, Mrs. President, she thought. She put a dollar bill into the feeder and traded it for an apple.
To preserve the sterility and cleanliness of the makeshift morgue, Dagny ate the apple in the hallway and pitched the core before returning to the gym. As she stepped back into the cold, she pulled out her phone and opened her Weight Watchers app. Searching the point database, she found that an apple was worth zero points. She had forgotten that certain fruits and vegetables were deemed so healthy as to merit no points at all. There were at least one hundred calories in the apple, so earning zero points for it wasn’t fair. She manually entered two points into the app, which seemed like the right thing to do. Victor walked toward her.
“I’m entering my points,” she said in an effort to preempt his hectoring.
“I wasn’t even going to ask.”
“You were, too.”
He looked ridiculous, as he often did. All of his suits had been inherited from his father, a taller and fitter man, so they were too long in some places and too tight in others. This was part of the reason he still looked like a child at twenty-five. Sometime, she would have to take him shopping—a task she hated doing for herself, but one she could stomach for him.
“So, what do we have here?” she asked.
“We’re separating and numbering the bodies, documenting all we can. Then we’ll try to merge all of that information with the information from the phones.”
“Do we have the families lined up to identify the bodies?”
“No luck with that yet, but Diego is trying. Some of the guys had wallets in their pockets. Most of them didn’t burn too badly, so we’ve been able to tie some names to bodies. Hopefully, with witness identification, we’ll have a lot more. Combined with the phone data, we’ll have a comprehensive picture of each of their lives. Everything they did, every place they went, every item they bought. Everything they said. The life story of every victim.”
“That’s pretty amazing.” And it was truly amazing. But she wondered where it all led. “How will any of this stuff help us catch the unsub?”
“Well, once we get the info together, we can . . .” Victor paused, took a deep breath, and closed his eyes. “I don’t know.” He surveyed the hyperkinetic activity around them. “Is this all a waste?”
“If we catch the guy, all of this stuff will be evidence the US Attorney can use to tell the story of the crime. But unless we find his DNA on a body, I’m not sure it gets us any closer to catching him.”
“Well, Sherlock, if we don’t find his DNA, how do we catch him?”
“We do what we usually do.”
“What’s that?”
“Hope he makes a mistake.” Her phone buzzed with a text. She glanced at the screen. “She’s parking.”
“Who?”
“Beatrice Minor. She’s the county coroner. I called her on the way here.”
“Okay.” He reached up and tugged at his red hair. “He will, right?”
“She. The coroner is a she.”
“No, the unsub.”
“Will what?”
“Make a mistake. If he were a genius, he wouldn’t be killing people, right? He’d be investing in something that made him rich.”
That was the thing that always saved them. People who were smart enough to get away with murder generally had better things to do.
They walked to the door, where Minor waited. She was a round, squat, middle-aged woman with short arms and a long face. Her skin was pale, her eyes drooped, and she wore about a dozen dour expressions on her face at the same time. Dagny shook her hand. “I’m Dagny Gray,” she said.
“Bea Minor.” She turned to Victor. “And you?”
“F Sharp,” he said.
She grimaced. “I don’t care for humor under normal circumstances. Do you think it’s appropriate under these?”
He sunk back in his stance. “So sorry. Victor Walton, ma’am.”
The coroner scanned the room for a moment, then nodded. “Okay, I get it. Staging. Isolation. Sampling. Yep. You’ve got refrigeration. Not ideal, but adequate.”
“Let’s sit down and talk.” Dagny led the two of them to the gym coach’s office. Sliding into the chair behind the desk, she motioned for them to take the chairs on the other side. “I don’t know what you heard about—” Something smelled terrible. She followed the scent to the bottom-right drawer of the desk. Opening it, she found a rotten orange. She closed it. “We found a large number of bodies in the silo—”
“It’s on the news. I heard about it. You’re concerned that there might be bodies he didn’t put in the silo. Unsolved cases involving Hispanic bodies.”
“Yes,” Dagny said. “I’d like it if you could—”
“Pull any files concerning Hispanic bodies—male, certainly, but female, too. Segregate all of them that are unsolved, but you’ll want the others, too, in case someone has been wrongly convicted. You’ll want any samples we associated with these cases. Now, I won’t have the actual investigation files—that’s Sheriff Don for the county stuff,
and it’s not too hard to guess why you aren’t going to him for it. If you need his files, you’ll have to get a warrant, because he won’t turn them over otherwise. If you get a warrant, you’ll probably need a SWAT team to enforce it. But that’s not worth the trouble unless you think you have something that might be a lead, and everybody who turns up in Bilford goes through my office, so I’m a good place to start. That about right?”
“Yes, that’s about right.” Dagny smiled. “Now, I also need—”
“Me to coordinate with surrounding county coroner offices to do the same? There’s no reason to think this guy would limit his activity to Bilford alone—”
She nodded. “I’d start with—”
“Hamilton in the south, Franklin in the north, and everywhere else in that circle.”
“Yes.”
Victor leaned forward. “The sooner the better, of course.”
“Tomorrow morning work for you?”
“That will do,” Dagny said.
“I’ll have all the coroners from the neighboring counties come with responsive materials first thing tomorrow morning, at my office. Mind you, we start early.”
“We love early.”
“Five a.m. work?” Minor asked.
“I’m sorry,” Victor said. “That’s not morning; that’s still night.”
“We can make it,” Dagny said.
“We can make it,” he repeated. “We might need a couple of gallons of your strongest coffee, but we’ll make it.”
“Five a.m. at 109 Brightward Road. I’ll bring the coffee; you bring yourselves. We set?”
“One more thing,” Dagny said. “That gas-station explosion was Franklin County, right?”
“It was.”
“Can you have the Franklin County coroner bring the autopsy file for the gas-station clerk?”
“I will.”
She loved this woman. “Thank you for your—”
“Efficiency is the reason I get reelected coroner. No politics in me. I just get the job done.”
“Well, thank you.”
They led her back through the gymnasium to the exit. After she left, Dagny turned to Victor.
“I like her.”
“She’s a character. Wouldn’t let you talk.”
“Didn’t need to. She knew what we needed.”
“Speaking of things we need, we need to sleep. Five a.m.? Really? I took a two-hour nap, but I know you’ve been up for two nights now.”
“That’s how these things go.”
“It’s not sustainable, Dagny.”
“Keep things going here. Get shipments out to the labs every four hours. Fibers, hair, fingerprints . . . we don’t have time to save it all up and submit at the end of the day. Chain of custody is everything. Spot-check the labeling and documentation. Assess competence. Pick the three best people you find, and give them reporting authority to you. And most of all . . .”
“Yes?”
“Don’t let them know you’re winging this. Act like you know what you’re doing. You’re twenty-five years old, and you look like you’re sixteen, so the only way people are going to follow you is if you don’t give them a chance to realize how silly that sounds. Right?”
“Right.”
She was distracted by his suit sleeves, which hung nearly to his knuckles. “Seriously, Victor, when this is over, I’m taking you to buy some new suits. Tell me you at least got a fitted tux for your wedding?”
“Not yet.”
“It’s less than two months away.”
“Well, I might have to postpone it if we’re still working this case.”
“Good Lord, we’d better be done by then.” She glanced at her watch and then patted him on the arm. “I’ve got to run.”
As she darted out of the gymnasium, she heard him yell, “What’s wrong with my suits?”
CHAPTER 33
The thin man’s thumb flitted among the buttons on the remote as he cycled through the channels once more. The local stations and cable-news networks had suspended their regular programing for around-the-clock coverage of his crimes. Famous people were talking about him. Anderson Cooper, who made $11 million a year, was talking about him.
He watched Anderson Cooper from a worn, plaid La-Z-Boy recliner, surrounded by a filth and squalor that began with Yanna’s death and had overtaken the 1,100-square-foot house when his murders began. Piles of papers from court proceedings. Empty bottles from both pills and drink. Pizza boxes. Discarded wrappers. Crumbs. The rats—they were new. There were two of them at least, hiding somewhere in the mess. He’d seen them a couple of times but heard them all the time, the patter of their feet scurrying along the floorboards.
Flip.
And then Lester Holt was talking about him—another national news anchor. Amazing. A famous, rich man in a suit in New York was talking about something he did. The thin man had never mattered before, and now no one mattered more.
The station threw the feed to Allison Jenkins, a Channel 2 reporter who was standing in front of Bilford City Hall. The building had nothing to do with his crimes, but they needed a backdrop, and the FBI wasn’t letting reporters go anywhere near the Hoover farm. Ridiculous, he thought. Even worse, Jenkins had no information, apart from the fact that “dozens” of Mexicans had been left to die in a silo. Dozens? Dozens could be twenty-four or thirty-six. He had killed eighty-six people. She should have known this.
Flip.
Channel 7 had an aerial shot of the Hoover farm, thanks to the station’s news chopper. A crane lifted a body bag from the silo and lowered it to a team of federal agents. The agents placed it on a gurney and then loaded it into a large truck. Using diesel for the bulk of the combustion had worked well—it gave a nice, explosive show for the community but still preserved the bodies enough that maybe they could be counted. Then they would understand the superlative nature of his accomplishment.
Flipping through the channels some more, he marveled at the ubiquity of the coverage of his crime. What was going to happen? It both delighted and scared him that he didn’t know. Would he get caught? He assumed he would. Almost every mass criminal was. Even the Unabomber, alone in that shack in the middle of Montana, was caught.
Or he could flee. To where, though? To Mexico? Now, that would be ironic. To move to their country after he’d killed so many who had moved here. It seemed poetic and also sensible. He didn’t need much. A roof, a small plot of land. He could work as day labor, if necessary.
He flipped back to Channel 2. Now Allison Jenkins was referring to him as the “Monster of Bilford.” This was outrageous. He wasn’t a monster. He was a victim.
Jenkins was telling the wrong story. It was time to make her tell the right one.
CHAPTER 34
Although Bilford’s motels and restaurants were booming from the media influx, most of the other businesses were closed. Nearly all of the locals were staying home to watch television or to avoid it. The few who ventured outside walked the sidewalks with obvious trepidation, their necks craning nervously back and forth, searching for signs of trouble. Children sprinted from their buses back to their houses and locked the doors behind them. It didn’t feel like a man had carried out a mass murder—it felt like there was a virus polluting the air. Everything in Bilford was cloaked in gray, rusted and worn, dulled and muted. Even the sun seemed to have dimmed three notches.
And then there was Diego’s bright-red Corvette, looking like a clown at a funeral as it barreled down Bilford’s weary streets. The pride he had for his car had never felt this sinful, so much so that his body began to shake and quiver, and he had to pull over. As anger welled up within him, he pounded his fists against the steering wheel until they started to bleed. He wasn’t mad at the car—the ludicrous red carriage didn’t know any better. He was mad at himself for spending so many hours to make it pretty while the world around it became uglier and uglier. The car was everything he hated about himself—vanity, selfishness, isolation. He felt trapped inside it.
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When his calls to the congregation had gone unanswered, he’d borrowed his Corvette back from Dagny so he could bang on some doors and beg for people to answer. No one did. The community had shut him out, which proved conclusively that he was never part of it to begin with.
Staring at the blood on his hands, he recalled a verse from the Bible and spoke it aloud.
“‘It is your crimes that separate you from your God. It is your sins that make him hide his face so that he does not hear you. For your hands are defiled with blood, and your fingers with crime; Your lips speak falsehood, and your tongue utters deceit. No one brings suit justly, no one pleads truthfully. They trust an empty plea and tell lies; they conceive mischief and bring forth malice.’” Diego paused, trying to think of the rest. Something about adders’ eggs. Shaking his head, he continued. “‘The Lord saw this, and was aggrieved that there was no justice.’ So what did God do? Did he give up? Did he go home and shut the doors and cry?” He welled up. “No! ‘He put justice on his breastplate, victory as a helmet on his head; he clothed himself in with garments of vengeance, and wrapped himself in the mantle of zeal.’ That’s what God did. That’s what we all can do. That’s what we all must do. That’s what we learn from Isaiah 59. We don’t fear evil; we confront it. Together.”
There was a rousing sermon in there, and if there were a way to force his congregation to hear it, it might change a mind or two. But people who were avoiding his calls weren’t going to come to an impromptu session of church.
Unless he found a way to bring church to them.
Diego pushed his car back onto the road and sped home. Sitting at his kitchen table, he jotted down notes on the back of an envelope, scratching and replacing everything that rang false.
When it was finished, he opened his laptop, stared into the webcam, and started recording. “My name is Father Diego Vega, and I have failed you,” he said in Spanish. “My job is not to carry you through the best, but to prepare you for the worst. Right now, this is the worst. It is too late for me to guide you. Only the Lord can carry us through these times. So let’s talk about what the Lord says.” He recited Isaiah 59, waving his bloody hands before the camera, his voice nearly cracking, rising in volume with each lyric, swelling to crescendos more common to a Baptist preacher than a Catholic priest. His eyes stared deep into the camera throughout, determined to pop through the screen into the homes on the other side. Determined to shame people into action.
