ONCE BOUND

by Blake Pierce

  She said, “Actually, not really. I’ve been doing some research on that. It’s a trope, all right, a cliché. And everybody seems to think they’ve seen it at one time or another, like some sort of urban legend. But it never seemed to show up in actual silent movies, at least not seriously.”

  Jenn turned her computer screen around so that Bill and Riley could see it.

  She said, “The first fictional example of a villain tying someone to railroad tracks seems to have appeared long before movies even existed, in an 1867 play called Under the Gaslight. Only—get this!—the villain tied a man to the tracks, and the leading lady had to rescue him. The same sort of thing happened in a short story and a few other plays around that time.”

  Riley could see that Jenn was quite caught up in what she’d found.

  Jenn continued, “As far as old-time movies are concerned, there were maybe two silent comedies in which this exact thing happened—a screaming, helpless damsel got tied to the tracks by a dastardly villain and got rescued by a handsome hero. But they were played for laughs, just like in Saturday morning cartoons.”

  Bill’s eyes widened with interest.

  “Parodies of something that was never real to begin with,” he said.

  “Exactly,” Jenn said.

  Bill shook his head.

  He said, “But steam locomotives were a part of everyday life back in those days—the first few decades of the twentieth century, I mean. Weren’t there any silent movies portraying someone in danger of getting run over by a train?”

  “Sure,” Jenn said. “Sometimes a character would get pushed or fall onto tracks and maybe get knocked unconscious when a train was coming. But that’s not the same scenario, is it? Besides, just like in that old play, the movie character in danger was usually a man who had to get rescued by the heroine!”

  Riley’s interest was thoroughly piqued now. She knew that Jenn wasn’t wasting her time looking into this sort of thing. They needed to know about anything that could be driving a killer. Part of that could be understanding all the cultural precedents of whatever scenarios they happened to be dealing with—even those that might be fictional.

  Or in this case, nonexistent, Riley thought.

  Anything that might have influenced the killer was of interest.

  She thought for a moment, then asked Jenn, “Does this mean that there have never been any real-life cases of people being murdered by getting tied to train tracks?”

  “Actually, it has happened in real life,” Jenn said, pointing to some more information on her computer screen. “Between 1874 and 1910, at least six people were killed that way. I can’t find many examples since, except for one very recently. In France, a man bound his estranged wife to train tracks on her birthday. Then he got in front of the oncoming high-speed train, so he died along with her—a murder-suicide. Otherwise, it seems to be a rare way to murder anyone. And none of those were serial killings.”

  Jenn turned her computer screen back toward her and fell quiet again.

  Riley mulled over what Jenn had just said …

  “… a rare way to murder anyone.”

  Riley thought …

  Rare, but not unheard of.

  She found herself wondering—had that string of murders between 1874 and 1910 been inspired by those old stage plays in which characters had been tied to train tracks? Riley knew of more recent instances of life imitating art in some horrible way—in which murderers were inspired by novels or movies or video games.

  Maybe things hadn’t changed all that much.

  Maybe people hadn’t changed all that much.

  And what about the killer they were about to look for?

  It seemed ridiculous to imagine that they were hunting some psychopath who was emulating a dastardly, melodramatic, mustache-twirling villain who had never really existed, not even in the movies.

  But what could be driving this killer?

  The situation was all too clear and all too familiar. Riley and her colleagues were going to have to answer that question, or more people would be killed.

  Riley sat watching as Jenn continued to work on her computer. It was an encouraging sight. For the time being, Jenn seemed to have shaken off her anxieties about the mysterious “Aunt Cora.”

  But how long will it last? Riley wondered.

  Anyway, the sight of Jenn so focused on research reminded Riley that she ought to be doing the same. She’d never worked a case involving trains before, and she had a lot to learn. She turned her attention back to her computer.

  *

  Just as Meredith had said, Riley and her colleagues were greeted on the tarmac at O’Hare by a pair of uniformed railroad cops. They all introduced themselves, and Riley and her colleagues got into their vehicle.

  “We’d better hurry,” the cop in the passenger seat said. “The railroad bigwigs are really breathing down the chief’s neck to get that body off the tracks.”

  Bill asked, “How long will it take us to get there?”

  The cop who was driving said, “Usually an hour, but it won’t take us that long.”

  He turned on the lights and siren, and the car started wending its way through the heavy late afternoon traffic. It was a tense, chaotic, high-speed drive that eventually took them through the small town of Barnwell, Illinois. After that, they passed through a railroad crossing.

  The passenger cop pointed.

  “It looks like the killer turned off the road right next to the tracks in some kind of off-road vehicle. He drove alongside the tracks until he reached the place where he did the killing.”

  Soon they pulled over and parked next to a wooded area. Another police vehicle was parked there, and also a coroner’s van.

  The trees weren’t very dense. The cops led Riley and her colleagues straight through them to the railroad tracks, which were only some fifty feet away.

  Just then, the crime scene came into full view.

  Riley gulped hard at what she saw.

  Suddenly gone were any corny images of mustachioed villains and damsels in distress.

  This was all too real—and all too horrible.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  For a long moment, Riley stood staring at the body on the tracks. She’d seen corpses mangled in all kinds of horrifying ways. Even so, this victim presented a uniquely shocking spectacle. The woman had been beheaded cleanly by the wheels of the train, almost as if by a guillotine’s blade.

  Riley was surprised that the woman’s headless body seemed unscathed by the train that had passed over it. The victim was bound tightly with duct tape, her hands and arms taped to her sides, and her ankles taped together. Clothed in what had been an attractive outfit, the body was twisted in a desperate, writhing position. Where her neck was severed, blood was spattered on the crushed stones, the wooden ties, and the rail. The head had been thrown some six or seven feet down the embankment along the tracks. The woman’s eyes and mouth gaped up at the sky in an expression of frozen horror.

  Riley saw several people standing around the body, some of them wearing uniforms, some not. Riley figured they were a mix of local police and railroad cops. A man in a uniform came toward Riley and her colleagues.

  He said, “You’re the FBI folks, I take it. I’m Jude Cullen, Deputy Chief of Railroad Police for the Chicago region—‘Bull’ Cullen, folks call me.”

  He sounded proud of the nickname. Riley knew from her research that “Bull” was general slang for a police officer on the railroad. Actually, in the railroad police organization they held the titles of Agent and Special Agent, much like the FBI. This one apparently preferred the sound of the more generic term.

  “It was my idea to get you guys here,” Cullen continued. “I hope the trip proves to be worth it. The sooner we can get the body away from here, the better.”

  As Riley and her colleagues introduced themselves, she looked Cullen over. He seemed remarkably young and had an exceptionally muscular physique, his arms bulging below the uniform’s short slee
ves and the shirt stretched tight across his chest.

  The nickname “Bull” suited him pretty well, she thought. But Riley always found herself put off rather than attracted by men who obviously spent many hours in a gym to look this way.

  She wondered how a muscle-bound guy like Bull Cullen actually found time for much of anything else. Then she noticed that he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. She figured that his life must be about his job and working out, and not much else.

  He appeared to be good-natured and not especially shocked by the unusually grisly nature of the crime scene. Of course, he’d been here for a few hours now—long enough to get somewhat numbed to it. Even so, the man immediately struck Riley as rather vain and shallow.

  She asked him, “Have you identified the victim?”

  Bull Cullen nodded.

  “Yeah, her name was Reese Fisher, thirty-five years old. She lived right near here in Barnwell, where she worked as the local librarian. She was married to a chiropractor.”

  Riley looked up and down the tracks. This stretch was curved so that she couldn’t see very far in either direction.

  “Where is the train that ran over her?” she asked Cullen.

  Cullen pointed and said, “About a half mile down there, exactly where it stopped.”

  Riley noticed an obese, black-uniformed man who was crouching next to the body.

  “Is that the medical examiner?” she asked Cullen.

  “Yeah, let me introduce you to him. This is the Barnwell coroner, Corey Hammond.”

  Riley crouched down beside the man. She sensed that, in contrast to Cullen, Hammond was still struggling to contain his shock. His breathing was coming in gasps—partly due to his weight, but also, she suspected, from revulsion and horror. He’d surely never seen anything like this in his jurisdiction.

  “What can you tell us so far?” Riley asked the coroner.

  “No sign of sexual assault that I can see,” Hammond said. “That’s consistent with the other coroner’s autopsy of the victim four days ago, over near Allardt.”

  Hammond pointed to mangled pieces of wide silvery tape around the woman’s neck and shoulders.

  “The killer bound her hand and foot, then taped her neck onto the rail and immobilized her shoulders. She must have struggled like mad trying to get loose. But she didn’t stand a chance.”

  Riley turned toward Cullen and asked, “Her mouth wasn’t gagged. Would anybody have heard her screaming?”

  “We don’t think so,” Cullen said, pointing toward some trees. “There are some houses through those woods, but they’re out of earshot. A couple of my guys went from door to door asking if anybody had heard anything or had any idea what had been happening at the time of the murder. No one did. They found out all about it on TV or on the Internet. They’ve been instructed to stay away from here. So far, we haven’t had any trouble with gawkers.”

  Bill asked, “Did it look like anything was stolen from her?”

  Cullen shrugged.

  “We don’t think so. We found her purse right here beside her, and she still had identification and money and credit cards. Oh, and a cell phone.”

  Riley studied the body, trying to imagine how the killer had managed to get the victim into this position. Sometimes she could get a powerful, even uncanny, feeling of the killer just by tuning in to her surroundings at a crime scene. Sometimes it almost seemed that she could get into his thoughts, know what was on his mind as he committed the murder.

  But not right now.

  Things were too jangled here, with all these people milling about.

  She said, “He must have subdued her somehow before he bound her up like this. What about the other corpse, the victim that was killed earlier? Did the local coroner find any drugs in her system?”

  “There was flunitrazepam in her bloodstream,” Coroner Hammond said.

  Riley glanced at her colleagues. She knew what flunitrazepam was, and she knew that Jenn and Bill did as well. Its trade name was Rohypnol, and it was commonly known as the date rape drug or as “roofies.” It was illegal, but all too easy to buy on the streets.

  And it certainly would have subdued the victim, rendering her helpless although possibly not fully unconscious. Riley knew that flunitrazepam had an amnesiac effect once it wore off. She shuddered to realize …

  It might well have worn off right here—just before she died.

  If so, the poor woman would have had no idea how or why such a terrible thing had happened to her.

  Bill scratched his chin as he looked down at the body.

  He said, “So maybe this started off date-rape style, with the killer slipping the drug into her drink at a bar or a party or something.”

  The coroner shook his head.

  “Apparently not,” he said. “There wasn’t a trace of the drug in the other victim’s stomach. It must have been given to her as an injection.”

  Jenn said, “That’s odd.”

  Deputy Chief Bull Cullen looked at Jenn with interest.

  “Why so?” he asked.

  Jenn shrugged slightly.

  She said, “It’s a little hard to imagine, that’s all. Flunitrazepam doesn’t take effect right away, no matter how it’s delivered. In a date-rape situation, that typically doesn’t matter. The unsuspecting victim maybe has drinks with her soon-to-be assailant for a little while, starts feeling woozy without knowing quite why, and pretty soon she becomes helpless. But if our killer stabbed her with a needle, she’d immediately know she was in trouble, and she’d have had a few minutes to resist before the drug took effect. It just doesn’t sound … very efficient.”

  Cullen smiled at Jenn—a little flirtatiously, Riley thought.

  “It makes sense to me,” he said. “Let me show you.”

  He walked behind Jenn, who was markedly shorter than he was. He started reaching around her neck from behind her. Jenn stepped away.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” Jenn said.

  “Just demonstrating. Don’t worry, I’m not really going to hurt you.”

  Jenn scoffed and kept her distance from him.

  “Damn right, you’re not,” she said. “And I’m pretty sure I know what you’ve got in mind. You’re thinking the killer used some kind of choke hold.”

  “That’s right,” Cullen said, still smiling. “Specifically, a so-called blood choke.”

  He twisted his arm to illustrate his point.

  “The killer approached her unexpectedly from behind, then crooked his arm like this around the front of her neck. The victim could still breathe, but her carotid arteries were shut off completely, cutting off the blood flow to the brain. The victim lost consciousness within seconds. Then it was easy for the killer to administer an injection that rendered her helpless for a longer period.”

  Riley easily sensed the friction between Cullen and Jenn. Cullen was obviously a classic “mansplainer” whose attitude toward Jenn was condescending as well as flirtatious.

  Jenn clearly didn’t like him one bit, and Riley felt the same. The man was shallow, all right, with a poor sense of appropriate behavior when it came to dealing with a female colleague—and an even worse sense of how to behave at a murder scene.

  Still, Riley had to admit that Cullen’s theory was sound.

  He might be obnoxious, but he wasn’t stupid.

  In fact, he might be genuinely helpful to work with.

  That is, if we can stand to be around him, Riley thought.

  Cullen stepped off the tracks and down the slope and pointed at a space where the ground had been taped off.

  He said, “We’ve got some tire tracks, from where he drove down here after turning off the main road back at the railroad crossing. They’re big tracks—obviously some kind of off-road vehicle. Here are some footprints too.”

  Riley said, “Have your people take pictures of these. We’ll send them to Quantico and have our technicians run them through our database.”

  Cullen stood with his arms akimbo for a mo
ment, taking in the scene with what seemed to Riley almost like a sense of satisfaction.

  He said, “I’ve got to say, this is a new experience for me and my guys. We’re used to investigating cargo theft, vandalism, collisions, and the like. Murders are few and far between. And something like this—well, we’ve never seen anything like it before. Of course, I guess it’s nothing really special for you FBI folks. You’re used to it.”

  Cullen got no reply and he fell silent for a moment. Then he looked at Riley and her colleagues and said, “Well, I don’t want to take too much of your precious time. Just give us a profile, and my team will take it from here. You can fly back home today, unless you really want to spend the night.”

  Riley, Bill, and Jenn looked at each other with surprise.

  Did he seriously think they could wrap up their work here that quickly?

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” Riley said.

  Cullen shrugged and said, “I’m sure you’ve figured out something in the way of a profile by now. That’s what you’re here for, after all. What can you tell me?”

  Riley hesitated for a moment.

  Then she said, “We can give you a few generalizations. Statistically, most murderers who leave the body at the scene have a prior criminal record. Over half of them are between the ages of fifteen and thirty-seven—and over half are African-American, employed at least part time, and have at least a high school education. Some such killers have had prior psychiatric problems, and some have been in the military. But …”

  Riley hesitated.

  “But what?” Cullen asked.

  “Try to understand—none of this is really useful information, at least not at this point. There are always outliers. And our killer is starting to look like one already. For example, the kind of killer we’re talking about usually has some kind of sexual motivation. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here. My guess is that he’s not typical in a lot of ways. Maybe he’s not typical at all. We’ve still got a lot of work cut out for us.”

  For the first time since she’d arrived, Cullen’s expression darkened a little.

  Riley added, “And I want her cell phone rushed to Quantico. And the other victim’s cell phone as well. Our technicians need to see if they can get any information out of them.”