by Andrew Mayne
“More or less, yes.”
He turns to his deputy, “Is he for real?”
“That’s why I called you down, Chief.”
“That’s one hell of a coincidence, you finding two bodies. Don’t you think?”
I realize the closest this guy has ever been to a murder case more complicated than a domestic dispute is what he’s seen on television.
“I’m a scientist. I’m working on a new detection procedure. I was looking into Summer Osbourne’s case because it was similar to Chelsea Buchorn’s and Juniper Parsons’s.”
“A detection procedure?”
“Just ask the people at Hudson Creek. They know all about it.” Right . . .
“And you just brought the body here? Don’t you know that’s tampering with evidence?”
“When I uncovered it, wolves showed up.”
“Wolves never bother anybody. They’re cowards.”
“I wasn’t worried about me. I was worried about her. They’re scavengers. They knew where I dug her up.”
“If you were worried about wolves eating her, then why did you dig her up?”
Is this a serious question? I take a deep breath. “I wasn’t sure if she was buried there until I started digging.”
“If you had a notion where her body was, why didn’t you just come tell us?”
Seriously? “I didn’t want to waste your time in case I was wrong.”
“Well, now I got tampered-with evidence. What am I supposed to do about that?”
“An hour ago you didn’t even think this girl was missing. You have a heck of a lot more to go on now.”
“Carl, go take a statement from him. I’m going to get the doc over here to take the body. Call Warren over at Fish and Wildlife.” He pauses for a moment. “And call in Jefferson with the fingerprint and forensic kit. I want to make sure this girl didn’t die in the back of this SUV.”
Carl stares at Summer’s body, then turns back to the chief. “From the looks of that girl, I don’t even think this had rolled off the assembly line by the time she was killed.”
“Just do it, Carl.”
“Yes, sir.”
I spend the next two hours making a statement and answering questions about my whereabouts. Chief Shaw then has me fingerprinted and photographed and runs them through their computer to make sure I’m not a mass murderer.
I then take a trip with Chief Shaw, Warren the Fish and Game guy, and another deputy to show them where I found the body.
The wolves are long gone, of course, but the shallow grave where I found her is just as I left it.
It’s midnight before they finally release me. As I leave, I overhear Warren explaining how bears will sometimes bury their victims to come back to later.
Great, guys. Believe whatever you want.
I just hope nobody forgets to contact Summer’s mother and tell her that her baby is never coming home.
Too exhausted to drive back to Gus’s motel, I get a room in the next town over.
I fall asleep making Xs on a map MAAT generated for me. They go clear across the state, following the purple band of the killer’s hunting pattern.
Each one is another potential Summer or Chelsea.
I prepare myself for more awkward encounters with local law enforcement as I keep digging up bodies.
At some point their default answer can’t be “A bear did it.”
I hope.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
BODY COUNT
Lily Ames was from a town near Seattle. Her parents last saw her nearly two years ago when she decided to hike across the country. There was some mention of seeing Yellowstone and Montana.
Two days after Summer, I find her under three feet of dirt two hundred miles from the nearest park entrance.
Her throat has been slashed to the point that her spine is visible at the back of her neck. Lily’s eyes are filled with terror. There’s a yellow bruise on the side of her face, implying she suffered some kind of injury long enough before her heart stopped beating.
Using my trowel, then my hands, I unearth the rest of the area around her legs and inspect the soles of her feet. They’re a bloody mess.
She ran before he killed her.
He was toying with her.
I place a plastic sheet over her body, then fill in the hole.
I put an orange flag as a temporary burial marker so the police will know where to find her when I call in my anonymous tip.
Michelle Truyols was from Alberta and worked her way down to Montana by waitressing at first, then turning to prostitution at some point before reaching the border. According to a newspaper account, a friend said she met some guy who was a long-distance trucker with a drug problem. Michelle may have picked up that problem.
Her body is sixty feet from the road, behind a small ridge in the same kind of shallow depression like the others. There are bruises all over her right arm, as if she was literally grabbed off the street and dragged here.
Long gouges run from her back to her stomach, as if she was struck down from above, then pinned to the ground.
I take my samples and photographs, then seal her back up in the ground with another orange flag for the police.
Stephanie Grant’s final resting place is under a clump of mixed vegetation just like the others. I can spot them pretty easily now by matching the growth pattern to the time the women went missing. It’s become extremely precise. Our killer has a preferred victim and a preferred type of location for burying them. I found her by standing on a hill and just looking. Her body almost called to me.
I’ve become numb. Five bodies so far. Each one lost and nearly forgotten.
Being the first person to lay eyes on them—to even know they exist—is unsettling.
Every one of the red dots in the purple band in MAAT’s map has proven a hit. This tells me something very frightening.
Statistically speaking, when your probability estimates keep knocking it out of the park, something is wrong. It’s not that MAAT is so accurate—it’s because there are many, many more bodies out there than red dots.
MAAT is just showing me the ones with 90 percent probability or more. When I adjust the range to include 50 percent or more, something terrifying happens.
My two dozen dots turn to hundreds.
I know how to find one kind of burial. Who knows if the killer has other methods of disposing of bodies? I could just be finding the impromptu killings he doesn’t have the time to do a better job of hiding. That said, he seems to be doing a good enough job.
Montana has a million residents and even more tourists visiting every year. There’s also the traffic of people driving through the state, crossing the country and going to and from Canada.
A watchful eye would be very good at spotting vulnerable prey—the kind most likely to vanish without much fuss.
Just like I’ve become accustomed to spotting the depression and the clumps of vegetation that signal a body is buried below, the killer might be able to gauge in a glance a victim’s vulnerability.
It could be the outward signs of drug addiction. Or it could be from watching them and realizing they have no immediate family or friends in the area.
It scares me to think this is a skill that the killer could get better and better at until he is utterly fearless.
As I tamp down the dirt around Stephanie’s grave and place her flag, I have a realization.
While it’s important that I keep locating the bodies, unless I find their DNA and get a match, I’m not going to catch the killer from some careless clue he left behind.
I have to understand how the killer thinks. I have to know why he does what he does.
I’m not going to find that buried in the ground out here. I have to go to the places he’s been and see what he’s seen.
I have to pretend I’m the killer.
CHAPTER FIFTY
ANTHROPOLOGIST
It’s been ten days since I left the hospital, and I’ve been ignori
ng e-mails from my supervisor, too afraid to read what they say. I’m getting closer, but I need more information.
Dr. Seaver, a middle-aged anthropologist currently teaching at Montana State University, leads me down the steps into the basement where his specimens are held.
“You want to see the good stuff?” he asks, giving me a somewhat fiendish glance over his shoulder.
I found his name doing a search for any information on ritualistic killing in the area. Seaver, originally from Cornell, is currently part of an interdisciplinary study examining violence and human culture. He caught my eye because he wrote a paper comparing contemporary homicides with historical precedents.
We reach the end of the stairs and come to a narrow passage between rows of cabinets. The sparse lightbulbs do little to fight back the darkness.
The air is musty with the scent of decaying things. It’s an anachronism compared with modern, climate-controlled labs and vacuum storage.
“The real lab is over at the Museum of the Rockies, but that’s paleontology, primarily. Pre-Holocene. Our study certainly goes back that far, but most samples are quite contemporary by comparison.”
He leads me into a small room with a workbench. Five skulls sit in separate clear plastic boxes. The color of the bone ranges from dark brown to almost bleached white.
“Here, put on a pair of gloves and take a look.” He removes the first skull and hands it to me. “What can you tell me about this?”
The skull is mostly complete, minus the jawbone. The brow appears slightly thick and the cheekbones wider than an average European, but it appears contemporary. “Asiatic?”
“Correct. How about this one?”
He places another skull in my hands. This one has similar features with a slightly higher brow. “Native American?”
“Correct again.”
The third one gives me some trouble, but I estimate it as being sub-Saharan. The fourth as Central European and the last from Southeast Asia.
“Perfect score on identifying the general ethnicity, Dr. Cray.”
“I took a lot of anthropology classes.”
“But you failed to see the forest for the trees,” he replies.
I glance back at the skulls, trying to grasp what I missed. Seaver picks up the middle one and drops it back into my hands. The face still tells the same story. This one is European, by all indications. I look for any other features, examining the teeth for dental variations. I can’t spot any.
I rotate the skull to look at the occipital bone. There’s a correlation between thickness and shape among races. In whites you can often see sex dimorphism—tell the males from the females—by features on this bone.
It’s just above the bone that I see what Seaver is trying to get me to see: a massive fracture. I examine the other skulls and find similar trauma.
“They were all murdered.”
“Exactly. And in the same way: blunt-force trauma to the back of the skull. Not the kind of thing you do in battle. It’s the way you kill someone in a kneeling or prone position. In my research, approximately 25 percent of the deaths in prehistoric burial sites come from violence. Statistically speaking, outside of infant disease, the number-one cause of death was another human doing the killing.
“This is the norm up until the development of agriculture. Even then, violence didn’t steeply curve until the age of reason. And this violence wasn’t committed by a statistical few. It was regular folks. Once upon a time I might have been the one holding this person down while you clubbed them in the back of the skull.”
I’m unsettled by the casual way he suggests this. I get the impression he’s imagined this scenario quite a lot.
He lines the skulls up in a row. Their haunted eye sockets stare out at us.
Seaver points to them, calling out their backstories one by one. “This one was murdered six thousand years ago in what’s now Hungary. This one died three thousand years ago in China. This one died one thousand years ago in Wyoming. This one was sent to me by the Genocide Project; the victim was from a mass burial in Darfur five years ago. The last one was found in the woods in Colorado twenty years ago. We still don’t know who they were or why they were killed.”
“Savage,” I reply.
“No, Dr. Cray.” Seaver shakes his head. “That’s the point. These are far from the most savage deaths I’ve come across. These are the humane ones. They were killed dispassionately. I have other skulls and bones with hack marks and stab wounds inflicted long after the victim was deceased. I have collarbones with tooth indentations, not from cannibalism, but from someone trying to bite the victim to death, after they were incapacitated. I can show you murder sites that would make the most hardened Nazi concentration camp commander want to vomit.” He waves at the skulls. “This is killing. Murder is what you’re interested in.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Killing is a solution to a problem. Murder is something you do because you want to. You divorce your wife because you don’t love her. You murder her because you hate her.”
The man who killed Juniper certainly took great pleasure in the act. He could have strangled her or slit her throat. But he didn’t. The act of killing was his purpose. Which leads me back to the method.
“Have you ever heard of someone making a murder look like an animal attack?”
“Disguising it after the fact?”
“No. Killing someone in the same way an animal would.”
“Virtually all acts of premeditated killing in warfare involve some kind of animal symbolism. Animal mascots for military units. Wearing animal claws and teeth. Prehistoric man would wear the skins of other predators to assume their powers.”
“What about the act of killing itself? Are there cases where someone has consciously used killing methods like an animal’s?”
“Ah, that’s more challenging. Up until when we went out into the savanna, we were opportunistic omnivores that only ate things much smaller than ourselves. We had to invent the spear and throwing projectiles because our teeth and fingernails weren’t adapted to hunting.
“Mimicry would be a very inefficient way for someone to try to kill, with a few exceptions.”
“Exceptions? Such as?”
“Certain weapons that would resemble the way an animal would strike.”
“Like what?”
“Follow me.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
SHARK TEETH
Seaver guides me to a different part of the basement and takes a dusty cardboard box down from a towering shelf. He lifts the lid and reveals a flat club with triangular white teeth sticking out around the sides, like a chain saw blade.
“In Hawaii they call this a leiomano. They use tiger shark teeth for the blades. It’s somewhat similar to the obsidian macuahuitl clubs they used in Mesoamerica. This one was found in a mound in Illinois. The teeth were from a great white shark. The Mound Builders obviously traded far and wide to have access to those.”
He hands me the club. The tips of the teeth are still sharp. I’d hate to have this slice into me.
“The amusing thing about this is that some anthropologists regard this as a more humane weapon than a sword, proof in their minds that their wielders were more kindhearted than we give them credit for. The reality is that this is the kind of weapon you make if you don’t have iron or bronze. When you get cut by this, you die of infection from a hundred different wounds you can’t sew up as easily as one gash.”
I hand it back. “I don’t think anyone would mistake the victim of this for a shark attack.”
“No. For the Hawaiians it was more symbolic. You’re talking something practical?” He returns the weapon to its box and the box to its shelf, then walks away. “Let’s go down a few rows.”
Seaver removes a long, curved knife from a drawer. “This is a karambit. It’s designed to resemble a claw. Fairly practical. You can find modern versions in most knife shops.”
He digs through another drawer and pu
lls out a metal handle with sharp nails. “This is the head of a zhua, a clawed staff used to pull men from horses and rip away shields.”
I examine the hooks at the end. This is close but wouldn’t leave the deep gouges I found in the victims.
We go over to another cabinet, and he sorts through some boxes until he finds the one he’s looking for. “Ever heard of a bagh naka? This one is from India, but there have been variations in other cultures. In the nineteenth century, the raja would have men fight each other with these until their skin peeled off.” He unfolds a piece of cloth and holds up a set of metal knuckles with four long blades sticking out.
I’m stunned. While I could imagine what kind of weapon the killer would use, I didn’t imagine that it was something that had ever been used widely.
“Here,” he says, extending it toward me. “Hold it. In the Great Calcutta Killings, Hindu girls were given these to protect themselves.”
I grip the weapon in my hand. The claws stick out an inch or so over my knuckles. I can easily imagine how a version of this with blades like the karambit could resemble an animal claw. If you cast the blades from an actual bear claw, the similarity would be even more pronounced.
As I hold the bagh naka up to the light, I get an image of the gashes across Chelsea’s body. I slide the weapon off my hand and set it down. I tell Seaver I want to get some photographs, but really I don’t want to touch it anymore.
“Have you ever heard of anyone using something like this to kill someone? Here? In the United States?” I ask.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if some martial arts nut went after a roommate with one, but no. To kill someone with this, you’d have to be strong.”
I think of the deep gouges in the girl’s bodies. “How strong?”
“I don’t know. But strong enough to hit an artery.”
I pick the weapon back up and use my phone to capture it from every angle.
“Thank you, Dr. Seaver. Just one more question. Have you ever heard of anyone mistaking a human attack for an animal attack?”
“There were reports of wolf attacks in France several hundred years ago that might have been the work of a man. That gave rise to werewolf legends in that region.”
