B00CCYP714 EBOK

by Bradshaw, R. E.

  Rainey stood and turned to the others saying, “Wait here,” before walking down the slight slope to the dry streambed. She knelt, holding the flashlight parallel to the slope of the other bank. As the beam skipped just above the surface, three distinct piles of leaves, branches, and pine needles appeared, and were too symmetrically spaced to be naturally occurring. Rainey shouted back to the others.

  “You can turn the lights back on. I found them, well, three of them anyway. Tell the ME to come on in, so we can take a look.”

  Rainey flashed her light around the area, while Wiley and Sheila made the appropriate communications. She noticed a small tree standing alone at the crest of the embankment, obviously planted there. It did not look like the other evergreens in the area. The cameraman came down into the streambed with her, recording the scene. He focused where her light was shining and commented on the tree, the first words Rainey had heard him speak.

  “That shouldn’t be here,” he said.

  “Why? What kind of tree is that?” Rainey asked.

  “It’s a Western Hemlock. I’m from Seattle, Washington. That’s our state tree.”

  Sheila worked her way down the slope to stand beside Rainey. “The ME is on the way,” she said.

  The light from the helicopter popped back on and focused on the spot where they were standing. The three piles of debris were more obvious now that Rainey had located them. She pointed them out to Sheila and Wiley, who had just stepped down into the streambed. “See those three evenly spaced piles of leaves and branches? Shallow graves on a stream bank with a Western Hemlock planted above them. This is either his homage to Gary Ridgway, The Green River Killer, or Ted Bundy, both from the state of Washington. I’ll have to see the bodies to determine which.”

  “How will you know?” Shelia asked.

  Rainey said matter-of-factly, “If they were strangled and still have their heads, then it’s Ridgway. The UNSUB mentioned ‘his study.’ If he truly conducted a study on serial killers, then he could not have skipped over old Gary. He was originally convicted of forty-eight murders, had another tacked on in a plea bargain, but confessed to committing more than ninety in his sixteen-year killing spree. If this is his Ridgway staging, then these bodies will be the missing prostitutes. We’ll need to check for signs of necrophilia, as well.”

  Wiley stared at the shallow graves for a moment. “So where do you think the others are?”

  “Let me see that map again,” Rainey said, holding out her hand.

  Wiley handed over the map and leaned in for a better look, as Rainey held it out in the light.

  “See how the main road branches off into these planned cul-de-sacs? I’d have your search grids start at the end of each turn around and expand out from there. He took the time to plant a tree here. If you stand back on the other bank, this looks like a museum exhibit. He used the paved road to create pathways to his exhibits. If he’s done what I think he has done, then this will be the least horrific of his displays.”

  Wiley’s radio cackled loudly with an excited voice. “Captain Trainer, come in. Captain Trainer, respond.”

  Wiley put the radio to his mouth and answered, “Trainer, go ahead.”

  “You’ve got to come back to the lake, now. Oh man, you need to come right now!”

  “I can’t come right now. I’m waiting for the ME to get here. Have they started back this way?”

  “Well, yes and no, sir. They started that way, but then they saw—Really, you need to come as soon as you can.”

  “I counted five ME vans out there on the road. You send one of them to my location and I’ll be back to the lake in a few minutes.”

  “Ten-four, Captain. And hey, you better bring that profiler back with you, too. She’s never going to believe this.”

  Rainey smiled when Wiley looked at her and spoke into the radio. “Son, the only person out here that can believe this shit is that profiler. The rest of us, well, we’re going to have to suck it up. Now, calm down and get that ME rolling to me.”

  “Ten-four, Captain.”

  #

  The site was photographed from all angles, before Rainey was allowed to move some of the debris aside. She only had to brush away a pile of dried pine needles to see that she was correct. Uncovering the upper body of a young woman, with the panties he used to strangle her still tied around her neck, Rainey recognized the posing from having viewed the photographs of Gary Ridgway’s victims’ gravesites.

  “These are going to be the working girls he kidnapped,” she said, standing and removing the latex gloves she had donned before approaching the body. She spoke directly to the medical examiner’s evidence collection team. “Do what you must to uncover the bodies, but please don’t move them until the FBI team arrives. They should be here soon.”

  An evidence technician whined, “Man, we’ll be standing around out here waiting on the feds for hours.”

  Rainey smiled at the young man. “There will be plenty for you to do, before your shift ends. In fact, I doubt you will ever forget this night.” She looked back over her shoulder at the skull staring up at the stars. “And don’t worry about her. She’s been waiting three years for us to find her. I’m sure she has the patience to wait for the people that are coming to help solve her murder.”

  The technician slipped away, red-faced and humbled by Rainey’s admonishment, as more crime scene investigators began to arrive. Wiley explained the parameters in which they should work, keeping the scene as pristine as possible until the behavioral analysts could have a look. Rainey walked out of the woods to the SUV with Sheila. The flatbeds were moving lights into the areas she had indicated needed to be searched first. Orders were given to the helicopters to fly around, basically making a show of searching the adjoining woods. She could still hear them clearly, but at least they could talk now without shouting.

  “Where did he put the first victim?” Rainey wondered aloud.

  Sheila commented, “I was thinking about that too. If the prostitutes were his Gary Ridgway tribute, what was the first one?”

  “The first one was an anomaly. I think she crossed his path at the wrong moment in his life and he finally took his fantasies from his mind to reality. Her body will reveal more clues about who he is. I’m not sure we’ll find her out here. They usually don’t put as much planning into the first body disposal. He would have wanted to get rid of the body quickly. She’s probably closer to where he lives, or was. I wouldn’t rule out him moving bodies around.”

  Wiley joined them at the SUV. “Let’s go see what all the fuss is about up at the lake and then we’ll get the search groups started. They should have all the lights set up by then.”

  Rainey stared out the window at the commotion erupting on the site, as they drove past flatbeds and ME vans positioning themselves for the body recoveries she had predicted. She had no doubt that her assumptions were correct. As they wound their way toward the lake, Rainey saw what the killer saw, erasing all the noise and illumination, just him on a slow walk through his museum of horrors. If he were caught on the property, he would claim he was just a local out for a walk in the woods, or an off-road enthusiast riding the back trails. The property did not appear to be disturbed in the least, meaning there was hardly any traffic through here at all.

  Rainey turned to Sheila. “Check and see if this area is patrolled by a security company, and talk to the local deputies. Find out if they have any records of trespassers, vandals, anything suspicious—and have them look back for calls that may have come in from the public, reporting activity out here. See if those reports came from people willing to give their names.”

  Wiley made eye contact with Rainey in the rearview mirror. “You think he may have called something in himself?”

  “Yes, I do. If you look at the timeline of abductions, there was a time about eighteen months ago, when no women fitting his MO were reported missing. He may have had a moment of clarity. He may have freaked himself out recreating one of these crimes. He may
have tried to have the bodies discovered, as a deterrent to future murders. If he did do that and his crimes still went undiscovered, it fed his narcissistic belief that he could not be caught. Big Ed Kemper had the head of one of his victims in the trunk, while he was inside having his juvenile murder record sealed by two psychologists who deemed him a new man. It emboldened him beyond measure.”

  “Well, it would take a special kind of freak to do the Bundy body dumps,” Sheila said.

  Everybody knew who Ted Bundy was, knew his crimes, knew his swaggering good looks, but not everyone was willing to know what really turned Theodore Robert Bundy on. Ted liked them dead. He had absolutely no use for a conscious victim. He revisited the bodies, often putting makeup on the corpse and fixing her hair, before violating her again. If this UNSUB went through with replicating the Bundy murders, it put him in a very special class of criminals. Necrophilia practitioners would admit to the most inhumane atrocities, but rarely wanted to discuss the post mortem activities they enjoyed. Even the sickest of the freaks knew sexual violation of the dead was extraordinarily offensive.

  When they arrived at the lake, Rainey could see high-powered lights lining the banks and aimed down in the water. The water was clear bluish-green, indicating a sandy bottom. The dive team’s Zodiac boat floated in the center of the lake, with two divers in cold-water dry-suits hanging onto the sides. The young detective who had frantically called Wiley on the radio hurried to the SUV before it came to a stop. As soon as Wiley opened his door, the young man started talking.

  “Captain Trainer, we have a video you need to see,” he said, trying to remain calm, but Rainey could tell it was taking quite an effort on his part.

  Rainey and Sheila followed Wiley and the young detective to the back of the dive team’s Humvee, where several officers were gathered around a laptop computer, resting on the tailgate.

  “Captain,” one of the officers said, dipping his head in an unofficial sign of respect for his superior.

  An older, silver-haired officer stuck out his hand to shake Wiley’s. “Captain, we got a strange one here. In all my years of recovering bodies from the water, I have never seen anything like this.”

  “Lieutenant Chambless,” Wiley began, “this is Rainey Bell. She’s a behavioral analyst consulting on the case.”

  Chambless extended his hand to Rainey. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, and I’m glad you’re here. Maybe you can tell us what we’ve found. We have video of what the divers saw. Nothing was touched. They just took the video and came back up.”

  Rainey shook his hand and said, “Well, let’s see what you got.”

  The sergeant moved the other officers out of the way and turned the laptop so Rainey could see the screen. He hit play, while he narrated what she was seeing.

  “When we turned on the lights, we could see a dark spot out in the middle there. The boys went in and started across the bottom. With our underwater lights, we can see pretty well in clear water. You’ll see the dark mass starting to form in front of them here.”

  He stopped talking and just let the video play. Rainey could hear the divers talking to each other through their full-face masks and the sound of the air bubbles moving through the water. The mass began to take the shape of a white Volkswagen. Rainey recognized the 1968 model right away. Ted Bundy drove the same car.

  As the diver grew closer, Rainey heard him exclaim, “Holy shit!”

  The driver’s side door came into focus. The hollow eyes of a skull stared out the window at them, its short dark hair floating in the water. The skeletal hands of the body were tied to the steering wheel.

  The other diver said, “Fuck me. What the hell is that?”

  The sergeant reached over and muted the volume, as the video continued to play. The camera moved closer, revealing two bodies buckled into the back seat. One of the bodies was bound with ropes around her ankles, knees, thighs, waist, and shoulders. A gag protruded from her mouth, and there was a plastic bag over her head. It seemed the UNSUB had also studied Dennis Rader, the self-proclaimed Bind-Torture-Kill murderer that terrorized Wichita, Kansas. The second body was also bound with hands behind her back, a hangman’s noose dangling from her neck.

  Rainey began to describe what she was seeing. “The victims are in varying conditions of decay, which indicates he killed them at different times. He’s done quite a bit of work to sink a car that floats and pose the bodies this way. The lake is too exposed to spend the kind of time it took to do that. I think he put the bodies in the car and rolled them in the water together.”

  Chambless said, “He could have floated it out to the middle and then sunk it. Easy enough to do, even for one person.”

  Rainey explained what the bodies represented. “The body with the bag over the head is indicative of Dennis Rader, BTK. The noose on this one is copying Gerard Schaefer. I’m sure you all recognize Ted Bundy’s car. The passenger seat has been removed, just like Bundy’s.”

  The camera moved around the car and then the diver poked it into the passenger side window. On the floor, by the driver’s seat, another body was laid out. This one was handcuffed with a crowbar still embedded in her skull.

  Rainey pointed at the screen. “That’s how Bundy killed his victims.”

  Sheila asked, “So what about the driver? Whose victim does that represent?”

  Rainey did not take her eyes from the screen, but answered, “I think that’s supposed to be Ted. I never profiled this UNSUB as killing men, but I guess he needed one for his artwork. That looks like a tie and suit jacket on the body.”

  “Sweet Mary,” the sergeant said under his breath.

  Rainey turned to him. “Could you ask them to open the trunk?”

  The sergeant picked up his radio and made the request. He turned off the video and started the live feed from the diver’s camera. Rainey watched as the divers descended to the front of the Volkswagen, getting a good view of the macabre scene behind the windshield. It took several tries, but when the diver finally pried open the trunk lid, everyone watching jumped back from the screen. A bubble of trapped air exploded from under the lid, causing three skulls to float up a few inches before settling back down in the trunk space.

  “How in the hell did she know that would be there?”

  She ignored the comment and spoke to Wiley and Sheila. “That’s Big Ed Kemper’s MO. We have extreme violence and intelligence here, a ruthless combination. I would not be surprised to find our UNSUB has killed more than we are aware of—many more.”

  The diver shut the trunk lid to keep the evidence intact. When he did, Rainey saw something written on the paint by the latch.

  Rainey asked the sergeant, “Can they get a close up of what that says?”

  The sergeant spoke into his radio again and the camera moved in closer to the words. Painted in freehanded small black print, Rainey read aloud, “Lady Killer.”

  “This guy is a real piece of work,” Wiley commented in disgust.

  Rainey nodded. “This is his lobby display, like the big dinosaur skeleton that welcomes you to the natural history museum.” She pointed at the gates. “That’s where you enter and then follow the road to his gallery of killers.”

  Rainey turned a complete circle, observing the fervor of activity in all directions. Up in the sky, news media helicopters danced on the perimeter, held at bay by the police air patrol. Searchlights crisscrossed the landscape. Emergency lights flashed red, white, and blue, bouncing off any reflective surface. The ground troops of the media forces had arrived at the gate. Cameras rolled under bright lights, electronic flashes popped repeatedly. It rivaled any Hollywood red carpet event.

  “This is his gala opening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the ‘Museum of Serial Murder,’ curator as yet unknown.”

  #

  The search parties descended on the woods and within minutes the radio began to crackle with reports of body discoveries. Rainey made the rounds to each site, before the ME and the crime scene investigators began
collecting evidence. In order of discovery, she identified the staged areas by the serial killer they depicted. The headless body parts in garbage bags and strewn about one area were probably a tribute to Edmund Kemper, the six-foot-nine giant known as the Co-ed Killer who terrorized Santa Cruz in the early seventies. It could also have been Jeffrey Dahmer, but Rainey doubted this UNSUB was into men or cannibalism. She was also pretty sure the landscaped flowerbed, meant to entice prospective buyers to the home site, would yield more clues.

  “Dig up that flowerbed out there by the road,” Rainey told one of the investigators. “You’ll probably find a head in there, maybe more.”

  Bundy’s scene was a decomposed body wearing makeup and a wig, along with a skeleton missing its head, both covered only with forest debris. Gerard Schaefer liked to do doubles, so his staging involved two women bound together, hangman’s nooses attached to their necks, and buried in shallow graves. Dennis Rader’s display followed so closely to the binding of his victims, the materials used, and the posing of the two bodies that Rainey thought the UNSUB must have seen the actual crime scene photos which, sadly, were available on the Internet. The last body she viewed was posed much like Jacquie’s. There was only one body found in the James Mitchell DeBardeleben display, but that was enough to see the UNSUB had moved on to the convicted killer responsible for largest collection of sexually sadistic evidence ever found.

  “He recreated the crimes of six of the most, if not prolific, then scarily proficient human predators since the seventies,” Rainey was saying to the colonel.

  She had seen enough and come back outside the gate to check on him and put distance between her and the smell of decay permeating the woods. Sheila was in the middle of an impromptu roadside press conference, with the corralled media jockeying for position to frame the property entrance in the shot. Between the gate and the media, Rainey leaned up against a patrol car talking to the colonel, a prominent figure in any camera angle they could take. She was part of the show for the UNSUB, and it was about to get better.