by Chris Carter
Click, clack, click, clack.
Maybe it was because the novelty of the silent and the no-eye-contact treatment had worn off, or maybe it was because every step Agent Fisher took was overflowing with determination, but this time the man’s eyes moved straight back to her.
She paused before the vacant chair, but decided against taking a seat.
The man waited, his gaze carefully studying her every move.
‘The coroner is done with the autopsy,’ she lied, her face as steady as a surgeon’s hand. ‘Not that we weren’t already expecting it, but since we’re talking, I was wondering if you could help me understand something here. Why the different MOs? Why kill them all differently?’
The man’s demeanor didn’t change. He simply continued analyzing her with the same dead, cold stare as before.
‘I mean,’ she proceeded, ‘you drowned your first victim, you strangled your second one, you slit the throat of your third, and now, death by poisoning. Why? Why jump from method to method? Why don’t you stick with the same MO? I’m just curious here.’
Agent Fisher’s performance could’ve gotten her a place at Juilliard. From the slight trepidation in her voice, to the confusion swimming in her eyes, her acting was absolutely flawless.
The man readjusted himself on his chair and looked back at Agent Fisher as if he knew something she didn’t.
Their stares battled against each other for several seconds before Agent Fisher broke eye contact.
‘You know what?’ she said, without too much concern. ‘I don’t give a damn if you answer me or not. We’ve got you. It’s over and you’re going to rot in jail, starting from right now.’ She turned on the balls of her feet and marched toward the door. ‘Enjoy the rest of your pathetic life.’
‘Well,’ the man replied at last, once again stopping Agent Fisher just as she got to the door. ‘One might like to experiment with different methods. Or each victim might request a different approach.’
Agent Fisher’s stomach tightened inside her as if she’d been dropped from an airplane with no parachute.
‘One? Experiment?’ she asked as she turned around and walked back to the table, her eyes about to ignite. The man had once again used a generic reply. One that would not implicate him in anything.
The man shrugged. ‘And why not? C’mon, Special Agent Erica Fisher, do you want me to do your job for you? It’s your job to figure these things out, isn’t it?’
That was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
‘You sonofabitch.’ She slammed her hands on the tabletop so hard it made the notepad on it bounce.
The man wasn’t expecting that sort of reaction and despite his coolness, her aggressiveness startled him, making him jump back on his chair.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ she yelled as she leaned forward, her voice croaking with anger. ‘There has been no change in the killer’s MO, you lying piece of shit. I just made that up.’
There was no pretending anymore. The man knew that his game was up, but he still didn’t lose his cool. His reply was a casual tilt of the head, which only served to bring Agent Fisher’s blood to boiling point. She reached for the man’s collar, grabbing it with both hands.
‘I swear to God, if you’re a reporter and you’ve done all this for a fucking story, I’ll make your life a living hell, you dickless moron. You fucked with the wrong agent here.’
The door to the interrogation room swung open and Hunter, closely followed by Agent Williams and Garcia, stormed in.
‘Erica,’ Agent Williams called, getting to her and placing his hands on her arms.
Agent Fisher hesitated.
The man waited. His eyes showed no concern.
‘Let him go, Erica.’
Agent Fisher breathed out, her stare glued to the man’s face.
Agent Williams applied a little more pressure to her arms, trying to move them.
Finally, the agent let go of the man’s shirt. She felt her whole body tremble with anger.
‘You’re so screwed,’ she whispered to the man, before standing up straight again and taking a step back from the table. ‘Somebody take this piece of shit out of my face before I teach him a lesson he’ll never forget.’
‘Not so fast, Special Agent Fisher,’ the man said, his eyes slowly moving from her to the three new arrivals. ‘I guess that this would be a good time for me to call my lawyer, don’t you think?’
‘Ha,’ Agent Fisher chuckled. ‘You won’t get shit. You’ve committed a federal offense, you moron.’
‘Have I?’ the man asked, pretending to be oblivious. ‘And which offense was that?’
Agent Fisher’s eyes widened. ‘You really are an idiot, aren’t you? You should’ve thought this through, because wasting the FBI’s time is a federal offense, you imbecile, and I will make sure you pay for this.’
‘Really?’ the man questioned, still in a carefree way. ‘And how exactly did I waste the FBI’s time, Special Agent Fisher? All I did was exercise my constitutional right to stay silent. When I spoke, I did not lie and I did not incriminate myself with any of my replies. If anyone has interpreted them wrongly, that isn’t my fault. I also never once admitted to being . . .’ His stare went back to Agent Fisher. ‘I believe the FBI is calling this killer The Surgeon or The Artist – apparently according to his skills. So no, Special Agent Fisher, I did not waste your or the FBI’s time. You did that all by yourself. All I did was sit here and listen.’ The man sat back on his chair, with a new victorious air about him. ‘Can I call my lawyer now? I’d really like to go home. I’m hungry, tired, and these handcuffs are quite annoying.’
Agent Fisher’s hands clutched into fists.
‘You are a freelance reporter, right?’ Hunter asked, taking a step forward. ‘Not really attached to any newspapers or news channels, correct? You just sell whatever story you have to the highest bidder.’
The man looked back at him curiously. ‘Sorry, but you are?’
‘My name is Robert Hunter.’
The man’s head tilted back slightly. He spent a moment studying Hunter.
‘You’re not an FBI agent, are you?’ His gaze moved around the room and paused on Garcia. ‘And neither is he. That’s easy to tell just by what you’re wearing. Something, shall I say, much more relaxed than what Special Agent Fisher and Special Agent “grumpy face” here are wearing.’ He nodded at Agent Williams.
‘You’re right,’ Hunter agreed. ‘We’re not FBI agents.’ He decided to leave it at that. ‘You’re very perceptive and your “silent” approach, together with your cold-reading technique, was quite an impressive trick. It did get you some information, but let’s be honest here – not enough for any reputable news piece, especially when you consider the fact that the federal government has seized your camera and the film in it. You’ll never get those pictures. You are aware of that, aren’t you?’
‘You have no right to seize my camera,’ the man replied. This time there was concern in his voice.
‘Unfortunately for you,’ Hunter said, ‘yes, we do. You can ask your lawyer when you call him.’
Once again the man’s stare bounced from person to person in the room.
‘But,’ Hunter said, lifting his index finger, ‘I have a proposal for you.’
Hunter’s words caught everyone by surprise, making his colleagues look back at him questioningly, but before Agent Fisher or Agent Williams could say anything, he signaled them both to give him a minute.
‘A proposal?’ the man asked.
‘That’s correct,’ Hunter confirmed. ‘Kind of – you help us, we help you.’
The man regarded Hunter with the same resolve he had regarded Agent Fisher throughout their interview. Hunter was much harder to read than she had been.
‘OK,’ the man said with a nod. ‘I’m listening.’
Fifty-Four
Dr. Morgan took his time getting ready. By the time he finished scrubbing up and made his way to Autopsy Theater One, on the ground floo
r of the Pima County’s Office of Medical Examiner, the body of Timothy Davis had already been washed, disinfected and transferred to the stainless-steel examination table at the center of the spotlessly clean, white linoleum floor.
The body was lying on its back, with its arms loosely by its side. As Dr. Morgan approached it, he paused for a moment.
Just minutes after death, due to the ceasing of heart function and consequently the lack of blood flow, human skin will begin to tighten and discolor, acquiring a grayish pale tone. Within thirty minutes of death, post-mortem lividity, which is the pooling of blood in the parts of the body that are closest to the ground, will start to settle, turning the skin purple and giving it a waxy feel, but Timothy Davis’s body looked a lot paler than anyone would’ve expected for an African American subject. But that wasn’t all – in his case, post-mortem lividity was practically unnoticeable.
‘Interesting,’ the doctor whispered to himself, adjusting his glasses on his nose to have a better look at the discoloration of the skin. He wondered if Mr. Davis had suffered from any dermatological conditions while alive.
Dr. Morgan checked the module directly behind him just to make sure he had all the instruments he needed. With everything in place, he finally turned on his digital Dictaphone, ready to start the official post-mortem examination.
He began by stating the date and time, followed by the morgue’s internal case number. After that he described the general state of the body, detailing any wounds, marks, scratches, abrasions . . . anything that could be seen externally. Once Dr. Morgan flipped the body over to examine its back, something somersaulted inside his stomach.
‘What the hell?’
Immediately he reached for his digital camera.
The marks to Timothy Davis’s back practically sucked the air out of Dr. Morgan’s lungs.
Arizona was not the most racist state, but unfortunately racial hatred was still going strong in pretty much every corner of America, regardless of which state you found yourself in. It was with that knowledge in mind that Dr. Morgan first considered the possibility of this being a racially motivated attack. The marks to the victim’s back looked at first like some sort of castigation, applied to Mr. Davis by a whip, or similar instrument. But a closer examination made Dr. Morgan realize that was impossible. Not all, but several of the marks actually looked like letters. He could clearly identify a ‘T’, an ‘R’, an ‘F’, an ‘M’, and possibly an ‘E’. That certainly was no coincidence and no matter how proficient one could be with a whip, Dr. Morgan just couldn’t imagine anyone being so good as to be able to write letters with lashes. The rest of the marks looked random – just a mishmash of straight cuts.
‘What in the world is all this?’ Dr. Morgan asked himself, as adrenaline pumped his veins with excitement.
Then it finally dawned on him.
‘I’ll be damned. So this is why they needed this autopsy ASAP. This is a message.’
Dr. Morgan had been a pathologist for thirty-one years, twenty-one of them as the Chief Medical Examiner for Pima County. He had autopsied more than his fair share of bodies brought in from homicide crime scenes, some of them in an awful state, but he had never been the examining pathologist in a serial-murder case. In fact, as far as he knew, there had only been one serial killer active in Tucson, back in the sixties – Charles Schmid, also known as The Pied Piper of Tucson, who had murdered three people and buried them in the desert.
Dr. Morgan was now sure that this wasn’t just any serial-killer case. This was a serial killer who had apparently left a cryptogram carved into his victim’s flesh. That was something that happened plenty in Hollywood movies and crime-fiction books, but rarely in real life.
After photographing Timothy Davis’s back and the markings on it from a variety of angles, Dr. Morgan turned the body back around, ready for the Y incision and the internal organs examination. From the module behind him, he retrieved a long-handed scalpel and brought it to the body’s right upper chest, starting the cut about an inch below its shoulder. As the laser-sharp scalpel ruptured through skin and muscle with tremendous ease, Dr. Morgan frowned.
Something didn’t seem right.
‘What is going on here?’
He proceeded with the incision and opened up the body’s breastplate.
The doctor’s jaw dropped open.
‘This is . . . impossible.’
Fifty-Five
Once again, the man at the metal table scooted forward and placed his elbows on the tabletop.
‘Before we start with this proposal you’re talking about,’ he said, addressing Hunter, ‘how about a gesture of good faith? These handcuffs really are annoying. I would feel much more relaxed without them.’
‘That can be easily arranged,’ Hunter replied. ‘But first, we would need to confirm your identity. Can we have your real name?’
The man exhaled while he weighed the odds. ‘OK,’ he finally said. ‘My name is Owen. Owen Henderson.’
Hunter waited, but the man offered nothing else. ‘You’re going to have to give us a little more than that if you want those removed with any urgency. If you’re not bothered and you don’t mind keeping them on for another few hours, we can go with just Owen Henderson and hope for a quick match.’
The man now had four different faces to study instead of just one, which made the task infinitely harder. He concentrated his efforts on Hunter’s.
‘Before we go there,’ he began. ‘What sort of deal are we talking about? What are you offering and what do you expect back?’
Agent Fisher, who had turned her back on the man and was now facing Hunter, managed to ask him four different questions with a single look: ‘Yeah, what sort of deal are you talking about here? What are you offering? What do you expect back and under whose authority are you able to offer anyone a goddamn deal?’
Hunter disregarded Agent Fisher’s frosty look and approached the table. ‘Somehow you ended up at a crime scene even before the police got there.’
The man could already guess where this was going.
‘There are only two ways in which that would be possible,’ Hunter continued. ‘One: you really are the person we’re after, in which case you’re screwed and this case is over, or two: you were tipped off, in which case we need to know every detail about that tip.’
The man broke eye contact with Hunter while he scratched the back of his left hand. ‘OK, I see what you need from me, but what do I get in return?’
‘You’ll get more than enough information for a very credible news piece,’ Hunter said. ‘Victims’ names, locations, dates . . . you know how it goes.’
The man continued regarding Hunter with the utmost attention. So much so that he missed the angry look Agent Fisher gave the LAPD detective.
‘And I get my photos back,’ the man said. ‘All of them.’
‘You’ll get your photos back,’ Hunter accepted.
Agent Fisher looked like she was about to put a stop to the entire conversation, but Agent Williams signaled her to hold on for a while longer.
‘But there’s one condition,’ Hunter added.
‘Oh really?’ The man didn’t look very impressed. ‘And what condition would that be?’
‘You’ll have to give us a few days before the piece is published,’ Hunter revealed. ‘Or else you will jeopardize the entire investigation and there’s no way we will allow that to happen.’
The man drummed his fingers against one another. ‘How many days are we talking about here?’
‘We need a week,’ Hunter replied.
The man shook his head. ‘No. I can give you three days.’
‘This is not a negotiation,’ Hunter came back, his voice so commanding it made the man blink. ‘I will not put this investigation in harm’s way for you or anyone else. That’s the deal. It’s that or nothing. No information. No pictures. No anything. Good luck trying to find anyone who will publish your flimsy article.’ As Hunter made his way toward the door, everyone el
se turned their backs on the man and followed suit.
‘OK, fine,’ the man called out. There was a little defeat in his voice. ‘I’ll give y’all seven days from today. It will give me more time to write the article, anyway.’
Everyone stopped and turned to face him.
‘So how about we speed this up?’ Hunter said.
The man nodded once. ‘Owen Henderson, 531 West 17th Street in Clark Park, Phoenix, Arizona. I’m a freelance investigative reporter and photographer. I’ve had articles and photographs published by the New York Times, the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, and the Miami Herald, to name a few.’
From the corner of his eye, Hunter saw Agent Williams reach for his cellphone before exiting the room.
‘OK,’ Hunter said. ‘Give us five minutes.’
‘Hey,’ the man called out. ‘How about my handcuffs?’
Hunter paused by the door. He was the last one of the group. ‘If everything checks out, Owen, I’ll take those handcuffs off myself. I’ll be back in five minutes.’
‘Seriously? C’mon, man. Why the hell would I lie now?’
Hunter wasn’t listening anymore.
Fifty-Six
Hunter, Garcia and both FBI agents had just returned to the observation room when Agent Williams received the callback from the FBI field office in Phoenix.
‘Great,’ he said into his cellphone after listening for all of ten seconds. ‘Just email me the lot.’ Once he disconnected he turned and addressed the rest of the group. ‘It’s a match.’ With a head gesture he indicated the man on the other side of the two-way mirror. ‘We are indeed looking at one Owen Henderson – thirty-six years old from Phoenix. He also didn’t lie about his address or profession. Right now, I have two agents on the way to his house. In the meantime, I should be getting an email with all his basic info any second now.’
‘Fine,’ Agent Fisher said, leaning against one of the corners of the table at the center of the room and looking at Hunter. ‘But you’re not giving this sack of shit any deals. You do not have the authority to do so. Not without Director Kennedy’s explicit authorization.’
