“So, Mather, you were saying that you were a jarhead?” Morrison asked.
“Ooh-rah,” I chanted. “You bet your ass, Morrison.”
He smirked. “So I know most women marines don’t see active duty, but something tells me you weren’t a POG.”
I was in mid-mouthful, devouring a hunk of charbroiled meat. I swallowed and then said, “No more than you were a banana, Morrison.” Calling a S.E.A.L a banana was an insult, akin to saying that he was a wet-behind-the-ears recruit. “I served with pride, you navy wimp.”
“Oh yeah? Where were you assigned, Mather?”
“Afghanistan with the Female Engagement Team.”
“Oh, horseshit! What did you do that was so dangerous, hand pamphlets out to the hajjis?”
“Yeah, but I was really good at it. They gave me the Silver Star.”
Morrison rolled his eyes. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Don’t tell me a big strong Navy S.E.A.L. like you doesn’t have a Silver Star—jealous or something?”
“What did you do to earn a Silver Star, Mather?” Morrison speared a hunk of meat and chewed it. He looked at one of the other divers. “Ha! Can’t wait to hear this.”
“I put down a Taliban machine gunner and a hajji operating a rocket launcher during a rescue mission at Mizri Ghar.”
He almost choked on his meat. “Put down? Put down how?”
“One to the heart and one between the eyes with my LMGAS.”
“You’re shitting me. You did that with an M-16?”
“On a mountaintop in the dark.”
It looked as if he was about to gag on his lunch. “You’re that good?”
“Froggy, I can dot an eyeball at a hundred yards with the wind kicking at thirty miles per.”
Morrison’s expression changed. “Oh my God, I just got such a boner. Tell me you’re not married.”
I blushed. I tried not to let it show, but I couldn’t help myself. Morrison had me by several years, but he was a real honest-to-God man’s man, and I couldn’t say that I wasn’t a little turned on by him. “I’m in a committed relationship. Besides, I ain’t no frog hog, smooth dog.” That was S.E.A.L. speak for I’m not a S.E.A.L. groupie, you slick-talking Casanova.
He laughed. “You sure are on top of all the lingo, aren’t you, Mather?”
“Bet your ass, bullfrog. And you? What was your specialty?”
“Seal Team 6,” he replied modestly. It was the designation for the special warfare unit. There was no such thing as a lightweight S.E.A.L., but Morrison was part of an elite group, the best of the best.
I raised my eyebrows. “Jesus, now I’ve got the boner.” I placed my plate on the ground and dropped to my knees as Wayne and Garth had when they offered praise to Alice Cooper in Wayne’s World. “I’m not worthy! I’m not worthy!”
I had all of the divers rolling, but their hysterical laughter stopped abruptly when a huge Pacific Islander strode into camp. He was practically as big as a house with a head the size of a basketball and shoulders as broad as goal post uprights. Ismaeli was the last diver to return after his morning search. His face looked grim, and in his arms he carried a plastic-wrapped human leg.
Chapter 18
Ismaeli was a mountain of a man. The leg cradled in his arms was dwarfed by his immense size and frankly looked as if it had been torn from the socket of a large Patti Playpal doll. So much for the wonderful mustard-glazed venison—Ismaeli’s find ended lunch abruptly. We were all quickly on our feet, surrounding the Samoan giant. A folding table was cleared of lunch plates—Ismaeli gently set the torn appendage upon it. Much of the flesh had sloughed away, cast off like the skin of a shedding snake, and was gray in color, but there was no mistaking what it was. As difficult as it was to believe, there was still a bit of hot pink nail polish on the big toe. Amazing! When I get a pedicure the polish doesn’t stay on a full week.
“Shit!” Morrison said, with a single word communicating what each of us was feeling. The leg’s discovery represented both success and despair simultaneously—success in the retrieval of evidence but despair in knowing that the missing woman, Maisy Grant, was more than likely dead. All hope of finding the woman alive had been dashed to bits.
The leg was short, thin, and in poor condition. I couldn’t help feeling that the leg had most certainly come from Maisy Grant, who had only been five foot two inches tall. “Let’s tag it and get it over to the crime lab,” Morrison said with disgust in his voice. “Son of a bitch!”
“I placed a marker in the water,” Ismaeli said. “I found it in the silt about twenty feet down.”
“Good work,” Morrison said in a somber voice. He addressed his team. “Finish eating and prep for the afternoon dive.” He checked his rubber-clad diver’s watch. “We’ve got a good four hours of daylight left—let’s make every one of them count.”
The divers began to murmur as they dispersed. A few were still carrying their lunch plates as they searched for a less upsetting environment to finish their meals.
Morrison turned to me. “FUBAR.”
FUBAR was a S.E.A.L. acronym for fucked up beyond all repair. “Doesn’t bode well, does it, Ken?”
“Nope. I’ll hurry up and get more divers. Now that we know there’s evidence down there, we’ll make sure that we get every last bit of it.” He grimaced. “So the poor girl was butchered.”
“It appears so. I hope there aren’t others.”
“You think that …”
“Now that we know a body has been systematically hacked to bits and dumped into the lake, I’m afraid it might not be the only one. It’s been known to happen—serial murders sometimes use a common dumpsite to dispose of all their victims. John Wayne Gacy buried twenty-six victims in the crawl space beneath his house, and Gary Ridgway dumped his first five victims in the Green River—the newest killing field to make the press is Gilgo Beach, Long Island, but new sites are found all the time that the public never hears about. Serial murdering has become an epidemic.”
“They never found the monster behind those Gilgo Beach murders, did they?”
I puffed out a sigh. “Shit, Ken, they’re not even close.” The public only hears about the big cases, but the truth is that there are more open cases of murder on the books than solved ones. There are many, I’m sure, that aren’t even on law enforcement radar.
I looked over at the mobile command post, which had been parked in a clearing beneath mature trees. We began to walk toward it, moving from the pebble-lined shoreline onto the soft brown earth. The crunch of pebbles beneath our shoes ended, and our footfalls became silent. Looking up, I saw leaves dancing on high boughs, but as I lowered my gaze and looked into the woods, it seemed ominous and never-ending, a potential killing field with a million places for a body to be buried. Don’t be paranoid, I thought. It’s not all like that. Most civilians are not aware of how much murder and crime goes on every single day. Here in the mostly civilized United States we’re insulated from a lot of the wanton killing that goes on, but in many parts of the world … At that moment the potential for unrestrained murder seemed to me infinite. All I could do was stomp out embers as they popped up here and there, but the inferno called crime could never be completely extinguished.
“You look down,” Morrison said as he reached for the door handle on the mobile command post.
“Yeah. The sight of a mutilated woman does that to me.” If this case was like most we’ve encountered, the victim’s death was but a small and final measure of the torment the victim might have endured: abduction, imprisonment, rape, false hope, torture—death was but the period at the end of a long and brutal sentence, and we might never know what happened before she was murdered.
“Now what?” he asked.
“I’ll call my CO and update him on your findings. After that I’ll head back over to the police station to see if our profiler has any insights for me.”
“I wish you luck, Mather. Well, I guess I’ll be seeing you again?” There w
as something in the inflection of his voice as he asked the question, a note of hopefulness or perhaps interest—at least that’s how I read it.
“Sure, barbecued venison and body parts; wild horses couldn’t keep me away.” I sat down in front of my laptop, and as I opened the lid, all thoughts of flirting with Morrison were swept away. I had paused the Leon Drade video before taking lunch, and it was frozen on an image that drew my attention. The UNSUB had a key ring on his belt loop. I had noticed it before but hadn’t thought much of it. Now, however, in freeze frame, I noticed the reflection in the passenger side-view mirror. In addition to the keys, a scan tag hung from the key ring. It looked like a supermarket membership card, and the barcode was somewhat visible in the reflection. To my eye it didn’t appear clear enough to scan, but with the bureau’s digital enhancement technology …
I saw that Morrison was staring at me. “What’s up?” I asked.
“Why are you smiling all of a sudden?”
Well, handsome … “I think we may have just caught a break.”
Chapter 19
I covered two hundred and fifty-some odd miles in just over four hours driving down Route 87 like a woman possessed. The trip took me back to within ten miles of Monticello Motor Club, the spot I had started out from on Saturday afternoon. Pandora’s Self Storage Box Center was my intended destination. The image on the videotape I had spotted had been enhanced and scanned. It was a barcoded tag used for entry into one of Pandora’s storage units. The identity of our UNSUB was still a mystery, as the storage unit had been rented by none other than our murder victim Leon Drade. It could’ve been a clever ruse the UNSUB had used to shield his identity, or it could have meant something entirely different. I was betting dollars to Doc Park’s scrumptious donuts that we’d find Drade in the self-storage unit, and perhaps we’d be all the wiser for the discovery.
The drive back down south was beautiful and yet sad. State Route 17 wound through the Catskill Mountains, past boarded-up summer camps, bungalow colonies, and near-abandoned main streets. I was approaching Liberty. Up a hill and past a guard shack plastered with "no trespassing" signs, the sarcophagus of the now defunct Grossinger’s Hotel appeared on the horizon, a hotel that had once been alive with thousands of vacationing guests each summer season. My father took the family up there when I was still a little girl. It was in the days before his secret life had been revealed, crippling the family and tearing it limb from limb much in the way I imagined Maisy Grant’s limbs had been blatantly hacked from her torso. I was no more than five or six at the time, but my memories were marvelous and grand in the way that an adult remembers those infrequent flashes of childhood wonderment. Children usually remember enjoyable things grander than they actually were. I recalled the resort being as big as a castle, with indoor and outdoor swimming pools, tennis courts, and every manner of kid-pleasing activity a child could ever dream of.
Those were fun times for me. It was before my father’s business trips were revealed to be something other than stated. His drunken binges would find him locked in a hotel room for days on end with a case of single malt scotch and two or three purchased women. Then there was the fighting and crying and the angry words, followed by Grace’s denial of what had happened to us as the family’s structure collapsed. Worst of all was the bitterness that was born in the aftermath of their marriage, that vile and cold fog that settled over us and refused to depart. I was eleven or twelve when all was said and done, my memories filled with pictures of my mother crying herself to sleep. It was truly ugly, like the ruins of the grand resort that lay before me.
Almost all of the resort had been demolished, and what was left looked as if it had been thoroughly picked through. The cabins and cottages that dotted the grounds looked unsafe to enter, their roofs rotted and covered with splintered wood. I imagined that every bit of copper and steel had been plucked from its walls, every bathroom smashed apart and sold for salvage … like my family. I wiped a tear from my eye as I passed the natatorium, one of the few seemingly intact structures still standing. Alas, in my mind the old hotel had become a metaphor for my family; something proud and alive that now lay crippled and rotting, covered with vandals’ graffiti. I don’t know how Grace found the strength to go on, but somehow she did. A lump formed in my throat, and I made a mental note to call her at the end of the day.
The phone rang, and I answered immediately. It was SA Dominic Cabrera, a man I knew more than most could wipe away the dismal feeling of melancholy that was eating me up.
“Whazzup, Gumdrop?” he began in his customary carefree tone. “I’m here waiting for you. You stop off for a mani and pedi or some other feminine pastime and Gumdrop-like?”
Cabrera knew that I was far from a girly girl, but that never stopped him from messing with me. The sound of his voice had flipped a switch and made me feel alive again. “How’s the plumbing, hose monkey?” Cabrera had recently been hospitalized for the removal of a giant and incredibly painful kidney stone. “The healing period over?”
“Yee-haw. I’m back in the saddle again.”
He had just begun to date a woman named Lorraine Franco. Their relationship had begun to percolate during our last case, way before it should have. She was a witness whom he had become infatuated with, a witness he should have stayed away from until the case had concluded. Cabrera was a funny rogue, and he and Lorraine were a documented case of lust at first sight. I didn’t know how long their love connection would last, but at the moment their relationship was in high gear. “How lucky for Lorraine.”
“Yeah. I think so. Say, thanks for those Yankee tickets, Gumdrop. It was one of the few games in recent history that the bombers actually crushed those Beantown bums.”
“Always happy to put a smile on your chubby little cheeks. Hey, did you bring my stuff?”
“Yes, indeed. I stopped by your place and picked up your threads. Don’t worry, I didn’t play dress-up with your fancy frilly things.”
I cringed over the implication. I had only packed an overnight bag for my trip to the racetrack. All I had was my jeans, driving shoes, and some clean skivvies. Cabrera lived about twenty minutes southwest of me, and I had asked him to pick up some extra threads.
I glanced at the dashboard clock. “I’m only a few minutes away—think you can stay out of trouble until I get there?”
“Don’t worry, Gumdrop, there’s an ice cream parlor down the road. I think I’ll keep.”
“Thanks for the chuckles, Dom.” I’m a much better cop when I’m smiling.
Chapter 20
The house that Pandora built looked much the worse for wear. Like many of the businesses I had passed as I drove through Liberty, Pandora’s had seen better days.
Even Liberty’s history was sad and worn. In its day, the area was best known for its fine tanneries, which had all but disappeared, and for an abundance of sanatoriums that housed tuberculosis patients. Now, though, they were all gone and only the sadness remained. It was as if the town was always meant to be an unhappy place. As I drove through town, I couldn’t help feeling that the world had passed it by.
I stopped at the unmanned security gate. Access was limited to those who had a barcode tag like the one I had spotted on our UNSUB’s key ring. Fortunately, a secondary key-code pad was provided as a backup, and the owner, a woman named Victoria and not Pandora, had given me a proprietary access code. She confirmed that Drade had been the renter of record for several years, but like most of her customers, they had never met. The barcode tags, padlock keys, and payments had all been exchanged by mail. Drade paid for the storage unit with a money order a year at a time. It had been my experience that those who did not use personal checks were either eccentric or hiding something. In a few moments I’d know which.
Pandora’s boxes were pink. Well, at least the building was. It was a one-level hangar-like structure constructed of cinderblocks and separated into units the size of broad single-car garages separated by firewalls. Roll-up overhead metal doors
were heavily oxidized and were much more brown from rust than silver. It was an absentee establishment without staff on-site on a regular basis. Fall leaves, which had frozen over the winter had thawed and dried, and now rested in clumps against the bases of the doors. Padlocks secured the roll-up doors on each side.
I was on my way to the trunk to retrieve a bolt-cutter when Cabrera rolled to a stop alongside my car. He had his left hand on the wheel and held a waffle cone to his mouth with the other. He lowered the window and handed me a cup of ice cream. “Here you go, Gumdrop, I figured an old mudder like you might enjoy a cup of rocky road.”
“An old mudder, am I?” I sampled the ice cream, which tasted homemade. “Delish. Now how about putting some elbow grease behind a bolt-cutter and snapping those two padlocks.”
“Elbow grease? Me? I’m still on the DL. You wouldn’t want me popping a hose or something now, would you?”
“If you’re strong enough to knock boots with Lorraine, you’re strong enough to snap two old rusted padlocks.” It was the first time I had seen him since his release from the hospital. “Actually, where are my manners? How is your johnson? I trust Lorraine is pleased with the outcome of your procedure.”
“I haven’t heard her complaining.”
“So did the surgeon have a gentle touch?”
“I’ll say.” Cabrera blushed. “Actually the urologist was a dame.”
“Yeah, but she was probably old and crusty and had barnacles on her hands, right?”
“Well, not so much. She was actually kind of nice, a pretty little thing with a healthy rack.”
“My God, Cabrera, you’re such a dirtbag. How in the world did you ever swing something like that?”
“Well, she wasn’t on my insurance plan, but I took one look at that learned beauty and said, ‘YOLO, the hell with the copay.’”
“So what you’re saying is that you chose your surgeon like you might choose a call girl, is that about the size of it?”
The Mather Triad: Series Boxed Set (Chloe Mather Thrillers) Page 31
