by Lisa Gardner
“Quincy …”
“I would do anything to make you happy, Rainie.”
And she said in a small voice, “I’m so sorry, Quincy, but I think I want a baby.”
Kaplan was already waiting for them when they pulled into the parking lot outside the Jefferson Dormitory. He looked hot, tired, and already pissed as hell with the day.
“A little birdie told me I’m not supposed to be talking to you two,” he said the moment they climbed out of their car. “Said I should deal only with some new guy, who’s now heading the investigation.”
Quincy shrugged mildly. “I haven’t been notified of any change in staffing. Have you, Rainie?”
“Nope,” she said. “Never heard a thing.”
“That little birdie must be pulling your leg,” Quincy told Kaplan.
Kaplan raised a brow. In a surprisingly quick move for a big guy, he swiped the cell phone clipped to Quincy’s waist, eyed its lack of power, and grunted. “Smart. Well, as long as they’re fucking their own people, welcome to my happy little club. I got a body, I still have jurisdiction, and I’m not giving it up.”
“Amen,” Quincy said. Rainie merely yawned.
Kaplan remained scowling. “So why do you want to reinterview my sentries? Think I couldn’t possibly have gotten it right the first time?”
“No, but now we have new information on the suspect.”
That seemed to appease the special agent. He shook out his shoulders, indicated for them to climb into his car, then headed back out onto the base. “Guys were out training this morning,” Kaplan filled them in. “I had their CO pull them aside. Both should be waiting for us at the school. They’re young, but good. If they know anything that can be of help, they’ll tell you.”
“Any more activity around here?”
“Dead bodies? Thankfully, no. Ads in the Quantico Sentry? None that has crossed anyone’s desk. I met with Betsy Radison’s parents late last night. That’s been about it.”
“Tough business,” Quincy said quietly.
“Yeah, it is.”
Kaplan turned into the cluster of buildings that marked Marine TBS—The Basic School. Sure enough, two young recruits sat to the side, dressed in jungle camo with hats pulled low to shield their faces and thick black utility belts strapped around their waists. Kaplan, Quincy, and Rainie climbed out of the car, and immediately the two snapped to attention.
Kaplan made the introductions, while the recruits held their rigid stance.
“This is civilian Pierce Quincy. He is going to ask you some questions regarding the night, fifteen of July. This is his partner, Lorraine Conner. She may also ask you questions regarding the same evening. You will answer all of their questions to the best of your ability. You will accord them the full respect and cooperation you would give any Marine officer requesting your assistance. Is that clear?”
“Sir, yes sir!”
Kaplan nodded at Quincy. “You may proceed.”
Quincy raised a brow. The pomp and circumstance was a little extreme. Then again, Kaplan had taken a lot of hits recently. The FBI had forced him out of their world. Now he was showing off the power he still wielded in his.
Quincy approached the two Marines. “You were both on duty for the night shift, July fifteenth?”
“Sir, yes sir.”
“Both of you stopped each vehicle and checked each driver for proper ID?”
“We stopped all incoming vehicles, sir!”
“Did you check passengers for proper identification?”
“All visitors to the base must show proper identification, sir!”
Quincy shot Rainie another dry look. She didn’t dare meet his eye or she would start giggling or burst into tears or both. The morning had already taken on a surreal quality, and now it felt as if they were interviewing two trained seals.
“What kind of vehicles did you stop that night?” Quincy asked.
For the first time, no immediate answer was shouted forth. Both recruits were still staring straight ahead as procedure dictated, but it was clear they were confused.
Quincy tried again. “Special Agent Kaplan said you both reported heavy traffic that night.”
“Sir, yes sir!” both Marines cried out promptly.
“The majority of this traffic seemed to be National Academy students returning to the dorms.”
“Sir, yes sir!”
“Is it fair to say that these people mostly drove rental cars or their own personal vehicles? I would guess you saw a lot of small, nondescript automobiles.”
“Sir, yes sir.” Not quite as vehement, but still an affirmative.
“What about vans?” Quincy asked gently. “Particularly a cargo van arriving in the early morning hours?”
Quiet again. Both sentries wore a frown.
“We did see a few vans, sir,” one finally reported.
“Did you happen to note these vehicles in your logs, or glance at the license plates?”
“No, sir.”
Quincy’s turn to frown. “Why not? I would think you’d see mostly cars coming and going off the base. A cargo van should be unusual.”
“No, sir. Construction, sir.”
Quincy looked blankly at Kaplan, who seemed to get it. “We have a number of projects active here on the base,” the special agent explained. “New firing ranges, new labs, new admin buildings. It’s been a busy summer, and most of those crews are driving vans or trucks. Hell, we’ve cleared guys on forklifts.”
Quincy closed his eyes. Rainie could already see the anger building behind his deceptively quiet façade. The little details no one thought to mention in the beginning. The one little detail, of course, that could make all the difference in a case.
“You have a ton of construction personnel active on this base,” Quincy said in a steely voice. His eyes opened. He looked straight at Kaplan. “And you never mentioned this before?”
Kaplan shifted uneasily. “Didn’t come up.”
“You have a murder on the base, and you don’t think to mention that you have an abnormally high number of eighteen-to-thirty-five-year-old males engaged in transient, menial labor, in other words, men who fit the murderer’s profile, passing through these gates?”
Now even the two Marine sentries were regarding Kaplan with interest. “Each and every person who receives authorization to enter this base must first pass security clearance,” Kaplan replied evenly. “Yeah, I got a list of the names, and yeah, my people have been reviewing them. But we don’t allow people with records on this base period—not as personnel, not as contractors, not as guests, and not as students. So it’s a clean list.”
“That’s wonderful,” Quincy said crisply. “Except for one thing, Special Agent Kaplan. Our UNSUB doesn’t have a record—he hasn’t been caught yet!”
Kaplan’s face blazed red. He was definitely aware of the two sentries watching him, and he was definitely aware of Quincy’s growing fury. But still he didn’t back down. “We pulled the list. We analyzed the names. No one has a history of violence or a record of assault. In other words, there is nothing to indicate any one of those contractors should be pursued as a suspect. Unless, excuse me, you want me to start attacking any guy who drives a cargo van.”
“It would be a start.”
“It would be half the list!”
“Yes, but then how many of those people once lived in Georgia!”
Kaplan drew up short, blinked, and Quincy finally nodded in grim satisfaction. “A simple credit report, Special Agent. That’s all you have to do. It’ll give you previous addresses and we can identify anyone who also has ties to Georgia. And then we’d have a suspect list. Don’t you think?”
“It … but … well … Yeah, okay.”
“There are two more girls out there,” Quincy said quietly. “And this UNSUB has gotten away with this for far too long.”
“You don’t know that he’s really a member of the construction crews,” Kaplan said stubbornly.
“No, bu
t we should at least be asking these questions. You can’t let the UNSUB control the game. Take it from me,” Quincy’s gaze had taken on a faraway look. “You have to take control, or you will lose. With these kinds of predators, it’s all about gamesmanship. Winner takes all.”
“I’ll put my people on the list,” Kaplan said. “Give us a few hours. Where will you be?”
“At the BSU, talking to Dr. Ennunzio.”
“Has he learned anything from the ad?”
“I don’t know. But let’s hope he’s been lucky. Because the rest of us certainly haven’t.”
CHAPTER 36
Virginia
11:34 A.M.
Temperature: 97 degrees
Tina had gone native. Mud streaked her arms, her legs, her pretty green sundress. She had stinking ooze coating her face and neck, primordial slime squishing between her toes. Now she picked up another sticky handful and smeared it across her chest.
She remembered reading a book in high school, Lord of the Flies. According to one of the notations in the handy yellow Cliffs Notes, Lord of the Flies was really about a wet dream. Tina hadn’t gotten that part. Mostly she remembered the stranded kids turning into little savages, first taking on wild boars, then taking on one another. The book possessed a fearful edgy quality that was also definitely sexy. So maybe it was about wet dreams after all. She couldn’t tell if the guys in her class had read it with any more enthusiasm than they’d read the other literary classics.
But that wasn’t really the point. The point was that Tina Krahn, knocked-up college student and madman’s current plaything, was finally getting a real-life lesson in literature. Who said high school didn’t teach you anything?
She started mucking up first thing this morning, the sun already climbing in the sky and threatening to fry her like a bug caught in the glare of a magnifying glass. The mud stank to high heaven, but it sure did feel good against her flesh. It went on cool and thick, coating her festering skin with a thick layer of protection not even the damn mosquitoes could penetrate. It filled her nostrils with a putrid, musky smell. And it made her head practically swim with relief.
The mud liked her. The mud would save her. The mud was her friend. Now she stared at the bubbling, popping mess and she wondered why she didn’t eat a handful as well. Her water was gone. Crackers, too. Her stomach had a too-tight, pained feeling, like she was on the verge of the world’s worst menstrual cramps. The baby was probably leaving her. She had been a bad mother, and now the baby wanted the mud, too.
Was she crying? It was so hard to tell, with the heavy weight of drying filth on her cheeks.
The mud was wet. It would feel so good sliding down her parched, ravenous throat. It would fill her stomach with a heavy, rotten mass. She could stop digesting her stomach lining, and dine on dirt instead.
It would be so easy. Pick up another oozing handful. Slide it past her lips.
Delirious, the voice in the back of her brain whispered. The heat and dehydration had finally taken their toll. She had chills even in the burning heat. The world swam uneasily every time she moved. Sometimes she found herself laughing, though she didn’t know why. Sometimes she sat and sobbed, though at least that made some kind of sense.
The sores on her arms and legs had started moving this morning. She had squeezed one scabbed-over mass between her fingers, then watched in horror as four white maggots popped out. Her flesh was rotting. The bugs had already moved in to dine. It wouldn’t be much longer for her now.
She dreamt of water, of ice-cold streams rippling over her skin. She dreamt of nice restaurants with white linen tablecloths, where four tuxedoed waiters brought her an endless supply of frosty water glasses, filled to the brim. She would dine on seared steak and twice-baked potatoes covered in melted cheese. She would eat marinated artichoke hearts straight from the container, until olive oil dribbled down her chin.
She dreamt of a pale yellow nursery and a fuzzy head nestled at her breast.
She dreamt of her mother, attending her funeral and standing alone next to her grave.
If she closed her eyes, she could return to the world of her dreams. Let the maggots have her flesh. Let her body sink into the mud. Maybe when the end came, she wouldn’t even know anymore. She would just slide away, taking her baby with her.
Tina’s eyes popped open. She forced her head up. Struggled to her feet. The world spun again, and she leaned against the boulder.
No eating mud! No caving in. She was Tina Krahn and she was made of sterner stuff.
Her breath came out in feeble gasps, her chest heaving with effort to inhale the overheated, muggy air. She staggered toward one vine-covered wall, watching a snake dart out of her way, hissing at her as it passed. Then she was braced against the wall, the vines cool against her muddy cheek.
Her fingers patted the structure as if it were a good dog. Funny, the surface over here didn’t feel like rough cement. In fact …
Tina pushed herself back. Her eyelids were terribly swollen; it was so hard to see.… She forced them wide with all of her might, while simultaneously pushing back the vines. Wood. This part of the rectangular pit was held up by wood. Railroad ties or something like that. Old, peeling railroad ties that were already rotting with age.
Frantically, she dug her fingers into one visible hole. She tugged hard, and felt the meat of the lumber start to give way. She needed more strength. Something harder, a tool.
A rock.
Then she was down on her hands and knees, once again digging in the mud while her eyes took on a feverish light. She would find a rock. She would gouge out the boards. And then she would climb out of this pit, just like Spider Man. She would get to the top, she would find coolness, find water, find tender green things to eat.
She, Tina Krahn, knocked-up college student and madman’s current plaything, would finally be free.
Lloyd Armitage, USGS palynologist and Ray Lee Chee’s new best friend, met them shortly after noon. Five minutes later, Mac, Kimberly, and Nora Ray were piling into a conference room Armitage had set up as his traveling lab. It was a strange entourage, Mac thought, but then this was a strange case. Kimberly looked bone-tired but alert, wearing that slightly edgy look he’d come to know so well. Nora Ray was much harder to read. Her face was blank, shut down. She’d made a big decision, he thought, now she was trying not to think about it.
“Ray Lee Chee says you’re working some kind of homicide case,” Armitage stated.
“We have evidence from a scene,” Mac answered. “We need to trace it back to the original source. I’m afraid I can’t tell you much more than that, other than whatever you have to tell us, we needed to have heard it yesterday.”
Armitage, an older man with bushy hair and a thick brown beard, arched a curling eyebrow. “So that’s how it is. Well, for the record, pollen analysis isn’t as specific as botany. Most of my job is taking soil samples from various field sites. Then I use a little bit of hydrochloric acid and a little bit of hydrofluoric acid to break apart the minerals in the sediment. Next, I run everything through sieves, mix that with zinc chloride, then place it in a medical centrifuge until voilà, I have a nice little sample of pollen, fresh from the great outdoors—or from several thousand years ago, as the case might be. At that point, I can identify the general plant family that deposited the pollen, but not a specific species. For example, I can tell you the pollen is from locust, but not that it’s from a bristly locust. Will that help?”
“I’m not sure what a locust is,” Mac said. “So I guess whatever you discover, it’ll be more than what we knew before.”
Armitage seemed to accept that. He held out his hand and Mac gave him the sample.
“That’s not pollen,” the palynologist said immediately.
“You’re sure?”
“Too big. Pollen is roughly five to two hundred microns or considerably smaller than the width of human air. This is closer to the size of sediment.”
The palynologist didn’t give up,
however. He opened the glass vial, shook out a small section of the dusty residue onto a slide, then slid it under a microscope. “Huh,” he said. Then “huh” again.
“It’s organic,” Armitage told them after another minute. “All one substance rather than a mix of various residues. Seems to be some kind of dust, but coarser.” His bushy head popped up. “Where did you find this?”
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.”
“Are there other samples you found with it?”
“Water and uncooked rice.”
“Rice? Why in heaven’s name did you find rice?”
“That’s the million-dollar question. Got any theories?”
Armitage frowned, wagged his eyebrows some more, then pursed his lips. “Tell me about the water. Have you brought it to a hydrologist?”
“Brian Knowles examined it this morning. It has an extremely low pH, three-point-eight, and high … salinity, I guess. It registers fifteen thousand microsiemens per centimeter, meaning there might be lots of minerals or ions present. Knowles believes it comes from a mine or was polluted by organic waste.”
Armitage was nodding vigorously. “Yes, yes, he’s thinking the coal counties, isn’t he?”
“I think so.”
“Brian’s good. Close, just missed one thing.” Lloyd slid out the slide and then did the totally unexpected by dabbing his index finger into the sample and touching it to his tongue. “It’s unusually fine, that’s the problem. In its coarser form, you would have recognized it yourself.”
“You know what it is?” Mac asked sharply.
“Absolutely. It’s sawdust. Not pollen at all, but finely ground wood.”
“I don’t get it,” Kimberly said.
“Sawmill, my dear. In addition to coal mines, the southwestern part of the state also has a lot of timber industry. This sample is sawdust. And, if these samples are supposed to go together …”
