Whispers of the Dead

by Kope, Spencer

  The neighborhood is exactly what one would expect of a successful defense attorney. The homes are exquisite, a number are gated, and all enjoy some of the best views to be had. Dali Avenue is a dead-end offshoot of Vista Grande Drive. It’s barely the length of a football field and ends in a cul-de-sac at Anderson’s driveway.

  As I swing into the turnaround and pull to the curb near the attorney’s house, I pull my glasses off and hold them in my right hand as I study the road, the sidewalk, the brown earth of the yards to the left and right. I start counting in my head: one … two … five … seven.

  It’s not good; it’s not good at all.

  Of the seven separate ice-blue tracks around the residence, four were left within the last few months. Isaiah’s been busy. Whether he has bigger plans for the attorney or he’s just scouting his next delivery, it’s hard to tell.

  The front and sides of the home are almost completely obscured by high vegetation, leaving only sections of the adobe structure visible in earth-tone patches peeking out here and there.

  The trees and bushes are nice.

  They look great, they lend shade to the residence during the hot New Mexico summer, and they thrive this close to the Rio Grande. They’re also a criminal’s best friend, providing cover to jimmy the lock on your kitchen window, or boot open the side door to your garage.

  Isaiah likes the vegetation.

  His most recent tracks are visible on all sides of the house, but most prevalent among the trees on the south side—the right side if you’re at the curb. The driveway is empty and the other four houses on the truncated street show no sign of life, so I decide to risk it. Hopping out of the driver’s seat, I hurry up the sidewalk and follow Isaiah’s shine into the southern clump of trees.

  The only opening behind the green foliage is a high frosted bathroom window. It’s bigger than most bathroom windows, which means Isaiah would have little difficulty getting through, and bathroom windows are sometimes overlooked when security systems are installed.

  “How are you getting up there?” I mutter to myself. It’s a good seven feet from the ground to the window, and the trees are too far away from the house to be of use. He’d need something to step on, a folding stepstool or something similar.

  Regardless, the hurdle is easily remedied.

  Back in the car, I waste no time exiting the cul-de-sac. I turn right on Vista Grande Drive and wonder how things are going at the storage unit … and then it happens. One moment the street is empty, the next I’ve got an APD unit behind me with his lights flashing and the blurp blurp of his siren warning me to pull over. At the same time, another unit approaches from the front and pulls his vehicle across both lanes at an angle, blocking my way.

  Moments later, a third vehicle appears behind me, seemingly out of nowhere, and pulls in behind the first. It’s only then that I remember the request for extra patrol.

  I’m close enough to Isaiah’s age and physicals, and we both have the same sandy blond hair. It would be easy to confuse us at a distance. I make sure my hands stay on the steering wheel, and I refrain from any sudden or furtive movements.

  Right now they’re running the plate and learning the car is a rental, which is only going to heighten their suspicions. The officer in front of me has his shotgun in hand. He’s doing a good job of concealing it, but the barrel peeks under the open door of his patrol car every now and then.

  Here they come.

  One moves up the driver’s side, one the passenger’s side, guns at the low ready. Just behind the rear doors they pause, scrutinizing everything in the back of the vehicle while I stare straight forward with my hands on the wheel.

  I could identify myself as FBI, but anyone can make that claim—why should they believe me? Besides, someone obviously saw me snooping around the house. I’ve been through this dance before and find that during a high-risk stop, the fewer distractions the officers have, the better. There’ll be time enough for badges and identification later.

  My only job right now is to sit tight and try to avoid lead poisoning.

  Officer One and Officer Two are just behind the doorposts now, scanning the front of the vehicle for weapons. Satisfied I have nothing within my immediate reach, they have me exit the car, hands first, which I then place palm down on the roof until they finish frisking me.

  We sort it out.

  They take turns looking at a picture and comparing it to my face until they decide that I don’t look anything like the picture of Isaiah that was distributed departmentwide, and when I show them my FBI credentials and explain why I was checking the outside of Paul Anderson’s house, they suddenly relax.

  Then it’s all smiles and questions.

  Everyone wants to know more about the serial killer.

  I’m still having a hard time lumping Isaiah in with all the other serial killers we’ve dealt with, but then I remember the desiccated face peering out from a pool of salt and lime back at the storage unit.

  Before leaving, I commend the officers for the extra patrol, and, without going into detail, advise them that Isaiah has been to Paul Anderson’s residence recently. I make it clear that the concern for his safety has increased, not decreased.

  I have a couple Special Tracking Unit patches in my bag that I keep for such circumstances, and as I hand one to each of the officers you’d think I was handing out hundred-dollar bills.

  * * *

  The steamer trunk is still full of lime and salt … and Bill Blevins.

  Clearly, I wasn’t gone long enough.

  Between driving to Paul Anderson’s house, prowling the outside of the residence, getting made by the Albuquerque PD and almost taken down at gunpoint, and driving back, you’d think a guy could kill more than an hour.

  Activity at the storage unit continues.

  Jessica and Matt are steadily working their teaspoon-sized scoops; two detectives watch as the medical investigators work; a half dozen uniforms stand perimeter, and CSI is slowly extracting every item in the locker piece by piece, documenting each, and looking for prints, blood, or evidence of any kind.

  Another hour passes, then two.

  At length, Jessica and Matt stand simultaneously and brush the debris from their clothes. They exchange words I can’t make out, and then Matt goes to the van for a body bag and a gurney.

  As he makes his way back, Jessica scans the area quickly and spots Jimmy and me sitting in the rental car a hundred feet away. Both front doors are wide open, and every window is down. I’m sure it’s just another refreshing Albuquerque afternoon for her, but eighty-eight degrees is fainting weather in the Pacific Northwest.

  She waves us over.

  “You might want to see this,” she says when we’re closer. “Looks like the salt and lime did a good job of mummification. There’s still decomp in some of the tissue, but it’s minimal. I bet the whole body doesn’t weigh much more than eighty or ninety pounds.”

  As I stare down at the desiccated corpse, the words of an old poem come to mind and I find myself speaking them aloud:

  And all the while the burning lime

  Eats flesh and bone away,

  It eats the brittle bone by night,

  And the soft flesh by day,

  It eats the flesh and bone by turns,

  But it eats the heart away.

  “Oscar Wilde,” Jessica says with a grin, “‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol.’ A long poem, but not unknown to pathologists. Only Wilde had it wrong—along with a whole bunch of screenwriters and novelists and even a good many murderers.”

  “Lime doesn’t dissolve flesh and bone,” I say, beating her to it.

  Her grin broadens. “No, no, it doesn’t. It’s actually a very good preservative. If you want to get rid of a corpse you need lye; that’ll do the trick.”

  “Do you think that’s what was intended here?” Jimmy asks. “Dissolve the body; destroy the evidence?”

  “Not a chance,” Jessica says without hesitation. “Your guy knew exactly what
he was doing. If he was trying to destroy the body, why add salt? No, he wanted him found, just not right away.”

  Placing the body bag on the tarp next to the trunk, Jessica and Matt lift the dried-out husk of Bill Blevins from its makeshift coffin and lower it to the pavement. The knees are pushed up to the chest and the arms are contorted to fit in the steamer, so the FDMIs slowly extend the limbs until the body lies flat.

  The feet are missing.

  I should have expected that.

  Jimmy is already crouched down looking at the stump of each leg, first the left, then the right, then the left again. “Take a look at this, Steps,” he says.

  “I can see it fine from here,” I reply. “Let me guess: clean cuts, probably from some kind of industrial equipment.”

  “No,” Jimmy says with a shake of his head. “Not this time. But we’ve seen this before, on other cases. It looks like he used a hacksaw.”

  “That was our thought too,” Matt says quickly.

  “Hacksaw?” Before I can stop myself, I’m on my knees next to Jimmy.

  “Hesitation marks, false starts,” he says as he points them out.

  He’s right, but this is a break from methodology. I lift my glasses an inch and cast my eyes upon the calves, just above the cuts. It’s there, and it makes me shiver: Isaiah’s shine pressed into the flesh. I can see the handprints where he held the legs down as he hacked through flesh and bone. “This was the first victim,” I say with conviction, though I can’t yet tell Jimmy about the shine because the curious medical investigators are standing over us.

  “This is sloppy, time-consuming, even disappointing,” I continue, waving a finger at the cuts. “This was his first; he learned from it. He figured out a better way. That’s why all the other cuts are precise and clean.”

  “I think you might be right,” Jimmy concedes.

  I stand and look one last time on the shriveled corpse of Bill Blevins.

  I know I’m right.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Albuquerque, New Mexico—September 15, 5:37 A.M.

  The sound waves come like the low concussions of bombs dropped on distant cities. Their woomp, woomp, woomp is felt as much as heard, coming in rapid succession, then followed by another wave.

  It’s a familiar sound—a hated sound.

  It’s the harbinger of bad; the prelude to things unpleasant.

  It’s Jimmy pounding on my hotel room door.

  At first I imagine it’s a dream—hope it’s a dream—but the carpet-bombing continues, so I force an eye open and glance over at the clock just as the red LED face flips over to 5:38 A.M. Even Jimmy isn’t this fanatical; he wouldn’t be at my door at this hour unless something had happened, and the increasing urgency of his pounding fist tells me it’s not something I’m going to like.

  “Steps,” he hisses through the door, trying not to wake the other guests.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I mutter as I roll out of bed. “I’m coming,” I say in a louder voice, anything to make the noise stop.

  When I open the door he pushes past and starts going on about Paul and Elizabeth Anderson. I comprehend about every third word, and then he turns the light on, which temporarily blinds me.

  “Are you listening?” Jimmy presses. “You need to get dressed—fast.”

  I’m rubbing my eyes. “Say it again, and slow down this time. I heard ‘Anderson,’ and something about another box.”

  “They’re gone,” Jimmy snaps, “taken from their home at gunpoint an hour ago.”

  “Both of them?”

  “Both,” Jimmy replies curtly as he starts picking clothes from my bag and throwing them in my direction faster than I can put them on: underwear, socks, pants, and shirt, topped off by a black FBI Windbreaker. Then he rinses my toothbrush and squeezes out some toothpaste as he continues his narration.

  “I didn’t have time for details, but his neighbor called it in after the house alarm went off, even got a license plate number.”

  “Isaiah’s not that sloppy.”

  “No, he’s not. Albuquerque PD had units in the area in two minutes, and on-scene in three, but there was no sign of the suspect vehicle.” Jimmy shakes his head. “After stuffing Anderson and his wife into the trunk, he paused and waved at the neighbor. Can you believe this guy?”

  “He’s been building up to this,” I tell Jimmy. “The messages—soon, tic toc—he was telling us something was coming. This is it. The Andersons were his target all along.”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Jimmy says.

  “Why else?” I argue. “Every other victim was solo; now we have two. Every other victim was snatched without a trace, they just disappeared. But with the Andersons, he makes a show of it, intentionally parading them in front of the neighbors.”

  “What’s his plan, then? Kill them both?”

  “I don’t know,” I say with a shake of my head. “I don’t know.”

  Brushing quickly, I run a wet comb through my hair. It’s not my best look, but it’ll have to do, considering the circumstances. As I’m doing this, Jimmy rummages around at the bottom of my leather travel bag and finds my Walther P22 in its holster. Slapping in a loaded magazine, he chambers a round and puts the safety on before sliding it back into the holster.

  He hands the gun to me as we make for the door, and I clip it to my belt with a sense of foreboding. Generally I don’t pack, but when I do, it’s always when things are most dangerous and least predictable, which is almost always during the last minutes and hours of a case.

  I’ve thought about getting a different gun, a lighter gun; it could even be the exact same make and model … just different. The Walther P22 weighs a mere fifteen ounces, but it’s not the physical weight that concerns me. It’s the weight on my conscience every time I carry.

  I killed a man with this gun.

  And no matter how much I tell myself that he deserved killing ten times over, I have an image stuck in my mind. It’s the image of serial killer Pat McCourt lying in red snow, a steaming shotgun by his side, an ironic smile on his face. Another permanent impression in the catalog of horrors I call my memory.

  Pat McCourt’s gone.

  Lives were saved.

  My guilt remains.

  * * *

  The early hour means that traffic is light and our progress is swift, even without the benefit of lights and siren.

  I was just at the Anderson residence yesterday and know the way, so Jimmy lets me drive while he starts making calls and waking people up. The first call is to Les.

  Both Jimmy and I agree that Isaiah will most likely take his captive to Deming. He didn’t move to the small town without reason, and despite this morning’s surprising lack of caution, he remains a secretive creature, a man of routine and ritual. With a good vehicle description and plate number, our best hope is to throw up a wall of state troopers, deputies, and police between him and his destination.

  If that fails, we’ll need Betsy.

  Time is wasting—tic toc.

  We had intended on flying to Deming yesterday afternoon, but finding a partially mummified and dismembered corpse in a steamer trunk tends to wreak havoc on travel plans, and we thought another night in Albuquerque wouldn’t hurt.

  We were wrong.

  * * *

  The circular cul-de-sac on Dali Avenue is awash in red and blue lights as we walk in from the closest available parking space on Vista Grande Drive. All of Dali Avenue is a crime scene, and the who’s who of the Albuquerque criminal justice system have gathered to wait for news—any news. These quiet observers include a fair number of judges and attorneys who, despite their standing in the community, must watch from the other side of the yellow police tape like everyone else.

  Their presence here doesn’t necessarily imply appreciation or admiration for Paul and Elizabeth Anderson; it’s more a point of professional courtesy: mess with one attorney, mess with them all.

  Jimmy and I show our credentials to the officer standing
perimeter, and he lifts the police tape for us to pass. Beyond the yellow line is a huddle of brass, to include the chief of police, the assistant chief of police, and both deputy chiefs. As we pass, they’re being briefed by a lieutenant and two sergeants.

  They’ll have to step in front of reporters soon, so they listen to every detail, and question everything.

  Despite our black FBI jackets, we show our credentials a second time to get into the house. The ice-blue shine on the pristine entry tile tells me that Isaiah exited out the front door, but that’s not how he came in.

  A white Styrofoam cooler sits in the middle of the living room floor; the feet inside belong to Bill Blevins. I half expect them to be mummified, but that’s not the case. The foul water at the base of the cooler tells me they were frozen, just like the others.

  I follow Isaiah’s ice-blue trial to the door of the master bedroom and observe CSIs collecting evidence within. An overturned nightstand and a few drops of blood on Paul Anderson’s pillow are the only evidence of a struggle.

  “Where’d the blood come from?” Jimmy asks one of the CSIs.

  “He was probably pistol-whipped.”

  We watch in silence as they work, and then I tug at Jimmy’s elbow and point up the hall with a toss of my head. As I follow the blue path deeper into the house, it leads directly to a bathroom with a high window.

  The bathroom.

  The one Isaiah had scoped out in one of his surveillance runs, and the very one I stood under just yesterday.

  Stepping up onto the toilet seat, I push the window up and find pry marks on the lower edge. Though the house has an alarm system, there’s no sensor visible on the window, either on the frame or on the frosted glass.

  “This was point of entry,” I tell Jimmy as I step down from the toilet, “which begs a question.”

  “What’s that?”

  I point up at the window. “No alarm. That means he made it inside the house without alerting the Andersons. He was armed; we know that from the neighbor’s statement, so he wouldn’t have had any trouble controlling them in the bedroom. I’m guessing he held Paul at gunpoint and had Elizabeth bind his hands, and then bound Elizabeth himself.”