by James Carol
The three-storey building on our right had once housed offices. To our left was a tall brick wall that could have been anything. The wall continued around to form the bottom of the dead end. The only features were a line of windows at third-floor level and that rusting door.
The dust in front of the door had been kicked up to the point where it was impossible to see any footprints. Maybe it was just the one set of feet that had kicked it up. Then again, it might have been three sets. No one else had noticed the tyre tracks, or, if they had, they hadn’t realised the significance. They were crowded around the Nissan like it was the Holy Grail.
The lock on the steel door had been oiled recently and was easy to pick. The door opened without a single creak. The smell that came out was a choking mix of spoiled meat that had been shot through with memories of barbecues past. It was a smell that stopped you dead in your tracks. A real attention grabber.
‘You might want to get over here,’ I called out.
The others peeled away from the Nissan and hurried over. Hannah arrived first, closely followed by Taylor.
‘Jesus,’ she whispered, her nose wrinkling. ‘That’s not good.’
‘Wait here,’ Taylor said to Hannah and Elroy. ‘If this is a crime scene, I don’t want you contaminating it.’
Hannah looked like she was going to argue, but didn’t. She took a step to the side where the smell wasn’t so bad, and I went inside with Taylor. The rusty door opened onto a narrow corridor. The dust in the middle of the floor was all kicked up as well, but there were partial footprints at the edges. Frayed cobwebs danced in our flashlight beams up near the roof.
Ten feet on, there was a sudden ninety-degree turn to the right and everything dimmed to twilight. There was some reflected illumination from the walls, but not enough. We were pretty much on our own with the flashlights, and the smell was getting worse.
We reached an open doorway and stopped. Flies were buzzing in the dark room beyond. Lots of flies. I went in first and fired the flashlight into all four corners. The room was large and airless, and that smell was so bad you could taste it. This place had been used for vehicle maintenance. There was an inspection pit and a rusting hydraulic auto lift. The double doors were big enough for a decent-sized truck.
And there were two corpses in the middle of the floor.
The flies had congregated on the bodies, large, bloated, well-fed bluebottles and blowflies. They were buzzing frantically around the corpses, crawling all over them, searching for those soft, moist places.
‘We need to leave,’ Taylor told me. ‘This is a job for forensics.’
‘You can go, but I’m staying. No way am I leaving until I’ve had a good look around. It’s not going to happen.’
‘You’ll contaminate the crime scene.’
‘I promise I’ll be careful.’
Taylor gave an exasperated sigh. ‘How certain are you that you can get me that job in San Francisco?’
‘Getting the job is no problem, Wyatt, what you want to be worried about is winning that bet.’
‘Keep guessing, Winter.’
Taylor turned and left. His footsteps faded down the corridor, the light from his flashlight bouncing up and down and gradually getting dimmer. The way the beam and the flies were interacting created the illusion that the bodies were still alive.
I waited until all I could hear was the flies, then walked over to the nearer body. My footsteps were deafening in the sudden lonely quiet. They ricocheted off the concrete walls, each one as loud as a gunshot. Every breath seemed to fill my head with noise.
But all those sounds were eclipsed by the hungry buzzing of the flies.
I moved the flashlight in a wide circle around the body, looking for blood. If you know how to read blood, it can tell all sorts of stories. This blood, and the way the corpse lay, shouted out that this had been an execution. I hunkered down and ran the beam from the top of the corpse’s head down to the tips of its mismatched shoes.
White male, middle-aged, five-nine. His head was tilted to the left. Hollowed-out cheeks and hollow eye sockets and a week’s worth of stubble. It was a lean, hungry face. A street face. His skin was lined like old marble, and the heat had increased the speed of decomposition, bloating his body.
There was an entry wound the size of a nickel in the middle of his forehead. The wound was cauterised from the muzzle flash, and the flecks of gunpowder residue that tattooed the surrounding skin indicated that the gun had been fired at point-blank range.
A large part of the back of the skull was missing, which meant the unsub had used a large-calibre bullet, something with enough of a punch to go into the skull and come out the other side. It was another example of overkill. This unsub wanted to be absolutely certain that this guy was going down and staying down.
43
Up close, the buzzing of the flies was louder than ever. The smell was worse too. Barbecues, death, gasoline. Blood and brains had seeped from the exit wound and dried on the floor. The victim had been left where he’d fallen because the killer hadn’t wanted to get the smell of gasoline on his clothes.
But how had the victim ended up here? What choices had led him to that point where he’d crossed paths with the unsub? And who was he? There was probably someone out there who knew the answer to that, a someone who’d once cared about him. A parent or sibling, maybe even an ex-wife. But for now he was just another dead John Doe. Since there was no one else to step up for him, that role had fallen to me. I wanted to know. I needed to know. Every victim deserves justice, and every victim deserves closure.
The second corpse was lying six feet away. I played the flashlight beam slowly from head to feet. Another white male, this one around five-ten and in his thirties. Fair hair, blue eyes, and a black sheriff’s department uniform.
Dan Choat.
There were fewer flies because this corpse was fresher. Insects were pragmatic, the path of least resistance programmed into their DNA. The homeless guy was in a more advanced state of decomposition, which meant he offered an easier, tastier meal.
Choat was lying flat on his back, dead eyes staring up at the concrete roof. A Smith & Wesson was on the ground close to his right hand. I had no doubt that a ballistics examination would confirm this was the same weapon that had been used on John Doe.
There was a small entry wound in his right temple, and a pulpy mess where his left temple had been. That side of Choat’s head had been obliterated a millisecond after the shot was fired. Large black flies buzzed around the wound.
A glimpse of white in Choat’s shirt pocket caught my eye. I crouched down and pulled out a single sheet of notepaper with the tips of my fingers. It had been folded neatly in two. I unfolded it carefully, again using my fingertips, trying to touch the paper as little as possible. A single word was written across the fold. No capitals, no punctuation. The handwriting was neat, but the shake in the letters indicated a high level of stress.
sorry
I refolded the sheet of notepaper as carefully as I’d unfolded it, then put it back. The narrative being played out here was simple to follow. Choat had kidnapped John Doe then coerced him into setting Sam Galloway alight. He’d then gone back to his neat-freak serial-killer life in his neat-freak serial-killer house. The next day had taken place on autopilot, guilt eating him up. When the guilt got too much he’d come back to the scene of the crime and blown his head off.
It was an interesting narrative, and it would be interesting to see how it would play out.
It would be interesting to see how the unsub wanted it to play out.
The door in the back wall led to another room that was much smaller and had probably been used for storing vehicle parts. There was no ventilation and that smell of rancid barbecue seemed to be everywhere.
I shone the flashlight around and got glimpses of the room. Small flashes, like random snapshots. Even so, I recognised it straightaway from the film clip. That same dirty grey concrete floor. The same cinderblock walls.
This was ground zero for that smell. There were no flies because there was nothing for them to feed on. All the good pickings were next door. It was another example of that DNA-inspired pragmatism. My flashlight found the incinerated remains of something that was once human.
‘Hi, Sam.’
44
Sam Galloway’s corpse was black and charred and burnt to the bone. Muscles and tendons had shrunk in the flames, pulling him into a pugilistic pose. The phrase was a favourite of forensic anthropologists and arson investigators, and it was easy to see why. Sam’s hands had clenched into fists and his arms were bent at the elbow, like he was squaring up for a boxing match.
I moved in closer and walked a tight circle around the body, my flashlight beam angled downwards. The black smears on the concrete had been caused by Sam’s death throes. His face had melted into a mask of agony, an illusion caused by the flames. By the point this expression was created, Sam wouldn’t have felt a thing. Whatever it was that had made him who he was had long gone.
I walked to the corner of the room and stood with my back to the wall, moving the flashlight beam from left to right then back again in an attempt to see the bigger picture. The problem with a crime scene like this one was that your attention was immediately drawn to the body. We’re all fascinated by death. Drive past a car wreck and you’re going to slow down to get a better look. If an ambulance screams past, you’re going to try and see in the back.
The reason for this fascination is simple. All any of us can be sure of is that one day we will die. The big question is how. Will you end up broken and bleeding out in a car wreck, or will you end up crossing paths with a killer? Maybe you’ll pass away peacefully in your sleep. Or perhaps you’ll die of a brain aneurysm, a brief, nuclear flash of white light, and then oblivion.
However it happens, the one thing we want to know is whether we’ll suffer. Given the choice, we’d all opt to slip quietly away. Nobody in their right mind would choose the hellish nightmare of being burnt alive.
I shone the flashlight around the room, studying every square inch. There were no windows and, aside from Sam’s corpse, the room was completely empty. Fire was difficult to control. Once it was loose, it became a living creature. Self-perpetuation was its only reason for being, so it sought out oxygen to keep breathing, and it searched for food to sustain it. And it was utterly relentless in that quest. That was why so many fires got out of control so quickly. What started as a single spark could turn into an inferno in no time.
Concrete required temperatures in the thousands of degrees before it begins to melt, and there was no way it was going to get that hot in here. For the purposes of our unsub, this room was a large fireproof box. The only fuel was Sam, and the accelerant the unsub used. With that heavy door shut, the only oxygen was what was in the room to start with.
This unsub had wanted to contain his fire, and he’d done a good job. His aim was to torch Sam without setting fire to anything else. That’s why he’d chosen this place. I wondered how long it had taken him to find it. Had he stumbled on it relatively quickly or had it taken a couple of visits?
Controlling the fire was the unsub’s first consideration. Illumination was his second.
There were lights fixed to the concrete ceiling, but they were useless without power, and that would have been switched off when the refinery shut down. I shone the flashlight over the floor until I found what I was looking for.
Between the door and Sam was a patch of floor where the dirt and dust had been disturbed. I went over and took a closer look. There were two sets of markings, both describing the corner points of a triangle, one large, one small. This was where the unsub had positioned his tripods, a small one for the camera, a larger one for the light. The additional markings around the smaller triangle suggested that he had moved the camera around to find the best angle.
I made a frame with my fingers and crouched down until what I saw through my makeshift frame matched what I’d seen on the film clip. Then I stepped over to the bigger triangle and moved my flashlight up and down until the shadows were approximately the same. At a rough estimate, the camera had been on a three-foot-high tripod, and the lights were five feet up.
Next, I went over the likely chronology in my head.
The unsub would have chosen this place well in advance, maybe even months before he murdered Sam. A couple of days before the murder, he would have come back to check that everything was still okay. He would have brought the lights and the camera, and he would have set them up here. He would probably have brought the jerry can, too.
At some point during the next twenty-four hours he would have kidnapped John Doe. Maybe from Shreveport, or maybe from Monroe. Wherever John Doe had been abducted, it would have been somewhere that memories were short and people were happy to turn a blind eye.
The unsub would have brought John Doe here. He probably locked him in this room. I went over to the door and checked it out. The fixings for attaching a padlock looked brand new, which backed up that theory.
John Doe would have been locked up here in the pitch dark without food or water. The unsub was intending to kill him so there would have been no reason to feed him. Without any reference point to work from, John Doe would have had no way of knowing whether it was night or day.
He would also have been gagged and hog-tied like Sam Galloway to restrict movement and noise. This place was as remote as the dark side of the moon, but the unsub was into overkill. He didn’t take risks. Even though there was nobody around to hear, he wouldn’t have wanted John Doe banging on the door and screaming himself hoarse to be let out.
The other reason was psychology. By restricting John Doe’s movement, the unsub was saying I control you. I own you. This would make it easier when it came to getting John Doe to light the match.
The next big event was Sam’s kidnapping. The unsub had wasted no time there. He’d snatched him from his office after everyone else had gone home for the night and brought him straight here. Then there was a period of around four hours before he set him alight. During that time the unsub would have tortured Sam.
There hadn’t been any signs of physical abuse on the film clip, but I could only see Sam’s hands and face. There might have been injuries to his body, but it was unlikely. This unsub didn’t like to get his hands dirty. John Doe and Dan Choat had been shot at close range. Quick and clean. All the mess would have been projected away from the unsub.
My money was on psychological abuse. Sticks and stones may break your bones but words can never harm you. Whoever coined that phrase hadn’t understood the power of words. Words could hurt you. Used over a long enough time period, and aimed with enough precision, they could kill. Every other month you heard about some poor high-school kid who’d hanged themselves because the bullying had become unbearable. That was the sort of power that words held.
Sam’s last few hours would have been a living hell. The unsub would have taunted and teased him, looking for Sam’s vulnerable places. And when he found those places, he would have gone to town.
Barbara Galloway claimed that Sam had lived for his family, and the unsub would have been merciless there. He would have outlined in detail what he planned to do to Barbara and the kids. He would have promised pain, suffering and mutilation, even though he had no intention of carrying out those threats. In the days after Sam’s murder, the police would be keeping tabs on the family, making it too risky. Also, killing women and children did not figure in this unsub’s profile.
But Sam wouldn’t have known that. He would have died believing that the unsub was going after his loved ones, and there was nothing he could do about it.
The unsub would also have spent time outlining exactly what he planned to do to Sam, revelling in every graphic detail. He would have explained how fire destroyed the human body a layer at time, eating away at it piece by piece.
He would have described how the heat would dry out the epidermis, the outer layer of skin, before incinerating it, causing
first-degree burns. Then he would have told him that the next thing to go would be the dermis. The process was the same. The heat dried it out and the fire incinerated it, causing second-degree burns.
The dermis was where most of the nerve endings were and once this had been destroyed, Sam wouldn’t have felt any pain. Third-degree burns extended through the dermis. Fourth-degree burns extended all the way down to muscle and bone.
A hell of a way to go.
No wonder Sam had been fighting and struggling to the end. I sat down on the floor with my back against the wall and stared for a moment at his charred remains. Sam Galloway, John Doe and Dan Choat. Three victims. This unsub had officially attained serial-killer status.
I switched off the flashlight and the darkness became all-consuming. The smell, too. My imagination projected flames onto the blackness, dancing oranges, yellows and reds. I could feel the fire burning me up from the outside in. I could hear the flies buzzing around the corpses in the workshop.
Most of all, I could hear Sam Galloway’s haunted screams.
45
The police arrived fifteen minutes later. Heavy feet hammered on the dirty concrete floor and echoed off the walls, making it sound like an invading army. Flashlight beams fired in all directions, like searchlights looking for enemy aircraft. Someone whispered a breathy ‘Jesus Christ’ when they caught sight of the bodies.
Shepherd came into the storeroom first, closely followed by Barker, Romero and Taylor. Almost twenty-four hours had passed since I arrived in Eagle Creek and the pecking order remained exactly the same. All four men froze when they caught sight of Sam Galloway’s remains. They were wearing all-in-one white crime-scene suits. Latex gloves on their hands, and rubber bands around their bootees to make it easy for forensics to tell the difference between their footprints and anyone else who might have been in here.
