Richard stuck his left palm into his eye. “Mark,” he said.
The deputy took a step farther to shine the flashlight’s beam into the truck. He made a circle with the flashlight’s light on the bloody seat. “Tell me you did not just dump another whore in my jurisdiction.”
Richard remained quiet.
“I’m waiting for you to tell me you didn’t.”
“You haven’t been taking care of them. I had to get rid of them. You know what happens if I keep them around.”
“Are you going to hear their voices?” Mark mimicked in a high-pitched voice.
“Don’t make fun of me. You push me to the edge, and you won’t like the results.”
“What are you going to do?” Mark reached into the truck and flicked the side of Richard’s face. “Huh, stupid? What in the hell are you going to do about it?”
Richard yanked the knife up. The light from Mark’s flashlight shone off the blade.
“I want to see that,” Mark said. “I’ll put a bullet right between your eyes. Splatter your shit for brains all over this truck. And you know what? Tomorrow, I’ll get the key to the city and a parade for doing it.”
Richard set the knife down on the seat. “Just don’t make fun of me. Mom wouldn’t like it.”
“Mom is dead, buried in your basement. I don’t think she has much say in what I do.”
Richard said nothing.
“Exactly,” Mark said. “Hold on. You said them. You said I didn’t come to take care of them. How many did you dump?”
Richard looked down. “Two tonight,” he said, his voice low, just above a whisper.
“Where?”
“I don’t know. I was just driving until I found spots.”
Mark let out a puff of air in anger. He pulled out his service weapon and rested it on the window opening of Richard’s truck. “Now, I want you to listen to me very closely.” Mark reached inside the truck’s cab and tapped the barrel of the gun on the top of Richard’s head. “Are you listening to me, stupid?”
“Yeah,” Richard said. “Quit it.”
“Turn this piece of shit around, go back to where you dumped the whores, and pick them back up.” Mark placed his gun back in the holster on his hip. “Now,” he said.
“Where am I supposed to put them?”
The deputy lunged into the truck and grabbed Richard by the side of the head, catching equal parts hair and beard. He brought his face inches from Richard’s. “Does it look like I give a shit where you put them? Dig a damn hole. Stick them in the basement. Just get them off my damn streets.”
Richard grumbled something.
“What?” Mark pulled Richard’s head to the side.
Richard yanked his head away from his brother’s grasp. “Ow, I said that I can’t keep them around. You know that.”
Mark spoke through a clenched jaw. “Just get them and leave them in the truck. I’ll be over tomorrow to get rid of them.” The deputy let out a long breath, and his shoulders sank. He shook his head. “You know what would have happened if someone else rolled up on your dumb ass sitting out here?”
“I would have killed them,” Richard said.
“Yeah, except they would have called the damn truck in. The plates are stolen, but the truck will still come back to me. You can’t be out here doing this kind of stuff, Richie. You’re causing problems for me now.”
“What problems?”
“There’s two feds sniffing around. They’re asking questions. They’re looking for you. Do what I say. Get the bodies and then take your ass home.”
Richard started the truck as Mark headed back to his patrol vehicle.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I woke up before six, showered, shaved, spoke with my parents about nothing for the better part of an hour, and grabbed a coffee from the front desk of the hotel before seven thirty. The coffee they provided was surprisingly awful, and I realized I would need to address my caffeine intake more after a bit. Ball had taken my call around ten o’clock the prior night and said he’d get the twins on everything I’d requested and e-mail me whatever they found as soon as they had it. Before Beth left the previous night, we’d put together a loose plan for the day—basically to meet up with the Nashville PD and go do a little street walking to see if we could get anywhere with the local women for hire. We were talking about leaving around eight, yet I hadn’t seen or heard from Beth yet that morning.
I pulled on my suit jacket and headed for the bathroom. I stared in the mirror and straightened my dark-blue tie. The gray in my hair and wrinkles at the corners of my eyes didn’t look as bad as the last time I’d looked—I chalked it up to my day starting well and headed for the door to go see what was going on with Beth.
I was two steps from the door when I heard banging from the other side. I glanced through the peephole to see hair bouncing up and down, so I pulled the door open.
Beth stood in the hall, hopping on one foot while she tried to put a shoe on the other. “Come on, we have to go,” she said.
“Okay. Where’s the fire?”
“I just talked to Clifford. They found two more bodies this morning.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“No. I’m actually not. Are you ready or what?”
“Yeah, just let me grab my things.” My hopes for a good day had vanished before they could fully take hold. I stepped back into the room, gathered everything I’d need for the day, and followed Beth from the hotel, across the sky bridge, and to her car. I hopped in the passenger side, and we headed for Clarksville County.
As Beth merged onto the highway, she glanced over at me. “Clifford said that neither body has been removed from the scenes, and he instructed them to not remove the bodies until we’re able to view both sites. The two dump sites are twenty minutes apart.”
“Did he send you the locations?” I asked.
“Yeah, Clifford sent them to my phone. He’s meeting us at the closer of the two. The town is called Sango. Here.” Beth passed her phone to me. “Hit the prompts to make the phone navigate to the first location.”
I did, and the screen showed our route. The drive time showed as thirty-five minutes. I handed Beth’s phone back to her.
“Forensics team?” I asked.
Beth leaned forward and placed her phone between the dash and the windshield. “I’d assume it will come from the sheriff’s department,” she said.
“Any idea if Clifford is in contact with them?”
“I don’t know,” Beth said.
I rubbed the back of my neck and pulled my cell phone from my pocket.
“Who are you calling?” Beth asked.
“The chief deputy. We need to see where the local sheriff’s department is at with this, and I want to make sure we have a forensics team at both sites.”
“One would think that they would,” Beth said.
“Yeah, I’m not putting too much stock in the local effort here.”
I searched the number for the sheriff’s department and dialed.
“Clarksville County Sheriff, how can I help you?”
“Agent Rawlings with the FBI. I’d like to speak with Chief Deputy Whissell.”
“Um, one moment.”
Soft jazz music played in my ear as I sat on hold.
The woman came back on a moment later. “He’s actually out of the office at the moment. Would you like to leave a message for him?”
“Do you have a direct number? It’s regarding the two body dumps that occurred this morning.”
“Oh, yeah, okay. Let me put you through.”
I heard a click, which I assumed was her redirecting me to his mobile phone.
“Whissell,” he answered.
“It’s Agent Rawlings. I wanted to touch base with you on these bodies that have been found this morning.”
“Yeah, I’m at one of the scenes now.”
“Okay, which one?” I asked.
“The one by Sango. Albright Road.”
“We�
�re actually on our way there now. Did you have a forensics team on scene?”
“Team? No. We have a forensics guy. He’s on his way here.”
“Okay. We’ll be there in a half hour or so. Will you still be on scene?”
“Yeah, I’ll be here,” he said.
“Okay, we’ll see you in a bit.”
“Sure.”
I hung up.
“Well?” Beth asked, looking over at me.
“He’s at the scene we’re headed to. He says they have a forensics guy that will be at that scene as well. He also seemed just as I don’t give a shit as he did yesterday.”
“Maybe that’s just the guy’s demeanor,” she said. “Some people are like that.”
I shrugged and checked the e-mail on my phone, looking to see if anything had been sent from Ball or the twins. My phone showed no new messages. “Did you get anything from Virginia yet this morning?” I asked.
“Nope. Nothing yet,” Beth said.
“Did you make contact with the Nashville PD to let them know that we were heading out there today?”
“Not yet. We can give them a call after we know what’s going on out here,” she said.
“Fair enough.”
The freeway drive made twenty-five minutes of our trip, followed by a quick five minutes of local highway. Beth flipped on her turn signal and made a left down the street the remains were found on. After a mile drive, we spotted official vehicles on the left and right hand sides of the road. Beth pulled up behind a gray Crown Victoria sedan with a small three-inch antenna on the roof—Clifford’s car. Ahead of Clifford’s vehicle, in a line along the edge of the road, were a sheriff’s SUV and a coroners van. On the other side of the street, parked in the opposite direction, was a single sheriff’s cruiser. We stepped out and headed over. The scene had no police tape, no camera crews, no onlookers, and no team of people searching for anything.
We spotted Agent Clifford standing with Chief Deputy Whissell and two other men. One, wearing a white lab coat, I figured to be from the Nashville Medical Science place we’d visited the night prior, while the other was another deputy, stocky and wide—just a few yards ahead of the van was a tarp covering a body in the ditch. We walked up.
“Rawlings, Harper,” Agent Clifford said.
“Agent Clifford,” I said.
Beth gave him a nod.
“Let’s just go with Tom,” he said.
“Tom it is then,” I said.
The chief deputy said nothing.
“Is the forensics guy here?” I asked.
“Not yet,” Whissell said.
“What are we looking at? Same?” I asked.
“It looks like it,” the guy in the lab coat said. “Excuse me for a moment.”
No one replied. The guy walked for his van and opened the back.
Whissell nodded to his deputy and pointed at the tarp. “Show them,” he said.
The deputy took a few steps toward it, and Beth and I followed. I noticed an evidence cone on the edge of the road to my right. We continued to the body.
The deputy knelt next to the remains and drew the tarp back while looking back up at us, seemingly trying not to view what was beneath. He had a square jaw, matching the shape of his haircut. His shoulders were thick, yet he didn’t appear overweight. I chalked the guy up to have been raised on a local farm somewhere. I caught his nameplate on his shirt: Washington.
My eyes went to the remains. A dark-haired woman lay flat on her back, facing the sky. She had a wound dead center in her forehead that was two inches wide and a quarter of an inch across, which wasn’t consistent with bodies found prior. Her eyes were glazed over, her throat opened wide. Though the tarp was only pulled down to her chest, in addition to the lack of arms, I could see multiple stab wounds.
I rubbed my nose and coughed. The smell coming off the woman was thick. “This is how she was found?” I asked.
Deputy Washington nodded his head. “Exactly as is. I found a little blood up on the street that I marked off.”
“Okay.” I turned away and looked at Whissell. “What’s our time frame on forensics?”
“Any minute,” he said. Whissell crossed his arms over his round chest. He wore the same outfit as he had the day prior—a white sheriff’s-department shirt with black pockets and a black tie. He reached up with his right hand and scratched the side of his white beard. His eyes showed anger.
“Done looking?” the deputy named Washington asked.
I nodded.
“I’ll show you where I found that blood.” He lay the tarp back over the body and walked back toward the coroner’s van. He stopped at the evidence cone at the edge of the road and pointed down. “Looks like she may have lay there for a bit—like she was pulled out of a trunk and dropped to the street or something. There’s no drag marks through the gravel at the shoulder here, so I’m guessing she was carried off to the side of the road.”
“Anything else stand out at you?” Beth asked him.
“Not really, I tried looking for footprints but didn’t see anything. Same goes for anything resembling evidence—a cigarette butt, separate drip of blood, any kind of paper or trash—nothing, though.”
While his not finding anything could be seen as a letdown, the fact that he described actually doing some police work to locate evidence was a bit refreshing.
“That’s all we have over here,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said.
Beth, Deputy Washington and I walked back to Tom and the chief deputy.
The deputy walked to Whissell’s side and asked what the chief deputy wanted in the report, and Whissell responded that he’d handle it. The conversation struck me as odd. As far as I knew, chief deputies didn’t typically show up to crime scenes, and I doubted they wrote up the reports on them. I pushed the thought away—maybe he was just trying to do his part to help.
“Nothing found with the woman?” I asked.
“You’re looking at what was found,” Whissell said.
“Who called it in?” Beth asked.
The chief deputy pointed up the road toward an older white house on the left side of the road, maybe a quarter mile up. “Homeowner there,” he said.
“Someone talk to him yet?” Beth asked.
“I did,” Washington said. “I got the call to come and check it out. Spoke with him when I arrived.”
“And?” Beth asked.
“He saw the remains as he was leaving for work, called it in, turned around, and waited until I arrived. I got a statement from him, checked the guy out, and then let him get off to work. He had a clean sheet—Army recruiter in Clarksville. Not too much there.”
“Okay,” I said. “What do we know about the other scene?”
“Haven’t been there, but I’m guessing it looks the same as this one—body at the side of the road,” Whissell said.
The sound of tires crunching the gravel at the shoulder of the road caught my ear. I turned to see a white sedan pulling up behind Beth’s rental car. A man wearing a white coat stepped from the driver’s side, took a box from the backseat, and approached us.
“This is our forensics guy,” the chief deputy said.
The man stopped at Beth’s side and looked over toward the tarp and then at us. He was average in height and weight and appeared in his midthirties. His hair was red with a few specks of gray on the sides—a goatee wrapped his mouth in the same colors. His face was thin, his skin fair.
“I’m Agent Harper,” Beth said. She pointed at me standing next to her and then past me at Tom. “These are Agents Hank Rawlings and Tom Clifford.”
“Um, hi. Dave McElroy,” he said. He reached out and shook our hands. “So what have we got?”
“Female. Arms and legs removed. Stabbed, throat cut,” I said.
“So the same as the others I’ve been looking at all week?”
“Appears so,” I said.
“Sure.” Dave turned his attention to the chief deputy. “Has the scene been alt
ered at all?”
Whissell shook his head. “No one touched anything other than laying down the tarp.”
“Okay.” He looked back at Beth, Tom, and me. “Let me get on a pair of gloves, snap some photos, and then I’ll look at the remains to see if I can tell you anything.”
“Sounds good,” I said.
Tom nodded.
Dave from forensics went about getting his things set.
“Excuse me, I need to make a call,” the chief deputy said. He rounded the front of the sheriff’s SUV and got inside.
Beth, Tom and I watched as Dave began to take his photographs of the scene.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Dave had been photographing the remains and surrounding areas for the better part of fifteen minutes. The man from Nashville Medical Science, who we learned was named Jeff, was assisting Dave to roll over the remains so he could get a few photos of the woman’s injuries from behind. As soon as Dave had finished, Jeff said he would load the body and they both would head over to the next dump site with us to repeat the process.
Beth had called back to Ball to give him an update and see if they had come up with anything regarding the family of Owen Matheson—so far, they hadn’t.
Beth, Tom, and I leaned against the side of Tom’s government-issued cruiser. The plan to head into Nashville and speak with the local police hadn’t changed though it had been added to. We planned to take them photos of each deceased woman that we didn’t have a positive ID for. We assumed them all to be Nashville prostitutes, which meant the women were more than likely in the system. Dave said he would e-mail me photos of the two women we were in the process of viewing. I called back to Dr. Nehls, who said he would supply me with the same for the unknown woman from earlier in the week as well as the female we’d viewed the night prior.
“We might have something here!” Dave called. He waved us toward him at the body.
Tom, Beth, and I went over.
“What did you find?” Tom asked.
“Well, we were rolling her to see if the knife wound to the forehead penetrated the skull, which by the way, takes some serious energy to remove a knife after doing something like this.”
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