In other words, he’s got no life. Then again, I could almost be accused of the same thing.
“Ben Tarkoff,” the middle-aged guy with bulldog features said. “Marshals Service. Been doing this fifteen years. Way I see it, you do the crime, you better be prepared to do the time. These assholes think the rules don’t apply to them. I’m here to make sure they do.” He turned to the man seated next to him, who took the cue and perked up.
“Jim Morrison, Secret Service.” He was one of two wearing a suit—a black one with a red tie. “Yeah. Jim Morrison, like The Doors lead. I’ve been known to do some songwriting but I can’t sing too good. Karaoke’s about it. I’d say I’m no Jim Morrison—but I can’t say that because I am.” That got some chuckles. “Anyway, I got my degree in finance from Louisiana State and hooked on with the Bureau, ended up working the Violent Gang Task Force in northwest Louisiana doing financial analysis before hooking on with the service. So among other things, I can definitely help with tracking down and analyzing Marcks’s financials.”
“Suits aren’t necessary here,” Hurdle said. “Cargo pants, jeans, khakis, any of that is fine. Doing what we’re gonna be doing, most of the time we don’t wanna stand out and be tagged as law enforcement from a mile away. Be comfortable. Casual professional. Concealed carry shirts are good. When we go operational, we’ll gear up with tactical clothing and vests. Got it?”
Morrison nodded.
“Good to have you on board. Whether or not you can carry a tune, your skills and contacts are going to be key. Next.” He nodded at the man to Morrison’s left, also wearing dress clothes—a tan sport coat that complimented his dark skin.
“Travis Walters. FBI.”
They waited a moment for Walters to add something, but he did not.
“How long you on the job, Walters?” Hurdle asked.
“Two years. First task force posting.”
Terrific.
“Same goes for you. No suits. Anything you want to tell us about yourself?”
“Not interested in discussing my personal life. I keep that separate from work.”
Hurdle shook his head, then gestured at Vail.
“Karen Vail. FBI. Started with NYPD, made detective, then moved to the Bureau and worked as a field agent before my promotion to the Behavioral Analysis Unit several years ago. I’ve got a son in college and a fiancé with the DEA. And I curse too much and I get pissed off too easily. And I tend to work too much. Trying to fix all that, lead a more normal life.”
“Good luck with that,” Hurdle said. “Anything else?”
“I play well with others and I’m easy to get along with.”
Curtis snorted.
Vail cut her eyes at him. “Fuck you.”
Curtis threw his hands up. “My point exactly.”
She managed to subdue her smile. “On a serious note, I handled the original Roscoe Lee Marcks case seven years ago when he was put away. Actually, the profiler who drew up the assessment that led to Marcks’s apprehension was Thomas Underwood. I came in right after that when Underwood retired. So I’m familiar with Jasmine Marcks, the daughter, as well as the offender. Hopefully I’ll be able to help with establishing his behavioral patterns and tendencies. We need anything from Jasmine, I’ve got a good relationship with her.” She turned to Curtis.
“Erik Curtis. Detective, Fairfax County Police, Criminal Investigations Bureau. Served on CARFTF a bunch of years ago, so I’m familiar with the drill. Plus, I worked the Marcks case. I was the arresting officer so I know this douche bag pretty damn well. Two grown kids, a younger brother who’s a detective in New Orleans, where I grew up. Oh, and I’m divorced. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions about that. Because you will anyway, no matter what I say.”
“Okay,” Hurdle said. “You’ve all met me and know who I am. Got a teenage daughter I don’t see enough and a wife I don’t see enough. And a bunch of friends like you I end up seeing way too much.”
Tarkoff and Ramos emitted a low groan of disapproval.
Hurdle reached over and gave Ramos a swat with the stack of papers. “We’ve got a bit of a new team here, so I’ll walk us through some of the things we’ll need to get up to speed. Think of me as the quarterback. We’ll huddle, I’ll call the plays, and you’ll go out and run the routes. If I hand the ball off to you, I expect you to run with it. No fumbles.
“Speaking of which, I run a tight ship. No penalties. By that I mean we follow the rules. And the law. When we can. You know some ways to bend shit, fine—as long as it’ll hold up in court. I don’t want any asshole going free because of some dipshitly stupid thing one of us did while under my command.”
“Is dipshitly a word?”
“It is now, Rambo. Know why?”
“Because you said it is, boss.”
“Right. Now, with that out of the way, let’s talk about this case.” He glanced down at his papers, then set them aside in favor of an iPad. “Marcks was incarcerated at Potter Correctional in West Virginia.” He stopped and turned to Curtis. “That’s a federal prison. Aren’t serials usually prosecuted by state or county?”
“Usually. But Marcks copped to two murders and one of them was done in a national park in Fredericksburg.”
“And thus federal jurisdiction,” Hurdle said. “Okay, well, our model citizen was involved in an inmate-on-inmate fight in the showers this morning at oh-eight-hundred. Looks like he instigated it against a known enforcer, a guy no one screwed with at Potter. Those two facts should give us reason to suspect that this was part of a preconceived escape plan. The fight was designed to put him in a bad way so he’d have to be transported to a nearby hospital.”
“But prison hospitals are usually pretty well equipped,” Morrison said. “How could he be sure they wouldn’t just treat him there?”
“You familiar with Potter Correctional?” Hurdle asked.
“Potter’s older than dirt,” Vail said. “Should’ve been closed decades ago. I’m willing to bet their hospital has never seen the equipment they’d need to treat a serious injury.”
Hurdle consulted the iPad again. “And he supposedly had a head injury and a wickedly fractured arm. That qualifies as a serious injury.”
“So Marcks intentionally got his head beat in just so he could escape?” Walters asked. “A bit extreme.”
“Hard to say how bad he was hurt. I’m told the nurse only did a cursory exam and said it was an emergency, that he needed to be transported to the hospital.”
“Nurse could’ve been in on it,” Vail said. “Not unheard of. That escape from Clinton Correctional in upstate New York wasn’t the first time something like that happened. Woman becomes enamored with a good-looking inmate, he charms her, promises her the world if he can only get out, convinces her he’s innocent and was framed, whatever. She hears what she wants, believes what she wants. Sometimes he’ll reel her in, do the charm thing, and once he’s made her do things that could get her fired or even arrested if they’re egregious enough, he’s got his hooks in her. He can up the ante under the threat of exposure. She feels like she’s got no choice because if he talks she’ll lose her job. So she does increasingly risky things to help him escape.”
“Have they detained her?” Curtis asked.
“She’s dead. Marcks slit her throat.”
“Another man who makes promises and doesn’t keep his word,” Vail said.
Chuckles and muted laughter trickled through the room.
“That’s one of the things we’ll be looking at,” Hurdle said, “to see if she was complicit. Back to the escape. He was taken in the back of a small correctional transport truck. Last communication was at oh-eight-fifty. Driver reported nothing unusual.
“When he failed to check in at the hospital at oh-nine-ten, Potter went into lockdown, we were notified, and an emergency bed book count was done.”
&nbs
p; “Bed book?” Vail asked.
Ramos answered. “It’s a book maintained by the cell house correctional officer that contains a quarters card for each inmate. The quarters cards contain a mug shot of each inmate, his cell assignment and job assignment. This helps confirm that the inmate assigned to that cell is actually the inmate standing in front of you. If one or more inmate’s not where he’s supposed to be, it helps the officer quickly identify who’s missing.”
“Like I was saying,” Hurdle continued. “Potter’s off-duty staff was called in and interior and exterior searches of the prison facility were conducted. All buildings. All closets, rooms. The kitchen. Everything. Vehicles were accounted for. Once they confirmed Marcks was the only escapee, Potter staff was assigned to their escape posting in the immediate area inside the city and county limits around the prison. State troopers were dispatched to expand the search and on Route 48 they found the transport vehicle on the west side of the road, just across the border in Virginia, near Strasburg. It crashed and might’ve been moved further into a nearby stand of trees.”
“The transport team consisted of two correctional officers,” Tarkoff said. “Correct?”
“Yes,” Hurdle said. “Driver was shot through the van wall, probably with the other officer’s service pistol. Sanders, the guard who was in the back with Marcks, was stabbed through the eye with what was likely a scalpel. Nurse’s throat was slit, no doubt with that same scalpel. Don’t know who was killed first.”
“What the hell was a scalpel doing on that truck?” Vail asked.
“Good question. Possible answer is that the nurse was a collaborator and gave it to him, assuming he’d use it on the guard, not on her. So we’ve got reason to question just how badly his arm was really injured.” Hurdle tapped on his screen. “Name was Susan Olifante. If she was part of the plot, we’ll have to reconstruct it. We can’t sit her down. Obviously. Forensics is going through the van, the prison, the medical facility at Potter. Anything turns up, we’ll know ASAP.”
“Big picture,” Ramos said, “is that if you escape from a max-security prison, you’ve gotta have help on the inside. Day in, day out, it’s all routine, scheduled stuff. They’ve got it down to a science, a proven science that’s designed to prevent escape. It’d be very difficult to get out of a facility without assistance—even an old one like Potter. We’ll find out who it was, whether it’s the nurse or someone else. Once we’re clear on the process of how he escaped, it’s just a matter of working backward: how did he have access to that location? Who had access to that location at this time? These three people? Bang.”
“Rambo, you’ve worked with Prisons,” Hurdle said, referring to the Bureau of Prisons. “Get on this. Let’s look at everybody who’s had contact with Marcks inside the facility. Medical staff, including that nurse—but don’t stop there. We don’t wanna miss anything—or anyone.”
“The COs, too,” Walters said. “See if any have a spotty record.”
“Not just the bad officers,” Ramos said. “We need to look at all of them or we could miss something in front of our faces. Even the good ones can get roped in.”
“How can you ‘rope in’ a good cop?” Walters said. “Doesn’t make any sense.”
Hurdle’s face stiffened. “I’ll tell you how. I’ve seen it happen first-hand.” He dropped his chin and his gaze bore into Walters. “Let’s say you’re a legit officer doing your job the right way. You steer clear of all the pitfalls that come with the post. But you talk with your coworkers, right? ’Cause we all do. Stuff happens at home, in your personal life, and you talk about it at work. You get married. You have a baby. So take that example. You come back to work the next day and you’re beaming. Why? Because your wife just had your first baby, Karina—a baby girl, six pounds eight ounces, and she’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. So you show some pictures you got on your phone and others that you posted to Facebook. And you’re ecstatic, you’re so fucking happy. Everyone pats you on the back, tells you how gorgeous she is. But you don’t know that one of the guys on your block is spilling your dirt.
“So next day, you’re on the block doing your rounds, an inmate says when you walk by, “So how’s Karina doing, dawg? Yeah, you want Karina to stay healthy? How about you get me a pack of Marlboros. Or I’ll have some homies come over and take care of your wife and daughter.”
Walters swallowed.
“That shit goes on all the time,” Ramos said. “No one talks about it, but that’s real life. Inmates as a group are very manipulative and they’re always probing for weakness. Always trying to see what they can get from you. They watch your body language, your face. If they can find that weakness, that button to push, they’re gonna use it on you. They teach each other how to do this shit. Because it’s proven. It works. Because correctional officers are people working in a very dangerous environment. And not all of them are the sharpest tools in the shed. It’s the easiest federal law enforcement career to get into, so who’s it going to attract?”
“Seriously?” Tarkoff asked.
“Seriously,” Ramos said. “Think about it. It’s a dangerous fucking job. You know anyone who walks around saying, ‘I wanna be a correctional officer when I grow up? I wanna walk a beat surrounded by violent criminals and not have a decent weapon on my hip?’ No, man. If they want to go into federal law enforcement, they’re looking at FBI, DEA, ATF, Marshals, DHS. Bureau of Prisons? Not likely on that list. But Prisons doesn’t require a college degree. So if you can’t pass the exam to get into one of the sexy alphabet agencies, you take what you can get: Prisons. And at some point you try to get a transfer out. You may think that’s just my opinion, but I’m just tellin’ it like it is.”
“Once the inmates identify who the care bears are,” Hurdle said, “it’s game on.”
“Care bears?” Walters asked.
“Guards they know they can manipulate,” Hurdle said, “who’ll do what you want and get you what you want, because you’ve got something on them. These inmates know how to twist your arm, manipulate you. Once they know your personal shit, now what do you do? They own you. Because you’re a human being and you know their threats have weight behind them. And you know these bastards are the scum of the earth.” He looked again at Walters. “That’s how a good officer, with a good record and admirable intentions, gets dragged into the muck of prison life.”
“And that goes to what I was saying,” Ramos said. “It’s a big reason why I’ve never heard of anyone who aspires to be a correctional officer.”
Hurdle brought them up to speed on Gregory Greeling, the deputy murdered at Jasmine Marcks’s house, then nodded at Curtis. “You two find anything out after I left?”
Curtis brushed back his hair, which was beginning to show gray streaks. “Based on Jasmine Marcks’s account of when she last saw him and when a neighbor discovered the body, he was killed in a window that we can narrow down to between 11:35 AM and 1:00 PM. That fit with what the ME estimated from liver temp.”
“That timeline also fits with what happened at Potter,” Vail said. “If Marcks escaped from the truck around 9:00 AM, he had time to get into Virginia and over to Jasmine’s house by the time the officer was killed.”
“You think Marcks did Greeling?” Tarkoff asked.
Curtis turned to Vail. This was clearly her call.
“There were odd markings on Greeling’s body, the abdomen specifically. Postmortem slices through the skin, adipose, and fascia to the muscle layer. Parallel lines. And his genitals were excised.”
A few of the men winced.
“I’m not trying to be graphic,” she said. “It’s significant because we’ve seen this before. Most of Roscoe Lee Marcks’s victims had this same pattern carved into them. Same with the genitalia. I know you’re all intimately familiar with MO. But it doesn’t really apply here relative to the previous Blood Lines murders because it’s a different sc
enario, different situation. If we assume that Marcks is responsible for this deputy’s murder, he was not selecting his victim based on the same set of criteria he used for his previous vics. This was an opportunistic kill, one out of necessity. He’s presumably after Jasmine. Greeling was in his way and presented the biggest threat. So he took him out.”
“But the markings,” Walters said. “The ‘blood lines.’ It’s a pattern, so more than likely it’s the same guy. It’s Marcks.”
“In the Behavioral Analysis Unit, we call these ‘patterns’ ritual behavior. Bottom line is that it’s things the offender does with the body, or crime scene, before or after he kills the victim. These are things that have nothing to do with succeeding in his crime. He measures success as murdering the person and doing it without getting discovered. The things he does to successfully kill his victim and get away with it make up his MO.
“These postmortem ‘blood line’ markings have meaning to him. We may not be able to make sense of what they mean, or why he’s doing them—but all that matters for the moment is that he felt the need to make them. It feeds some inner desire. It’s comforting to him in some way. Because of that, the offender does it on all his victims, or almost all, depending on the situation. He enjoys doing it and it becomes like a signature that allows us to link his kills.”
“So,” Walters said, spreading his hands apart, “what you’re saying is that I was right.”
“Do we know what kind of knife or implement he used to make those lines?” Tarkoff asked. “Kitchen knife that he found at the scene or—”
“Great question, Ben,” Vail said. “No, this was something we’re almost certain he brought with him.”
The Darkness of Evil Page 8
