The Informant

by James Grippando

  She smiled and opened her purse.

  “My treat,” he said. “You can pay when we dine at the Russian Tea Room.”

  “Deal.”

  They said good-bye and exchanged a nothing kiss. He watched as she walked to her car, hoping she’d look back, maybe give him a smile. He didn’t get one.

  He ordered another Evian with lemon, then turned his attention to the people parade along the extrawide sidewalk on Ocean Drive. A statuesque brunette clad in a strategically ripped dago-T scurried toward the Ford Agency. A geriatric retiree inched along on his walker. Amazing, he thought, South Beach was the one place on earth where even the homophobic cop down from Brooklyn seemed to blend right in with the flamboyant transvestite walking six poodles on a leash. Peaceful coexistence. So why did every conversation with Karen feel like a boxing match?

  At ten after two he called his office voice mail on his portable phone, then dialed the answering machine back at his apartment. Actually, Zack’s apartment. As he waited for the fourth ring, it suddenly occurred to him that for nearly two decades he’d had the same best friend. Karen didn’t seem to keep in touch with anyone longer than a few months. Maybe they were opposites.

  “Hello,” Zack answered.

  “Dumbshit, what’d you pick up for? I’m calling in for messages.”

  “Gee, it’s good to hear your voice too, man.”

  “Sorry. I’m not exactly having a banner day.”

  “No problem. Anyway, the light’s not blinking on your machine, so I guess nobody loves you. But you did get a package this morning. Kind of weird. It’s got “urgent, open immediately” written all over it, but it came second-day, non-Saturday delivery—which means a three-day delay.”

  “From who?”

  “Not sure. Can’t read the name on the delivery invoice. Looks like it was mailed from Atlanta.”

  “Go ahead and open it.” Mike heard the package tearing open, then he couldn’t hear anything as a Jeep full of bikini-clad Brazilians rolled down Ocean Boulevard with the boom box blasting.

  “Hmmm,” said Zack. “This is strange.”

  “What?”

  “Just a sheet of paper. Nothing on it but some woman’s name. Typed. Do you know a Gertrude Kincaid?”

  Mike froze. He’d been following the gruesome trail of “tongue murders” ever since the third victim had turned up in Miami. “Actually, I’m doing a story on her.”

  “She one of your sources?”

  “No. A victim. Looks like she’s body number six for that serial killer I’ve been covering. Her name just came over the wire this morning. Small town in Georgia. Police found her body yesterday, but they think it happened sometime Friday.”

  “Friday?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Like I said, the package took three days to get here. It was sent on Thursday.”

  Mike could suddenly hear himself breathing. “Don’t touch anything, all right? Just leave everything right where it is. I’ll be there in a minute.” He switched off the phone and ran to his car.

  Chapter 4

  a record-breaking cold front was working through south-central Georgia that Monday afternoon. Gray skies cast an eerie pall over a brown, rolling landscape that seemed shocked by the blast of Arctic air. Livestock herded together in the open fields along Highway 46, sheltering each other from the cold north wind. At the end of the long line of barbed-wire fencing, bare oaks and azaleas lined the quiet streets of Hainesville.

  Special Agent Victoria Santos parked her rented Oldsmobile at the curb in front of 501 Peach Street. “Kincaid” was the name on the mailbox at the end of the driveway. As she opened her car door a blue-and-white van marked ACTION NEWS pulled away from the curb. She presumed several other media types had already come and gone in the past twenty-four hours since the body had been discovered. A curious neighbor watched from beyond the white picket fence as she ducked under the yellow police tape and headed up the brick driveway. Three men wearing the brown leather jackets and dark brown trousers of the Candler County Sheriff’s Department were standing on the covered front porch, on the official business side of yet another line of yellow police tape stretched across the top step. It was cold enough for her to see their breath steam. Little puffs of conversation came from all directions, each seeming to talk over the other.

  Victoria rubbed her hands together and pulled her trench coat tight, cursing the cold beneath her breath. It was a far cry from the steaminess of Cuba, where she’d been born thirty-three years ago, or, for that matter, the warmth of Miami Beach, where she’d spent her childhood. She’d spent the last ten years up north, after graduating from the FBI Academy, but her blood still hadn’t thickened. Strangely, it had been warmer in Virginia this morning than in Georgia, and she hadn’t had time to check the weather before flying to Savannah, let alone pack appropriately. She’d left on a Bubird—the Bureau’s name for its own aircraft—directly from the Quantico airstrip, five minutes after taking an urgent call from her supervisor.

  “Santos, FBI,” she announced with a flash of her credentials. She was standing on the top step, just shy of the police tape. “I’m looking for Sheriff John Dutton.”

  The conversation stopped, and their stares made her mildly self-conscious. She was taller than the sheriff, but she felt much shorter standing one step below the men on the porch. They looked at her as though they might have found her attractive at a bake sale or church picnic. Here, however, she was definitely the intruder.

  Sheriff Dutton stepped forward, hands resting irreverently on his hips. He came close enough for her to read his name bar pinned to his jacket, but he didn’t formally introduce himself. “You’re the help they sent down from Washington, I take it.”

  “Not Washington, exactly. I work out of Quantico, Virginia. Thanks for notifying us.”

  “Wasn’t my idea to notify anybody. It was the State Attorney who wanted to call in the feds. Hell if I know why—we take care of our own here.” He gave Victoria an assessing look. “I’ll just remind you once, miss, I’m the one running this investigation.”

  Less than five minutes on the scene, she thought, and already she was knee-deep in testosterone. “I fully intend to respect your authority, Sheriff. However, you should know that my reasons for being here are not casual. I’ve spent the last four months working with local law enforcement in five states on five previous murders that may be related to this one.”

  “Do say…Well, right now, this is the only murder we’re concerned about. In Hainesville, ain’t nothin’ more important than a matter of local concern.”

  “I can appreciate that.”

  “Then I hope you also appreciate that things are well under control. Crime scene’s secure. I did it myself, to reduce the chance of any disturbance. Filled out the initial report. Sketched a floor plan, took photographs and a videotape. You can look at any of that. But I’m not about to have anybody who shows up with a badge poking around inside willy-nilly.”

  “Rest assured, I want to work with you to catch this killer. We can talk about the crime scene later. First, though, I’d like to see the body.”

  “It’s long gone. The body van picked it up yesterday. Georgia Bureau of Investigation routed it to the branch crime lab in Macon.”

  “I know, I’m on my way there. I was just hoping you’d come with me, maybe give me some background. I’m sure I could use your insights as well. Can I count on you, please?”

  She did everything short of batting her eyes, struggling to keep a straight face. With her forensic background she could practically have performed the autopsy herself, and she hardly needed a county sheriff to show her around a morgue. Politics, however, made it important at the outset to reassure the locals that they weren’t being squeezed out of their own investigation.

  “All right,” he said, seemingly disarmed. “I’ll drive.”

  In two minutes they were in the squad car, headed west on 1-16. Cunningham’s funeral home normally served as Hainesville’
s morgue. The local coroner, a paramedic at Candler County Hospital, had already ruled the death suspicious, so the body had been transferred to the Georgia State Crime Lab for examination by a trained forensic pathologist. It was over an hour’s ride, mostly on interstate, so there was plenty of time for Victoria to review her notes.

  “What can you tell me about Mrs. Kincaid?” she asked, finally looking up from her sheaf of papers. The wipers squeaked across the windshield, clearing away a few slushy drops that were on the verge of becoming Candler County’s first significant snowfall in more than five years.

  “Seventy-eight-year-old widow. Her husband was a state legislator who died when she was in her early forties. She never remarried, raised a two-year-old daughter by her lonesome and fifteen years ago was elected Hainesville’s first woman mayor. She retired a couple years back, but still went to every city council meeting. Lived alone, drove herself wherever she wanted to go and chewed the hell out of anyone who suggested she was getting too old to do it. LBJ was president the last time she’d missed a Sunday-morning service, and she couldn’t have been sick more than a few days in her life. That’s why it was so conspicuous when she wasn’t in the front pew singing yesterday morning.” He took his eyes from the road and looked at her directly. “That’s why it’s so important I catch the animal who killed her.”

  “And that’s why I’m here. To help.”

  “I know why you’re here,” he scoffed. “You think we’re a bunch of dumb rednecks who can’t handle a homicide because there ain’t been nobody killed in Hainesville since the bad guys wore blue and the good guys wore gray. Well, that ain’t the case, miss. We know our stuff here.”

  “I’m sure you do. But whether you’re good or bad cops has nothing to do with my being here.” She paused, trying to think of some way to explain her visit without insulting. “Have you ever heard of CASKU, Sheriff?”

  He furrowed his brow, searching, but he was plainly drawing a blank. “Heard of it, yeah. Stands for…for somethin’.”

  “It’s an acronym for the FBI’s Child Abduction and Serial Killer Unit, based in Quantico. It’s fairly new, created specifically to provide operational assistance to any local, state or federal law enforcement agency involved in the investigation of a child abduction or serial murder case. My job is to make sure you get the services you need—crime analysis, formulation of investigative strategies, technical and forensic resource coordination, use of the FBI Evidence Response Teams or FBI laboratory services. I also coordinate our analysis of the behavioral characteristics of unknown serial killers. It’s called ‘profiling.’”

  “Now that you’ve described it, I have heard of it. You’re the guys responsible for those god-awful forms.”

  “You must mean the VI-CAP form—Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. They are long, but the key to the profiling program is to make sure the information fed back to Quantico is as complete and accurate as possible, so it’s worth the effort. The whole program started with actual interviews of convicted killers like Manson, Richard Speck and Ted Bundy. Now it’s grown into a huge database that includes profiles of virtually every known serial killer in modern time. The idea was to figure out what makes these guys tick, what drives them, what they feel and don’t feel before, during and after the murders. The learning curve is ongoing, but special agents back at Quantico can now look at the evidence in a given case and construct a psychological profile of the killer. For the investigators in the field, a solid profile gives them somebody to look for.”

  “But if this is the sixth murder, like you say, there must already be a profile.”

  “Not a good one. This is a particularly tough case. We figure the killer’s probably a man, but only because female serial killers are so rare. The classic victim’s female, between the age of fifteen and thirty. Here, we’ve got three men and—counting Mrs. Kincaid—three women, their ages ranging from thirty-one to seventy-eight. The classic serial killer is a sadistic sexual psychopath who strikes within his own ethnic group. In this case, none of the victims was sexually assaulted, three are white, two are black and one’s Hispanic. If that’s not confounding enough, they come from six different states, six very different communities. Manhattan. Eugene, Oregon. Miami. Cleveland. Fayetteville, Arkansas. And now Hainesville.”

  “Don’t see much of a common thread there. What makes you think they’re all related?”

  “That’s another benefit of VI-CAP. The computer helps link up crimes from different jurisdictions that might otherwise never be connected—you know, the old joke about a killer signing his name on the victim’s forehead in Oregon, while the cops in Cleveland are looking for the same guy but don’t know a thing about it. VI-CAP gave us a match after the third victim was found in Miami. It was the bizarre MO. Granted, it’s still the only thing that links the victims to each other or to any one person who could be their killer, but it’s a strong link—more like a signature than an MO. All were stabbed, multiple times. And each one had their tongue extracted from their mouth.”

  Dutton cringed, thinking how much it hurt just to bite his own tongue. The image of the dried blood on Gerty’s lips suddenly returned. “When you say extracted,” he said warily, “you mean cut, I suppose.”

  “Partly.” She stared out the window, deep in her own thoughts of five other victims who came before Gerty. “But mostly I mean ripped.”

  She heard the sheriff breathe a heavy sigh, and they rode the rest of the way to the morgue in silence.

  “Looks like myocardial infarction,” said Dr. Percy Ackerman, medical examiner. He was short and stocky with a very round head covered by a salt-and-pepper stubble that was no longer than a five-o’clock shadow. He stood at the head of the autopsy table, bearing the stains of various bodily fluids on his green surgical scrubs and latex gloves.

  Victoria peered down at the old woman’s naked, gray body. Two deep incisions ran laterally from shoulder to shoulder, across her breasts at a downward angle and meeting at the sternum. A long, deeper cut ran from breastbone to groin, forming the stem in the coroner’s classic “Y” incision. The liver, spleen, kidneys and intestines were laid out neatly beside a slab of ribs on the dissection tray behind Dr. Ackerman. The cadaver was literally a shell of a human being, strangely reminiscent of the hollowed-out half of a watermelon on a table of hors d’oeuvres. Victoria smeared another dab of Vicks Vapo-Rub beneath her nostrils, taking extra care to cut the odor. At moments like these she would swear that a degree in medicine was the only thing separating serial killers from forensic pathologists. That, and a conscience.

  “You mean Gerty died of a heart attack?” Sheriff Dutton asked incredulously.

  “I’m saying she was literally scared to death. Medically speaking, extreme terror or fear can cause a sudden and massive release of epinephrine—better known as adrenaline—causing ventricular fibrillation of the heart. That seems to be what happened here. I would point out, though, that her rather advanced arteriosclerosis made her somewhat susceptible to V-fib.”

  “Well,” said Victoria, “you can’t crack somebody over the head with a lead pipe and then defend yourself by saying his skull was too thin. A killer has to take his victim with all her weakness, all her vulnerabilities. The mechanism of death may have been myocardial infarction, but surely you agree that the manner of death was still homicide.”

  “Absolutely.”

  She walked around to the other side of the table, looking more closely. “Tell me more about what scared her. Was it something the killer did to her? Or does it look like she just saw him standing in the doorway and that was all her poor heart could take?”

  “Gerty Kincaid was no scaredy-cat,” the sheriff scoffed.

  “In this case,” sighed Dr. Ackerman, “I’d say she was too strong for her own good. An immediate death of natural causes would have been a blessing.”

  Victoria glanced at the clear plastic bag on the tray, holding a flat, reddish brown wedge of flesh. The color ran from her cheeks, and
the torrents of cold air from the ducts overhead suddenly seemed colder. “You think the tongue came out before she was dead, then.”

  “Actually, it wasn’t completely removed until I did the examination.”

  Victoria shot him a look of concern.

  “The killer had taken it better than three-quarters of the way,” said Ackerman, slightly defensive. “That’s what made the State Attorney call you in the first place, thinking it was connected to these tongue murders in the news. It was just hanging by a shred. I took it the rest of the way to inspect the wound.”

  “All right,” she said. “But this is important: Do you think the killer did his part before or after death?”

  “I’d say it was perimortem—at or near the time of death. We’ve got various signs of torture. Look here,” he said as he turned one of the hands palm up. “Nails dug into the skin on the inside of the palms. She actually punctured the skin and drew blood. I’d say digging in that deeply is consistent with sustained, excruciating pain—the kind of pain you might expect to be associated with someone trying to rip the tongue right out of your mouth.”

  “We’ve seen that on a few of the other victims,” Victoria said quietly. “What about time of death?”

  “She was starting to swell with gas buildup. A few blisters had already formed under the skin, and fluids were leaking from her nose and vagina. So I fixed the time of death sometime on Friday, figuring she’d been dead maybe two and a half days. It’s hard to pinpoint an exact time.”

  Victoria nodded. His conclusions seemed sound, but she suspected that his estimation of the time of death was no doubt influenced by newspaper reports that Gerty Kincaid was last seen alive on Friday morning.

  Dr. Ackerman carried on about livor mortis patterns and the details of his examination for another twenty minutes, until Victoria announced it was time to leave. She and Sheriff Dutton walked in silence to the parking lot. The sun had just set. Gray skies were turning black, and the temperature had dropped even further. Tiny drops of water on the hood of the squad car had actually frozen.