Ruskin downshifted hard as we curled around a steep curve and saw flashing red and blue lights. Cars and EMS vans loomed up ahead, solemnly gathered at the edge of thick pine woods.
A dozen vehicles were parked haphazardly along the side of the two-lane state road. Traffic was sparse out there in the heart of nowhere. There was no buildup of ambulance-chasers yet. Ruskin pulled in behind the last car in line, a dark blue Lincoln Town Car that might as well have had Federal Bureau written all over it.
A state-of-the-art homicide scene was already in progress. Yellow tape had been strung from pine trees, cordoning off the perimeter. Two EMS ambulances were parked with their blunt noses pointed into a stand of trees.
I was swept into a near out-of-body experience as I floated from the car. My vision tunneled.
It was almost as if I had never visited a crime scene before. I vividly remembered the worst of the Soneji case. A small child found near a muddy river. Horrifying memories mixed with the terrifying present moment.
Don’t let this be Scootchie.
Sampson held my arm loosely as we followed detectives Ruskin and Sikes. We walked for nearly a mile into the dense woods. In the heart of a copse of towering pines, we finally saw the shapes and silhouettes of several men and a few women.
At least half of the group were dressed in dark business suits. It was as if we had come upon some impromptu camping trip for an accounting firm, or a coven of big-city lawyers or bankers.
Everything was eerie, quiet, except for the hollow popping of the technicians’ cameras. Close-up photos of the entire area were being taken.
A couple of the crime-scene professionals were already wearing translucent rubber gloves, looking for evidence, taking notes on spiral pads.
I had a creepy, otherworldly premonition that we were going to find Scootchie now. I pushed it, shoved it away, like the unwanted touch of an angel of God. I turned my head sharply to one side—as if that would help me avoid whatever was coming up ahead.
“FBI for sure,” Sampson muttered softly. “Out here on the Wilderness Trail.” It was as if we were walking toward a mammoth nest of buzzing hornets. They were standing around, whispering secrets to one another.
I was acutely aware of leaves crumpling under my feet, of the noise of twigs and small branches breaking. I wasn’t really a policeman here. I was a civilian.
We finally saw the naked body, at least what was left of it. There was no clothing visible at the murder scene. The woman had been tied to a small sapling with what appeared to be a thick leather bond.
Sampson sighed, “Oh, Jesus, Alex.”
Chapter 14
WHO IS the woman?” I asked softly as we came up to the unlikely police group, the “multijurisdictional mess,” as Nick Ruskin had described it.
The dead woman was white. It was impossible to tell too much more than that about her at this time. Birds and animals had been feasting on her, and she almost didn’t look human anymore. There were no fixed, staring eyes, just dark sockets like burn marks. She didn’t have a face; the skin and tissue had been eaten away.
“Who the hell are these two?” one of the FBI agents, a heavyset blond woman in her early thirties, asked Ruskin. She was as unattractive as she was unpleasant, with puffy red lips and a bulbous, hooked nose. At least she’d spared us the usual FBI happy-camper smile, or the FBI’s famous “smiling handshake.”
Nick Ruskin was brusque with her. His first endearing moment for me. “This is Detective Alex Cross, and his partner, Detective John Sampson. They’re down here from D.C. Detective Cross’s niece is missing from Duke. She’s Naomi Cross. This is Special Agent in Charge Joyce Kinney.” He introduced the agent to us.
Agent Kinney frowned, or maybe it was a scowl. “Well, this is certainly not your niece here,” she said.
“I’d appreciate it if the two of you would return to the cars. Please do that.” She felt the need to go on. “You have no authority on this case, and no right to be here, either.”
“As Detective Ruskin just told you, my niece is missing.” I spoke softly, but firmly, to Special Agent Joyce Kinney. “That’s all the authority I need. We didn’t come down here to admire the leather interior and instrument panel of Detective Ruskin’s sports car.”
A thick-chested blond man in his late twenties briskly stepped up beside his boss. “I think y’all heard Special Agent Kinney. I’d appreciate it if you leave now,” he announced. Under different circumstances, his over-the-top response might have been funny. Not today. Not at this massacre scene.
“No way you’re going to stop us,” Sampson said to the blond agent in his darkest, grimmest voice. “Not you. Not your Dapper Dan friends here.”
“That’s fine, Mark.” Agent Kinney turned to the younger man. “We’ll deal with this later,” she said. Agent Mark backed off, but not without a major-league scowl, much like the one I’d gotten from his boss. Both Ruskin and Sikes laughed as the agent backed down.
We were allowed to stay with the FBI and the local police contingent at the crime scene. Beauties and the Beast. I remembered the phrase Ruskin had used in the car. Naomi was up on the Beast board. Had the dead woman been on the board as well?
It had been hot and humid and the body was decomposing rapidly. The woman had been badly attacked by forest animals, and I hoped that she was already dead before they came. Somehow, I didn’t think so.
I noted the unusual position of the body. She was lying on her back. Both her arms appeared to have been dislocated, perhaps as she twisted and struggled to free herself from the leather bonds and the tree behind her. It was as vicious a sight as I had ever seen on the streets of Washington or anywhere else. I felt almost no relief that this wasn’t Naomi.
I eventually talked up one of the FBI’s forensic people. He knew a friend of mine at the Bureau, Kyle Craig, who worked out of Quantico in Virginia. He told me that Kyle had a summer house in the area.
“This shitheel’s real savvy, real smooth, if nothing else.” The FBI forensic guy liked to talk. “He hasn’t left pubic hairs, semen, or even traces of perspiration on either of the victims I’ve examined. I surely doubt if we’ll find much here to give us a DNA profile. At least he didn’t eat her himself.”
“Does he have sex with the victims?” I asked before the agent went on a tangent about his experiences with cannibalism.
“Yeah, he does. Somebody had repeated sex with them. Lots of vaginal bruises and tears. Bugger’s well equipped, or he uses something large to simulate sex. But he must wear a cellophane body bag when he does it. Or he dusts them somehow. No pubes, no trace of body fluid yet. The forensic entomologist has already collected his samples. He’ll be able to give us the exact time of death.”
“This could be Bette Anne Ryerson,” one of the gray-haired FBI agents within earshot said. “There was a missing-person report on her. Blond-haired gal, five six, about a hundred and ten pounds. Wearing a gold Seiko when she disappeared. Drop-dead gorgeous, at least she used to be.”
“Mother of two kids,” said one of the female agents. “Graduate English student at North Carolina State. I interviewed her husband, who’s a professor. Met her two children. Beautiful little kids. One and three years old. Goddamn this bastard.” The agent started to choke up.
I could see the wristwatch, and the ribbon that tied back her hair had come undone and rested on her shoulder. She was no longer beautiful. What was left of her was bloated and suffused. The odor of decomposition was pungent even out in the open air.
The empty sockets seemed to be staring up into a crescent-shaped opening at the tops of the pine trees, and I wondered what her eyes had looked at last.
I tried to imagine “Casanova” cavorting around in these deep dark woods before we had arrived. I took a guess that he was in his twenties or thirties, and physically strong. I was afraid for Scootchie, much more than I had been, in fact.
Casanova. The world’s greatest lover… God save us.
Chapter 15
&
nbsp; IT WAS well past ten o’clock, and we were still at the grisly, highly disturbing murder scene. The dazzling amber headlights of official cars and emergency vehicles were used to illuminate a footworn path into the shadowy woods. It was getting colder outside. The chill night wind was a gritty slap in the face.
The corpse still hadn’t been moved.
I watched the Bureau’s technicians dutifully strip search the woods, collecting forensic clues and taking measurements. The immediate area had been cordoned off, but I made a sketch in the dim light, and took my own preliminary notes. I was trying to remember what I could about the original Casanova. Eighteenth-century adventurer, writer, libertine. I had read parts of his memoirs somewhere along the line.
Beyond the obvious, why had the killer chosen the name? Did he believe that he truly loved women? Was this his way of showing it?
We could hear a bird somewhere let out an unearthly scream, and also the sounds of small animals all around us. Nobody thought of Bambi in these woods. Not under the circumstances of the gruesome murder.
Between ten-thirty and eleven, we heard a loud roar like thunder in the eerie woods. Nervous eyes looked up into the blue-black sky.
“There’s a familiar old tune,” Sampson said as he saw the fluttering lights of an incoming helicopter approaching from the northeast.
“Probably mediflight finally coming for the body,” I said.
A dark blue helicopter with gold stripes finally swirled down onto the blacktop highway. Whoever was piloting the copter in was a real pro.
“Not mediflight,” Sampson said; “more likely be Mick Jagger. Big stars travel in copters like that one.”
Joyce Kinney and the regional Bureau director were already headed back to the highway. Sampson and I followed along like uninvited pests.
We received another rude shock right away. Both of us recognized the tall, balding, distinguished-looking man who stepped from the helicopter.
“Now what the hell is he doing down here?” Sampson said. I had the same question, the same uneasy reaction. It was the deputy director of the FBI. The number two man, Ronald Burns. Burns was a real hummer inside the Bureau, a bigtime cage rattler.
We both knew Burns from our last “multijurisdictional” case. He was supposed to be political, a bad guy inside the Bureau, but he had never been that way with me. After he had looked at the body, he asked to speak to me. It was getting stranger and stranger down in Carolina.
Burns wanted to hold our little talk away from the big ears and small minds of his own people.
“Alex, I’m real sorry to hear your niece might have been kidnapped. I hope that isn’t the case,” he said. “Since you’re down here, maybe you can help us out.”
“Can I ask why you’re down here?” I said to Burns. Might as well skip right to the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.
Burns smiled, showing off his capped, very white front teeth. “I do wish you had accepted our offer of that VICAP position.”
I had been offered a job as a liaison between the Bureau and the D.C. police after the Soneji kidnapping case. Burns was one of the men who interviewed me.
“I like directness more than anything in a senior officer,” Burns continued.
I was still waiting for an answer to my direct question.
“I can’t tell you as much as you’d like to hear,” Burns finally said. “I will tell you that we don’t know if your niece was taken by this sick Johnny. He leaves very little physical evidence, Alex. He’s careful and he’s good at what he does.”
“So I’ve heard. Leads us into some obvious areas for suspects. Policemen, army vets, amateurs who study the police. That could be misdirection on his part, though. Maybe he wants us to think that way.”
Burns nodded. “I’m here because this has become a high-priority mess. It’s large, Alex. I can’t tell you why at this time. It’s classified large.” Spoken like a true FBI honcho. Mysteries wrapped in more mysteries.
Burns sighed. “I will tell you one thing. We believe that he might be a collector. We think he could be keeping a few of the young women nearby… a private harem maybe. His very own harem.”
It was a scary, startling idea. It also gave me hope that Naomi might still be alive.
“I want to be in on this,” I told Burns, holding eye contact with him. “Why don’t you tell me everything?” I gave him my terms. “I need to see the whole picture before I start giving out any theories. Why does he reject some of the women? If that’s what he’s doing.”
“Alex, I can’t tell you any more right now. I’m sorry.” Burns shook his head and closed his eyes for a second. I realized that he was exhausted.
“But you wanted to see how I would react to your collector theory?”
“I did,” Burns admitted, and finally had to smile.
“A modern-day harem would be possible, I guess. It’s a common enough male fantasy,” I told him. “Strangely, it’s a prevalent female fantasy, too. Don’t rule that out yet.”
Burns catalogued what I’d said and left it at that. He asked me to help again, but was unwilling to tell me everything he knew. He finally walked back to be with his own people.
Sampson came up beside me. “What did His Rigidness have to say? What brings him to this unholy forest with us mere mortals?”
“He said something interesting. Said that Casanova might be a collector, maybe creating his own private harem somewhere near here,” I told Sampson. “He said the case is large. His choice of words.”
“Large” meant it was a very bad case, probably worse than it already seemed. I wondered how that could be, and I almost didn’t want to know the answer.
Chapter 16
KATE MCTIERNAN was lost in an odd, but nicely illuminating, thought. When the strike of a hawk breaks the body of its prey, she considered, it’s only because of timing.
That was the insight from her latest kata in black-belt class. Exquisite timing was everything in karate, and also in so many other things. It also helped if you could bench-press almost two hundred pounds, which she could.
Kate dawdled along busy, funky, rambunctious Franklin Street in Chapel Hill. The street ran north and south, bordering the picturesque campus of the University of North Carolina. She passed bookstores, pizza shops, Rollerblade rentals, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. The rock group White Zombie was blaring from the icecream store. Kate wasn’t a dawdler by nature, but the evening was warm and pleasant, so she stopped to window-shop for a change.
The college-town crowd was familiar, friendly, and very comfortable. She loved her life here, first as a medical student and now as an intern. She never wanted to leave Chapel Hill, never wanted to go back and be a doctor in West Virginia.
But she would go. It was her promise to her mother—just before Beadsie McTiernan died. Kate had given her word, and her word was good. She was old-fashioned about things like that. A small-town mensch.
Kate’s hands were thrust into the deep pockets of a slightly wrinkled hospital medical jacket. She thought that her hands were her bad feature. They were gnarled, and she had no fingernails to speak of. There were two reasons for that: her job as slave labor at the cancer ward and her avocation as a second-degree black belt, a Nidan. It was the one tension releaser she allowed herself; karate class was her R & R.
The name pin on the upper left pocket of her jacket said K. McTiernan, M.D. She liked the tiny irreverence of wearing that symbol of status and prestige with her baggy pants and the sneakers. She didn’t want to seem like a rebel, and she really wasn’t, but she needed to keep some small individuality inside the large hospital community.
Kate had just picked up a paperback copy of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses at the Intimate Book Shop. First-year interns weren’t supposed to have time to read novels, but she made time. At least she promised to make time tonight.
The late April night was so fine, so perfect in every way, that Kate considered stopping off at Spanky’s on the corner of Columbia and Fra
nklin. She might sit at the bar and just read her book.
There was absolutely no way she would let herself meet somebody on a “school night” —which meant most nights for her. She usually had Saturdays off, but by then she was too bushed to deal with pre- and post-mating rituals.
It had been that way ever since she and Peter McGrath had severed their on-again, off-again relationship. Peter was thirty-eight, a doctor of history and close to brilliant. He was handsome as sin and way too self-absorbed for her taste. The breakup had been messier than she had expected. They weren’t even friends now.
It had been four months without Peter now. Pun intended. Not good, but not in the top ten worst things she’d had to deal with. And besides, she knew the breakup was really her fault and not Peter’s. Breaking up with lovers was a problem she had; it was part of her secret past. Secret present? Secret future?
Kate McTiernan raised her wristwatch to her face. It was a funky Mickey Mouse model that her sister Carole Anne had given her, and it was a swell little timekeeper. It was also a reminder to herself: Never get a big head because you’re a DOCTOR now.
Damn! Her farsightedness was getting worse—at almost thirty-one years old! She was an old lady. She’d been the grandam of the University of North Carolina Medical School. It was already nine-thirty, past her bedtime.
Kate decided to pass on Spanky’s and head back to the hacienda. She’d heat up some fourth-degree chili, and maybe have hot chocolate with about an inch topping of Marshmallow Fluff. Curling up in bed with some junk food, Cormac McCarthy, and maybe R.E.M. didn’t sound half bad, actually.
Like many of the students at Chapel Hill—as opposed to the wealthier crowd up Tobacco Road at “Dook” —Kate had a major cash-flow problem. She lived in a three-room apartment that was the top floor of a frame house, a North Carolina “country” house. All the paint was peeling, and the house looked as if it were molting. It was at the ass-end of Pittsboro Street in Chapel Hill. She had gotten a good deal on the rent.
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