She looked so peaceful sitting in the sun that he was loath to disturb her. But Luke Decker's course was set. He had no choice but to carry this through to its conclusion. Dr. Alice Prince was the mother of Axelman's thirteenth victim, and to find where the bodies were buried, he had to ask her the location of the Snake Tree.
He had driven to Dr. Prince's house, but she was out. After some persuasion her maid said she was walking the dogs and had given him directions. He had come straight here.
Prince looked the way she did in the case file photographs, older but otherwise unchanged. She wore flat shoes, a pleated skirt, and a navy cardigan over her cream blouse. She didn't look like the founder of a major multinational corporation. Just over five feet tall, she had a moon-shaped face, short black hair streaked with gray, and thick, round eyeglasses. Her small mouth seemed pinched into a permanent frown. She wore no jewelry except for an unusual teardrop amulet around her neck. Only her gray eyes flecked with gold made her stand out. They scrutinized Decker with a ferocious, unblinking intellect.
He walked toward her, introduced himself, and showed his badge. "Dr. Prince, my name is Special Agent Luke Decker. I run the FBI's behavioral sciences unit, which specializes in serial crimes. I wish to talk to you about your daughter, Libby."
Her shoulders slumped momentarily, and the pain in her eyes told Decker more about her damaged psyche than any record of her divorce or breakdown in the FBI case file. Time didn't always heal. Alice Prince was still a devastated woman. She stood up and folded her arms in a defensive gesture, barely looking at Decker's badge; instead she kept her eyes locked on his face. For a moment they both stood in silence, listening to the wind blowing in the trees.
"If you prefer, we can talk back at your house," he said.
She didn't appear to have heard him. "Have you found Libby?" she asked.
"Not yet, but I believe I know who was responsible for her murder. With your help I might be able to locate her body."
"Who killed her?"
"A man named Karl Axelman."
"Karl Axelman?" she repeated, her face frowning in disbelief. She said his name as if she were familiar with it. Her right hand moved to the unusual teardrop amulet around her neck, stroking it like a worry bead. She suddenly seemed miles away, her eyes peering off into space at some scene Decker would never see. "How can I help you find where Libby was buried?" she asked him, her voice barely above a whisper.
"As you may be aware, Axelman committed a number of other similar crimes. Something we believe your daughter said to him could identify the resting place of all his victims."
"What? What did Libby say to him?"
"Apparently Axelman gained access to his victims' resting place through an entrance near a tree your daughter called the Snake Tree. Does that mean anything to you?"
Prince's eyes suddenly misted over, and she smiled, the saddest smile Luke had ever seen. "Yes, yes, I know the Snake Tree."
Decker's mouth felt dry. "If you can tell me the location, I'll get it checked out."
Alice Prince gazed at him for some seconds in silence, before suddenly turning away. At first he thought she might be collecting herself, stopping herself from crying. Then she pointed to the other end of the clearing, toward the setting sun. "See the big oak. That's the Snake Tree. That's the tree Libby always used to climb."
Squinting into the dying light, he looked at a silhouetted clump of trees. Slightly by itself was a vast gnarled oak, which looked much older than the trees around it. It had low branches and a thick trunk. Around the base some of the roots were exposed and seemed to coil around the trunk like slumbering serpents.
"Thank you," he said. "I'll get the place checked over. If we find anything, we'll inform you immediately."
She opened her mouth as if to protest, but then said nothing.
"Can I give you a lift home?" he asked. "Can I call anyone for you?"
"No," she said, leashing her dogs. "I prefer to walk. I want to be alone."
Alice Prince was numb as she walked her dogs out of the clearing to the path that led back home. It seemed wrong somehow. She was sure she ought to feel hysterical relief or grief or something. But she could feel nothing. There was a cold void in her soul that robbed her of all sensation, as though she'd just put her hand under a tap of scalding water and were awaiting the pain.
When Agent Decker had told her about Libby, she had been less shocked than she expected. Over the last ten years she had been subconsciously preparing for this day. But the news about Karl Axelman had been a blow to the stomach. She had thought it could be he, as indeed had the FBI. But since none of Libby's effects were among the killer's trophies, it was deemed unlikely. It seemed ironic now that she'd unwittingly used Axelman as one of the guinea pigs to verify TITANIA's projections on Crime Zero.
Axelman's abduction of Libby had been the catalyst for both Conscience and Crime Zero.
When Libby was taken, Alice's husband, John, deserted Alice for a woman he had been secretly seeing for years.
After this betrayal Alice collapsed and was admitted to an upstate sanatorium. Madeline and Pamela visited often, vowing to do everything in their power to help. Alice took great comfort from them, but her science had saved her sanity.
Making them bring the papers and books she required to the sanatorium, she devoured everything she could find on the topic, believing that if she could discover the answer, then she would repair her fractured mind. Just as she was about to give up, she read an article in Nature published by a Ph.D. student from Harvard named Kathryn Kerr. It was an ingenious theoretical model based on primates, and like an epiphany, a sacred message from God, it made sense of everything. It was to be her salvation.
Within weeks she was back at ViroVector Solutions. Taking Kathy Kerr's detailed theories, Alice used her expertise with viral vectors to put them into practice, not only to diagnose violent behavior but modify it. Most science is built on failure and disappointment, but Kathy's theories on gene calibration were rigorously thought through and extremely well documented. Within months of leaving the sanatorium Alice lured Kathy Kerr to Stanford University and, using her expertise on gene calibration, developed a genetically engineered retrovirus that successfully modified chimpanzee genes. Within another three months, without Kerr's knowledge, Alice perfected a viral vector that she was convinced could deliver Kerr's control genes into man.
She laid out her plan to Madeline and Pamela when they next met. If they really wanted to help, as they had vowed to do, then she had found a way to stop crimes like Libby's abduction from happening again. But she would need to conduct criminal tests. And to do this without FDA approval, she would need the backing of her now powerful friends.
Dr. Kerr wasn't told about the criminal trials yet; instead she was given the brief of following the usual painstaking stages of preclinical screenings, primate studies, and human volunteer trials to gain FDA endorsement that the treatment was safe. Once she had done this and won approval, and assuming their secret efficacy trials on criminals had worked, they could go public. The FDA approval would vindicate conducting human experiments years before they should have.
Pamela, who was then being groomed to be the new governor of California, had been difficult to convince. But in time she came aboard, especially when she realized how political correctness and the notoriously conservative FDA were stifling research into this area. Some black civil rights groups even protested against conducting research on black males because they claimed the findings would be used to reinforce white prejudices. Even though these fears were completely unfounded, the National Institutes of Health avoided using black subjects, making any broad-based research meaningless. Pamela eventually realized secret trials would not only speed things up but also get them started. She even approached the new U.S. President, Bob Burbank, and, using her formidable powers of persuasion, gained his broad agreement that curing crime was a good idea. Making no commitments, Burbank made it easier for them to cut through
red tape and keep the project secret, while always maintaining a distance should anything go wrong.
But it was Madeline who had taken the project to the next level. She had been even more excited about it than Alice. In fact her initial reaction was that Conscience didn't go far enough. Over the following months she slowly convinced Alice of the controversial but shockingly logical next step of Crime Zero.
Turning back to the clearing, Alice saw Decker standing motionless in the slanting sunlight, staring at the Snake Tree. No doubt he would call his colleagues soon, and then they would conduct the search. She felt compelled to stay, even though she knew he wouldn't allow her to. She was desperate to find the body. The nightmare of "not knowing" had poisoned the past ten years.
After strolling farther on, she paused behind a bank of bushes and watched Decker walk back to his car. To her surprise he didn't get in and drive off or reach for a phone. Instead he opened the back door and pulled out a spade and a flashlight.
She watched Decker carry the spade on his broad shoulders and switch on the flashlight. Wielding the flashlight like a sword, he cut through the encroaching shadows and moved toward the Snake Tree, its massive trunk silhouetted against the sun.
Chapter 15.
The Snake Tree.Thursday, October 30, 5:47 P.M.
Luke Decker was embarked on a course of action from which he could not deviate. Yet as he approached the looming tree with its serpentine roots, he couldn't remember such fear. A band of steel tightened around his chest, and a film of sweat covered his skin. In his time he had faced all manner of killers, but physical danger had never affected him-- not in the way psychological danger could. Not like now, when he couldn't escape the bizarre notion that somehow he was returning to the scene of his own crimes.
After Decker's breakdown, Sarah Quirke, the FBI shrink at the Sanctuary, had warned him not to inhabit the minds of the killers he hunted so completely, particularly when working simultaneously on a number of traumatic cases. "If you play with too many fires, one of them's bound to burn you," she'd said. He'd always believed he could handle it. Entering a killer's mind didn't mean he had to bring something of him back with him.
Now as he sat down on the roots of the large tree and tried to think the way the killer might have done, he wasn't so convinced. This time the killer had been his own flesh and blood. He was walking in his father's shoes, and he shuddered at the thought of how snug the fit might be.
He began to compile a mental profile from what he remembered out of Karl Axelman's files. The teenage girls had been abducted over a twenty-year period, with at least eighteen months between each one. This meant that the abductions had been planned in meticulous detail, with the stalking and anticipation giving Axelman as much excitement as the eventual act itself. It also told Luke that Axel-man had done something with the bodies that allowed him to visit them again and again, thus enabling him to stave off his need to kill for long periods. It was likely therefore that the bodies had somehow been preserved. Since Axelman was a hoarder, he would have wanted to keep all the bodies intact, not just the most recent kills. That required space, a lot of space.
Decker looked around him and then studied the huge Snake Tree. He stood up and moved around the trunk, tapping the bark for clues, testing for any hollow sounds. Nothing.
It was unlikely that Axelman would have squirreled the bodies in the trunk of the tree; they would have rotted too fast, and wild animals and insects would have eaten them. But in his time Decker had seen stranger hoarding sites.
It was far more likely that Axelman had buried the bodies, perhaps in protective wrapping to prevent the ingress of worms and other predators. But he needed access to them. This place was remote, but people did come here. Axelman would have had to have some means of viewing the corpses without fear of being disturbed. Just the thought of discovery would have seriously inhibited his fantasies and curtailed his enjoyment.
But then Axelman had been a builder. He would have known how to construct some kind of storage facility that he could easily enter and exit without the entrance's being discovered. Decker could only guess at why Axelman had chosen this particular site.
Stepping over the gnarled roots, Decker moved closer into the base of the tree and studied the vast trunk. It was at least eight feet in diameter. From one angle the base of the tree resembled an upside-down Y, as if the tree stood on two squat legs. Walking farther around the trunk, to the side that still caught the last rays of sun, he noticed an area of earth, three feet square, partially sheltered under the low crotch of the two legs. He jabbed the earth with his spade, and the impact jarred his shoulder.
Moving in closer, he scraped away the scrubby grass, leaf litter, and topsoil, revealing dark wood. More roots, he thought, before scraping away a wider area. Gradually he uncovered more wood, until there was a flat platform a yard square. His heart beat faster; the wood was too regular to be natural. Then his spade hit something metallic, and in the dying sunlight he saw a glint of dulled brass. Throwing the spade to the ground, he dropped to his knees and began to brush away the damp dirt from the center of the panel, revealing a brass hand ring lying flat in a brass well. He gripped the ring and pulled it upright, forming a handle. Then he stood and tugged the ring as hard as he could. There was a groan and a creak from the damp wood, and then the panel hinged upward, a trapdoor opening to the underworld.
Grimacing at the stale air that emanated from the hole, Decker reached for the flashlight and shone it down into the dank darkness. To his surprise there was a timber-lined hole that went down about ten feet; an iron ladder was attached to one side. The timber was green with damp, but there was no sign of rot, and the workmanship was impressive.
He found a stick to wedge the trapdoor open, took the flashlight in one hand, and eased himself into the hole. He tested the ladder with his right foot and, when he was convinced it was firm, made his way down into the darkness. At the bottom of the ladder a tunnel gently sloped away from him and away from the tree. The ceiling and walls were made from interlocking beams, and the floor had a matted surface that stopped him from slipping. Every ten yards or so there were perforated panels in the ceiling that looked like ventilation ducts. There was a smell of damp earth and decay.
Tentatively he walked forward into the blackness, his feet testing each step before he trusted his full weight to it. All the time he sought out telltale cracks in the ceiling with his flashlight. But aside from the occasional creak and groan the tunnel appeared robust. Then, after some twenty yards, he turned a bend and came to an abrupt dead end. Using the flashlight, he saw that to his right there were broad concrete steps, leading deeper down. To his left the wall was a square plug of cement, as if the passage to an earlier entrance had been filled in. The wall on each side of the concrete steps was no longer timber but brown tiles caked with mold.
Decker suddenly understood why Axelman had chosen this place. It was part of the old zoo, which had been bulldozed over thirty years ago to make the exclusive estate where Alice Prince lived. Evidently not all of the zoo had been destroyed. The underground sections that didn't interfere with the foundations of the new houses were simply sealed and returned to nature, with new trees planted on top. Axelman had built the wooden tunnel to gain unauthorized access to the sealed area.
The smell coming from the base of the concrete steps was different, no longer earth but something else, a chemical smell Decker recognized but couldn't place. He had encountered it only recently but couldn't remember exactly where. The flashlight shook in his hand as he gradually walked down the steps. He tried to tell himself it was the damp and the cold, but it wasn't.
The beam of the flashlight reflected off a rusting steel sign screwed onto the tiles: REPTILE HOUSE AND AQUARIUM. At the base of the stairs, discarded on the floor, was another sign. Dented and buckled, it was barely legible. CAROLAN CONSTRUCTION was painted in black letters. Axelman must have worked on this area thirty years ago and earmarked it for his own private use. It c
ouldn't have been that difficult to seal the area, as he was contracted to do by his employers, while at the same time making plans for his secret tunnel.
Decker came to a junction in the brown tiled maze. A faded arrow marked AQUARIUM pointed right, and a virtually invisible arrow with illegible markings pointed left. The chemical smell, now so strong it made his eyes water and stung the back of his throat, was coming from the right, from the aquarium. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and tied it over his nose and mouth. Suddenly he remembered where he had last encountered that smell: the morgue of San Quentin. With leaden legs he began to walk toward its source.
A few yards into the aquarium section he realized that the flashlight beam in front of him had narrowed. He must have twisted the end of the Maglite when tying the handkerchief around his face. He quickly adjusted the flashlight, and as the beam broadened, he realized that the corridor had narrowed dramatically, each wall now less than an arm's length away. He also realized that the claustrophobic walls were no longer tiled but smooth.
As smooth as glass.
A chill ran down his spine, and the skin prickled on the back of his neck.
As if chancing upon some slumbering beast, he slowly lowered the beam onto the floor in front of his feet, highlighting the mold-stained tiles. Then, gripping the Maglite white knuckle-tight, he carefully inched the flashlight to his right. Where the floor met the wall there was a strip of chrome and above that a thick black band of rubber. The rubber was a seal, and the smooth reflective material making up the rest of the wall was a plate of thick glass. Moving along the base of the glass, he saw a typed label. It didn't identify the species of some rare fish or carry notes on its preferred diet and geographical origin. There was simply a name, a date, and a location.
Crime Zero (aka the Crime Code) (1999) Page 13
