by Spencer Kope
“A tree?”
Ross shrugs. “They’re detectives; I’m sure if they say it’s a tree, it’s a tree.”
“Do you have a lot of businesses around here with tree logos?” I ask. “Maybe tree toppers, tree-service companies, things like that?”
“Can’t be that many,” Jimmy says before Ross can answer.
“The logo was old,” Ross reminds us. “Whatever business originally owned the van, it’s doubtful they still hold the title. From what little they could see, it sounds like a typical doper vehicle, the type of rig you find parked out front of a drug house, or up on blocks in the yard.”
Jimmy shrugs. “It’s some place to start.”
“Agreed.” Ross nods. “I just don’t want you to get too hopeful. I’ve got a CI, a reliable guy I recruited when I was with the drug task force. I’ll give him a call and see if he knows of any nasty characters driving a white van with a tree on the side. I’ll also throw Johansson’s name past him, see if it rings any bells.” Ross takes a long pull from his coffee, sets it down, and gives Jimmy a wink. “Looks like we finally have something real to work with.”
“I guess so,” Jimmy agrees.
We watch Ross for a long moment, expectant. When the moment grows long, Ross fidgets a bit in his seat. “I got something on my chin?” He wipes at his face.
“No—”
Jimmy cuts me off. “When you said you were going to call your CI, we thought you meant … now.”
Ross laughs. “Brother, it’s”—he glances at his watch—“barely seven forty-five in the morning. I don’t know what kind of CIs you’re used to working with, but mine never rise before noon. If I call him too early, I’ll just piss him off.”
“So, we wait?”
“We wait.” The detective hoists his cup aloft. “Isn’t that why God made coffee?”
22
By nine thirty the morning crowd has mostly cleared from the coffee shop, and what remains is a spattering of heads curled over keyboards or textbooks. For me, Ross, and Jimmy, what was intended as a quick stopover to get ready for the day has turned into a two-hour research session.
Between the three of us, we have two laptops. The Wi-Fi at the shop is strong and steady, and it’s as good a place as any to do what we need to do.
“Harmony Lawns, Harmonious YardScapes, Helwig Landscaping,” I read aloud as I write the business names one by one on a sheet of paper. We’ve been tracking down every business in the county even remotely involved with trees, trying to match up the logo from the surveillance video.
Ross and Jimmy are checking individual websites using their laptops, while I use my smartphone to identify the targets and feed them names. So far, we’ve checked all the arborists, nurseries, urban foresters, tree-service companies, and tree-related nonprofit foundations. I didn’t know there was such a thing as a tree-related nonprofit, but I suppose it makes sense. I found two of them in Kern County.
We must have run through a hundred companies by now, and still no luck.
Right now, we’re working on landscapers—and there’s a lot of them. I’ve already bet Jimmy that when we finally sort all this out, we’ll find that the logo belongs to some company that’s not even remotely connected to trees: Herb’s Pressure Washing, or something like that.
Jimmy’s a true believer in the process, though, so we continue to slug through the endless list. Diane would normally do this for us, but she’s doing the workup on William Johansson. That and Jimmy feels guilty about forgetting to tell her about Abel Moya. I know him; he figures that by putting in some extra work he can make up for the oversight.
For Jimmy, guilt is like compound interest: it grows with time.
Not only does he feel guilty about the Abel Moya snafu, but that we didn’t come clean is starting to fester and itch at the back of his mind. I try to tell him that’s what happens with cases like this. Things slip. Stuff’s forgotten. It happens all the time.
He thinks it would have been better all the way around if we just confessed to the mistake when we talked to Diane this morning. She would have lectured us a few minutes and held it over our heads a few days, but in the end, all would have been forgiven.
That’s what Jimmy thinks.
I’m not so sure.
* * *
“Millstone Aqua Gardens,” I drone, scratching the name onto paper and noting that my handwriting has degraded significantly in the last hour. While this registers in my mind, I find that I don’t care. My brain, it seems, is almost as glazed over as my eyes.
Whatever we pay Diane, it’s not enough.
Ross’s phone rings and he seems relieved to push away from the laptop. He answers and the coffee shop is quiet enough that he doesn’t have to cover his ear or evacuate to the parking lot. Whatever the news, there’s no laugh this time, no cheerful banter. Ross’s face goes slack, the perpetual smile gone.
He looks like he’s going to be sick.
When he ends the call, he sets the phone on the table and stares at it for a moment. His eyes tell me he wants to smash it or hurl it across the room, but the phone is only the messenger. You don’t kill the messenger.
Ross speaks with deliberation as if drawing each word up from his gut. “An employee at Nelson Dental arrived at work this morning to find Wade Winchell duct-taped facedown on a dental chair.”
“Alive?” Jimmy practically whispers, as if the quieter he asks the more hope there is of it being true.
Ross shakes his head.
The three of us sit frozen for perhaps a full minute, each staring off into our own personal hell, not daring to make eye contact. Then, slowly, I pocket my phone while Jimmy and Ross close their laptops and gather their notes. They stuff the material into their respective briefcases, and we rise from our chairs as one. Collecting the empty coffee cups, scone wrappers, and napkins, we dump them into the trash and walk out into the world.
No more words are necessary.
23
People march toward hell one step at a time.
Sometimes they commit murder the same way.
—JIMMY DONOVAN, FBI
The flat-roofed, single-story building on Seventeenth Street stands as a monument to 1960s architecture. The walkways are clean and the windows have been washed, but the place brings to mind an out-of-fashion dress that, upon closer inspection, is threadbare and smells of mothballs.
A dry fountain adorns a corner of the desolate flower bed out front, its basin now filled with an assortment of supposedly decorative rocks, topped by a green ceramic frog that appears to be a recent addition. The faded brown and tan paint clinging to the walls of the complex reminds passersby that the structure has yet to enjoy the slow gentrification sweeping through the neighborhood.
Despite its sturdy bones and still useful spaces, the building looks forlorn.
The yellow police tape doesn’t help.
* * *
“Hey, Ross. It’s pretty bad in there,” the patrol sergeant cautions as we approach.
His eyes dart to Jimmy and then to me, lingering a moment as if to weigh our purpose. Dismissing us just as quickly, the sergeant returns his gaze to the detective. “I’ve never”—the words falter—“I’ve never seen anything like this. What the hell’s the world coming to?” The sergeant looks for a moment as if he might lose his breakfast.
Ross says nothing. He puts his hand on the sergeant’s shoulder, as if to say, I know, and then moves on by. We follow.
A perimeter of yellow police tape surrounds the entire building and parking lot, pushing back the media vans and gawkers who have already gathered. The responding officer’s call for assistance had been brief but unhinged, almost panicked. Even if the veteran reporters hadn’t known the code for homicide, they would have heard the urgency in his voice, felt it in the choked words that spilled out over the police band.
Pointing a cautioning finger at the broken glass scattered at the base of the entrance door, Ross leads the way into the office. What strikes me
first is an all-too-familiar smell. Not decomp, but the metallic taint of violence that proceeds it. Somewhere in the building a significant quantity of blood is festering, turning.
The second thing that strikes me about the office is that the interior in no way matches the bland exterior. The walls are fresh and marked by few blemishes, the carpet is full and shows little wear, even the reception counter, a magnificent piece of live-edge cedar, glows with new resin.
If buildings can be schizophrenic, this one is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
* * *
We hear the voices before we see their source.
They emanate from someplace around the corner at the end of the main hall, a garbled mess of words falling over one another, indistinguishable save for an occasional string of syllables.
As we draw near, the world becomes surreal: a waking dream. I pause at the edge of hell itself as my eyes absorb the thing that gathered us here, and which now demands our attention.
I say thing because what lies in the dental chair is not Wade Winchell.
Once upon a time, it may have been the tough district attorney. But that was yesterday, yesteryear, a lifetime ago. Today something different occupies the vinyl, something … not human.
“We save the ones we can,” I hear Jimmy croak. It’s our mantra, our steadying words. His hand clasps my elbow briefly and then falls away, reminding me that we have work to do, despite the horror before us.
Slipping my glasses off, I feel them tremble in my hand.
On the ground before me, in dark neon green, is the polished, pulsing malachite from the cemetery. The disturbing shine traces through the macabre room. It covers the floor in those places not awash in blood. It’s on the strips of black plastic that hang like curtains from the ceiling, walling off the small work space from prying eyes.
It’s on Wade.
It’s in Wade.
A full set of dental instruments rests on the counter. Even these, though unused, show impressions of malachite where they were handled and examined. The handler may have admired them, enjoyed their feel, but it was no dental instrument or combination of instruments that flayed and cut Wade Winchell. This was the work of a butcher, and it took a butcher’s tools.
Despite the presence of green shine, it’s Wade’s pewter shine that dominates the room, splattered, pooled, and omnipresent, as if the killer went out of his way to fling the body fluids at the walls, the ceiling, the floor. A bloodfest of intentional cruelty.
Stepping back from this horror, I glance down the hall. The malachite footprints stand apart, heavy on the carpet as the butcher carried his victim like a side of beef to the back of the office. Of Marco and Noah, there is no trace. Wade, like Jason, went to his death alone.
It was probably better that way.
* * *
Dr. Ben Herrera beat us to the crime scene and now crouches next to the body laid out facedown in the fully reclined dental chair. The good doctor is unfazed by the horror that lies before him. His calm is an illusion, I suppose, a professional necessity. Occasionally, he directs a CSI to take a close-up of one thing or another, variables and discrepancies that may or may not prove useful in the coming investigation.
Most of the work will be completed back at the coroner’s office, but some things need to be recorded before the body can be removed.
When Ben notices us, he quickly waves us forward. In a low voice, he begins to unravel the true nightmare that lies before us.
“He was alive until almost the end,” the pathologist begins as if continuing a thought interrupted. “There are marks drawn on his back like those a surgeon would make.” Ben turns a flap of loose skin over in his hand so we can see. “The marks are amateur and don’t match the cuts, so they were probably used to terrorize the victim before the real horror show began.”
“He was conscious during this?” I ask.
“Probably not at first. I imagine he was sedated when he was brought in and strapped down, otherwise he would have put up a fight, and there’s no evidence of that.”
“So, he waits until Wade is secured,” Jimmy says, “then he wakes him. It’s not good enough to simply kill him, he wants to see the terror in his eyes as he does it.”
An ominous silence settles between us, punctuated by the grisly scene.
Ben is still holding the flayed flap of skin and, as if suddenly aware of it, returns it to its folded-back position. With a gloved hand, he gives us a tour of the carnage wrought upon Wade’s opened upper torso.
“I’ve found a combination of hatchet, chisel, and saw marks,” the pathologist continues, clearly rattled by what he’s seen. “This wasn’t surgery, it was brute force versus flesh and bone. Why he didn’t just use a Sawzall or jigsaw I don’t know, but I think he liked it. There’s no other explanation.”
Ben swallows hard but continues in a clean, clinical voice.
“He separated the ribs from the spine one by one, and … and yanked them up and away.” Ben runs his finger along a row of spikes rising from the right side of Wade’s back. They point away from the body at a forty-five-degree angle, like the plates of a stegosaurus, but dagger thin and white.
A similar row runs down the other side of the mutilated back.
Ben stares at the mess and then speaks again, but in a small, still voice, as if the words are meant for him alone. “The lungs were pulled from the chest cavity, still attached, and laid out, as if on display. He was probably still breathing at the time … still using them.”
The words and the image jar me.
“There are some superficial lacerations on both lungs, as well as some deeper cuts, likely caused as the ribs were being separated.” The pathologist wipes his forehead with the back of his wrist, careful not to touch the bloodied gloves.
“How many ribs are in the human body?” I ask after counting nine broken and upturned bones on each side of the spine.
“There are twenty-four,” Ben replies. “Twelve on each side.”
I nod my understanding. The killer didn’t break them all, just the nine on each side required to expose the lungs, to pull the spongy organs from their cavity, and lay them out for the world to see. Something clicks in my head as if a light switch were suddenly thrown or a revealing match were lit.
“He was alive,” I say with uncommon certainty. “That was the whole point.”
Jimmy turns to me, and Ben looks up, waiting for more.
“He was still alive because to do the ritual properly the lungs had to breathe in and out, at least a couple of times. They would flutter where they lay as if flapping in some small way, like wings.”
“What ritual?” Jimmy asks, a horrified look on his face.
“It’s called the Blood Eagle.” I glance at each of the men in turn. “It was supposedly devised by the Vikings, a particularly nasty method of execution reserved for only the worst offenders or traitors. It was so bad that some historians doubt it was ever used.”
“They might want to rethink that,” Ross says, glancing tellingly at the body.
Jimmy turns. “Where’d you hear about this?”
“The History Channel.”
* * *
The hum of the investigation consumes the dental complex. Voices overlap and mingle with the steady shuffle of bodies and equipment, creating a low resonance that, at a distance, sounds more like the vibration of subterranean machinery, a song of death from the pit of the world.
Jimmy and I find a place to tuck out of the way, while Ross joins his fellow detectives in the hunt for latent prints, DNA, hairs, or clothing fibers.
A half hour later, they’re just discussing how best to cut Wade’s mangled body free of its restraints when Ross’s phone rings. He waves us closer, then covers the mic and whispers, “They found Marco’s BMW.”
The conversation lasts less than a minute, and Ross promises to “get out there” as soon as we finish at the dental office. Ending the call, he stuffs the phone back into his pocket.
“They
found it?” Jimmy asks as if to confirm Ross’s words.
“Yeah, some telecom employee was working on a cell tower on Round Mountain this morning and spotted something that looked out of place tucked away in a draw on the other side of the ridge. When he went to investigate, he found the still-smoldering hulk of a torched BMW X5. The sheriff’s office was just up there and pulled a VIN off the engine block. It’s Marco’s, all right.”
“What about—”
Sensing my question, Ross shakes his head. “No bodies inside.”
“At least that’s something,” Jimmy says with obvious relief.
Ross glances over his shoulder as an empty gurney wheels by. “We’ll be here at least another half hour, so if you want to head up there, I can meet you when I finish. It’s about eight miles as the crow flies, but the switchbacks will add some time to the drive.”
“They’ve secured the scene?” Jimmy asks.
“A couple of deputies are sitting on it. Special Agent Weir is on the way and has requested CSI. Fortunately, that’s outside the city limits, so the county will handle it, otherwise…” Ross motions around at the flurry of activity and the many personnel wearing shirts with either CSI or CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATOR marked across the back.
“Yeah,” Jimmy acknowledges, “busy day.”
“Nothing we can’t handle.”
Jimmy nods as if coming to a decision. “Finish your work here. We’ll wait.” He looks past Ross as the tempo around Wade’s mangled body suddenly changes. “Anything we can help with?”
Ross shakes his head. “No. We’re getting ready to transport the remains. Ben’s worried that the cut ribs might turn Wade into two hundred pounds of potatoes stuffed into a half-full bag.” Ross shrugs. “Without the stability provided by the spine and ribs working together, things might get … sloppy.”
“How sloppy?”
The detective sighs. “I’d stay out of splash range.”
