Over Tumbled Graves

by Jess Walter

  34

  To her surprise, Caroline found that she rather liked working for Spivey’s newly organized task force. He was professional and thorough, and his nerdy, detail-oriented personality—which had seemed simply officious before—was perfect for a job that was essentially that of investigative accountant, criminal bean counter. In six weeks, he had transformed the small conference room that had been Dupree’s cluttered clubhouse for the cynical and anxious into something that actually looked like headquarters for a multiagency task force—maps and charts and photos lining every wall, reports on soil samples and carpet fibers and bacteria slides filed neatly on a sort of lazy Susan filing cabinet available to investigators at any time. Dupree had done some of this, of course, and so the main differences were in organization and atmosphere. Gone was the feel of an old police squad room, cops drinking coffee, their feet up on their desks, talking endlessly on the phone. Where before, investigators had gone home every day having failed to catch a killer, now they went home having completed a review of prostitution case files, or an “environmental activity report” of the insects found on the corpses, or some other some small, managed task. The computer evidence database was up and running, organizing reams of information: tips, interviews, intelligence, forensics, reports, follow-ups, field interview cards, and similar data from other cases around the country. The detectives gathered this raw data as if the weight of the information might solve this crime, as if Lenny Ryan might be hiding in the paper itself. Each detective had a terminal on his desk, and each contact he made was entered into the computer, filed and cross-referenced and available in the database at the stroke of a Function-2 key. A technician worked full-time simply adjusting software to the task force’s needs and keeping the frustrated and computer-illiterate Detective Laird from firing his handgun into his terminal when it didn’t do what he thought he’d asked it to do. The six detectives had divided up different areas to concentrate their investigative work—backgrounding victims and interviewing other prostitutes (this was Caroline’s area), crime scene assessment and forensics, and the tracking of Lenny Ryan. They met every day to report their progress and to brainstorm.

  Of course, many things about Spivey still grated on Caroline’s nerves, such as his habit of pushing up the sleeves on his suit coat like a banker about to reach into a toilet, or his insistence on providing coffee and baked goods to the investigators. During daily meetings he seemed less a task force commander than a condescending waiter.

  “You look like you’re eyeing that last scone, Caroline.”

  “Nope. All yours, Chris.”

  “More coffee then?”

  “No. I’ll just have the check.”

  “Jeff? That scone has your name on it.”

  McDaniel raised an eyebrow at Caroline. “I don’t eat processed sugar. Bad for the metabolism.” That was the other major change, of course, the full-time involvement of the profiler Jeffrey McDaniel. Spivey’s first order of business had been to secure McDaniel’s help by convincing the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit that Spokane would be a great public relations opportunity to have its experts go beyond consultation and theorizing and actually help local police catch a serial murderer.

  His first day in the office, McDaniel made a beeline to Caroline’s desk and pretended to be interested in her dealings with Lenny Ryan. He leaned on her desk, an obsessively fit, overly muscled man with graying hair furiously parted to the side, a guy who, at forty-seven, still described himself as “in my late thirties,” and who, if Caroline saw him on the street, she would bet a month’s salary on his being a cop. McDaniel had been in the office only an hour before he hit on her, leaning on the corner of her desk and crossing his arms, roping the muscles beneath his tight dress shirt.

  “I’m hoping for someone to work out with while I’m here,” he said, looking her up and down. “Seems like you keep in pretty good shape.”

  “It’s amazing what they can do with prosthetics,” she’d said.

  “Come on. You must go to the gym.”

  “I don’t think I’d be a very good spotter for you.”

  “I don’t need spotting,” he’d said. “Just a workout partner. I like working out with women better. They’re more trustworthy. I need someone I can trust.”

  “Well,” Caroline said, “good luck with that.”

  When he wasn’t hitting on Caroline or the receptionist, McDaniel’s role in the investigation was less defined. He dominated entire meetings theorizing about Lenny Ryan’s “down time” or explaining why his signature changed: “Rubber bands hold money in the victims’ hands as well as show his increased need for power and organization.” Dupree called FBI profilers the “hindsight experts,” and that struck Caroline as an apt description. Every time the detectives unearthed some new information about Ryan (his father was arrested for beating his mother), McDaniel would nod and say, “That fits,” or “Textbook,” and then add the detail to his ever-expanding profile.

  The rest of the time he was Spivey’s private mentor, following the eager young detective around and telling war stories. He sauntered around the office and the only time he seemed uncomfortable was when Curtis Blanton’s name came up or when they discussed the report he’d given Caroline in New Orleans. McDaniel’s lips would go white and thin and he’d stare at his shoes until the subject changed. He was outwardly dismissive of only one of Blanton’s conclusions, the idea that Lenny Ryan was obsessed in some way with Caroline. “Ridiculous, melodramatic tripe,” McDaniel spat. “He’s clearly communicating with the entire outside world, with all of us.”

  She heard McDaniel acknowledge Blanton only once, one morning when Caroline took a phone message from a woman who claimed to be McDaniel’s agent. “Tell Jeff he didn’t get the Court TV thing,” the agent said. “I explained to the producer that he’s retiring next month and would be available, but they wouldn’t budge. They’re going with that fat bastard again.”

  When Caroline gave him the message, McDaniel shook his head bitterly and muttered to himself, “If I’d retired first, I’d be a millionaire.” Then he looked up at Caroline. “Have you ever seen him on TV? He stammers. Repeats himself. Guy’s as telegenic as a warthog.” He looked around the office, then leaned over and spoke quietly. “He didn’t actually retire, you know. He was forced out. Just between you and me. He’s…unbalanced. You know?” He stood at Caroline’s desk, nodding his head and rocking on his heels and reading the message over and over. After more than a minute of this, he balled up the paper, threw it in the garbage, and walked out of the office.

  But if Blanton was McDaniel’s sworn enemy, their profiles of the Southbank Strangler were nearly identical. Both profilers attributed the crime scene evidence to an extreme example of “excitation/retaliation serial homicide”—Ryan being both attracted to and repulsed by prostitutes, the victims being symbolic of the girlfriend who betrayed him by sleeping with other men for money. The lack of semen on the victims and the obsessive cleaning of their hands after the killings showed his intense disgust for these women; he wouldn’t even allow himself to orgasm with them. And while he wanted the police to know that he was the killer (why else lead Caroline to a body?), he didn’t want these women to have any trace of him on their bodies or under their nails. The money he left in their hands was his way of letting police know that the victim was “only a hooker,” and both profilers believed it was possible Ryan felt a kinship with police; he was doing them a favor by ridding the streets of unclean women. But the money also was a final, bitter gesture to one particular hooker. Ultimately, both profilers wrote, Ryan blamed his girlfriend for her own death and for his killing spree. She made him do it.

  If McDaniel expanded Blanton’s profile, it was within his particular area of expertise, which also was his doctoral thesis: childhood commonalities among serial sex criminals. McDaniel offered a template for the kind of kid who might grow up to murder women and taunt the police. As they checked Lenny Ryan’s past against McDaniel’s pro
file (“…as an adolescent, offender likely experienced run-ins with authority and has a history of juvenile crime…offender’s early experiences with intimacy occurred with prostitutes…”), the two lined up perfectly.

  When Caroline first saw McDaniel’s report, she experienced the disorientation she’d felt in New Orleans, the sense that it might be better to not understand someone who would kill so easily and so effectively. McDaniel’s report had seven headings. The first was: “Perception among offenders of parental neglect or sibling rivalry during preteen years.” She didn’t know a single person who couldn’t claim that. The headings got progressively more specific, including one that jogged an old memory: “In a display of the early use of surrogates for his anger, the young offender exhibits cruelty toward animals.” She thought for a moment about the awful realization she’d had in New Orleans, that these “profiles” were so horrible because they were so common. She remembered the first time she’d heard at the grade school bus stop that a boy in her neighborhood amused himself by putting cats into garbage cans and shooting them with his pellet gun. She tried to remember his name, Pete something. Was this Pete something now a serial killer? Pete…Pete…What the hell was his last name? It would come to her sometime today, and when it did maybe she would enter his name into the computer, just to see what happened; the thought made her smile because she knew how Dupree would appreciate such a gesture. At first she wished he’d stayed on the task force, or at least stayed in Major Crimes. But after a month with Spivey at the helm Caroline realized that Dupree couldn’t have existed on a task force run by profilers and accountants so contrary to the things that twenty-six years as a cop had taught him.

  He would especially hate the daily reviews—Spivey’s signature morning meeting. Once they dispensed with Spivey’s muffins and coffee, the procedural improvements, McDaniel’s latest insight into the boyhood habits of Lenny Ryan, and the irrelevant information they gathered the day before, there was nothing to review. No sign of Ryan. No new bodies. No sign of Jacqueline or Risa, the missing prostitutes. Details drifted in, but led nowhere—the odd blood spatter, a bit of curious carpet fiber.

  At this morning’s meeting, McDaniel sat champing gum with his mouth open, patiently waiting for his turn to lecture while Spivey progressed beyond the ever-improving computer system to the actual work they were accomplishing. At the chalkboard, Spivey wrote the word “Victims” and turned to Caroline.

  “Caroline, we’ll start with you,” he said. “Anything new on the prostitute front?”

  They’d been over her report before, of course. Spivey checked with each of his detectives throughout the day, but she knew his reasons for wanting to share the information with the group, in a formal setting, to make sure that nothing slipped through the cracks, that information culled by the suspect investigators was available to the victims’ investigators and so on.

  Caroline handed out six copies of the transcript of her interview with Lynn Haight, an exotic dancer and occasional prostitute who had left a suburban club approximately three weeks earlier and was approached by a white man in his late thirties or early forties in a red sedan. The man claimed to be a police officer investigating the serial killings. He seemed friendly and asked some questions about prostitution: Had she seen anything suspicious? Did she ever work along East Sprague? During the questioning he offered to give her a ride, but the woman became suspicious and asked to see a badge. When the man stalled she got scared and ran back into the club. The dancer hadn’t reported the incident because of an outstanding warrant for failing to show up for court on a drug possession charge.

  “Textbook,” McDaniel said. “Ryan’s posing as a cop again, just like he did in California. He actually thinks he’s one of us.”

  Caroline cut him off before he had a chance to take over the whole meeting. “Still, the biggest problem we’re having is getting prostitutes to cooperate,” she said, thinking again of Jacqueline. “That lack of trust.”

  She explained that the man who tried to get Lynn Haight into his car had been wearing a baseball cap and had a full beard, and so she had been unable to pick him from a photo lineup that included Ryan. But one of Spivey’s new toys was a computer program that allowed police to manipulate photographs, and so beards were added to all of the men in the same six-pack of mug shots and placed in front of Lynn Haight. She immediately pointed to Lenny Ryan.

  “The prosecutor doesn’t think we’d ever get a manipulated photo ID accepted by the courts,” Caroline said, “but I guess we’ll worry about that if we ever get to trial.”

  “Outstanding work,” Spivey said. “And what about the prostitute registry? Where are we with that?”

  This had been one of Spivey’s better ideas. Starting with police reports, Caroline had gotten together with social workers, outreach ministers, and others who came in contact with street hustlers, dancers, and call girls, and had set out to compile a kind of hooker catalogue, as complete a list as they could make of every woman who’d turned a trick in Spokane in the last five years. She had come up with more than three hundred names or street names of women, two-thirds of whom she could locate, half of those in jail, on probation, or already dead. The hope was that this registry would allow detectives to figure out if other hookers might be missing and to keep track of the rest, but the result was merely to drive home just how daunting their task would be. There were more than a hundred hookers on the list who could not be accounted for, most of them women like Jacqueline, for whom they didn’t even have a real name.

  Prostitutes were a transient population, most of them chronic drug users; a woman might run off to Seattle when her dealer got arrested, or move to Portland to look up an old pimp. “We’ve sent names to shelters across the Northwest, and we’re getting other police agencies to do sweeps. That’s all we can do, I guess.”

  “Outstanding,” Spivey said. “More coffee?”

  Most of the other detectives were engaged in hunting for Lenny Ryan. A motel owner in Spokane had called in after the photograph of Lenny Ryan ran in the newspaper and said that a man matching that description had stayed at his motel from April 22 to April 27 under the name “Gene Lyons.” They’d found no matching fingerprints from Ryan at the motel, but a handwriting analyst had matched the rigid signature on the guest registry to a signature from his file at Lompoc.

  Spivey beamed and nodded appreciatively to the group. “Great work, people,” he said. “Top drawer. We have an alias. We have Mr. Ryan posing as a cop and trying to get hookers into his car. We have him in Spokane at least five days before the drug bust in Riverfront Park. And, best of all, we can add some more information to our timeline.”

  The timeline was Spivey’s pet, a huge grid that took up half of one wall. The names of Ryan and his victims ran down on the far left column. Dates ran across the top of the chart. Whenever a detective found information to add to the timeline—like when Caroline had found out that the first victim, Rebecca Bennett, visited a friend in the hospital on March 14—Spivey said, “Outstanding!” and made a production of printing out the new information, clipping it with scissors, and gluing it to the timeline, like a salesman recording a big week on the thermometer marking quarterly totals.

  Despite Spivey’s enthusiasm, it struck Caroline that the investigation was in most ways no better off than it had been under Dupree. No new bodies had been found, and except for a couple of unreliable witnesses, there was no sign of Ryan or Jacqueline or Risa. Their last official contact with him, their last positive identification, had been two months earlier, in the alley where he led Caroline to the body of the fourth victim. The media had been flashing Ryan’s picture every day (“Serial killer suspect still at large”), and still all they had were two sightings, two women who claimed that a man who looked like Ryan, wearing a ball cap and a beard, stopped to talk to them. That was it. The timeline, the prostitute registry, the pet torture—none of it meant anything if Lenny Ryan had packed up and moved on.

  “Great work,
people,” Spivey said.

  There was a light knock at the door, and a senior volunteer in wire-rim glasses came into the conference room, looking confused, as if he had been trying to find the rest room. He looked around the table and then saw Caroline, walked over, and handed her a message. “Is this you?” he asked.

  She looked down. It was a phone message with her name on top and one short sentence below: “Body of Kevin Hatch located near Nine Mile.” She stared at the note and held her breath. For so long it had been the natural order of things, to have him floating out there. The note fell to her lap as if it weighed fifty pounds.

  “Yes,” she said weakly to the senior volunteer. “This is me.”

  35

  Dupree bent down, shined his flashlight beneath the tree limbs, and caught a glimpse of braces, a white bra, and a boy pulling up his pants. He thought for a moment about walking away and just letting the young couple reach whatever base they were nearing—third, by the look of their clothes and his memory of teenage sexual progression—but it was too late. They’d seen him. They’d been caught, and religious kids like these had high expectations of punishment once they were caught. They emerged from the bushes straightening their clothes, the girl staring at the ground, trying to avoid Dupree’s eyes, the boy having trouble fastening his belt.

  “There are better places for that kind of thing,” Dupree said.

  “We were looking for something,” the boy said.

  “I know what you were looking for.” Dupree shined the light into the boy’s eyes. He looked about fourteen. The girl too. “Go on back to the concert.”

  Thankfully, the concert was winding down in the grassy meadow beneath the old railroad clock tower in Riverfront Park. It featured a band called Loaf and Fish, which the promoter explained to the disbelieving Dupree was a “fundamentalist Christian rap-punk band with ska influences.”