Collecting the Dead (8 page)

After the traditional round of palm-mating and arm-pumping, Jimmy asks, “What do you know so far?”

And then I see her.

On the other side of the good doctor, dumped unceremoniously on the ground, is a sad stretch of bones. Most of the flesh is gone, and several of the ribs with it. Other bones have been pulled away from the body and gnawed upon by teeth of every size.

I pull my lead-crystal glasses off, and the crime scene suddenly erupts with neon shine. If I paid any attention, the flood of color would be exhilarating: like static electricity pulling at every hair follicle on my body. But I don’t pay attention. Even the coolest sensation dulls after ten thousand repeats. Folding the metal earpieces down one by one, I slip the glasses into their leather case before turning my attention back to the body.

The skeleton is problematic.

As the flesh surrenders to rot and rodent, so goes the shine. On the ground around the corpse are no less than two dozen distinct shines, any one of which could be the killer. I need to find something that sets him apart from the others.

“Female,” Nob begins. “Based on bone fusing, I’d place her age at around twenty-four, give or take a year. I’ll be able to firm that up once I take X-rays. Height was between five-two and five-four and she was fairly trim. We don’t have the skull, so dental records won’t do us any good, but we can run DNA.” Looking at Walt, he adds, “All the physicals seem to match your missing person. Oh, and she was a natural blonde but dyed her hair brunette.”

“How do you know that if you don’t have a skull?” Jimmy asks.

The doctor remains silent, but points through the trees to the north. His jaw is set and the muscles of his face are taut. Our eyes meet briefly and I see the horror in his expression … the haunted stare … the same look I see in my bathroom mirror in the long hours of the night.

“I’ll show them,” Sheriff Gant says softly, waving us along as he starts picking his way through the brush.

The tree is unremarkable from all the others along Buck Hollow Trail, giving no clue as to why he chose this particular trunk to make his statement. Perhaps he had no preference and this one was just convenient. Regardless, the killer took his time decorating it, as if bestowing special favors upon the forest sentinel.

I look at the display.

Brilliant amaranth—almost crimson—with the texture of rust
.

His hands are all over the tree, all over her bra, her shirt, her panties. Each is nailed to the tree. Her shirt is at the bottom, fastened lengthwise with three nails near the center and equal portions drooping off each side of the tree. Above the shirt the panties, barely recognizable, are held by a single nail. Then the bra, its straps wrapped around the trunk as if the tree were wearing it.

Above all this, as if crowning the display, is mounted a tangled mass of faux-brunette: a scalp peeled from the poor girl’s skull. I can see where he grabbed her hair, wrenching her head back as he went to work on her.

I pray she was already dead.

“This one’s killed before,” I say to no one in particular. But as I say it my mind is grinding, grinding, grinding.
Brilliant amaranth and rust
. Why do I know that? Why does it seem so familiar?

Turning suddenly, I snatch up my cell phone. Her number’s on speed dial and Diane answers on the first ring. I don’t even wait for her to say hello.

“I need you to do something.”

*   *   *

By 10:45
A.M.
Dr. Wallace identifies the victim as twenty-three-year-old Alison Lister. “As suspected, the skull was found not far from the body, under some brush,” the good doctor explains, “though it didn’t find its way there due to predation.” He leaves the words hanging, begging for explanation.

I raise a curious eyebrow at him—after a two-hour plane ride and hours in the woods, it’s the most I can manage without some caffeine … and maybe a scone; a blueberry scone.

“How do you mean, Doctor?”
Jimmy to the rescue
.

“Your perp—that’s what you Feds call them, right: perps?”

“Only on TV,” Jimmy says.

“Well, then, it appears your suspect separated the skull from the spinal cord right at the occipital bone, probably with a hacksaw, if I had to guess. The exterior has mostly been picked clean—that part was predation; crows and rodents and such—and, of course, the flesh from the top and back came off with her hair when she was scalped. Despite the damage from both man and beast, the teeth are still intact, and Alison’s dental records were already on file. She was reported missing four months ago, which means either she was kept alive for a while, or our estimated time of death was a bit off.”

“Local girl?” Jimmy asks.

“Born and raised. No drugs, hardworking, pretty, just your all-American girl.” He shakes his head slowly. “She didn’t deserve this.”

None of them do
, I think.
The world is filled with monsters, Doctor.

The world is filled with monsters and some of us hunt them. Some of us wallow into the nightmare and track the beasts to their lairs. We pay for our successes with happy thoughts and well-slept nights and sanity, for we give up a little of each with every monster we capture.

Is it worth it?

I don’t know.

Ask me as I shiver in the darkness at midnight, freshly woken from a vision of blood and unspeakable horror.

Ask me then.

*   *   *

Little is known about Alison’s disappearance. She worked the evening shift at a Redding take-out pizza joint—not one of the chains, but a local start-up called PizzaZ. She finished her shift at eleven
P.M.
, said good night to her coworkers, and headed home. The next day she didn’t show up for class at the community college, then was a no-show for work that night; highly unusual for Alison.

Her parents, also residents of Redding, filed a missing persons report the next morning after a long night checking with friends and relatives and searching for Alison’s car, which was absent from the parking space in front of her apartment. In the four months since Alison’s disappearance, the only real evidence came from the discovery of her car in the Walmart parking lot three days after she went missing.

“An analysis of the store’s surveillance video showed Alison parking her car and entering the store shortly after eleven the night of her disappearance,” Walt explains. “She bought several small, indistinguishable items from the cosmetics section and the freezer and then exited the store at eleven-fourteen
P.M.
” He inserts a DVD into his laptop and queues up two video files.

“This first video is a minute and seven seconds and shows Alison as she leaves the store and returns to her car.” The nighttime images are washed out and grainy and show the whole abduction … yet show nothing. Still, the video was enough to convince the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office and Redding PD that this was a kidnapping, not just someone who didn’t want to get found or was suicidal.

While the video is poor quality, we can see Alison as she approaches her car—appearing only as a multipixel blur. As she pauses by the driver’s door, a shadow moves in behind her. With startling speed he’s on her, and they both drop from view, falling to the asphalt between Alison’s Honda Accord and an older white pickup parked next to her.

The shadow pops up near the truck’s tailgate eleven seconds later, lingering; there’s a blur of activity, and then it moves to the other side. The headlights flash on and splay across the empty parking lot as the truck pulls slowly out of the parking space; in seconds it’s gone, giving no clue to final direction.

“That’s all we have to go on,” Sheriff Gant says. “Redding PD tried identifying the truck, but there’s just not enough detail.”

“Can you burn us a copy?” Jimmy says. “We might be able to come up with something.” He’s thinking about Dex, which is fine by me. I have a piece of Leonardo video I was going to have him look at anyway.

“This next one has us puzzled,” Walt says, queuing up clip number two. “This is right after Alison went into the store. We didn’t catch it at first because we were too focused on her and the cameras inside.”

When he presses the play button, images of the parking lot begin to unfold but from a different angle from the first video. Alison’s car is in the upper portion of the screen, nestled among shadows broken only by the soft glow of the parking lot lights.

There’s little activity on the screen for almost three minutes, but Walt lets it play out. “There it is,” he says, pointing to the white truck as it drives purposefully through the parking lot—not up and down the rows but across them—and parks next to the silver Accord; the lights turn off; nothing.

A minute passes.

Two.

“He’s waiting for her,” I say, mesmerized.

A light appears in the cab, just briefly, almost mistaken for the reflection of a headlight sweeping past the windshield. In seconds it’s gone, leaving an ember behind, a small orange glow that flares up, then settles down, flares up again, then settles down.

“He’s smoking.”

“Did your detectives find any discarded butts?” Jimmy asks.

“That would be Redding PD,” the sheriff replies, “and I already checked the report and there’s no such documentation. Ooh. Here we go. Watch closely.”

A shadow exits the driver’s seat and walks around the back of the truck to the Honda, cigarette still in hand. He stands there for several minutes, taking pull after pull on the cigarette before flicking the glowing ember into an empty parking space. When he moves to the back window it looks as if he’s leaning over the car, maybe peering inside.

“What’s he doing?” I say to no one in particular.

“That’s what we were wondering,” Walt says. “The car doesn’t appear to have been tampered with. In fact, it was still locked when they found it.”

“I’m assuming Redding PD impounded it?”

“We did,” Sheriff Gant clarifies. “There’s some ambiguity about jurisdiction on this one, so we’re treating it as a joint case between Redding PD and the sheriff’s office. The car’s locked up tight in our evidence building a couple miles down the road.” Walt anticipates my next question. Standing, he says, “I’ll drive.”

*   *   *

The Shasta County Crime Lab and Property Room on Breslauer Way in Redding, California, is like every other evidence building or property room I’ve seen: too much property from too many cases with too few investigators to work the cases and too few leads. It’s always a case of funding, or lack thereof. It’s the same reason DNA from a stranger-rape takes more than a year to analyze in some states; meanwhile the suspect may be out committing additional offenses instead of sitting behind bars where he belongs.

“Some of the case vehicles we keep outside,” Sheriff Gant says, pulling the Expedition into a no-parking zone by the front door and pointing to a number of cars parked behind a chain-link fence to the left of the building. “Only major-case vehicles stay inside. We just don’t have room.” He leads the way through an alarm-equipped door and into a large open-bay warehouse.

Alison Lister’s Honda Accord is in the corner.

Even now, after four months, the car is nearly spotless inside and out, but as I slip my glasses off I see him at once—
brilliant amaranth and rust
. I walk around the car and check for more shine before returning to the driver’s-side rear window.

“Can you give us a minute, Walt?” I say. The sheriff nods and walks across the warehouse to a small office, where he pours himself a cup of coffee.

“What is it?” Jimmy says.

“I think he pressed the side of his face to the window here.” I circle an area with my finger, being careful not to touch the vehicle. “I couldn’t make it out at first, but I’m pretty sure I see his jaw and his nose.”

“Like he was looking inside?”

“No, that’s the thing; the side of his face is completely flat on the window.” I shrug. “It’s almost like he’s using it as a pillow, resting his head on the glass.”

Jimmy’s face is grim. “He’s imagining her, getting close to her through her car, building up his courage … or excitement.”

I know he’s right. As soon as he says it I know it, and it sends a shiver through me. I tease Jimmy about his psychology degree, but I’ve seen him dissect the minds of too many sociopaths, identifying their motives, their traumas, their fetishes, for me to doubt him. He reads people, particularly bad people, like I read shine. He should be at the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, but instead he’s stuck with me.

“That’s not all,” I say. “Before he pressed his face to the glass, it looks like he drew something with his finger. I can barely make out a circle with … I don’t know … maybe some dots and lines on the inside. The facial imprint is fuzzy at the edges; these lines are sharper, but they’re being blocked by the larger print.”

“You don’t have any idea what it is?”

“No,” I reply, “but it’s important to him. It means something.”

It means something.

CHAPTER SEVEN

June 21, early afternoon

Diane calls at 1:32
P.M.
and by 1:49 we’re in the air heading for Carson City, Nevada; more specifically, we’re heading for Washoe Lake State Park, just north of Carson City.

Brilliant amaranth and rust:
now we’ll see how good my memory is.

Landing at Carson Airport, we leave Les and Marty to figure out where to park the plane and make our way to the terminal looking for our local contact. He’s already there, a big grin on his face, his eyes hidden behind dark aviator glasses.

“You boys look like hell!” he bellows, pumping my arm and slapping Jimmy on the back. Detective Bobby Decker of the Nevada Highway Patrol looks impeccable in his suit and tie; his obsidian hair is perfectly and precisely in place and I detect a Goldilocks portion of Stetson aftershave—not too much, not too little, but just the right amount.

Bobby’s nickname around the office is GQ and he earns both letters. Buried under the pretty exterior, however, is a smart, ambitious cop with a head for details and a memory like a titanium lockbox. Bobby was with us two years ago for the Natalie Shoemaker homicide; it only seemed fair to give him a heads up.