Consumed (6 page)

“Agreed,” Dr. Nehls said.

Nehls, who was roughly my size, minus twenty pounds or so, took a step toward me and reached out for a handshake.

I shook his hand. “Agent Hank Rawlings.” I motioned to Beth, who was standing from her chair. “This is Agent Beth Harper.”

“Agents Rawlings and Harper. Got it. Chief Deputy Whissell said you’d like to see the remains that were brought in.”

“If possible,” I said.

“Sure, why don’t you follow me on back.”

We followed the doctor around the far side of the front desk and through a door that led to a long white hallway—at its end, we passed through another set of double doors and into what looked more like a traditional morgue. I caught a whiff of death and a chill of colder air. The doctor turned right, through a metal door, and we followed.

A sterile-looking green-walled room stood before us. The floor was glossy white with multiple drains. Stainless-steel tables filled three workstations. Metal shelving units holding various equipment surrounded each of the three tables. Next to each workstation, I spotted a table scale for what I imagined was weighing organs. The back wall was filled with the stainless steel doors of the body refrigerators. I counted six across by two high.

Doctor Nehls grabbed a set of gloves from a nearby shelf and donned them. He walked to the furthest-right set of doors at the back of the room and opened the higher of the two. He stopped with the door ajar. “You know what to expect here, correct?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“A body, no arms, no legs, throat cut, stabbed a bunch of times?” he asked.

“We know,” Beth said.

“Okay. I’m just making sure.” He pulled the door open the rest of the way and slid out the remains located within. The body was in a black zippered bag. The doctor pulled the zipper down, exposing the female.

I put the sleeve of my black suit jacket over my nose and moved my head a few inches back from the smell. Though my stomach was empty from having missed lunch, I could feel what was left of my breakfast turning down there. I let out a puff of air through my nose and glanced down at the woman. Her skin was darkening though she wasn’t very bloated. I chalked that up to the multiple stab wounds penetrating her body. The woman wore a black fishnet top and a dirty white undershirt stained in blood. Covering the lower half of her torso was the hot pink skirt that Chief Deputy Whissell had spoken of. The arms were removed at the shoulders, the legs removed in a straight line across below the buttocks. The throat cut was almost ear to ear and deep, allowing me to actually see the inner workings of her throat. Breakfast spun in my stomach a bit more. I could see her hair was blond from the parts not stained brown from blood. Her bangs looked to be cut straight right across her eyebrows. Something caught my eye behind her right ear through a gap in her hair.

“Doctor Nehls?” I asked. “Can you move her hair a bit here? She has something behind her ear. Looks like it might be a tattoo.”

“Sure. One second.” He stepped around the table to my side and brushed the hair away with his fingertip.

I got a better view. It was indeed a tattoo in the shape of a crescent moon with a couple of stars.

“Mean anything to you?” he asked.

I shook my head and let out a breath. “I’m going to need a photo of the woman’s face and tattoo. We may need it before you have the autopsy completed.”

“Sure.”

I quickly snapped two photos with my phone.

He let her hair drop and walked back to the other side of the table.

“When are you doing the autopsy?” Agent Clifford asked.

“I should be able to take care of it tomorrow morning,” Nehls said. “I was done for the evening when I got the call that you guys were heading over. We have staff here twenty-four seven, but something like this I’d prefer to take care of myself.”

“Anything standing out at you?” I asked.

“Well, we have over a dozen knife wounds, the deepest penetrating from the chest straight out of the back. Pretty good guess would say our killer has some power, I doubt you’re looking for a little guy or woman. Aside from that, the throat injury looks consistent with the females that came through like this earlier. As far as definitively matching up the knife wounds and what I would bet to be saw marks on the bones, I’ll have to wait until I conduct the autopsy.”

“As far as getting us an ID?” Beth asked.

“I’ll do the usual: DNA, dental records, photographs of birthmarks, tattoos, and the like. That, with approximate height, weight, and age, should give us a decent profile. Once that is done, we’ll make it available to distribute to missing persons, et cetera.”

“No personal belongings came in with the body?” I asked.

“Nope,” Nehls said. “What you see is what you get. No pockets on the skirt she’s wearing, either. No jewelry, no nothing.”

“Can you get a hold of us with the autopsy results as soon as they are set?” I asked.

“The profile of everything as well,” Beth added.

“Sure,” Nehls answered. “It will be morning, like I said. It might be pushing afternoon by the time I have everything complete.”

“That’s fine.” I glanced down at my watch—almost six thirty. “We’ll let you get out of here. I appreciate you sticking around for us.”

“No problem,” he said.

Doctor Nehls showed us out. Beth, Clifford, and I stood in the parking lot next to our cars, talking.

“I’m going to have to be hitting the road in a bit here. It will be seven thirty by the time I get home,” Agent Clifford said.

“No problem. You can head out. It’s getting late, and we’ll probably be heading back to our hotel,” Beth said. “We’ll touch base in the morning.”

“Sure. Are you guys coming out to the office?” Clifford asked.

“Um, we’ll see,” Beth said “We need to meet with the Nashville Police yet. We’ll give you a call and figure it out from there.”

I leaned back on the lime-colored desk chair and put my feet up on the edge of the hotel bed. The phone rang in my ear as I waited for Karen to answer.

I heard a click, followed by faint screaming and moaning and more screaming. The background noise stopped.

“Hey, hon,” Karen said.

“What’s up? And what the hell was that noise? Sounded like someone was getting killed. Either that or—”

“Oh, yeah, they were being killed. Getting their brains eaten, actually.”

“Zombies, I take it.”

“Yup. Hey, there was a message on the house from your dad. It sounded like he wanted you to call him.”

“Okay. I still don’t understand why he won’t just call my cell.”

“You know how that is. He thinks that if he calls your cell phone, it will end up costing you money somehow.”

I smirked, thinking of my old man’s fear of technology. “I’ll give him a buzz in the morning, maybe. I’m guessing it will be a good hour-long conversation. Anyway, what are you doing? Just watching zombies or what?”

“Yeah, I’m powering through a few episodes and calling it a night. I have an early meeting tomorrow, so I’m just going to take it easy on the couch. I talked to Callie before. If you’re back by next weekend, did you want to try to get down there again?”

“Absolutely, and I think I’ll be back.”

“Did you want me to book something? We’ve already been credited for cancelling our previous tickets.”

I heard more of the faint screaming and moaning, followed by gunshots coming from her end of the call. Then the noise stopped once again.

“Give me a few days, and I’ll know a little more. This investigation has a bit of a different feel than the last. Right now, I’m not so certain we’re going to get very far with it.”

“Why is that?”

“I don’t know. Just a gut feeling. Seems like the people in charge around here would rather just kind of pretend like it’s not happening.”

“Really?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not. We’ll see.”

“Anything new on the investigation since you and Beth got in?”

“Another body found. Same as the others. Not too much there. We basically just met with our local agent that we’ll be working with and the local sheriff’s department to get a little background on the case. I think Beth and I are going to go over some things and try to put a plan together when she gets back.”

“Gets back?” Karen asked.

“Oh, she’s just printing off some things downstairs in the hotel’s business center and grabbing a map so we can try to plot out where all these bodies were found. Maybe it will help us get some kind of location.”

The zombie sounds started again.

“I see. You want to just call me when you and Beth are through for the night?” Karen asked.

“I thought you said you had an early meeting.”

“Yeah, but it’s fine. I like hearing your voice before I fall asleep.”

I heard someone screaming for help from her end of the call, followed by more gunshots.

“Mmm hmm. So what you’re saying is you want to get back to your television show?”

“And I like hearing your voice,” she said.

I smiled. “Have fun with your zombies. I’ll talk to you in a bit.”

“Love you. Bye.”

“Love you.” I hung up.

I tossed the phone onto the bed and sat back up in my chair. I swiveled toward the wall shelf that doubled as a room desk. The investigation file was spread out in neat stacks, one for each victim—something Beth had done prior to leaving the room. I grabbed my notepad and began to go through each case file one by one, wanting to write down who was the first deputy on each scene. A follow-up talk with each of them would hopefully give us a bit more information.

A tap came from the other side of my door. I stood to go open it for Beth. She entered, pushing the desk chair from her room. On the chair’s seat was a stack of papers. Beth pushed the chair over next to mine and had a seat after lifting the pile. She separated it and reached into her bag for a cover for each new stack.

“Did you look these over at all?” I asked.

“Just as they were coming off of the printer. I can’t say there is much there, and we don’t have the autopsy report yet. I got those photos you took of the woman’s face and tattoo printed out as well. You can delete them from your phone now.”

I immediately did it. “Did you get a map from downstairs?” I asked.

“Yeah.” Beth leaned back in her chair, brushed the hair from her shoulder, and opened her blazer to pull the map from the inner pocket. She began unfolding it but then looked around the room. “Um, this thing is like four feet wide by a couple high. Where are we going to put it?”

“I don’t suppose you have any tape?” I asked.

“That’s a negative there.”

“Um.” I stood and walked toward the window. I moved the lounge chair to one side and took a seat on the floor. “Marker and map,” I said.

Beth brought both over and I spread the map out on the floor. “Do we have addresses on all the body dump locations?”

“Approximates on most. These were dumped in fields, on sides of the road, just kind of wherever. But…” Beth looked through a couple of the individual case files. “Looks like most have at least something we can use for location.”

“Good. Give me a name, if we have it, and location. I’ll make a point on the map with some initials and jot it down in my notepad.”

“Got it. Let’s go with Rhonda Oakley. She was found two blocks down Jim Taylor Road off of Lake Road. The town of Woodlawn.”

“Okay.” I found it on the map, made a mark with the initials R.O., and wrote it down in my notepad.

“Want the next?” Beth asked.

“One second.” I reached up onto the bed and grabbed my phone.

“What are you doing?”

“I want to see the street view on a map and see what the area looks like, then jot down a few notes.”

“You’re not planning on visiting all the dump sites?” she asked.

“Yeah, I am. I just want to see if I can find something in common about them other than
side of the road
.”

“Got it.”

Beth and I moved on through all four women found in the past week and a half. The next mark I made was where the bag of bones had been found. Beth handed me a different-colored marker, and I noted locations on the map of the previous victims from the eighties. I stuck the cap back on the marker, lifted the map, and set it on the bed. The process of making my location marks, taking notes, and looking at the places on my phone had taken the better part of an hour.

“Well, what do you think?” I asked.

Beth scooted her chair to the edge of the hotel bed. “That looks like a map with a bunch of marks on it,” she said.

“No immediate pattern jumping out at you, huh?” I grabbed my matching lime office chair, took a seat, and rolled it beside Beth.

“Well, Clarksville is dead center of the county for the most part. And it looks like all these dump spots are kind of scattered about three miles out from town,” Beth said.

“So we have Highway 79 that comes in from the west and heads out of Clarksville to the northeast, Highway 13 kind of comes up from the southwest, we have 12 that comes down from Kentucky, and I-24 kind of cuts through the corner of the county.” I scratched my face and stared at the map. “There isn’t a single one of these main arteries in and out of Clarksville County that gives you an easy access to all of the drop spots.” I drew lines with my finger on the map. “If you came in from here, these two or three would be easy. But these over here would take you probably forty minutes of back-and-forth on country roads.”

“Yeah, and if this guy is from Nashville, I highly doubt he’s driving an hour out here to then drive around for another forty minutes, looking for a spot.”

“So you think our guy is a local?” I asked.

Beth let out a hard breath through her nose. She held up her palms. “Hell if I know.”

“Well, where haven’t there been drops?”

Beth pointed at the map. “Clarksville dead center and the southern section down here.”

“Well, assuming he’s staying out of Clarksville because it’s more heavily populated, a case can be made that our guy could reside in this area”—I pointed at the southern section of the county—“Just a quick jump to I-24 that takes you straight into Nashville.”