Darkness peering (24 page)

"Help us find your friend."

"I'm trying!" she blubbered.

"Shelly," her mother scolded. "Look at Chief McKissack when he's
talking to you."

Shelly reluctantly lifted her mottled, hysterical lace. "I don't know
where they went... someplace secret, she said!"

Rachel didn't like the look in McKissack's eyes.

Back outside in the New England drizzle, he told her, "This is about as
bad as it gets."

SENSING HE HAD A CRISIS ON HIS HANDS, MCKISSACK ORGAnized another
full-scale search-and-rescue operation. Officers, bloodhounds and over
three hundred volunteers combed the surrounding forests and cornfields
in the pouring rain. The entire neighborhood within a two-mile radius
was thoroughly searched. It rained all day and into the night, and
didn't start to clear until the following morning when helicopters with
special heat-seeking detection equipment repeatedly circled the area,
spotters on board searching for Nicole's yellow T-shirt, her red
backpack, a body lying in a cornfield or a swamp. Patrol ears cruised
the tangled back roads, searching abandoned buildings, dumpsters and
ditches on their meandering route. Patrolmen stopped to talk with the
locals, displaying Nicole's picture and asking if anyone had seen
her.

Around 10:00 A.M." Rachel pulled into the parking lot behind the
medical examiner's building on Lagrange and met McKis sack in the
basement where the autopsies were performed. Archie Fortuna was
pushing sixty-five but nobody wanted to get rid of him. He had the
stamina of a much younger man and a mind as sharp and functional as a
tack. He was corpulent, with a shock of white hair like the tuft on a
cockatoo, and today he reeked of garlic and onions.

The three of them donned surgical masks, gowns and gloves

before entering the morgue. Claire Castillo's body was laid out on a
steel tray on top of a gurney, lit by an overhead fluorescent lamp.
Rachel could see where the blood had pooled on the underside of the
body, and there were tiny holes in the flesh of the victim's chest,
face and right arm from where the sutures had been. Her long red hair
coiled onto the steel tray like a bolt of silk.

Beginning the postmortem, Archie examined the external features of the
girl's body in minute detail before starting an internal exam. Tracing
a gloved finger over the suture holes in her chest, he said, "These
were simple running sutures made of nonabsorbable cotton thread. The
nurse saved them for me." He pointed at an evidence bag full of curled
lengths of blood encrusted thread. "The sutures were placed at an
equal distance and depth and didn't strangulate any of the tissue.
Knotted on the better-vascularized wound edge."

"So this guy knew what he was doing?" McKissack asked, stress showing
on his face.

"Maybe. Or could be he's just very neat." Archie delicately lifted
the girl's left arm. X rays of the body were displayed in light boxes
mounted on the far wall. "Injuries to her wrist were antemortem."

"Ten years old," Rachel said.

"There's some sort of sticky residue on her wrists and ankles ..."

"Duct tape," McKissack surmised.

"I'm taking fingernail scrapings now ... looks like mud. There's dirt
ground into her knees and elbows, and lots of mud and debris on her
body from where she crawled through the woods."

"That's how they found her, right?" Rachel asked, the thought of it
causing a tectonic shift inside of her. "Crawling out of the woods on
her hands and knees?"

"All sutured up and everything, yep. Dragged herself along by

one arm," Archie said, his voice cruelly matter-of-fact. "Three of
her nails are broken off."

Archie switched on a Luma-Lite, which normally caused any hairs, fibers
or semen stains on the body to glow. Traces of luminescent fuzz showed
up around her face, neck and chest, especially in the areas of sutured
flesh where fibers clung to the drying blood. "A lot of these fibers
and hairs might've been picked up in the ambulance or the ER," Archie
said, collecting evidence with a mini--vacuum cleaner.

McKissack stood stiffly beside Rachel, their arms touching, while
Archie slowly ran the Luma-Lite down the length of the victim's body.
He paused on a bright yellow splotch on the victim's left calf.

"Looks like we got lucky, Chief," Archie said, taking a sample. "I've
found a small amount of what appears to be semen on her left calf. If
the perp is a secretor, we can get blood type and markers down at the
state lab."

"So he raped her?" McKissack asked.

"Don't know yet, Chief," Archie said. "Let's wait until we complete
the internal. You know," he said, looking at them, "this little piece
of equipment's the best investment I ever made."

"Expensive?" McKissack asked.

"Hell, the entire lab costs the community one movie ticket per year per
person. Not bad," he said. "She was in good health overall. Well
nourished."

Rachel glanced at McKissack, whose jaw was set.

"At some point, the UN SUB removed her clothes, her jewelry,
everything," Archie said with a shake of his head, "even her earrings.
My guess is he washed her body before driving her out to the woods.
Also took his time making those sutures. They were very precise."

"He use an anesthetic?" McKissack asked.

"Without a painkiller of some sort, she would've put up quite a

struggle. Let me show you something." He shone the Luma-Lite on the
corpse's feet, which lit up with bright bits of grass and fiery
splotches of mud. "The soles of her feet are blistered, embedded with
debris ... pine needles, dirt, pebbles ... indicating that she walked
quite a ways through the woods."

"I thought you said she crawled?"

"Crawled out of the woods. Walked into the woods." He aimed the
Luma-Lite at her slightly swollen right foot, parted two of her toes,
and a distinctive orange area about the size of a dime lit up. "See
this spot between the toes here? If you look real close, you can see a
hole slightly larger than a pinprick."

"An injection site?" McKissack asked, and Rachel felt him stiffen
beside her.

"Barry? Let's take some samples."

Archie's assistant, Barry, a thin young man with wire-rim glasses, pale
droopy hair and an even droopier demeanor, handed Archie a bottle and
some swabs, and Archie took samples of the chemical around the site of
the puncture wound.

"I'll need a syringe, Barry."

"Are you saying she was drugged?" Rachel asked.

"We won't know for sure until the toxicologist examines the blood,
stomach contents, urine and liver. You know, centuries ago, they
believed that the heart of a person who'd been poisoned wouldn't
burn."

"So you suspect she was poisoned?"

Archie shrugged as he collected vitreous samples with a needle and
syringe and placed them in the glass containers Barry held up gingerly
to him. "You say the ER staff couldn't figure out what went wrong.
Maybe they didn't do anything wrong. Maybe she was injected with a
slow-acting poison. If she was, it should be present in the blood.
Actually, the best place to find poison is in the liver, since it's the
garbage pail of the body."

"What kind of poison?" McKissack asked.

"You got me, Chief. There are ten million organic chemicals,

and each of those can be combined with one or more other chemicals to
form an infinite number of mixtures. If you think about it, anything
in great enough quantity can be toxic. Water can be toxic."

"Water?"

"People drown." He winked.

"Let me get this straight," Rachel said, trying to fathom the horror of
it all. "The UN SUB held her captive, kept her well fed and in fairly
good shape ... and then, sometime late last night, he anesthetized
her..."

"Slipped her a Mickey," McKissack suggested.

"Stripped her, washed her body ..."

"Washing away all traces of any hairs or fibers that might later
incriminate him."

"Mutilated her, stitching up her face and torso, then drove her out to
the woods, where he escorted her to a specific location--"

"Whoa, wait a minute," McKissack said. "Escorted her?"

"Archie said she walked through the woods long enough to get blisters
on the bottoms of her feet. With her eyes sewn shut like that, she had
to have been escorted." She tried not to imagine Claire stepping over
branches and pinecones and twigs, maneuvering her way past wet fir
boughs with one arm sewn to her chest--eyes, ears and mouth stitched
shut. "Then he forced her to lie down on the ground and injected her
with some slow acting poison?"

"This place between the toes is fairly clean, like it's been swabbed,"
Archie said. "All the bits of debris were wiped off, and there's
cotton fibers around the site. I'm going to do a biopsy. The muscle
is well preserved."

"Wait a minute. Why march your victim through the woods and then drug
her?" Rachel asked.

"So that we'd find her there," McKissack suggested.

"But she didn't stay put. Besides, why would it matter where we found
her?"

McKissack shrugged. "Why clean the body of all trace evidence, then
leave your sperm behind?"

"Maybe he knows he's a nonsecretor?" Archie suggested.

"Who found her?" Rachel asked.

"Ozzie Rudd." McKissack's countenance was grim.

"What?"

"Claims he spotted her from his rig. Looks like you reopened the
D'Agostino case just in time."

"Where was she when he spotted her?"

"Crawling out of the woods onto Winnetka Road."

Rachel shuddered, wondering how you could crawl anywhere with your
right arm sewn to your chest, in awe of the victim's bravery.

"She's got abrasions on both knees," Archie said, taking samples. "The
skin's embedded with dirt. Lesser abrasions on both elbows. Some
bruising around the neck and chest, but that could've occurred in the

ER."

Rachel nodded. "Intubation and CPR."

"Faint ligature marks on the wrists and ankles." Archie pointed them
out. "Here ... here ... a slight bruising around the mouth, possibly
from a gag."

"He held her captive for three weeks," Rachel said. "She must've been
bound and gagged at least some of the time."

"Probably most of it," McKissack guessed. "Unless he kept her drugged
the entire time."

Archie flicked off the Luma-Lite and straightened his back with a
good-natured groan. "No major contusions or hematomas. No
fractures."

"Dinger's not sophisticated enough to pull off something like this,"
Rachel said.

"Ozzie Rudd is," McKissack said.

"I hope to God those two ran away together."

"If they did, we wouldn't have the ring," McKissack reminded

her. "Whoever it is, he's taunting us. He's got Nicole, all right.
He's probably got them both."

Rachel choked back the outrage she'd been feeling all morning. There
was no place to put it. They were impotent, playing some surreal
guessing game, trying to shine a penlight into the dim recesses of a
sick and twisted psyche.

"Hmm," Archie said, swabbing the vagina and anus for semen. "No
evidence of rape. No internal abrasions. No visible semen stains,
except for the single deposit on her calf."

"I don't get it," McKissack said. "First he kidnaps her, but there's
no ransom note. Then he waits three weeks before he drops her off in
the woods, where he ejaculates on her leg. But first he mutilates her
face and body. This is fucking unbelievable."

"Then the other daughter disappears," Rachel picked up the thread, "and
her necklace ends up in Claire's hand, tipping us off. He wants us to
know what he's done."

"Maybe we should look at the father again?" McKissack said. "I mean,
what are the odds that both of your daughters get targeted by the same
psychopath? Let alone the fact that he's a doctor, he knows how to
suture a wound."

"Yale Castillo may be an arrogant jerk," Rachel said, "but he's no
psychopath. They're a close-knit family. He adores his daughters.
They're the light of his life."

McKissack tore off his surgical mask. "All I know is, we've got one
demented puppy-kicking freak on our hands." He stormed out of the
morgue.

Steeling herself, Rachel headed after him.

SHE CAUGHT UP WITH HIM IN The BACK PARKING LOT. MCK1Ssack's jacket
was off, his shirt drenched with sweat. Above them, red-winged
blackbirds razored the granite-colored sky.

"Time's against us with this type of intelligent, organized offender,"
McKissack said, eyes focused sharply on some middle distance. "This
crime was well planned, not opportunistic. He's clearly from the area.
We're dealing with a local."

"There's something I don't understand," Rachel said. "Why drop her off
in the woods alive? After all, he'd held her captive for nearly three
weeks. If she'd lived, she would've been able to identify him through
his voice, the abduction site, maybe even a physical description. Why
take such a chance?"

"He must've known she wasn't gonna make it."

"The injection." She nodded. "But the drug didn't kill her right
away. What kind of poison doesn't take effect for several hours?"

"You took a toxicology class, right? Give it your best shot."

She turned the question over in her mind. "Arsenic is tasteless,
odorless and easy to obtain. But death is slow and painful. Besides,
there was no vomiting or diarrhea."

"Heroin overdose?"

"Very strong central nervous system depressant. No needle tracks, and
therefore no repeat injections. No vomitus. In a typical heroin
overdose, the lungs are heavy and show congestion."

"Cyanide?"

She shook her head. "There'd be localized areas of bright red livor
mortis, cherry red or pink."

"Strychnine?"

"Symptoms occur within minutes. Violent convulsions."