Over Tumbled Graves (29 page)

She was startled when her phone rang; still thinking about Dupree, she didn’t even check the number. Instead, she held a finger up to the drug counselor and Chloe, turned her back, and took the call.

“Hey,” she said, fully expecting to hear Dupree’s voice on the other end.

“Ms. Mabry,” said Curtis Blanton. “My ticket insists this big Quonset hut is the Spo-Caine
International
Airport.”

“Because of Canada,” she said.

“Oh. Of course. I guess that makes sense.”

She felt two steps behind. “Wait a minute. You’re in Spokane?”

“Aren’t you going to ask what I’m doing here?”

“What are you doing here?”

“Good question. After we got off the phone I looked over your case again, and I thought of you with that sick twist McDaniel milking this thing for his next stupid book, and I knew you needed my help. So I caught the first flight out.”

Caroline rubbed her head. “You know, I’m in an interview right now. Can you rent a car? Or take a cab?”

“No need. I’ll wait here for you. But don’t tell McDaniel I’m in
town. Okay? I want to surprise the big, neckless bastard. He’s gonna shit paper when he sees me.”

Caroline didn’t know how to answer, so she just turned her phone off. Everything was moving too quickly. When she turned back the counselor was bent down, showing Chloe the letter he’d taken from the envelope.

“What is that?” she asked.

The counselor straightened up and patted his corn-rowed hair in the back. “We operate on the same model as AA or NA here,” the counselor said. “Even the counselors here, most of us have been…are you familiar with the twelve steps, Detective?”

“Somewhat.”

The counselor handed her the short letter and the envelope. “One of the most important steps is the acknowledgment of the people we’ve hurt through our addiction. That’s one thing we do here. We have the women write letters to the people they hurt. Some apologize. Some just make excuses. Some aren’t even ready for that and they just hit their family up for more money or blame their parents for their problems.

“I worried about that with Shelly because she only wrote one letter. And when I tried to get her to mail it, she begged me not to because she didn’t want the man to know where she was. So I put it in her file and never mailed it. Normally, I wouldn’t think of violating a patient’s privacy like this. But…”

Caroline looked away from him then, down at the letter in her hands, which began, “Dear Lenny.”

An undated letter from the treatment file of Shelly Nordling at the Bright Shining Day Group Home:

A note stuck with a magnetic apple to Kelly Baldwin’s refrigerator at his home in Moses Lake, Washington:

A letter typed on Spokane Police Department stationery, folded in half and slid into the mail slot of Assistant Chief of Police James Tucker:

A jogger found the fifth body in a blind of wild grass on the steep riverbank, a mile from where the first victims had been dumped. From the condition of the remains it was clear this one had been dead for weeks, and only recently had been moved to this spot. Caroline held back, letting the crime scene people do their work, but the moment she edged forward and saw the dried patches of flesh, the sun-bleached teeth, she felt with dread certainty that this pile of orderly bones was Rae-Lynn Pierce.

As Blanton had promised, the pressure increased exponentially with the discovery of another body, and in those first days of August, the office thrummed with activity. Calls came in from psychics, along with tips from prisoners in Texas and Florida, and requests for interviews from CNN and
Newsweek
. The work itself felt natural; with the two profilers and the growing expertise of the task force, the kind of details that had stumped them three months ago were quickly fitted to Lenny Ryan’s ever-changing methodology. This time, the twenty-dollar bills were stuffed in the victim’s mouth, a detail that sent the profilers into frenzies of
supposition that devolved into an argument in the middle of the task force office in which they yelled over each other without making eye contact, like two professors who’d been assigned the same lecture hall.

“He’s getting angrier,” McDaniel said to Spivey. “He put money in her mouth as a sign of his anguish over oral sex—”

“He ran out of fucking rubber bands!” Blanton interrupted without looking up from a report he was writing. This was a ten-year argument they’d apparently dragged into this investigation and from the two or three times Caroline already had heard it, she surmised that the debate boiled down to whether or not a killer’s signature—his unique crime scene behavior—constituted only his obsessive, subconscious activity or also encompassed the more standard MO, the things he did to commit and cover up a crime. Like the others, this victim’s fingernails had been torn away with pliers and the fingers scrubbed. Both profilers acknowledged this was part fetish, part reasoned attempt to destroy evidence. Their argument seemed to be over the fine point of whether it was a ritual that also concealed what he’d done, or an act of concealment that became ritualized.

“Pedestrian, small-minded hick,” McDaniel muttered as the argument faded.

“Bed-wetting thumb-sucking Freudian,” Blanton said.

It seemed to Caroline a ridiculous argument because they agreed on the larger point: that this preparation stage was Ryan’s signature. Immediately after each murder he hid the bodies and continued to visit each corpse, baby-sitting it, fulfilling his emotional need for control while also preparing it for discovery by the police. In this stage, he scrubbed the bodies and planted forty dollars and most likely masturbated. Both men said this preparation of bodies was what kept them interested in the case even after it turned from a profiling job to a manhunt. Blanton talked about how Ryan incorporated aspects of five or six killers that he’d tracked over the years (the fingernails, for instance, were right out of a case he’d handled in Texas), while McDaniel talked about the rare chance to catch a monster who was evolving before their eyes.

But after watching them, Caroline believed that each man stayed to get under the skin of the other, to keep an eye on the com
petition and fight over publicity, to look for material for their next books. They circled each other like vultures and contributed little to the practical aspects of the investigation—the stakeouts and interviews—spending all their time on their insular, peculiar science. At one meeting, Caroline read over Blanton’s shoulder: “Due to a lack of early microbial activity and the postmortem displacement of the right clavicle, the remains were moved two weeks prior to their discovery.” Caroline was stumped by his mathematical surety.

A week after the fifth victim was found, dental records were compared to those of Rae-Lynn Pierce and determined not to be hers, but likely those of the missing Jane Doe they called “Risa,” who still existed only as a street name. While it bothered Caroline that they couldn’t even assign Risa a real name, Spivey and the profilers seemed far more comfortable with a body that had no connection to a living person.

With the frenzy of this new corpse, the focus shifted away from Caroline’s recent discovery of Lenny Ryan’s motive for killing Burn, and she felt herself pushed to the side by this humming and grinding machine, which the remains of poor Risa fed like fossil fuel. In the office, Caroline tended to her own small tasks, trying to forget the idea that had begun choking her thoughts the last few weeks, stopping her cold in traffic or walking to the copy machine:

What if Lenny Ryan wasn’t killing these women?

It wasn’t some sudden piece of exculpatory evidence that sparked doubt in Caroline; in fact, she found few answers of any kind in the evidence. If anything, the evidence reinforced the idea that they were going after the right man—the great wall of Spivey’s timeline surrounding a city of cold forensics, witness interview cards, and credit card receipts that covered every desk in the task force office.

Still, this doubt crept up, catching her off guard like a boom in the distance. If only there were a conclusive semen sample or eyewitness. Instead, the evidence served only to
not eliminate
Ryan. It was like building a house with all windows but no doors.

Of course, she knew thousands of suspects convicted on less evidence. By its nature, such an investigation involved lining up coincidences until you eliminated all other explanations and arrived at a premise. Spivey’s timeline provided the premise: the murders, which began about two weeks after Lenny Ryan left
prison; his skulking around asking about hookers; the murders of Burn, Uncle Albert, and the pawnbroker; Caroline chasing Ryan into the alley where the fourth body was found; his fingerprints on the refrigerator there; his following Rae-Lynn the day she and Risa disappeared. Even the gloomy county prosecutor had begun talking about this as a death penalty case.

No, she knew her doubts were irrational. Dupree had even invented a name for what she felt—Yearbook Syndrome. Whenever they interviewed the relative of a suspect, invariably that person dragged out a yearbook, pointed to the picture of a shy, pimple-covered kid, and said emphatically, “See. He didn’t do it.”

That’s what I have, Caroline thought, a kind of Yearbook Syndrome by proxy. She had deluded herself into believing that she knew Lenny Ryan. She had stood face-to-face with him and she’d felt the distance between them close. So there it was. The inglorious return of her intuition, six years after Dupree made off with it, telling her that if Ryan had a solid motive for killing Burn, wouldn’t there be a motive for killing the hookers too, beyond the psychological backflips described by Blanton and McDaniel?

She never mentioned her doubts to Spivey or to the profilers, of course, who were more convinced than ever that Ryan was the killer. The fact that Ryan blamed Burn for Shelly Nordling’s death didn’t eliminate the idea that Ryan was acting out his twisted resentment against all prostitutes. If anything, the letter from Shelly’s old group home just reinforced their basic theory: Lenny Ryan was acting from a deep-seated obsession over what he felt was Shelly Nordling’s betrayal of him.

Whenever she spoke to one of the profilers, Caroline found herself convinced by their surety. Blanton persuaded her that she could never understand Ryan or his violent sexual fantasies. McDaniel convinced her that a monster wasn’t something you saw, but the sum of the things you didn’t see, the childhood failings and disappointments, the insecurities and rejections.

But when she was alone, at home or in traffic, Caroline remembered Lenny Ryan’s eyes. She had been surprised to find not a monster in those eyes, but herself, her fear, her temper, her frustrated attempts to find explanations, to make the world fit into a child’s box. And when she felt like this, the evidence and the ever-expanding
work of the profilers seemed just a few degrees off, even purposefully misleading, like the illusion of an urn made up of two men’s profiles. While the rest of the task force worked to describe the urn, Caroline couldn’t stop seeing the two faces.

She looked up at Blanton and McDaniel, physical opposites angled across from each other at the big conference table: Blanton short, squat, and pale, like he’d come out of a can; McDaniel tall, tanned, and buff. Across the table sat Spivey and a slight woman who’d been introduced to Caroline as an assistant producer from
Dateline
. It was McDaniel’s idea that some national publicity might bring a tip on Ryan’s whereabouts or maybe even draw him out. Key to their plan was creating what McDaniel called the “super-antagonist model,” directing Ryan’s attention to one police officer, an “alpha cop” that Ryan would imagine as a worthy foe and would find himself irresistibly compelled to contact. Caroline had been that foe early on, both profilers agreed, but for whatever reason, Ryan was no longer engaged by her. So they needed
Dateline
to create a new opponent—actually, two, since neither Blanton nor McDaniel was willing to step aside.

“From the Bureau’s standpoint, this is a groundbreaking case,” McDaniel told the assistant producer, who was there to do leg-work before the rest of the crew arrived that afternoon. She was a slender, attractive woman in black pants, black shirt, and black shoes. A size zero, Caroline guessed. She worked the profilers, shaking her head and saying “Wow!” as they described their harrowing work. McDaniel especially ate it up.

“The role of the FBI Investigative Support Unit has always been just that: to
support
local law enforcement,” he said. “But in this case, we’re going a step further, using profiling to anticipate Ryan’s next move, to actually catch him. And for me?” McDaniel stuck out that ledge of a jaw, and leaned forward until his face was just inches from the assistant producer’s. “I need to catch this guy. For me, it’s personal.”

“Wow!” The producer jotted some notes, “make sure you say that to the reporter when we’re on air tonight. Just like that.”

McDaniel tried to be nonchalant. “Who will the reporter be?”

The assistant producer tossed off a name.

“Ah,” said McDaniel. “Mmm-hmm. It’s just…people have
said I look like Stone Phillips. I thought it’d be interesting to see the two of us side-by-side.”

No one said anything, but Blanton turned and made eye contact with Caroline.

“Yeah, well, Stone doesn’t leave the studio much,” the assistant producer said.

“There’s the resemblance,” said Blanton. “Neither does he.”

From her desk across the room, Caroline watched McDaniel glare at Blanton. With serial killers fading in popularity, with Spokane in the middle of nowhere, and with only eight victims—five of them hookers—getting the attention of anyone beyond
America’s Most Wanted
was going to be tough, and so McDaniel had convinced Spivey to play up the role of the profilers, the idea that the top experts in the country were working together for the first time in a decade to catch a killer. Just as McDaniel had predicted, the angle elevated the story to network newsmagazine fodder. Tonight they were taking Blanton and McDaniel to the dump site along the river, where they would film the two super-sleuths digging in dirt and staring wistfully out at the river, spouting horseshit to draw Lenny Ryan out:
For me, it’s personal.

“What about you, Mr. Blanton?” the assistant producer asked. “How has this case affected you personally?”

“Well, I’m no longer working as a prostitute. So that’s good.”

McDaniel cleared his throat and stepped in. “It’s impossible to
not
take this case personally. Even before we identified Ryan, when we were dealing with an UNSUB—”

The assistant producer interrupted. “Unsub?”

“Sorry,” McDaniel said, reaching for her arm. “Bureau talk. Even when we were dealing with an unknown subject, it was apparent his communication with the police, his taunting, was a key part of his fantasy. The killer’s focus started with these women, but now it sits squarely on the shoulders of Mr. Blanton and me.”

Again, Blanton looked uncomfortable and sought out Caroline’s eyes. But she spun away in her chair and picked up the phone to make her weekly calls to Rae-Lynn’s family and friends. That list of phone contacts had reached twenty, but no one had heard from her. Blanton and McDaniel said she was likely dead and that her disappearance and the death of Risa marked a new
period for Lenny Ryan in which he took longer with the bodies, perhaps out of disappointment over Caroline’s reaction to what they called “his gift”—the dead woman in the refrigerator. When no one answered the phone call, Caroline hung up the phone and glanced up at the conference table.

“What about the danger that Ryan poses?” the producer was asking. “If he has moved out of the area, are women elsewhere in danger? The woman leaving the gym? The mother going to the store? Me? Am I in danger?”

Blanton looked over at McDaniel. “Oh, you’re definitely in danger.”

Again, McDaniel jumped in. “Is there a danger? I would say yes.” He nodded, raised his eyebrows to the producer, and spoke more quietly. “Yes.”

Caroline couldn’t help wondering what Dupree would make of this, of this film crew dragging the profilers down to the riverbank. She hadn’t seen Dupree in three weeks, since the night he dropped his bombshell about Glenn Ritter, but she heard he’d requested early retirement. She called him once, but hung up when she got his voice mail and couldn’t imagine what to say. And then the new body surfaced and time just got away from her.

McDaniel was holding his index finger to his lip as he thought about a question the assistant producer had asked. He nodded slightly, as if he were about to admit wetting his bed. “For me? This job makes it hard to meet someone. Every relationship goes back to trust for me. A case like this makes it hard to…to trust.”

There was an awkward silence at the conference table in the center of the room, and then Spivey cleared his throat. All morning he’d been practicing the line McDaniel had given him and he offered it stiffly. “From my standpoint, it’s been a real education. If anyone can catch this killer, it’s these guys.”