R. E. Bradshaw - Rainey Nights (2 page)

Thursday, May 10, five days later.

Southeast of Eagle Rock Gorge, the James River formed a small island. On the east embankment facing the island, the dark trail of dried blood was still visible five days after the murder. Bloody bare footprints ran up and down the hill, forming a macabre choreography along the crimson trail. Rainey’s eyes followed the stains to the rapidly moving water below and then back up to the naked, headless body attached to the tree. The hands were still duct taped together in prayer. Rainey pulled on the latex gloves she had been squeezing tightly in each fist, trying to distance herself from the pain and horror the victim experienced. She turned from the rotting smell of the corpse and took a deep cleansing breath, before she walked back up the hill to join the others by the tree.

FBI Supervisory Special Agent, Danny McNally, his broad muscular shoulders in stark contrast to the wiry mountain men, towered over the two local detectives. His red wavy hair was wildly out of control. He had not tried to tame it since they ran out from under the helicopter blades, jumped into a waiting SUV, and rushed to the crime scene. Rainey’s experiences with helicopter blades and the thick mass on her head were not good ones. Before leaving this morning, she captured her unruly chestnut locks in a ponytail that stuck out the back of her FBI baseball cap.

Rainey and Danny were here to try to make sense of a series of brutal murders along US 220, from the Blue Ridge Mountains down through the Piedmont area of North Carolina. They left the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, or NCAVC, on the campus of the FBI Academy, just after seven a.m. Using the twenty minutes of flying time to go over the files prepared by the Behavioral Analysis Unit, of which they were both members, Danny and Rainey were now analyzing the most recent crime scene. The BAU2, as it was known, was tasked with understanding evil the average person could never fathom. Her unit concentrated on violent criminal acts like serial murders, mass murders, spree killers, unusual murders of all types, along with sexual assaults and kidnappings targeting adults. The nine murders tied to this particular unknown subject or UNSUB certainly met the criteria of violent and unusual.

Danny turned to Rainey, as she approached, and made the introductions. “Detectives Blaine and Martin, this is SSA Rainey Bell.”

Rainey ignored the hands extended toward her. She held up her gloved hands to show the officers she didn’t want to contaminate them. She simply nodded and acknowledged each with, “Detective.”

Danny began to fill her in on what he found out from the locals. “Blaine here says the body was discovered just before dawn by those two scared boys over there. They were huntin’ a new spot to do some fly-fishing, found a path, followed it, and stumbled on her. They’re going to have to wash out those waders when they get home. No sign of the head, but they’re pretty sure this is the Granger girl that went missing last Saturday.”

Rainey walked over and studied the body without touching it. “What makes them so sure it’s her?”

Blaine answered, “That ‘WWJD’ tattooed on her ankle is exactly like the picture her folks gave us. They weren’t too happy she had a tattoo, but it helped us identify her. We’ll know positively when we get the hands un-taped and compare prints. We hope the scavengers left the thumbs under the tape untouched. The M.E. thinks the tape may have preserved the skin well enough to rehydrate. She was printed at one of those safe kids things at the mall, so we have a comparison set. If we can’t get a print, then we’ll have to wait for DNA, but I’m pretty sure it’s her.”

At that moment, a small white haired man in blue coveralls came toward them. He made eye contact with Rainey. A huge grin enveloped his face, curling the ends of his white mustache upward. “Agent Bell, how nice to see you again. Sorry it’s under these circumstances, but then we always seem to meet over a dead body.”

“Dr. Patrick, I’m glad to see you. I was hoping it would be you on this one,” Rainey said, and then added, “Her hands… they are the same. Can we see if she’s holding anything before you bag her?”

“Let me get something down so we can lay her over and then we’ll see what the tape could be hiding,” Dr. Patrick said, as he and his assistant moved a plastic sheet into position beside the body.

Rainey squatted in front of the putrid, blackening remains. Rainey wasn’t “used to” the smell, but she had learned to block it out and breathe properly. Still, she had to fight the gag reflex trying to overtake her. Detective Martin moved closer.

He spoke behind a handkerchief, held over his nose and mouth. “Did he beat the others this badly?”

“It’s hard to tell what’s bruising and what’s lividity. The animals and insects didn’t do us any favors,” Rainey answered, dispassionately.

She had to be detached. How else could she deal with the torturous images she saw almost daily? She spent the last seven years researching serial killers, rapists, sadists and the like, by reading about them in reams of reports, interviewing them in prison, cataloguing their behavior, and going out into the field to help catch the new ones. It took time to develop the expertise needed to become one of the eight members of Rainey’s team. In conjunction with their extensive field experience and accrued wisdom, she and her coworkers had studied an extremely large volume of cases. An average law enforcement officer would pursue maybe one serial killer in a lifetime. Rainey’s team averaged twelve serial investigations a year.

Criminal behavioral analysis developed based on the idea, a person’s behavior directly resulted from that person’s thought processes. The repetitions of behavior in his or her crimes became recognizable. By comparing types of criminal behaviors and the people who committed those offenses, it was possible to classify the type of person who would most likely commit a crime with similar characteristics. In other words, Rainey Bell spent her days and most nights submerged in human depravity. Today would be no different.

Rainey stood up and moved back as Dr. Patrick approached. He removed a cross, suspended on a gold chain, from what remained of the neck. He placed it in an evidence bag and handed it to Rainey. She studied the cross while the doctor and his assistant cut the ropes fastening the victim to the tree, careful to leave the knots intact. Slowly, they lowered the body onto the plastic sheeting. Once all the bindings had been bagged and tagged, the doctor moved to the hands. He cut the tape with a scalpel only enough to see inside. Prying the hands open slightly, he reached in with tweezers and removed a small piece of folded paper. He placed the paper, stained with body fluids from decomposition, in another evidence bag and handed it to Rainey. She looked at the paper, unable to see what was written on it, but she knew from the way it was folded what it would say.

Detective Martin moved in to get a look at the contents of the bag. “I don’t remember seeing anything in the reports about a note in the previous victims’ hands.”

Danny spoke up. “We kept that out of the reports. We need one piece of evidence that only the killer knows. We would very much like to keep it that way.”

Rainey was glad Danny didn’t give Martin all the information about the notes. The fewer people that knew certain details the better.

“Sure, sure,” Martin replied. “So you don’t think this is a copy cat? This is the real deal?”

Rainey looked down at the body, trying to see the smiling face of Crystal Lynn Granger from the missing persons report. She said quietly, “Yeah, this is the real deal.”

#

Later in the evening, Rainey and Danny were shown into an empty conference room at the county sheriff’s office. They spread a stack of files across the long table in the center of the room. They just arrived from the morgue where Dr. Patrick confirmed that Crystal Lynn Granger suffered almost identical wounds as the first eight victims. The doctor had the unfortunate experience of recovering, now, his third victim in the case and had reviewed the other victims’ autopsy reports. He concluded that all of the women were victims of the same killer the media had nicknamed, “The Praying Hands Killer,” in reference to the victims’ final pose.

Crystal most likely died within hours of when she was last seen on the previous Saturday. Like the others, the retraction of her neck muscles indicated decapitation was the cause of death. Crystal’s body was in advanced decomposition when she was found, but there was still enough evidence to link the cases. All of the young women were bound, choked, beaten severely, savagely raped, and sodomized. The instrument used to behead the victims appeared to be consistent with a long, thin blade, possibly a sword or machete. The same weapon also made the cut to the abdomen. No semen was found and Dr. Patrick seemed to think all the rapes had been carried out with a large phallus or similar instrument. There was no sign of the head. It was assumed to be in the James River. Several of the other victims’ heads showed up weeks after the bodies were found, downstream from the scene of their murders and always in a river.

Rainey set about taping pictures of the known fatalities on a white board placed in the room for that purpose. Nine times she reached into a file folder and pulled out a picture of a teenage girl, full of life. Nine more times she taped a picture of each girl’s mutilated body beneath their corresponding smiling faces.

“Damn,” she said, under her breath.

Danny looked up from the corner where he was concentrating on pouring a cup of coffee. “What?”

“Nothing,” Rainey responded, then added quickly, “They were all so young with their whole lives ahead of them. Look at their faces. These are confident, athletic, beautiful girls. How does he get a girl like that to go with him willingly?”

“The news media all up and down 220 warned about this killer, but he has no trouble getting control of them,” Danny said.

Just that quickly the two analysts began the process of working the Granger murder case without an official pronouncement. They brainstormed, shared ideas, and formed hypotheses based on the evidence at hand and the knowledge they gained studying similar murderers. Back at Quantico, Rainey, along with the rest of the analysts, already generated a profile of this serial killer. Rainey and Danny were sent to evaluate the latest murder to see if the profile still applied. An hour later, they emerged from the room ready to give the local detectives their opinions on the case.

Often asked to work together, they made a good team. Rainey was always happy to go into the field with Danny. They were Academy classmates and joined the BAU at almost the same time. She never let him forget she was a full member of the team first. At thirty-nine, Danny was just two years older than Rainey. They had an almost sibling relationship on and off the job. He sometimes made her crazy, but she loved him anyway. He could always make her smile when his cherubic, freckled cheeks dimpled up in a grin. Rainey’s work didn’t allow her to smile often. Danny took her mind off the human misery they witnessed. She appreciated it more than he would ever know.

Rainey followed Danny into the squad room where the detectives and other officers had gathered. She was used to the way local law enforcement stared at them. It was as if she and Danny were magicians about to reveal the secrets behind a trick. Most people did not understand what the BAU did. Behavioral analysts were not psychics, but rather a group of people who were trained to recognize the undercurrents that link various criminal personality types. Rainey couldn’t tell them exactly who the perpetrator was, but she could tell them what kind of person to look for. It wasn’t magic. It was hard, life consuming work.

Rainey’s most recent and longest standing relationship, with Bobby, a cop in Arlington, had fallen victim to the job. He wanted to marry her, but he also wanted a wife he would find at home, not one he had to wonder when or if she was coming home. Rainey chose the job and they parted amicably, but she missed him. She missed his companionship most of all. He was her best friend. She didn’t have time for many friends. In a sad way, Rainey was glad to have this case to occupy her mind while her personal life fell apart. She needed a vacation, but she was determined to find this killer before taking time off. For now, she buried her needs and focused on the young girls whose pictures she had taped to the board.

With all eyes in the room on her, she began to speak. “The UNSUB in this case has now taken the lives of nine young women that we are aware of. You are looking for a white male between the ages of twenty and thirty. He will be above average to very good looking, with no outward physical deformities. He will be well liked and appear non-threatening. The young women this UNSUB takes are pretty, self-confident, in good physical condition, and live very low risk lifestyles. We think these women go with him willingly, with no resistance. They are comfortable and feel safe with him. If they felt threatened, these girls would have fought back. There is no evidence of a struggle at the scenes where we think he coaxed them into his vehicle.”

Danny jumped in. “The victims were all good girls, smart, popular, with strong ties to their churches. This type of girl does not go with a stranger willingly. She must have known the UNSUB, if only casually. You are looking for a man that travels Highway 220 for some reason. He gets off the highway and comes into these little towns, picks a victim, and then leaves again without anyone suspecting him. We know he travels this route frequently, going both north and south. He has a totally innocent reason to be here, to meet these girls, and then returns to take them at his pleasure.”

Rainey added, “We’re encouraging all the other law enforcement agencies involved to re-examine the victims’ history for any possible connection to traveling salesmen, businessmen, service technicians, etc. You should also check out local hotels for men fitting the profile, who stayed in hotels near the crime scenes, around the time of the murders or when the bodies were found. This guy would probably hang around a few days to watch the cops.”

Danny rejoined the conversation. “Due to the remoteness of his kill sites, he could have committed crimes we are unaware of. With that said, we think the first murders happened up here in Virginia, then he traveled south to North Carolina, and now he’s back up north. Highway 220 is significant to him for some reason. We have no evidence that he’s committed a crime like this anywhere else, but don’t be surprised if more bodies turn up near here. This is his territory.”