Snake Skin (13 page)

"Why? Think you have something?"

"I don't know what it means, but I was
right. Her hard drive was scrubbed."

"English, Taylor."

"A program was used to overwrite all the
sectors multiple times. It's the same thing the government does to
clean hard drives before disposing of them."

"You mean a fourteen-year-old kid somehow
got access to a government program?" Boy, that opened up a whole
huge can of worms.

"That's the problem. These programs have
been around for years—they're used by every level of government and
also available on the web. Anyone could have sent it to her or she
could have googled it for herself."

"Well hell, that doesn't help." Lucy
squeezed a lemon into her water. It felt so good to wring the life
out of something right now. A stray seed caught in her wedding ring
and she flicked it clear.

"It might if I can trace it back to its
source. Anyway, I'm working a reconstruction program. It compares
each sector on the hard drive then—"

"How long?"

"Maybe as early as tomorrow. If we're
lucky."

"I need it sooner. And don't let up on her
ISP. We need her emails and instant messages."

"They promised them this afternoon."

"Hey, is Fletcher still around?"

"The ICE guy? Haven't seen him. But you
know, some people actually take weekends off. Besides, I've got
things covered here." Taylor was territorial with sharing "his"
cases with other agencies.

"He worked a bust with me this morning."

"How come I wasn't in on it?"

"Because it wasn't your case." It was like
running a nursery school, reassuring the boys they'd all have their
chance to play. "Anyway, do me a favor and call him, let him know
I'll need him tomorrow morning. We're going to bring in the
Canadians—it's some kind of bank holiday up north this weekend and
they're taking advantage of the long weekend."

His snort of disapproval carried through the
phone. "Yeah, some holiday, taking a tour to meet a little kid for
sex."

"Call me when you find anything." She hung
up just as Burroughs slid into the seat across from her.

"So, how's your kid?" he asked, nodding to
her phone.

Guilt flushed her. She needed to call home.
"It was Taylor. Nothing new."

"Uh-huh." He looked at her over top of his
menu. "Taylor. He has a thing for you, you know."

She waved his comment aside. Last thing she
needed was watercooler gossip. "He's just excited. First big
case."

"I can't get over how well orchestrated this
was," were his first words after ordering a bacon cheeseburger and
onion rings. "Scripted."

Lucy shook her head
without even realizing it. Stopped herself and masked her emotions.
Best not to get too involved—baring that, at least not to reveal
her involvement. But Ashley's artwork had tipped the scales for
her. Such raw pain, gnawing despair.
"Not by Ashley."

"Of course by Ashley. Who else?"

"No. I don't think she's in control."

"So you think she was coerced? That she's a
victim?" He tilted his head, thinking, then frowned. "No. I don't
buy it. She's been planning this a long time—maybe all summer if
what the mom said is right. She had a definite objective, knew
exactly what she was doing, we just need to figure out where she's
headed."

"We can't write her off as a routine
runaway," Lucy protested. She didn't care if the evidence so far
indicated otherwise, she had to go with her gut.

"Oh, I don't think there's anything routine
about it. I think Ashley's leading us on a wild goose chase—she is
in control. And we're just puppets."

"She's only fourteen for chrissakes."

"A fourteen year-old-who is smart, knows
what she wants, and had the resources and freedom to put her plan
in action. Trust me, she's playing us."

Even though she disagreed with him, it was
too early in the case to ignore any possibility. "Okay, walk me
through it."

"Right. She leaves from school, why? To buy
time."

"Plus mobility," Lucy put in. "No bus stop
near her house and she doesn't drive."

"So she must have wiped her computer before
she left for school. Something like that has to take several hours
at least."

"Not to mention taking the camera card and
setting up her alibi with her mom last week."

"What fourteen-year-old thinks that far
ahead? When I was her age, I couldn't remember to make sure I had
clean underwear for the next day." Burroughs tapped his fork handle
against the tabletop as he thought. "Told you. Scripted."

Their food arrived and both of them dug in.
Lucy had ordered a breakfast platter, tons of protein, it should
keep her going until she stopped to eat again. Lord only knew when
that might be.

"What about money?" he asked, wiping ketchup
from his chin.

Lucy shrugged. "No bank account or credit
cards that she could access. Mom gave her twenty a week in
allowance, who knows how much she had on hand in cash."

"Twenty a week? Sheesh, don't tell my kids.
They get five and that's only if they do all their chores."

They finished eating and returned to the
Impala. Lucy stood with her car door open for a few minutes while
Burroughs cranked the AC's blower. She remembered warm Indian
summers when she was a kid in Latrobe, the air heavy with the smell
of yeast and hops from the Rolling Rock brewery, but never this
hot.

While she waited, she leafed through
Ashley's binder again. Raw images of screaming mouths, tortuous
geometric shapes resembling mazes with no escapes, and few images
of hope.

On the last page, set apart by several blank
pages, was a portrait. A young man slaying a demon. Standing beside
him, hidden by shadows, was a feminine figure with a sword drawn.
It was hard to tell if she was poised to stab the man in the back
or come to his aid.

Which was Ashley? The victim cowering in
shadows….or the assassin, ready to strike?

Chapter 11

Saturday, 3:47 pm

"Let's get back to the house." Lucy climbed
into the broiling car.

"You think the mom is hiding something from
us?"

"No. But I need to get a better feeling for
Ashley. What kind of kid she was, what kind of person she would
turn to for help. There has to be something in the house."

Lucy's phone rang when they were about three
miles away from the Yeager's house. It was Walden. "We may have
something. A body."

"Where?" she asked, grabbing a pen and her
notebook.

"Tastee Treet on Route 22 just past
Murrysville. A young woman. While working the scene, they found
Ashley's ID."

"Is it Ashley?" Her voice remained neutral
but her molars clamped down with a pulverizing force that spiraled
pain into her jaw.

"Don't know for sure."

"We're about ten minutes away. Stay with the
mom. I don't want her hearing anything about this until we know
what's going on."

"No problem."

She hung up and repeated what he'd said to
Burroughs. The slightest frown was Burroughs' only response as he
steered the Impala through the traffic. Minutes later, she spotted
the crime scene: fire truck, ambulance, a smattering of police cars
from several jurisdictions all crowded a tiny dirt parking lot. Men
in uniform milled around the outside of the ramshackle shack that
housed the Tastee Treet.

Burroughs slid the Impala between an
Allegheny County Sheriff's vehicle and the Murrysville volunteer
fire rescue squad. Two kids in their late teens, wearing
firefighter turnout pants, sat on the rear bumper of the squad.
They looked up at Burroughs and Lucy but didn't meet their eyes,
instead their gaze slid away, back down to the hard-packed dirt.
Lucy spotted a puddle of vomit nearby and guessed it belonged to at
least one of them.

The building itself was small, maybe 700
square feet. It listed to one side. Lucy had the urge to tell the
group of cops and firemen leaning against the far wall, laughing
and smoking, to move around to the opposite side of the building,
push the other way and try to re-balance things. White paint was
peeling from around fogged windows, the roof was missing several
shingles and the cardboard signs with the daily specials had rotted
in place within their plexiglass holders.

She pushed open the front door, setting off
a much too cheerful jangling from a brass bell. A half dozen police
officers were gathered at the counter, laughing.

"Jeezit, it's not a carnival," she
muttered.

"They heard the FBI was coming, didn't want
to miss their chance at the big time," Burroughs said.

"Help me clear them out." She plastered a
smile on her face and addressed the crowd. "Gentlemen, I'm
Supervisory Special Agent Guardino from the FBI. Who is in charge
here?"

An Allegheny County deputy turned from where
he'd been chatting with the other men at the counter. "Well now,
Special Agent from the FBI, we've just been trying to figure out
why you'd be interested in our little case." He shifted his duty
belt, adjusting the weight, and glanced at his audience. "This sure
as hell ain't no case of domestic terrorism."

"Unless the French did it," a Murrysville
officer put in. "Get it? French fries?"

The few chuckles and nods he received in
response gave Lucy some idea of what she might be dealing with. And
why the two boys out front had lost their lunches.

"I called the FBI," Chief Deputy Dunmar said
as he entered from the door behind the counter. "Get your butt off
that counter, Lassiter, and clear these people out of here." The
deputy jumped to his feet. "Now!"

Lucy gave Burroughs a nod. "See, that's how
it's done." She beamed at Dunmar and for once it wasn't fake.
"Thank you, Chief Deputy. Mind running over things for myself and
Detective Burroughs?"

"No problem at all," he replied, his shirt
buttons threatening to spring off as he puffed up with importance.
"If you follow me."

He led them behind the counter, past the
soft serve machines and deep fryers. One of the fryers was covered
with clear plastic, a smattering of black fingerprint powder
visible beneath it.

A small room was chiseled out of the back
corner of the building. In it there was a card table and two
folding chairs. A young woman with blond hair pulled back into a
hair net and wearing a polyester, robin-egg blue uniform, sat at
the table, her face buried in her hands, crying. A uniformed police
officer stood beside her, looking miserable.

"This our reporting witness?" Burroughs
asked in a low voice that barely carried over the sound of the
girl's weeping.

Dunmar nodded. "But everything you want to
see is out here."

He pushed open an emergency exit door in the
rear of the establishment. Here there was a green metal dumpster
and several large air-tight liquid waste containers. One of them
had the lid off and a foul stench emanating from it.

Burroughs hid his retch with a cough. Dunmar
didn't bother to hide anything. Instead, he freshened the wad of
chaw in his mouth and stood at the door, not going any closer.

The smell wasn't the usual odor of decomp.
Instead, it blended odors of burnt flesh, fried doughnuts, and
French fries into a sweet and greasy melody of death.

Lucy breathed through her mouth, leaving
Burroughs fumbling for his notebook as she approached the vat. If
not for the burnt flesh part, the smell might have been at a home
at any McDonalds or Krispy Kreme.

"Actually not too bad once you get used to
it," the guy from the medical examiner's said. He squatted on the
far side of the container, taking photos.

"I think that's what bothers me the most."
Lucy stayed clear as he positioned a ruler beside a wet footprint
and shot another picture. "Okay if I take a look?"

"Yeah, the crime scene guys finished awhile
ago. I was just keeping busy until you got here. I'm ready to roll
anytime you are."

"Roll?"

He nodded to a hand truck parked beside his
van. "Thought it'd be best to take the whole vat in. Empty her in
the lab, save all the trace."

"Good idea." She looked over her shoulder.
Burroughs was now engaged in earnest conversation with Dunmar,
comparing notes on the Steelers' home opener. Lucy crept closer to
the barrel. It stood chest high, she had to bounce up on her
tiptoes to get a good peek inside.

Maybe Burroughs was the smart one. Avoiding
this. A woman had been folded into the vat of oil.

Her hair was brown, long like Ashley's,
swirling around in a mass of over cooked French fries and other
debris congealed into a waxy yellow substance that caked the top of
the liquid.

"Rigor's come and gone," the assistant
Medical Examiner said. "She's been dead since sometime Friday.
Can't say for sure until we get her back for the PM. Want to see
more?"

"Yes, please." Lucy forced a polite smile,
even though every instinct in her body absolutely, positively did
not
want to see more of the mutilated corpse.

He drew on a thick, black rubber glove that
covered him up to his armpit and reached in, snagging the corpse's
hair and pulling her head up. Golden brown oil ran off the curves
and planes of the woman's face and neck. What it left in its wake
was something Lucy was certain she wouldn't be able to banish from
her dreams for months.

There was no face. The eyes were gone, faint
rims of the orbital bones gleaming white around a red, swollen mass
of blisters. The nose looked like some creature had bitten it off,
leaving behind a chalky white mass of irregular tissue. And the
mouth—no lips, no tongue, a few teeth gaping from a large hole
gnawed from grey-white-red swollen flesh.

"Did the same with her hands," the ME said.
"I figure he maxed out the fryer to about 400 degrees then plunged
her face into it, held her there a good long time."