Stranded (14 page)

Gwen swallowed, hard. Maggie and Tully believed this killer had murdered others, but more than a dozen? This wasn’t what she had expected.

“Did you find another one of ’em?” Otis asked. He sat forward, his brow furrowed, not just curious now but offering her his confidentiality.

“Yes. We think so. She had on orange socks.”

This time Otis’s smile flickered and he raised one of his eyebrows, as if all of a sudden he had tasted something bad but he didn’t really want to complain. Finally he shook his head.

“I don’t think it’s one of Jack’s.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You see, Jack said he did all kinds of things. Different ways, what have you. So there wouldn’t be no pattern.” His tongue poked out and wet his lips.

Gwen waited.

“Last time that pretty little thing with the orange socks … you see, she had those on. Or that’s what Jack said. She was wearing those. He didn’t plan that.”

“What if he put orange socks on this one?”

Otis looked to the ceiling again and when his eyes came back down he was shaking his head. “Why’d you think he’d do that? That don’t make no sense at all. See, Jack likes to change things up. That’s why he sometimes does doubles.”

“Doubles?”

“I guess he travels a bit. Said he gets bored. Likes a challenge or what have you.”

Gwen’s mind raced over what she knew about Gloria Dobson and Zach Lester. She couldn’t remember anyone saying that they believed the killer took on both intentionally. Lester’s body had been so viciously decimated it had been presumed that he had gotten in the way of the killer’s real target: Gloria Dobson. Was it possible he had planned it that way? That he wanted to take on two victims at the same time?

“So where’d you find this one?”

Gwen hesitated. In a day or so the location would be all over the news, so there wasn’t a reason to keep it secret. But she knew criminals could draw facts out of their interviewers, lead them to drop enough details that they could cleverly manipulate and spin them back. She hadn’t gotten anything out of Otis that would help Maggie and Tully. And she sure as hell wasn’t going to give Otis anything more than he had given her.

Instead of telling him where they had found the last victim, she simply said, “We believe we’ve found his dumping ground.”

She watched his reaction, trying to see beyond the silly grin.

“Which one?” he asked.

Gwen’s stomach flipped. Again, was it boyish charm or was he just a very good liar?

“Are you saying he has more than one?”

She showed him her doubt, even a little impatience. And she saw that he noticed.

He laughed but it was a nervous laugh. Then he sat back, putting some distance between them, like perhaps she no longer deserved his confidentiality. He tilted his head again to look at her, studying her.

“That first reporter I told about the girl in the orange socks, he didn’t believe me. Warden Demon—that’s what we call him and I know he’s probably watching and listening behind that glass and I don’t even care if he makes me pay for telling you that—he didn’t believe me either. You decide you believe me, you come back and maybe we’ll talk some more.”

The entire time he said this, his tone remained gentle and polite. He didn’t sound angry, though his words certainly were. The grin hadn’t left either. Then Otis pushed away from the table
as far as his shackles allowed and he stood up, finished with her. Immediately a guard came through the door.

“The dumping ground is someplace in the Midwest,” Gwen told him, calling his bluff, giving him just enough rope to hang himself. She didn’t want to come back here and put herself through Demarcus’s full-body searches. If Otis was lying, she wanted to trip him up now and be done with it.

Otis nodded and squinted again like he needed to give it some thought.

“That’d be the one off I-29. Sioux City, Iowa.”

She stared at him. Was it simply a lucky guess?

“You should check the barn,” he told her. “I think that’s where he buried the biker guy with all the tattoos.”

Then he offered his hands to the guard to release his shackles from the iron rings in the floor. And Otis P. Dodd shuffled away without looking back at her.

CHAPTER 25

“He was pretty convincing,” Gwen told Maggie.

She called Maggie as soon as she got back to her office. She had been anxious to get back, asking for a rain check on lunch when AD Kunze offered. Now as she stood looking out the window and at the Potomac in the distance, now that she was back in familiar territory, she felt comfortable and—she hated to admit it—she felt
safe
. She also knew she could give Maggie a more objective assessment of Otis P. Dodd and what he had told her. And what he had
not
told her.

“But there’s something very odd about him,” Gwen added.

“Agent Alonzo said he’s mentally slow.”

“No, I don’t think he is. He’s like a giant hulk, only with a receding hairline and thick sideburns and a crazy lopsided grin that doesn’t go away. He speaks in this slow and easy Southern drawl that can easily disarm you. He actually comes off as polite and … God, I hate to admit this, but he’s almost charming.”

“But not mentally challenged?”

“Socially he’s stunted and that’s probably what causes people to think he might be slow. Also, he’s not well educated. He talks very simply. Double negatives, poor grammar in general. He may
not be the sharpest, but he’s definitely not dumb. In fact, I think he’s quite manipulative.”

“He wants people to believe he’s not smart?”

“Yes,” Gwen said, relieved that Maggie understood despite Gwen’s difficulty in explaining.

“So is he making this all up?”

Gwen let out a sigh and raked her fingers through her hair before she admitted, “That I don’t know. There were some things about him that were quite genuine. Things I don’t think he could have faked.

“For example, he genuinely appears to be uncomfortable in his own skin. He has the mannerisms of a thirteen-year-old boy. Awkward. Almost gawky. Facial tics that I don’t think he’s aware of. He reminded me of a teenager who woke up one day to find that he had grown six inches in the last month but in his mind he still wasn’t that tall.”

“Are you saying he has the maturity of a thirteen-year-old? Or just the physicality?”

“That’s a good question. I’m not sure I have an answer.”

“Well, he’s serving a twenty-five-year sentence for arson. From what I understand, he’s set more than thirty fires in the state of Virginia. It takes a certain maturity to get away with that many, even for a pyromaniac.”

“Oh, that reminds me. He said people call him a pyromaniac, but he says he’s a powermaniac.” As soon as she repeated his line Gwen realized she had been fooled. Before Maggie could respond, she said, “He’s playing me, isn’t he?”

“If he is, how did he know about the woman in the culvert? The first one in orange socks? He told them exactly where the body could be found.”

“And he couldn’t have randomly chosen Iowa along with Interstate 29 as a lucky guess, could he? I did prompt him by telling him it was in the Midwest.” Now Gwen wished she hadn’t even given him that much.

“No, I don’t think he could. That would be too big of a coincidence. Tully and I know how hard this has been to pinpoint and we had a map. That we found this killer’s dumping ground so quickly was dumb luck. It’s just started to leak out to the media so he couldn’t have heard about it on the news.”

There was a pause. Gwen realized neither of them knew what to think. She took the opportunity to talk about personal things for a few minutes. Gwen wanted to know how Tully was doing. He hadn’t been feeling well when he left yesterday morning. And Maggie wanted to know how the contractors were progressing on her house. A good deal of her two-story Tudor had been damaged in the fire. There was no connection to Otis. He had already been in prison.

Gwen tried to keep positive, constantly reminding Maggie that now she could rebuild her house exactly how she wanted it. But the contractors were already behind schedule and she knew it was driving Maggie crazy to not be able to check up on them. Gwen promised to do a drop-by.

As they wound down their conversation, Maggie suddenly asked, “Are you doing okay?”

“Yes, of course,” Gwen said too quickly and immediately wondered what tell she may have unconsciously given Maggie.

“You seem … I don’t know, tired?”

“Maybe a little.”

Maggie was quiet and Gwen knew she owed her more than that.

“I just had my yearly physical on Monday,” she added. “So I’m
fine.” She hadn’t heard back on any of the lab results but they were always good. She took care of herself. She didn’t feel ill. Truth was, she didn’t want to admit to Maggie that being back out at Quantico and interviewing criminals—all of it was having an adverse effect on her. Silly, but she didn’t want to admit that perhaps she had lost her edge … or worse, her nerve.

So she changed the subject. “Do you think Otis made that up about a body in the barn? Is there even a barn? When I talked to Tully this morning he said some of the buildings had already been bulldozed.”

“I would have sooner believed it if the barn had been bulldozed. Then a body could have been buried where it once stood. But the barn’s still there,” Maggie said. “And I’m not sure how easy it would be to bury someone under its floor.”

Then she added as an afterthought, “I guess we’ll see if Otis likes to serve up his facts mixed with a little fiction.”

CHAPTER 26

Ryder Creed had stopped at a Drury Inn just outside Kansas City. He and Grace had gotten a couple of hours of sleep. He didn’t need much. As Hannah had reminded him, he had slept through an entire day. But he wanted a shower and a hot breakfast and he was even able to add some scrambled eggs to Grace’s meal, too.

Creed was particular about where he stopped and more so about where he stayed. He always used this hotel chain whenever he could because it treated pets as family and provided a large grassed area for his dogs, as well as a nice clean room that didn’t smell like an ashtray. He never understood interstate motels and hotels that put pet owners in smoking rooms, like the two were even related. Even after a long day’s work, his dogs never smelled as bad as a smoker’s room.

His GPS had them arriving at the site in a few minutes. Creed had already begun observing and assessing the terrain, determining what he and Grace would deal with. Lots of foliage just starting to bloom, but this far north he knew it had still been chilly at night. The cold and snow of winter usually preserved much more than what they had to deal with in the South. A real winter with cold temperatures for weeks, if not months, of frozen earth slowed down decomposition.

It was only March. In these parts that meant fewer insects, another slowdown. Most investigators would prefer those conditions. After all, they wanted to find as much of the remains intact as possible. But cold temperatures made it more challenging for an air-scent dog that depended on finding bodies by smelling all the by-products of the decaying process—the gases, liquids, and acids.

Creed took in the blue sky, not a cloud as far as he could see. The weather forecast called for more of the same later today and tomorrow. It was a gorgeous spring day, already close to seventy degrees, with no wind.

A perfect day for decay
.

He caught himself smiling at that and wondered when he had started measuring the success of each day by his ability to find dead people. Maybe he really did need Hannah to schedule a search and rescue for him. Or even a bomb or drug search assignment. At least there was a fifty-fifty chance there’d be living people at the end of the search.

Grace had been watching all morning from the back of the Jeep. As soon as Creed turned into the long driveway she started getting excited.

“Sit back down,” he told her. “You know the rules.”

She wagged and squatted, pushing the envelope.

“All the way down.”

Finally, down went her butt. Her head stayed up, looking out at the surroundings. Halfway up the driveway a black-and-white sheriff’s department SUV blocked the gravel road. Creed still couldn’t see the farm buildings. Trees blocked his view. Before he stopped his Jeep a sheriff’s deputy was already walking down the middle of the road to head him off.