The Dying Hour (14 page)

T
he pain shooting along the nerves and muscles of Karen Harding’s wrists and arms now reached to her shoulders and neck.

With every ounce of strength she worked against her restraints. She couldn’t stop.

Push. Push. Push. Come on. You can do this. You can beat this. Push. Push. Push.

Then it happened.

In stretching and straining the rope around her aching wrists, Karen had succeeded in working enough play to pull the base of one palm over the other. Her stomach fluttered. She was astounded.

Raw and sore, her hand slid free. The rope dangled around her wrist. Karen cupped her face. Tears came. And with them hope.

Thank you, God.

The RV slowed. Then swayed. They were turning. From a paved road to a gravel road. Stones popcorned against the undercarriage, and Karen felt the ping-pong of direct hits beneath her. The RV tottered as the road rolled with hills, dipped with sudden valleys, twists, and turns. Branches slapped and brushed against the body. They must’ve entered a forest. The motor growled and the RV’s suspension sagged as they drove deeper into it. She sensed no other traffic. No civilization.

Only isolation.

Like the last time.

Her stomach muscles clenched and she began trembling, forcing herself not to remember the panicked face of the other woman.

Forcing herself to silence her screams.

Don’t think of the saw.

Karen prayed. They kept moving as the time passed. She could only guess at how much. An hour. Ninety minutes. Two hours. They were still on a back road. Where on earth were they? She pressed her face against her viewing crack. Daylight dappled under a canopy of trees and she sensed it was late afternoon, maybe early evening. As the RV continued deeper into the woods, the mattress overhead creaked. The woman above her groaned.

She was awake.

Good, Karen thought, forcing herself to subdue her fear and work on her plan. She started by trying to bring the feeling back into her hands, drawing her fingers into fists, driving her nails into her palms, massaging her wrists, her arms. Slowly, she felt warmth and strength trickle back into them.

It was impossible to reach the bindings around her ankles. She began rubbing at the numbness in her hips, thighs, and upper legs when, without warning, the RV jolted and shuddered.

The motor stalled.

In the quiet, Karen now heard the rush of water. A river. Birds. She looked through the crack. Still daylight. The motor restarted and the RV proceeded slowly, inching along, as if in a treacherous area. They took dramatic turns as they continued on for what seemed like half an hour before the RV stopped and the engine shut off.

The rush of water was louder now. Birds chirped. The RV vibrated a little as the reverend stepped from the driver’s seat, opened the door, and began working outside. She could hear and feel him adjusting the levelers. He was settling in.

Where were they?

The doors to the exterior storage bins opened and she heard him rummaging for tools, a lawn chair, and other items. Humming. She actually heard him humming. He must be confident that they were completely isolated. She strained to detect any sounds of other people.

Nothing.

A branch snapped and she heard his footfalls fading. Except for the water, all was quiet. As if the place were airless.

This was her chance.

Karen swallowed. Her pulse began to pick up as she whispered: “Hello, up there. Can you hear me?”

Knock.

“This is our chance. I’ve got my hands free. Can you see if he’s gone far?”

The mattress squeaked. It sounded like she was stretching, pressing against the window next to the bed. A blind swayed. The mattress creaked.

“Is he gone far?”

Knock.

“Okay, listen for him.”

Karen pressed her hands against the crack that paralleled the small door he used to give her food. It sprang a bit, leaking more light as she put more weight on it. She turned on her side to face it, bending her knees, wedging her legs and entire body against the back wall. Turning herself into a coiled spring, she leveraged all of her strength through her hands against the split. The wood gave way.

Crack!

She was startled by the noise.

“Is he still gone?”

A creak. The blind brushed. Knock.

On her first effort, Karen pushed the small wall by a few inches. She inhaled, summoned even more strength, and pushed even harder.

Crack-Crack!

Another few inches. Without pausing she harnessed a sudden searing anger and pushed for her life against this outrage. Pushing. Pushing. Gritting her teeth. Pushing. Almost crying out when the wall gave way and shot along the floor, presenting her with a jagged hole about the size of a phone book. She caught her breath and sent her arm through it. Reaching up for the bed above, Karen nearly sobbed at the warm touch of another human being as the woman clasped her bound hands around hers.

Karen cocked an ear for the reverend.

Nothing.

She resumed working on her door to freedom, using her shoulder and elbow to smash away bits of wood until it looked big enough to pass through. Her head went first, clearing the pointed, splintered sides. Her shirt got snagged as she worked her torso out, but she dismissed the pain, quickly dragging her bound legs from her foul coffin-prison.

Pulling herself to her knees, Karen stifled a scream.

The woman was about her age. She was clothed, gagged, and bound on the bed. She had been beaten badly. Her face was a grotesque mask of bloodied bruises. Cheeks and lips swollen. Her eyes swelled with fear.

“We’re getting away,” Karen whispered, gently brushing the woman’s hair. “My name is Karen Harding and we’re going to escape.”

She pulled off the duct tape around the woman’s mouth.

“Oh God,” the woman whispered, then sobbed.

Karen worked on the silver duct tape wrapped around the woman’s wrists. “Tell me your name.”

“Julie. Julie Kern. He’s crazy. He’s dangerous.”

“I know. He’s killed a girl already.”

Julie gulped air.

“No! My God! Oh Jesus!”

Thud!

Both of them froze. The sound was near. He had returned from gathering firewood. Karen quickly found the tail of the tape on Julie’s wrists and began unwrapping it until Julie’s hands were free.

Thud.

“Do your feet,” Karen whispered, going to her own bound ankles.

Thud.
He was out there chopping wood.

Freeing themselves fast, Karen and Julie crept toward the RV’s door, holding hands and holding their breath. Their bodies were weak, shaking from shock. Karen glimpsed the reverend’s back. He was alone, swinging an ax a few yards away.

She swallowed.

Near him she saw loops of chains and other tools.

He stopped swinging his ax and turned his head toward the RV as if listening. He approached, still gripping the long-handled ax. The women were paralyzed. Could they fight him? He was a big man. He stopped at the door. He didn’t enter. He bent down and disappeared from view. They heard a commotion from a storage bin as he retrieved a plastic bucket and headed for the riverbank, down a terraced slope, some thirty yards away.

Karen watched the top of his head bob in and out of sight.

Finally it vanished as he crouched to scoop water with the bucket.

Gently, she turned the RV’s door handle. The women stepped out in silence, closing the door soundlessly behind them. As the rush of the river water filled the air, they padded to the rear of the RV, then around it, out of sight, coming to the road.

They ran for their lives.

A
t his desk in the Benton County Sheriff’s Office, Detective Brad Kintry absorbed every word of the Spokane Police Department’s most up-to-date file on Roxanne Palmer.

It had been sent that morning by the Spokane detective handling Roxanne’s case there. Kintry had been waiting for the report on Roxanne’s life in Spokane, to enhance what they knew about her murder on Hanna Larssen’s farm in the Rattlesnake Hills.

Kintry would spend the rest of his day, as Lieutenant Buchanan advised, submitting Roxanne’s case to several critical databases designed to help track repeat violent offenders, including serial killers.

He went to his computer and called up the site for the Washington Attorney General’s Homicide Investigation Tracking System, known as HITS, a statewide computerized database used to analyze violent crimes committed in the Pacific Northwest. It drew upon cases in Washington, Oregon, and parts of Idaho.

Using his law enforcement password, Kintry logged into the site and entered data on Benton County homicide file number 05-6784-54. He was a fan of HITS, one of the most respected crime-fighting systems in the world, because it worked.

It had emerged in the 1980s, in the wake of the hunt for people like Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer. The fact that serial killers were often mobile, crossing into different jurisdictions, drove home the need for investigators to quickly share key data that could link cases and result in an arrest.

HITS catalogued murders, rapes, and missing persons, holding data on thousands of cases. Information included crime scene evidence, characteristics about geographic location, weapons, vehicles, suspects, and the victim.

Kintry liked how the system made it easy for agencies to search and analyze information on their case, while comparing it with cases submitted by other agencies. If you got a hit, bingo, you were on the line to the investigator handling a case linked to yours, opening the door to more information and a chance at solving the thing.

Another advantage Kintry liked was how HITS acted like a case file checklist, ensuring that you covered the basics, such as the victim’s known associates, which in Roxanne’s case was being handled by Spokane. They’d already provided a list in their report. Mostly prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers, customers, and social workers. Kintry took great care to ensure that he entered their names with the proper spellings, and their aliases. Benton County could look for a link to those names here.

The system also called for checks on all known convicted killers and sex offenders. That would include those living in Roxanne’s Spokane neighborhood and surrounding counties. And those residing in Benton County. Buchanan already had some of the other detectives in the division going hard on that, shaking down the sex offender registry, parolees, checking alibis, rumors, and any data from informants.

Kintry paused to consider Karen Harding’s case in Sawridge County. Detective Hank Stralla had told him they were going to submit it to HITS. Kintry would check with Stralla soon, to again compare Roxanne’s case against Karen’s. They were looking for a thread, a link, anything, no matter how small, to determine if the two cases were connected.

Nothing had surfaced.

Nothing except that the women were similar victim types. The same body type, age, race, and last seen outside, in an environment that made them vulnerable to just about anyone who happened by, Kintry thought.

Finished entering his data, he queried the system.

No hits.

He got a fresh coffee and returned to begin submitting his case to the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, known as ViCAP. Similar to HITS, the FBI’s national computerized database also analyzed, collated, and searched for links in murders and violent crime cases submitted to it.

Kintry was fascinated by the history of the FBI’s system. It was conceived by Los Angeles Police Detective Pierce Brooks in the 1950s. He was investigating a killer who was luring his victims by placing ads in Los Angeles area newspapers seeking women to model. The killer would tie them up, photograph them, rape them, then hang them. Brooks suspected the killer was likely committing murders beyond his jurisdiction, so he went to the public library to look for similar murders in out-of-town newspapers. Sure enough, his theory paid off. He discovered other cases with enough links and evidence to track, identify, and arrest the killer.

Brooks conceived of a system where details in crimes of neighboring jurisdictions were stored in an easily accessible system. The FBI picked up on his idea and worked with him over the years to create a central computerized system for police to quickly share information on mobile suspects. The guy was a visionary, Kintry thought.

ViCAP asked investigators to answer close to one hundred questions detailing every known aspect of the victim, the suspect, the crime scene, including key fact evidence, known as holdback. Once a case was submitted, FBI analysts continually compared all submitted files with others from across the country, searching for matches, signatures, patterns.

When they got a hit, detectives were alerted.

The most unique aspect of Roxanne’s homicide was its ritualistic nature, the series of Xs, burned into the skin and the letters VOV, over the heart. Kintry was a little nervous providing his holdback, but if it was key to solving the case, then he’d give it up. Besides, the FBI was constantly assuring investigators that their holdback was secure.

Dismemberment, full or partial, even mutilation, was not uncommon in stranger-on-stranger homicides. No, it was the markings the killer had left on her body, his signature, that flagged the case.

The mark of a monster.

Not far from Kintry’s office, Benton County Coroner Morris Pitman removed his bifocals as he ruminated over the gruesome violation the killer had inflicted on Roxanne Palmer.

Massive tearing of vaginal and rectal tissue was consistent with the application of a sixteenth-century torture instrument known as a Venetian Pear. Then there were the amputations, the decapitation.

The strange markings were familiar to Pitman, but just how and why, he couldn’t say. Increasingly, his secret frustration had been turning to anger at himself. He couldn’t sleep, he’d lost his appetite.

He went back to his autopsy report and photographs, zeroing in on the manner in which the killer had branded her. There were eleven small distinguishing Xs, about a quarter to half inch in scale, which trailed along her upper shoulder and leg-hip areas.

There were the letters VOV, about an inch in scale, burned over her heart. What the letters signified was a mystery to Pitman.

He stared long and hard at the autopsy photos and kept staring until a small light of hope glimmered in the corner of his mind. The wounds were consistent with ancient torture practices and variations during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In some corners, the X signified the church at war during the Inquisition. An executioner would brand his name, or mark, into enemies of the faith as a warning to others, an effective, terrifying tactic.

But how did Pitman know this? How did he specifically know this?

He scanned his office for his textbooks. A memory was coming. He thought back to his conferences, classes, his own university days in Seattle at the University of Washington. He had first come across ancient torture during his student days. Now, was it a lecture? Or a textbook? He was going back some forty years. He remembered a reference to this very specific phenomena. Where? Where had he seen it?

Damn. This was futile. Pitman reached for his phone, pressing the number for his office assistant.

“Kathy, can you do me a favor?”

“Yes, Morris.”

“Call the University of Washington’s history department and get them to look up a course reading and textbook list from the mid 1960s on a course called the History of Torment and Torture.”

“My word, they had such a course?”

“They did. And I need the complete lecture and reading list faxed to us right away.”

“Okeydoke, boss.”

A few hours later, Kathy stood in his doorway holding the faxed pages.

“Don’t go away.”

Pitman slid on his glasses, studied the list and the titles, maybe a dozen in all.

“This could be it.” He half smiled, passing the list back to Kathy.

“Call the University library, the state library, and the Library of Congress if necessary and see if we can arrange an emergency loan on each book, and I mean each and every title on that list, and get them shipped to us ASAP.”