The Killing Hour (33 page)

CHAPTER 44

Wytheville, Virginia
3:24
A
.
M
.
Temperature: 94 degrees

“
YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND, I DON
’
T THINK HE
’
S WELL.
”

“Your brother may have kidnapped and killed over ten women. Being not well is the least of his problems!”

“I don’t think he meant to hurt them—”

“Holy shit!” Mac drew up short. He was looming above Ennunzio, who was now slumped on the edge of his bed. Quincy and Rainie had arrived and guarded the door, while in the right-hand corner, Kimberly kept watch over Nora Ray. Kimberly had taken the girl’s needle away. Hostility in the small room, however, remained sky-high. “You’re the caller!”

Ennunzio bowed his head.

“What the hell? You’ve been playing me from the start!”

“I was not trying to play you. I’ve been trying to help—”

“You said the caller might be the killer. What was that all about?”

“I wanted you to take the calls more seriously. Honest to God, I’ve been trying very hard to assist, I just don’t know much myself.”

“You could’ve given me your brother’s name.”

“It wouldn’t have done you any good. Frank Ennunzio doesn’t exist. However he’s living now, it’s under an assumed name. Please, you have to understand, I haven’t actually spoken to my brother in over thirty years.”

That brought them all to attention. Mac frowned, not liking this newest bit of news. He crossed his arms over his chest and started to pace the tiny room.

“Maybe you should start from the beginning,” Quincy said quietly.

Ennunzio tiredly nodded his head. “Five years ago, I started work on a case in Atlanta, a kidnapping involving a young doctor’s child. I was called in to analyze notes being delivered to the house. While I was there, two girls from Georgia State University also vanished. I clipped the articles from the newspaper. At the time, I chalked it up to an investigative hunch. I was working a disappearance, here was another disappearance, you never knew. So I started to follow the case of the missing college girls as well. That summer and then the next summer, when two other girls also went missing during a heat wave.

“By now, I knew the case of the young girls had nothing to do with my own. I was dealing with what turned out to be a string of ransom cases. A very cool young man who worked at one of the more prominent country clubs was using his position to identify and stalk wealthy young families. It took us three years, but we finally identified him, in large part from his ransom notes.

“The heat-wave kidnappings, however, were an entirely different beast. The UNSUB always struck young, college-aged girls traveling in pairs. He’d leave one body next to a road and the second in some remote location. And he always sent a note to the press. Clock ticking . . . heat kills. I’ve remembered that note for a long, long time. It’s not the sort of thing you forget.”

Ennunzio’s voice broke off. He stared down at the carpet, lost now in his own thoughts.

“What did your brother do?” Rainie spoke up quietly. “Tell us about Frank.”

“Our father was a hard man.”

“Some fathers are.”

“He worked in the coal mines, not far from where we were today. It’s an unforgiving life. Backbreaking labor by day. Brutal poverty by night. He was a very angry person.”

“Angry people often become physical,” Rainie commented.

Ennunzio finally looked up at her. “Yes. They do.”

“Did your brother kill your father?”

“No. The mines got him first. Coal dust built up in my father’s lungs, he started to cough, and then one day we didn’t have to fear him anymore.”

“Ennunzio, what did your brother
do
?”

“He killed our mother,” Ennunzio whispered. “He killed the woman we had spent all of our childhood trying to protect.”

His voice broke again. He didn’t seem capable of looking at anyone anymore. Instead his shoulders sagged, his head fell forward, and on his lap he began to wring his hands.

“You have to understand . . . After the funeral, our mother went a little crazy. She started yelling at Frank that he was ungrateful, and next thing we both knew, she went at him with my father’s belt. At first, Frank didn’t do anything. He just lay there until she wore herself out. Until she was so exhausted from hitting him that she couldn’t even lift her own arm. And then he got off the floor. He picked her up. So gently. I remember that clearly. He was only fourteen, but he was already big for his age and my mother was built like a bird. He cradled her in his arms, carried her to her room and laid her down on the bed.

“He told me to get out of the house. But I couldn’t leave. I stood in the middle of the cabin, while he got down the oil lamps and started pouring the oil around the rooms. I think I knew then what he was going to do. My mother just watched. Lying on the bed, her chest still heaving. She didn’t utter a word. Didn’t even lift her head. He was going to kill her, maybe kill all of us, and I think she was grateful.

“He covered the cabin in oil. Then he went to our stove and dumped the burning coals onto the floor. The whole house went up with a single whoosh. It was an old wood cabin, dry from age, never burdened by insulation. Maybe the house was grateful, too; it had never been a very happy place. I don’t know. I just remember my brother grabbing my hand. He pulled me through the door. Then we stood outside and watched our house burn. At the last minute, my mother started screaming. I swore I saw her standing right in the middle of those flames, her arms over her head, shrieking to high heaven. But there was nothing anyone could do for her by then. Nothing anyone could do for any one of us.

“My brother walked me to the road. He told me someone would be by soon. Then he said, ‘Just remember, Davey. Heat kills.’ He disappeared into the woods and I haven’t seen or talked to my brother since. One week later, I was placed with a foster family in Richmond and that was that.

“When I turned eighteen, I returned to the area briefly. I wanted to visit my parents’ headstone. I found a hole had been gouged into the marker, and inside I found a rolled-up piece of paper that read, ‘Clock ticking . . . planet dying . . . animals weeping . . . rivers screaming. Can’t you hear it? Heat kills.’ I think that summarizes my brother’s last thoughts on the subject.”

“Everything must die?” Kimberly spoke up grimly.

“Everything of beauty.” Ennunzio shrugged. “Don’t ask me to explain it completely. Nature was both our refuge—where we went to escape our father—and our prison—the isolated area where no one could see what was really happening. My brother loved the woods, he hated the woods. He loved our father, he hated our father. And in the end, he loved my mother and he loathed her. For him, I think the lines are all blurred. He hates what he loves and loves what he hates and has himself tangled in a web he’ll never escape.”

“So he seeks heat,” Quincy murmured, “which purifies.”

“And uses nature, which both saved him and betrayed him,” Rainie filled in. She turned troubled eyes toward Nora Ray. “And how did you end up in here? I thought you never knew who attacked you and your sister.”

“Voice,” Nora Ray said. “I remember . . . I recognized his voice. From when the man came walking up to our window and asked if we needed help.”

“Did you see his face?”

“No.”

“So the man you heard that night could’ve been Dr. Ennunzio, or it could’ve been his brother, or, in all honesty, it could’ve been anyone who sounds like either of them. Don’t you think you should’ve mentioned this to one of us, before you came charging in with a syringe?”

Nora Ray stared at Rainie with hard eyes. “She wasn’t your sister.”

Rainie sighed. “So what are you going to do now, Nora Ray?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you believe Dr. Ennunzio’s story?”

“Do you?” asked the girl.

“I’m thinking about it. If we turn you loose, are you going to attack Dr. Ennunzio again?”

“I don’t know.” Her overbright gaze swung to Ennunzio. “So maybe it was your brother instead of you. You should still be ashamed of yourself! You’re an FBI agent, you’re supposed to be protecting people. Instead, you knew something about a killer and you said nothing.”

“I had nothing to add, not a name, not a location—”

“You knew his past!”

“I didn’t know his present. All I could do was watch and wait. And I swear, the minute I saw my brother’s note suddenly resurface in a Virginia paper, I mailed a copy to the GBI. I wanted Special Agent McCormack involved. I did everything in my power to get the police’s attention. Surely that must count for something—”

“Three girls are dead,” Nora Ray spat out. “You tell me how valuable your efforts have been.”

“If I could’ve been sure . . .” Ennunzio murmured.

“Coward,” Nora Ray countered savagely and Ennunzio finally shut up.

Quincy took a deep breath. He regarded Rainie, Mac, and Kimberly. “So where does this leave us?”

“Still short one killer and still short one victim,” Mac said. “Now we’ve got motive, but that’s only going to help us at trial. Bottom line is that it’s the middle of the night, scary hot, and another girl’s still out there. So cough it up, Ennunzio. He’s your brother. Start thinking like him.”

The forensic linguist, however, merely shook his head. “I understood some of the clues in the beginning, only because I’ve also spent a lot of time outdoors. But the evidence you’re seeing now—water samples, sediment, pollen. That’s way over my head. You need the experts.”

“Doesn’t your brother have any favorite places?”

“We grew up dirt poor in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. The only favorite places we knew were the ones we could walk to.”

“You knew the cave.”

“Because I used to be into caving. And of all the places Frank’s chosen, that’s been the most local.”

“So we should look at the Appalachian Mountains, stay in the area,” Rainie spoke up.

Both Mac and Ennunzio, however, were shaking their heads.

“My brother’s methodology may be influenced by the past,” Ennunzio told them, “perhaps even triggered by the trauma of heat spells, but the places themselves aren’t tied to our family. I didn’t even know he lived in Georgia.”

“Ennunzio’s right,” Mac said. “Whatever hang-ups got this guy started, he’s moved beyond them now. He’s sticking to his game plan, and that means diversity. Wherever we are now, the last girl will be the farthest point away.”

“We need Ray’s team,” Kimberly said.

“I’ll go check on them,” Mac said.

But in the end, he didn’t have to. Ray met him halfway across the parking lot, already on his way to Mac’s room.

“We have a winner,” the USGS worker said excitedly. “Lloyd’s soil samples turned out to contain three kinds of pollen from three types of trees—bald cypress, tupelo gum, and red maple—while the crushed plant matter is actually a sorely abused log fern. The shoes were also covered in peat moss. Which could only mean . . .”

“We’re going to DisneyLand?”

“Better. The Dismal Swamp.”

Four
A
.
M
., the group made their decision to divide and conquer. Quincy, as elder statesman, once more inherited the responsibility of contacting the official FBI case team. He and Rainie also assumed watch over Nora Ray, whom nobody trusted alone.

The USGS team members were packing up their gear and loading up their vehicles. According to Kathy Levine’s debriefing, the Dismal Swamp was six hundred square miles of bugs, poisonous snakes, black bears, and bobcats. Trees grew to stupendous sizes, while a dense underbrush of brier bushes and wild vines made sections of the swamp virtually impassable.

They needed water. They needed insect repellent. They needed machetes. In other words, they needed all the help they could get.

Mac and Kimberly had Ennunzio in the back of their car. They would follow Ray’s team to the site. That gave them seven people to search an area that had daunted even George Washington. While the sun once again peeked over the horizon, and the mosquitoes started to swarm.

“Ready?” Mac asked Kimberly as he climbed into the car.

“Ready as I’m gonna get.”

His gaze rested on Ennunzio in the rearview mirror. The agent was wearily rubbing his head; he looked like he had just aged twenty years. “Why didn’t they arrest your brother after the fire?” Mac asked crisply.

“I don’t think they ever found him.”

“Did you tell anyone what happened?”

“Of course.”

“Because you never hold back the truth.”

“I’m a federal agent,” Ennunzio said curtly. “I know what needs to be done.”

“Good, because finding this next girl is only half the battle. After that we go after your brother, and we don’t stop until we’ve found him.”

“He’ll never surrender. He’s not the type to spend the rest of his life in a cage.”

“Then you’d better be prepared,” Mac said grimly, “because we’re not the types to let him go.”

CHAPTER 45

Dismal Swamp, Virginia
6:33
A
.
M
.
Temperature: 96 degrees

HER MOTHER WAS YELLING AT HER.
“I sent you to college for an education. So you could make something of yourself. Well, you’ve certainly made something, now haven’t you?”

Tina yelled back. “Woman, bring me a goddamn glass of water. And get those tuxedoed waiters out of here.”

Then she sat down and watched the blue butterfly.

Water. Lakes. Ice-cold streams. Potato chips. Oh, she was hot, hot, hot. Skin on fire. She longed to peel it off in strips. Peel down to the bone and roll in the muck. Wouldn’t that feel good?

The flesh on her forearm squirmed. She watched bloody sores ripple and ooze. Maggots. Horrible little white worms. Writhing under her flesh, feasting on meat. She should pull them out and pop them in her mouth. Would they taste like chicken?

Pretty blue butterfly. How it glided along the air. Dancing up, up, and away. She longed to dance like that. To dance and glide and soar. To drift off to the comforting shade of a giant beech tree . . . or lake . . . or cool mountain stream.

Itched. Her skin itched and itched. She scratched and scratched. Didn’t make a difference. Hot, hot, hot. So thirsty. Sun, coming up. Going to burn, burn, burn. She would cry, but no moisture left. She slathered on the mud, flattened out puddles and sought desperately to wet her tongue.

Her mother was hollering at her again.
Now look at what you’ve done
. She didn’t have the strength to yell back.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. Then she closed her eyes. She dreamt of deep Minnesotan winters. She dreamt of her mother holding out her arms to her. And she prayed the end would happen quick.

It took over two hours to drive due east to the swamp. The visitors’ entrance was in North Carolina on the east side. Operating under the assumption that the killer would stick to the Virginian playing field, however, Kathy Levine led their little caravan to a hiking entrance in Virginia, on the west side. All three vehicles pulled into the dirt parking lot and Kathy, the official search-and-rescue member of their party, assumed command. First, she handed out whistles.

“Remember, three blasts signifies the international call for distress. Get in trouble, stay put, blow away, and we’ll find you.”

Next, she handed out maps. “I downloaded these from the Internet before we left the motel. As you can see, the Dismal Swamp is basically a rectangle. Unfortunately for us, it’s a very large rectangle. Looking at only the Virginia half, we’re still talking over a hundred thousand acres. That’s going to be a bit much for seven people.”

Mac took one of the maps. The printout showed a large, shadowed area, crisscrossed by a maze of lines. He followed the various markings with his finger. “What are these?”

“The dashed lines represent hiking and biking trails bisecting the swamp. The broader lines here are unpaved roads. The thin dark lines reveal the old canals, most hand-dug by slaves hundreds of years ago. When the water levels were higher, they would use the canals to harvest the cypress and juniper trees.”

“And now?”

“Most of the canals are marshy messes. Not enough water for a canoe, but not dry enough to walk.”

“What about the roads?”

“Wide, flat, grassy; you don’t even need four-wheel drive.” Levine already understood where he was going with this. She added, “Technically speaking, visitors aren’t permitted to bring vehicles onto the roads, but as for what happens under the cover of night . . .”

Mac nodded. “Okay. So our guy needs to get an unconscious, hundred-and-twenty-pound body into the heart of the swamp. He’d want to take her someplace remote, where she wouldn’t immediately be found by others. He’d need a road for access, however, because carrying a woman through a hundred thousand acres would be a bit much. Where does that leave us?”

They all studied the map. The marked hiking paths were fairly centralized, with a clear grid pattern occupying most of the west side of the swamp. Closest to them was a simple loop labeled a boardwalk trail. They immediately dismissed that as too touristy. Farther in lay the dark oval shadow of Lake Drummond, also highly populated with hiking trails, roads, and feeder ditches. Beyond the lake, however, moving farther east, north, and south, the map became a solid field of gray, only periodically bisected by old, unpaved roads. This is where the swamp became a lonely place.

“We need to drive in,” Kimberly murmured. “Make it to the lake.”

“Branch off from there,” Mac agreed. He looked at Levine intently. “He wouldn’t leave her by a road. Given the grid pattern, it would be too easy for her to walk out.”

“True.”

“He wouldn’t use a canal either. Again, she could just follow it straight out of the swamp.”

Kathy nodded silently.

“He took her into the wild,” Mac concluded softly. “Probably in this northeastern quadrant, where the trees and thick underbrush are disorienting. Where the predator population is higher and that much more dangerous. Where she can scream all she wants and no one will hear a thing.”

He fell silent for a moment. It was already so hot out this morning. Sweat trickled down their faces, staining their shirts. The air felt too heavy to breathe, making their hearts beat faster and their lungs labor harder, and it was barely sunrise. Conditions were harsh, bordering on brutal. What must the girl be going through, trapped here for over three days?

“Going there ourselves will be dangerous,” Kathy said quietly. “We’re talking brier thickets so dense in places you can’t even hack your way through. One minute you might be walking on hard-packed earth; the next you’ll have sunk down to your knees in sucking mud. You need to be on the lookout for bears and bobcats. Then there’s the matter of cottonmouth snakes, copperhead snakes, and the canebrake rattler. Normally they keep to themselves. But once off the trails, we’re intruding in their terrain, and they won’t take it kindly.”

“Canebrake rattler?” Kimberly spoke up nervously.

“Shorter than its cousin, with a thick, squat head that will scare the piggy out of you. Cottonmouth and copperhead will be around the wet, swampy patches. The canebrake rattler will prefer rocks and piles of dead leaves. Finally, we have the bugs. Mosquitoes, yellow flies, gnats, chiggers, and ticks . . . Most of the time, none of us considers the insect population. But the overwhelming swarms of mosquitoes and yellow flies are what help the Dismal Swamp to be considered one of the least hospitable places on earth.”

“No kidding,” Ray muttered darkly. He was already swatting at the air around his face. The first few mosquitoes had picked up their scent, and judging from the growing buzz in the air, the rest were on their way.

Ray and Brian dug in their packs for bug repellent, while the mood grew subdued. If the girl was in the wild lands of the swamp, then of course that’s where they would go. No one liked it, but no one was arguing it either.

“Look,” Kathy said tersely, “the biggest dangers today are dehydration and heatstroke. Everyone needs to be drinking at least one liter of water an hour. Filtered water is best, but in a pinch, you can drink the swamp water. It looks like something that’s been used to wash dirty socks, but the water is actually unusually pure, preserved by the tannic acids in the bark of the juniper, gum, and cypress trees. As a matter of fact, they used to fill barrels with this water for long sea voyages. The habitat and water have changed some since then, but given today’s temperatures . . .”

“Drink,” Mac said.

“Yes, drink a lot. Liquids are your friends. Now, assume for a moment that we get lucky and find Tina alive: First priority with anyone suffering severe heatstroke and dehydration is to reduce core body temperature. Douse her with water. Massage her limbs to increase circulation. Give her water, but also plenty of salty snacks, or better yet a saline solution. Don’t be surprised if she fights you. Victims of extreme heatstroke are often delusional and argumentative. She may be ranting and raving, she may seem perfectly lucid, then lash out at you the next instant. Don’t try to reason with her. Get her down, and get her hydrated as fast and efficiently as you can. She can blame you for the bruised jaw later if need be. Other questions?”

No one had any. The mosquitoes were arriving in force now, buzzing their eyes, their ears, their mouths. Ray and Brian took some halfhearted swipes at the winged insects with their hands. The mosquitoes didn’t seem to notice. They all doused with bug repellent. The mosquitoes didn’t seem to mind that either.

Last-minute check of gear now. Everyone had water, first-aid kits, and whistles. Everyone had a map and plenty of bug spray. That was it, then. They loaded their packs back into their vehicles. Ray opened the gate to the main road leading to Lake Drummond. And one by one, they drove into the swamp.

“Scary place,” Ennunzio murmured as the first dark, muddy canal appeared on their right and snaked ominously through the trees.

Mac and Kimberly didn’t say anything at all.

Things grow bigger in a swamp. Kimberly ducked her head for the fourth time, trying to wind her way through the thick woods of twisted cypress trees and gargantuan junipers. Tree trunks grew wider than the span of her arms. Some leaves were bigger than her head. In other places, tree limbs and vines were so grossly intertwined, she had to take off her backpack to squeeze through the narrow space left between.

Sun was a distant memory now, flickering in a tree canopy far above. Instead, she, Mac, and Ennunzio walked through a silent, boggy hush. The spongy ground absorbed the sound of their footsteps, while the rich scent of overripe vegetation filled their nostrils and made them want to gag.

On a different day, in different circumstances, she supposed she would’ve found the swamp beautiful. Bright orange flowers from the trumpet vines dappled the swamp floor. Gorgeous blue butterflies appeared in the beams of sunlight, playing tag among the trees. Dozens of green and gold dragonflies darted along their path, offering delicate flashes of color amid the deepening gloom.

Mostly, however, Kimberly was aware of the danger. Piles of dried leaves bunched at the base of trees and made the perfect home for sleeping snakes. Predatory vines, the same thickness as her arm, bound trees in tight, suffocating coils. Then there were clearings, sections of the swamp that had been logged out decades ago, and now just worn, rounded tree stumps dotted the shadowed landscape like endless rows of miniature gravestones. The ground would be softer there, marshy and popping as toads and salamanders leapt out of their hiding places to escape the encroaching footsteps.

Things moved in the dark recesses of the swamp. Things Kimberly never saw but felt like whispers in the wind. Deer, bear, bobcat? She couldn’t be sure. She just knew she jumped at the random, distant noises and was aware of the hair rising at the nape of her neck.

It had to be over a hundred degrees out. And still she battled a chill.

Mac led their little party. Then came Kimberly, then Ennunzio. Mac was trying to work a rough grid, sweeping between two unpaved roads. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. Thickets and dense trees often made passage impossible, however, so they started having to veer a little more to the right, then a little more to the left. They had to take this detour and then that detour. Mac had a compass. Maybe he knew where they were. From what Kimberly could tell, however, the swamp now owned them. They walked where it let them, passed where it let them pass. And increasingly, that path was taking them to a dark, decaying place, where the tree branches grew denser, and they had to round their shoulders to fit through the tight, cramped spaces.

They didn’t speak much. They slogged their way through the hot, wet vines, searching for signs of broken twigs, scuffed ground, or bruised vegetation that might indicate recent human passage. They took turns issuing single blasts on their whistles or calling out Tina Krahn’s name. Then they heaved themselves over giant, lightning-felled trees. Or wriggled between particularly large boulders. Or hacked their way futilely through dense, prickly thickets.

While they downed more and more of their precious supply of water. While their breathing became hard and panting, and their footsteps grew unsteady, and their arms started to tremble visibly from the heat.

Kimberly’s mouth had gone dry, a sure sign she wasn’t drinking enough water. She found herself stumbling more, having to catch herself on tree limbs and tangled brush. The sweat stung her eyes. The yellow flies constantly swarmed her face, trying to feast on the corners of her mouth or the tender flesh behind her ears.

She didn’t even know how long they had been hiking anymore. It seemed as if she’d been in the steaming jungle forever, pushing her way through thick, wet leaves only to encounter another choking eternity of vines, briers, and bushes.

Then, all of a sudden, Mac held up his hand.

“Did you hear that?” he asked sharply.

Kimberly stopped, drew in a ragged gasp of air, and strained to hear: There, for just an instant. A voice in the wind.

Mac turned, his sweat-covered face at once triumphant and intent.

“Where is that coming from?”

“Over there!” Kimberly cried, pointing to her right.

“No, I think it’s more like over there,” Mac said, pointing straight ahead. He frowned. “Damn trees; they’re distorting the sound.”

“Well, somewhere off in that direction.”

“Let’s go!”

Then, a new and sudden realization sucked the last of the moisture from Kimberly’s mouth. “Mac,” she said sharply. “Where is Ennunzio?”