Victim Six (15 page)

September 26, 10:44 p.m.
Key Peninsula

There was something comforting about speaking to a machine, if comfort had ever really been a concern. Which, of course, it hadn’t. Sam Castile had never done a thing in his life other than find ways to feel good. Sometimes he wondered if his desires worked on some other plane, in a world far from those of other men. Other men seemed to strive. They seemed to seek to protect. It seemed that other men just wanted to ensure that they were always at the top of the heap, the winners of the competition.
Control
. What gave him a charge—both sexual and intellectual—were the hunt, the capture, the destruction of someone weaker than he was. It was primal. When he watched those other men with their pretty salon-cut hair and Macy’s clothes lament the challenges of their jobs, he wanted to laugh. They were playing a game that they could never really win. They’d been told by women how it was to be a man.

How they should be. Feel. Do.

By doing so they’d lost any real semblance of manhood. Sam saw the ruse for what it was and almost pitied those who didn’t understand that, in the case of domination and submission, there could only be one victor.

Sam loved the fight, the moment in which his prey acquiesced, fell limp, gave up. He loved the screams for mercy, the promises to do whatever he wanted, when he wanted.

Before he could tell her how dark his thoughts were, he talked into the machine. No judgments. No assessments about what he was doing. Just the cool sound of his voice as he recounted how things operated in his universe.

Where he was king.

“Me again,” he began, “I’ve been thinking about Number Three the past few days. How her skin felt, all wet, warm, soft. She was the prettiest one. She was the one teenage boys would dream about boning. Not all of them have been as hot, as weak. She was compliant. She did what I commanded. She was mine, like a pet. Like a toy.”

He could feel the bulge in his leather underwear grow with the recollection of what she’d been like. He slipped his right hand into his waistband, feeling the warmth of his own body. Liking what he felt. Rubbing his penis. The shaft, the head, his testicles.

All of it was feeling so good.

“She could have been my pet longer. She could have done what I wanted her to do. But no, she had to get some ideas of her own. Stupid bitch. She hurt me. She found a goddamn screwdriver and actually tried to kill me. Kill
me
! That stupid bitch!”

Sam opened his desk drawer and retrieved two black metal binder clips. He clamped one on his right nipple, the other on his left. He winced and gulped. The hurt was good, what he imagined it felt like for his victims when he brought them to the edge of passing out with pain.

He was nearing climax as the images of her surrender came faster and faster. He worked his right hand faster and faster, leaning back in his brown leather office chair. Thinking of how he had snuffed out her life, and the relief that came with it.

“Oh, you stupid bitch. You shouldn’t make me mad. I’ll goddamn slice you up like a deli sandwich.”

His mind conjured up the brutal images of his own hands, his hairy knuckles, white with tension as his fingers squeezed her slender neck. The struggle. The quiet, coughing scream that ended with her falling limp. He’d started to roll her over, determined to put himself inside her in a way that he was sure she’d like. If she were alive. To his disappointment, she’d soiled herself.

“Jesus,” he’d said, “you piss me off. You could have been such a good bitch. A clean bitch. I don’t like a dirty whore. You shouldn’t have tried to hurt me. I’m the boss. You belonged to me.”

As he remembered her, how she had been, he thought how much he might enjoy it if he could tell a living person what he’d done.

He spoke into his recorder.

“No one really knows what it takes to be me.”

Once he’d finished all he needed to do, he clicked on the Web site for the
Lighthouse
newspaper. How he loved seeing his work, reliving the glory of the last moments of another’s life. It excited him once more.

Here I go again,
he thought, feeling another erection swell.

Kendall Stark tucked Cody into bed as Steven looked on. The nighttime ritual was as it had always been, quiet and peaceful. She kissed him on his forehead, still warm from his bath after dinner. Cody’s eyes fluttered, his lids heavy with sleep.

“Good night, my baby,” she said.

She imagined a smile, yet there really wasn’t one.

“He had a good day,” Steven said. “He seems happy in the new school.”

“He’s adjusting,” she said. “We all are.”

Steven put his arms around her waist as they left their son’s bedroom for their own.

Kendall looked at her husband and nodded, although she was unsure what he had said. She hated more than anything that she wasn’t living in the moment. She was far away on the shores of Little Clam Bay with a dead girl, a girl without a face.

September 27, 10:45 a.m.
Portland, Oregon

Not surprisingly, a number of forensic artists find their way to the profession because of an interest in criminology. These were the kind who stayed up late watching crime and cop shows, feasting on criminology. They had artistic skills, of course, but artistry wasn’t the driving force for their careers.

Margo Titus, a good-looking brunette who always wore her hair up in a messy bun, with frameless glasses on a gold chain around her slender neck, was from the other camp. She’d been an artist first. She drew Sparky in the margin of a magazine reader response card when she was eleven years old, waiting for her mother in an Idaho doctor’s office. She wore all sixty-four of her prized Crayolas to nubs, even the ugly flesh-toned one. She won two school competitions for her artwork by the time she was in junior high. One was a sculpture of a woman walking a dog that landed her in a coffee-table book,
KID ART!

There was no mistaking it. Margo Titus was going to be a fine artist, a sculptor. She was going to sell her pieces in galleries in New York. She was so talented that if she stuck with it, she was told by all her teachers, she could be the artist that generations would remember.

“You are the kind of student that teachers dream of having but once in a lifetime,” said her high school mentor, a woman who wore knee-length skirts and copper bangle bracelets. “You are going to do all the things I dreamed about when I was your age.”

Dreams, Margo learned, do die. Her pieces never caught fire like she and others had hoped. They were dismissed as too provincial. Sweet but forgettable. She ended up moving back to Boise and waitressing at a downtown martini bar for a couple of years before going to Boise State for classes in forensic science, inspired by a TV show spotlighting how artists could put their skills to use in helping others.

“The most important thing in the world isn’t how a piece of art goes with your couch and love-seat set,” she told an artist friend when she made up her mind.

Three years later she was doing facial reconstruction out of a studio she called The Face Lab Inc., in Portland.

Kendall Stark contacted Margo to work the Little Clam Bay case. They’d met at a Seattle conference several years earlier. When Margo answered the call and the two women exchanged some personal updates, Kendall was very direct on two key points.

“We have a limited budget up here, but we also have a case that needs solving.”

“I’m sure I can work within your parameters, Kendall. What’s the case?”

“A young woman, early twenties, found floating in one of our local estuaries. We’ve put the word out, but, you know, sometimes a description isn’t enough.”

“Decomp?”

“No. Not too bad.”

Margo knew that sometimes a morgue photo required a little help too. Facial expressions, the way a person’s mouth and eyes work together to form a true representation of what he or she looked like in life, were sometimes crucial to finding out just who they were.

“There is some tissue damage. The coroner thinks it was animal activity.”

“How bad?”

“Parts of the mouth and nose.”

“Eyes in place? Brows?”

“Yes. Barely.”

“That’s fine. I’ve worked with a lot less.”

“I know that they closed the case on Ridgway’s ‘last victim’ because of you,” Kendall said, indicating the case profiled in a police journal that featured Margo’s work. The article had recounted the discovery of a small skull near Star Lake in south King County, Washington. Over time, seven more bodies had been found in the vicinity, most together in a single cluster of grisly mayhem that shocked the Pacific Northwest nearly as much as the Ted Bundy murders had over the previous decade.

The article had concerned the skull of a young African American woman—or maybe even only a girl. No other personal effects. No bones. No nothing. Just the dark gray skull found by hikers among the sword and bracken ferns that fill in the lush undergrowth. The “last victim” went unnamed until six months after the trial, when Margo took up the challenge because, according to the article, “every mother deserves to know what happened to her daughter, no matter what. I don’t care if this girl was a prostitute or a gangbanger. At one time she was someone’s precious baby girl.”

It turned out that the Star Lake location was Green River Killer Gary Ridgway’s body dump site. Margo’s work gave the victim back her name: Tammy Whitman.

Kendall admired the humanity and respect for the victim that was an essential part of Margo’s work. Being murdered was heartbreaking enough. To be a victim with a Jane or John Doe bracelet in some Podunk morgue was an insult to whatever life that person had led.

Or to those loved ones or friends who were out there, wondering just where he or she had gone.

“I’m assuming that a 2-D image is acceptable,” Margo said. “How soon can you send me facial measurements? Photos?”

“How does this afternoon suit you?”

Margo laughed. “This is one of those you-need-it-yesterday requests, isn’t it, Kendall?”

“Not really. Sooner is better than later.”

“All right. Get me the material, the coroner’s contact info, and I’ll see what I can have for you in, let’s see…a day or two?”

“Next time you’re in town, martinis on me,” Kendall said.

After she hung up, Kendall went looking for Josh Anderson. Help was on the way. Without knowing who the victim was, there was no way they’d catch the killer.

Everything always started with the ID.

Most of her contemporaries worked solely on the computer, but Margo Titus still loved the way colored pencils and Conté crayons felt against the smooth surface of high-quality rag paper. She found greater success in bringing the material to life by using the old-school methods that she’d first picked up to make her reputation, her legacy, as a fine artist. After working to specific measurements on a transparency atop the photographs, she’d draw, color, and then scan the image for manipulation in Photoshop.

On a row of shelves above her worktable were three sculpted heads that she called the “Janes.” Although they’d been found in three different states, they shared the unique bond of being Jane Does. All three were crafted with such realism even Margo thought their eyes followed her about the room. Sometimes she wondered if their vigilant gazes were meant to remind her that she’d failed to determine who they were.

Who is missing you three?

Next to the Janes was a framed portrait of Margo’s husband, Dan, and their sons, Jacob and Eli. Below the shelves was a corkboard decorated with the whimsically macabre drawings of her boys, depicting their mother at work in her studio. Heads on the table. Morgue photos scattered like confetti. A paintbrush in hand.

I’d love to be a fly on the wall when the boys are talking about my work at school,
she’d thought more than once.

She looked down at the photos and the autopsy report, all of which she’d printed out.

“You won’t be one of the Janes,” she said. “Not if I can help it.”

Margo stirred some sugar into her licorice tea and turned on her CD player. The liquid notes of a Stan Getz samba filled the air. She’d have played it louder, but she didn’t want to miss a call if her boys or husband tried to reach her. There was something soothing about the samba, with its sliding percussion overrun by a soaring saxophone. It gave her a calm energy.

“Let’s see who you are, little one,” she said as she undertook her distinct blend of science and art.

She had no one to consult with as she began to work. In cases she’d worked for the Portland and Boise police departments, she’d had the opportunity to interview witnesses who’d seen a perpetrator. She would inquire carefully, probing into the memory of the viewer. It was a collaborative process as the witness offered up the cues of recognition fixed in his or her memory. The slant of a brow. The flare of the nostrils. Lines on a forehead. So much information was held in a person’s recollections that the true skill came in digging it out as much as the application of any artistic skills.

But this one had no one to speak for her or who her killer might have been.

October 1, 11:50 p.m.
Port Orchard

They had made love all night long, and as she positioned herself on the toilet in the darkness of his bathroom, Serenity Hutchins knew that she’d gone too far for the story. It wasn’t that she wasn’t attracted to him. He worked out, and, despite being old enough to be her father, he had a nice physique. The last guy she’d dated was much younger, but his body was a doughy mess. She finished going and debated for a moment whether or not she should flush. She didn’t want to wake him.

If I wake him,
she thought,
he’ll want to do it again.

She risked it. Whoosh! She squinted in the faint light coming through the mini-blinds as she washed her hands.

“Baby, come back to bed.”

“Coming. But Baby’s tired,” she said.

“We don’t have to go to work tomorrow,” he said as she moved toward him in the darkness.

“I do,” she said. “I have to get some sleep. I have an event to cover in Manchester. A salmon feed or something.”

He put his mouth on hers.

“Oh, Josh, don’t you have a crime to investigate?”

He nuzzled her. “Kendall is working the hard stuff. I’ll just lay here and enjoy you.”

The face staring up at her was young and pretty. She had a slender nose and a mouth fuller on the lower lip that gave her a slight pout. It was very late, and the chill of an early autumn seeped through the windows as Margo Titus stepped back from her worktable. The face she’d painstakingly restored seemed more melancholy than most that she’d created. Margo never created a face that would cause someone to smirk: a cartoonish visage that somehow made a joke out of the victim. Some forensic artists offered up images that, while possibly very accurate, cast a distinctly creepy vibe.

Margo wanted the kind of countenance that spoke to the viewer. She sought an expression that triggered a genuine emotion of concern. This face looking up at her was a sad one. A heartbreaker. It was the face of a pretty young woman, one who had to be missed by someone.

Somewhere. But where? And by whom?

She looked at her wall clock. It was 4
P.M
. She had time to finish up, get to Whole Foods, and have dinner going before her family assembled around the table. After working on the rendering with such deliberation, such intensity, she could still set it aside when it came to being a wife and mother. It wasn’t that the morgue photos were expunged from her memory, but they were stored in a place separate from the world that saw her as something other than a woman who draws dead people.

Margo scanned her artwork and prepared to send it via e-mail it to the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office. It would be quicker than a phone call, and she had to get going.

Before she pushed
SEND
her eyes lingered on the damage to the right breast. The cut looked so clean, so precise. It was as if a diamond of flesh had been removed from the dead woman’s breast.

Sweet Jesus,
she thought.
What kind of maniac would do that?

As he tore at her, ripping her underclothing, commanding her to do this and that, she flashed on how it had started. The first few times Sam Castile made a shopping list for Melody, she saw nothing interesting in it. He wanted a motion detector, a fourteen-foot steel chain, and four brown tarps. The items were mundane, utilitarian. Melody looked at her husband’s list, added a few things she needed for herself, and pointed her silver-colored Jeep in the direction of Home Depot and Costco. Sam Castile had made it clear that the tarps he required were not blue, which were the ones most commonly sold by local stores. The brown were certainly less conspicuous when placed over a leaky roof, a cord of wood, a chicken yard. He wanted the chains to be polished steel, not galvanized. He said galvanized links were weaker. The motion detector had to be top of the line.

“If someone’s out there, you know, lying in wait,” he’d said, “I want fair warning.”

He was concerned about her safety, or so she had first believed.

The motion detector morphed into a trio of the devices. One was affixed to the side of the house, casting a beam whenever an errant deer wandered by. The other pair stood guard along the winding driveway that meandered through the heavy fringe of salmonberries, sword ferns, and a tangle of ocean spray leading to the house.

“If you want to run a day care out here, babe,” he’d said, “you’ll need to make sure the kids are safe.”

In the beginning she’d believed her husband. She thought that Sam’s words of concern, his need for protecting her and the children, were genuine.

That, of course, was only in the beginning. But there was no day care. There was only isolation.

Sam installed motion detectors fifteen feet past the farm gate, which they kept chained tightly. Visitors hated the gate more than anything: there was no way of tripping it so that it would open without them getting out of the car, unlatching the chain that held it in place, swinging the gate open, driving through, and then getting out of the car to shut the gate. It was a colossal hassle by any measure. In the early days, at least, if Melody had any designs on sharing a cup of chamomile tea with a girlfriend from next door, the gate obliterated them.

No one came over unless they absolutely had to.

Her tuxedo mocha on her desk, Kendall Stark looked intently at the image of the Little Clam Bay victim as Josh Anderson strolled into her office.

“Hey, you,” he said, sitting down, “what do you have there?” He seemed more upbeat than usual, and certainly more upbeat than the moment called for.

“Margo’s rendering of our victim.”

“Let me have a look,” he said, reaching for the photo printout. “Good-looking girl. Sure doesn’t look like what we saw on the scene.”

“That’s the point,” Kendall said. “We’re looking at trying to find out
who
she is, not scare people away.”

“I know. I was talking to the sheriff yesterday. He thinks we should use this case to spark some better relations with the local media.”

Kendall took her eyes off the photo and studied Josh.

“I wasn’t aware there was a problem with local media. Are we talking about KIRO TV and what they said about our jail?”

“No. More local. Local like the
Lighthouse
.”

“I thought we were good with them,” she said.

“There have been some complaints. You know, from the publisher to the sheriff. Says we don’t give them a heads-up on anything. You know, blah blah blah, you only talk to us when we cover your stupid office pancake feed for Kitsap Crime Watch.”

“No one mentioned it to me,” Kendall said, taking a sip from her coffee.

“No biggie. Sheriff thought we should toss them a bone now and then. Maybe I could take this over to the paper myself.”

Kendall thought for a moment. Josh’s ulterior motive was so transparent, she wanted to laugh.

“I’ll give it to Serenity what’s-her-name,” he said.

“That’s all right,” she said, pulling the photo back from Josh’s grasp. “I’ll take it.”

Josh looked a little disappointed.

“She’s too young for you.”

“Who is?”

She scolded him with a cool look before answering. “Serenity Hutchins.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Kendall.”

Kendall nodded. “Never mind. I was only joking.”

But she wasn’t, of course. She almost never joked.

Serenity Hutchins was hunkered in front of her computer screen when Kendall made her way across the small newsroom.

“I want to talk to you. I have something I need to discuss with you.”

Serenity looked up. “You do?”

“Yes, I do.” She dropped a photo on Serenity’s chaotic desk.

Serenity looked at it for a long time, her eyes finally returning to the detective’s.

“She was pretty. Who made this?”

“A forensic artist from Portland. Her name and number’s on the back, in case you want to interview her. I’m giving this to you first. It goes out to the Seattle, Tacoma, and Bremerton media tomorrow.”

Serenity nodded. “I’m all over it, Detective.”

“I’m sure you are.”

Kendall turned toward the door. She didn’t hear the reporter thank her, although she did. She was focused now on the part of police work that depended on the public and whether or not someone would help her find out the name of the dead woman. She brushed past a girl talking to the receptionist at the front desk. She didn’t know right then that she had walked past a young woman who had also caught the killer’s eye.

She didn’t know there were others too.

Melody Castile had one thought that reverberated in her mind. It was a kind of mocking refrain that she knew no longer carried the kind of weight she might have hoped.
Better her than me.

The figure on the filthy mattress was streaked with blood and her own feces. Fear had caused her to let go of all bodily functions. She was weak, barely breathing. Her mouth had been covered by the now-familiar silver-gray duct tape.

“Clean her,” Sam said, unbuttoning the snaps on his blue and red flannel shirt.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
His undershirt was torn, and he pulled that over his head, flexing his biceps and his triceps for his adoring audience. “Then Baby and Daddy are gonna play.”

He stepped out of his jeans, kicked them aside, and stood there nude, his penis already hard.

“Is she okay?” she asked.

“She’s alive,” he said, “so I guess not.” He let out a laugh and bent down. The woman on the plastic-covered mattress couldn’t speak, but her eyes were flooded with terror. He slapped her, and the woman shook. “See, she’s alive.”

“Good. That’s good.”

“Now, get naked,” he said, looking over at Melody, who was already unfastening her bra, “and let’s have some fun—you know, until one of us can’t anymore.”

Melody reached for the baling wire and grinned at him.

“Want me to spin my web?” she asked, already knowing the answer.