“Serial killer! Now, who’s been—”
“Lieutenant Doyle, we really need to get going,” Kelly said sharply. The blonde’s attention flicked over to her, taking inventory, and her eyes narrowed.
“Excuse me, ma’am, which unit are you with? Are you part of the task force?” Jan asked, shoving her microphone forward.
Kelly ignored her, and Doyle finally eased the car forward. Jan stepped back as he drove away.
“What the hell was that?” Kelly asked through gritted teeth.
“Just issuing a statement to the press,” Doyle said without taking his eyes off the rearview mirror.
“Oh, is that what they’re calling it these days?” Monica asked.
Kelly repressed a sigh and sank back into her seat. In a parallel universe she’d be lying on a beach right now drinking a piña colada, not babysitting these two. She could already tell this was going to be a long case.
Dwight’s leg jiggled nervously as he tapped out a cadence on the bar with his fingers, humming along to the jukebox. Before I was born, late one night, my papa said everything’s all right… Catchy tune, “Hand Jive”; he’d always liked it.
Charlie the bartender shuffled over and squinted at his arm. “Looks like you got a new tat.”
Dwight glowed at the attention, held his arm up and tilted it forward to catch the light emanating from the TV set. “Yup, got it done yesterday.” The letters were black, the skin around them an angry red. The tattoo stood out in bold relief against his pale skin, squeezed into the space between a Navy Seal logo and a Coast Guard skiff.
Charlie leaned forward and peered at it. “CIA, huh? So you got in?”
“Just going through the final security check,” Dwight answered proudly, missing the dubious tone of voice. “You know, to get top clearance takes a while. They gotta talk to everyone—Ma, the guys at work, maybe even you.” Something suddenly occurred to Dwight, and he leaned forward eagerly. “Hey, anyone come by asking questions about me?”
Charlie slowly shook his head, avoiding his eyes. “Not on my shift.”
“That’s all right.” He waved an arm and settled back on his stool, took a big gulp of tepid tap beer. “Sure they’ll be in soon.”
“Sure they will,” Charlie said. “Hey, you should probably keep that covered, first few days after inking it can get infected.”
Dwight ignored him, distracted by what was happening onscreen. On the television a chopper was circling a line of searchers barely visible through the trees. The camera cut back to the blond reporter who looked like she had a real pole up her ass. Her pursed lips murmured silently into the microphone.
“Hey, Charlie, hit the volume, would ya?”
The bartender followed his gaze, grunted and reached up to press the button. The blonde’s voice, sharp as her looks, gradually increased in volume but was periodically drowned out by the jukebox.
“…no word yet on…task force has arranged to meet…more developments later…”
The station cut back to the anchors, sitting at their usual cheap-ass plywood desk. Terrible studio set they had, they’d been using the same one since the seventies. “Any word, Jan…dealing with a…”
Jan’s head was cocked to the side, her expression of concern as carefully tailored as her suit. She listened as the other anchor uttered the words Dwight had been waiting to hear.
“Police won’t confirm or deny, but all indications are that’s exactly what…”
The bartender shook his head. “You believe that? A freakin’ serial killer, here?”
Dwight smiled into his beer. “Yeah, I believe it. Lot of sick fucks in the world, Charlie.”
“Sure are,” the bartender agreed. “Good thing the season’s almost over. Hate to think what this’ll do to business.”
Dwight stood, slid the pile of pennies he’d been playing with off the counter and into his pocket, then dug out a five and slid it across the bar. “Yeah, time to get back to the grind. Keep it.” He jiggled the change absentmindedly as he strode out into the blazing sun.
Three
“I don’t give a goddamn what you want, you’re not getting it!” Doyle fumed.
Kelly leaned against the edge of the desk, regarding them silently. The three of them were crammed in a windowless conference room at the Berkshire State Police barracks in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. A battered desk in the far corner held a lamp and a black phone on a ragged blotter. In the center of the room, the conference table had one noticeably shorter leg bolstered by a piece of shredded cardboard, with four rickety folding chairs holding court around it. Just inside the door a fake ficus plant was doing a poor job of hiding the large water stain on the grayish wall, while next to it a large piece of corkboard was mounted clumsily with thumbtacks. On top of it all, with no AC, the room was like an oven. All in all, this was easily one of the worst command centers she’d ever been stuck in.
Lieutenants Doyle and Lauer glared at each other across the table. Their feuding had started at lunch with barbed comments about the relative incompetence of their respective departments, and had escalated to the point where Kelly recommended they pack up their sandwiches and head over to the office. It was either that or chance having everyone in the diner hear the full extent of the investigation. Not that there appeared to be much progress. Aside from the actual recovery of the remains, most of which had been located by the volunteer search and rescue team, remarkably little investigative work had been accomplished. Kelly generally resisted the prevailing Bureau belief that cops were bumbling hacks who’d rather shoot someone than use their brains. Over the years she’d met plenty of talented detectives in police departments across the country. But based on first impressions, these weren’t two of them. Kelly wondered how they’d managed to scramble so far up the career ladder.
Every time they descended into another spat, Kelly gently coaxed them back to civility. She was already exhausted. Hard to believe these two had only been acquainted for a week, Kelly mused as she watched them peck away at each other. If she hadn’t known better, she would have taken them for a couple married twenty years too long.
“Well, why don’t we just find out what the FBI has to say about it?” Monica snapped. They both turned toward her, faces expectant.
Kelly smiled thinly. “Keep in mind that so far no federal statutes have been violated so, officially, I’m only here in an advisory capacity.”
“So advise,” Doyle sneered.
“I don’t think that tone is necessary, Lieutenant.” Kelly raised an eyebrow at him, and his eyes dropped. Silently he unwrapped another piece of gum and popped it in his mouth. Typical bully, she thought to herself—once confronted he backed right down. “Why don’t we start by reviewing what we know so far, then we can work on the jurisdictional issues.”
Doyle grumbled something that she took for acquiescence; Monica just shrugged.
“Great,” Kelly continued. “Let’s start with what the hiker found. First recovery was the forearm and part of a hand, just over the state line in Massach—”
“We got the rest of that body in Vermont,” Monica interrupted, casting a scathing look across the table.
Kelly peered at her notes, then glanced up at the corkboard where she had mounted photographs of the body parts lying in situ. “Right, I see that a partial skeleton was found a half mile away in the Green Mountain National Forest.”
“Would have had all of him if it weren’t for that damn bear,” Monica finished.
“Wouldn’t have found him without the bear,” Doyle retorted.
“Much as I appreciate your level of enthusiasm for the case, could we keep this civil?” Kelly chided them again. “Time of death is still being determined, but based on the fact that we’re dealing with skeletal remains, the body was dumped at least a month ago. All the victims appear to be males, but no luck yet on an ID.”
“Your guy’s working on that though, right?” Monica said.
Kelly had sent Dr. Stuart over to the morgue in Bennington, Vermont, to examine the John Doe being stored there. McLarty claimed that Stuart was the top forensic anthropologist in the field, capable of extracting evidence from the most scattered of remains. She was fervently hoping that he lived up to that reputation. Based on the expression of anxiety on his face when she sent him off in a Vermont state cruiser, she had her doubts.
“How much longer we gotta keep Sam and his crew out there? You know, some of those people have jobs to get back to…” Doyle said.
“We’ll get to that later,” Kelly said. “But let’s discuss the SAR team. Why were they called in?”
Doyle shrugged. “Our unit didn’t have the manpower to handle that kind of search, and they volunteered to do the job. Why?”
“It just seems to me that whoever dumped these bodies had to have some outdoor experience and familiarity with the area.”
“And a member of the SAR unit would fit the bill,” Monica chimed in, finishing her thought.
Doyle rolled his eyes. “Great theory—if half those guys weren’t bankers and stockbrokers. I can just see them running around the woods at night dumping bodies.”
“Could happen,” Monica said, “Maybe one of them decided to try blue-collar crime for a change. Problem is, we got a lot of groups like that up in Vermont. At least a dozen I can think of offhand. Camping and hiking are what folks do for fun around here. Hell, even I know most of these trails like the back of my hand.”
“Then I’d like each of you to compile a list of all the outdoor groups on your side of the border,” Kelly said firmly. “See if you can get membership rosters, some of them might be posted online. Based on what was found at the site in Vermont, we can be reasonably certain we’re dealing with a homicide.”
Doyle scoffed. “Yeah, or some guy that got lost in the woods.”
Monica raised an eyebrow. “And I suppose he just got rid of all his clothes and lay down there? Not to mention the evidence of wounds on the bones.”
“Animals could’ve done that.”
“Not any that I’ve ever—”
“The Vermont medical examiner has ruled the death of John Doe number one a homicide. Until I hear otherwise, we’ll continue on that assumption,” Kelly interrupted. “So far we have five bodies confirmed, and other remains that haven’t yet been matched to the bodies. Doyle, when will your lab finish dating and running DNA on what you’ve got?”
Doyle shrugged. “They get to it when they get to it.”
“Well, have them put a rush on it.”
He rolled his eyes. “I’m not going to make my guys work on a weekend for a stack of bones that’ve probably been there for years.”
Kelly said firmly, “You will, or I’ll pull some strings and get samples sent to the FBI lab.”
He glowered at her. She matched his gaze and cocked her head to the side. After a minute, he looked away. In truth, this was an empty threat on her part. There was still no evidence that any federal statutes had been broken, so she didn’t have the authority to move the bodies anywhere. But Doyle was clearly territorial, and she’d already gleaned that her best bet for keeping him in line was implying that with one word from her, a swarm of FBI agents would descend on his precious homicide unit. Kelly knew that among cops of all stripes, the fear of having the Feds steal “their” case was universal.
The United States has one of the most decentralized policing systems in the world, with every city, county and state maintaining their own force, each with their own way of dealing with crimes. Which was why in cases like this one, where similar victims were found across state borders, there tended to be a lot of jockeying for position. Sometimes when that happened, the respective head honchos agreed to pool resources and create a task force. Putting an FBI agent in charge was a great way to shift the blame to the federal government if the case was never solved, and it also kept their department’s homicide stats in the black.
Kelly let her eyes trail across the corkboard. It contained a jigsaw of photos, some of nearly complete skeletons, others just a few fragments of bone. Each photo was marked as a John Doe, with a number and a rough estimate of how many months the victim had been dead. The bones in the photos were brown and moldered. It was almost impossible for Kelly to imagine them as people who had laughed and danced and loved, never dreaming that one day they’d end up as so much detritus scattered across a forest floor. “So do we have any leads on who these victims may be? This is a small region. I can’t imagine many people go missing without being reported.”
“You’d be surprised,” Monica said. “We get a big influx of people in the summertime for all the festivals, then another group in the fall for the foliage. Plus there’s the Appalachian Trail hikers—no record of them but the logbooks. It could be months before anyone realizes they never came back from the hike.”
“What about those logs? Anyone check those against missing-persons reports?” Kelly asked.
“Hikers go by handles instead of their real names, so we won’t have much luck there. In addition to them we got the drifters, former deadheads—”
“Not in Massachusetts,” Doyle muttered.
“Forgive me for implying that such—undesirables—might cross state lines,” Monica scoffed. “Anyway, I went through our missing-persons reports, and there’s not much. If they were locals they would’ve been missed.”
“What about you, Lieutenant?” Kelly asked.
“Same here,” Doyle conceded grudgingly. “Most of what we’ve got is older men skipping out on their families, that sort of thing. We’re at the tail end of the season, lots of tourists still around.” He raised an eyebrow and smirked at her. “So looks like it’s up to your forensics guy to figure out who our arm belongs to.”
“Looks like it,” Kelly said, straightening out the papers in the file in front of her and silently praying that Dr. Stuart wouldn’t let her down; otherwise, she could be stuck here indefinitely. “As far as jurisdiction goes, here in the command center we’ll keep a record of all evidence corresponding to the remains, including the map marking where they were found. As long as your respective labs are processing the finds in a timely manner, I’m fine with the remains staying where they are. If in the future I feel that everything needs to be consolidated at one central location, I’ll let you know. Agreed?”