Authors: John Gilstrap
"But who would do such a thing? And why?"
Russell smiled. "Well, those are the big questions. When we answer those, we'll have ourselves a killer."
He inexplicably thought of Tim as he explained these things and found his conscience stinging him. There was no excuse for treating a fellow agent the way he had, and one day, when the roles were reversed, he knew he could count on vicious revenge. He should have sent Sarah packing as soon as he realized that they had a new crime scene, but truth be told, he enjoyed her company. He also welcomed the opportunity to show off a little. Later, when Tim inevitably made a stink about it all, Russell would simply point out that she was the official representative of the National Park Service, and that he had thought she might have important insight. Senior rank brought senior benefit of doubt.
Oh, yeah, the payback would be hell.
"Be very careful where you step and what you touch," Russell warned, but judging from Sarah's nervous stance, and the depth to which her hands were stuffed into her pockets, his warning was probably unnecessary.
Russell gently strolled around the perimeter of the pit, hoping to awaken that spot in his brain or in his gut where he made his connection with the crime scene. Over there by the edge opposite where he stood, thought he recognized boot-tread imprints similar to the ones on the body. The forensics people would make that final determination, of course, but he already knew, just as he knew that the key to this case lay with the link that tied the two crime scenes together.
So, what did he have here? A hole in the ground, a stack of baby food jars, and a collection of footprints. Anything else? Nothing jumped out at him, but that was all right. Something else was bound to show up, but even if it didn't, maybe they already had enough. If the baby food bore serial numbers, for example, they might be able to trace it to a specific store and a specific time. From there, they could talk to the clerks and maybe get a description of the person who'd bought it. Twenty-plus jars is a big purchase. Russell figured chances were good that it might have stood out.
Maybe the forensics lab would learn that the boots that had made these particular impressions were unique to a particular part of the country, or that the person who wore them had an unusual foot deformity. Russell never ceased to be amazed by the amount of data that could be gleaned by the forensics techs from seemingly mundane little details.
As fascinating as all the Mr. Wizard stuff was, though, it was people like Russell-the analytical thinkers-who really won the day. He considered himself to be more of a macro investigator than a micro one. All of that physical evidence and those trace analyses meant nothing without motive and a clear picture of what likely transpired. Without those logical linkages, all the proverbial smoking guns in the world meant nothing. Nobody in the Bureau was better than Russell at the tedious task of placing those smoking guns in the hands of the bad guys who had pulled the triggers.
Crime scenes, like accident scenes, were really inanimate witnesses to incidents that occurred in exactly one way, and once you learned to listen to what these scenes were telling you, the most complicated, elusive investigations became obvious. More times than not, once all the evidence was collected and sifted, and the puzzle finally solved, he wondered after the fact how it could have taken him so long. He called those cases forehead smackers, and he sensed that this was one of them.
He liked his initial notion that someone was being prepared for a live interment. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed to fit the physical evidence. Early in his career, live burials were rare, but in recent years that seemed to be the outcome of virtually every kidnapping. Russell blamed the trend on a couple of high-profile feature films. Leave it to Hollywood.
Fact was, if Russell were himself a kidnapper, he'd bury them, too. In the old days, when kidnappers stashed their victims in warehouses or in a basement somewhere, finding the kidnapper almost always meant finding the victim as well. The bad guy had no leverage. An off-site burial, on the other hand, raised the stakes for everyone. If the kidnapper got an inkling that the good guys were getting too close, all he had to do was keep his mouth shut, and even if he got caught, without a victim to point to, he stood a damn good chance of staying free. Besides, SWAT snipers hesitate to blow the head off the only person who knows the whereabouts of the victim.
The end result, then, was a trend toward families who simply paid the ransom, without reporting the crime to the police. In Latin
America, kidnapping had become a boutique industry, with kidnappers raking in cash by the pound. Of course, there in the Third World the kidnappers had to be true to their word if they were going to stay in business, and more times than not, the victim was reunited with his family as soon as the ransom was paid. Here in the States, unfortunately, the record wasn't as encouraging. In Russell's experience, most American victims were dead long before the first ransom note was written, and the rest were killed within hours of ransom delivery. And why not? With virtually identical penalties for kidnapping and murder, why not go for broke and make sure there are no witnesses?
Russell pulled on his lower lip as he sifted it all through his mind. He'd have to check the boards when he got back to the office, but as far as he knew, there were no outstanding abduction cases out here. What was the deal with that? he wondered. Surely somebody should have noticed that a cop was missing.
"Am I interrupting if I talk?" Sarah asked.
Russell had moved to the far end of the excavated rectangle. "I'll tell you if I need you to be quiet."
She smiled. "Can you tell me what you're doing? What you're looking at so intensely?"
He shrugged one shoulder. "I don't know exactly. I'm just looking to see what I see. You ever buy an Oriental rug?"
The question surprised her. "Can't say as I have."
"Well, neither have I, but my first wife was into Oriental rugs. Seriously into them. In fact, the rugs became an issue during our divorce. I made her fight like hell to get them just so she'd feel like she'd won a battle." He chuckled, but when he saw that he'd confused his audience, he went on, "Anyway, one of the things I learned about Oriental rugs is, each one has a dark side and a light side. If you look at it from one end, it looks one way, but then when you view it from the opposite end, it's like a whole new rug. Even the colors are different."
Sarah still didn't get it.
"Crime scenes are the same way," he explained. "You look at them from only one angle, and you see only a part of the story. You have to walk around and look at everything from all sides. When you do, you sometimes get a whole different feel for what you see."
He turned the third corner around the grave and paused. A big grin bloomed on his face. "Like right over there." He pointed toward a small stand of bushes. Something lay in the tangle of branches, but from where he stood, he couldn't quite tell what it was. Sarah followed as he moved closer.
It looked like a discarded solid-core door, bigger than most, and someone had cut a round hole through the middle of it, maybe three inches in diameter.
"What is it?"
Russell didn't answer. Instead, he craned his neck to see past the door into the woods. "Aha," he said triumphantly, and he waded through the undergrowth over to a five-foot coil of what could have been dryer vent hose. He didn't touch, but he knew right away what he'd found. "This is their ventilation system. Once you get your victim down into the hole, you cover it with that door to keep the dirt from crushing the guy, and this tube runs from the hole in the door up to the surface here so your captive can breathe."
"How horrifying," Sarah gasped.
"It beats the hell out of a noseful of dirt." He said that in such a cavalier way, but the very thought of the panic and the claustrophobia made Russell's stomach hurt.
"So, are you thinking that the kidnappers captured the police officer and tried to bury him? And that he somehow got away?"
Russell pulled his lip some more. Is that what he thought? The evidence supported that theory, but something bothered him. First of all, what would the motive be? It sure as hell wasn't because he had a rich family (cops never had rich families), and if it was about revenge, why go through all the hassle of keeping him alive?
One thing was sure: this had been well planned, and Russell was willing to bet that it wasn't the perpetrators' first effort. That was good. If they'd done this before, there'd be a pattern for the computer to find. On the other hand, if they were professionals, how did they let their man get away? Why wasn't he hog-tied and under tight guard the whole time? Given their line of work, it was a pretty stupid mistake.
Finally, why hadn't word of a missing cop reached his desk? This one really bugged him. Granted, he'd been away for a while, but surely
Tim would have made that connection right away. Any crime that specifically targeted a cop as its victim swept through the law enforcement rumor mill with breathtaking speed. It became the stuff of chatter in every coffee room where badges were present. Yet, this one had gone unreported. Interesting.
Troubling.
Just as crime scenes spoke to you if you were willing to listen, they also told lies to investigators who ignored facts that contradicted their pet theories. The problem of no missing cop reports rang a huge warning bell for Russell. If only he knew what it meant.
He wandered back to the excavation. Why the hell didn't they just shoot their guy on the spot when he started to run? It didn't make any sense that they let him get away.
Maybe they never got him this far, he thought.
Nope, not possible. The footprints clearly showed that the victim had walked around up here. Whether it was minutes before he died or hours, Russell couldn't tell, but clearly he'd been up here.
"You look really confused," Sarah observed.
He nodded. "I'm just trying to figure out the series of events. Say you're being kidnapped."
"Let's not."
"Just for the sake of argument. Help me talk this through. You're brought up here and maybe you see what they're going to do to you, so you panic. That makes sense, right? I mean, you're not going to say, 'Oh, okay let me just climb into my own grave,' right? You're going to fight like hell."
"Right."
"So, where are the signs of the fight?"
She made a half-hearted pantomime of looking around, but this obviously was not her department.
"Well, there aren't any," Russell answered for her. "At least none I can see. So, instead of fighting, maybe you just run off. Why don't the bad guys shoot you down where you stand?"
"Maybe they missed."
"Maybe. We'll certainly look for any signs that a gun was fired, but that would have been the first thing my buddies Gary and Mandy would have mentioned. Anyway, shot at or not shot at, you go plunging through the woods, with kidnappers right on your tail. How do you end up getting killed a half mile downhill?"
Sarah thought that one through. "I suppose the people who pitched the tent were waiting for him."
Russell nodded. The pieces were beginning to fit together. "Okay, so you stumble onto these people who are somehow in on the plot, and they pop you." A buzzer rang in his head. "No, wait. That won't work. Remember the burns on the guy's face? They fought first."
She looked horrified. "Burns?"
"I forgot you didn't see the body. Yeah, he had burns on his face. They looked like scalds, actually."
Sarah shuddered. "That's terrible."
"Very. But why? How?"
Sarah didn't seem to have a problem with that at all. "I don't know, you're cooking eggs, maybe, and this guy comes crashing through the woods, and he startles you, and you react with the first thing you can get your hands on."
"Okay, then that would mean they weren't part of the plot, right? I mean, who boils water in the middle of a kidnapping?"
"So, they weren't involved."
"Until they shot him." Russell rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand, and the answer flashed in his mind. He didn't quite know what it was yet, but he knew he had it, just enough information to put the pieces together. It was like having some little guy in his brain playing peek-a-boo, opening the answer door just enough to give a quick wave and then disappearing again.
"Agent Coates?"
He held up his hand, calling for silence. Their victim-this Thomas Stipton of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-came to the campsite on purpose. Was he looking for help? If so, why did the campers shoot him? If the campers were part of the plot, why did he come all the way up here, and once he was killed, why didn't the campers bury the body?
No one was acting logically here, and that meant he was chasing a dead end. All of it lay out in front of him. He just wasn't bright enough to see what it meant.
Then he had it. The thought materialized just like that, whole and fully formed. When he looked up again at Sarah, everything suddenly made sense.
"We've been coming at this from the wrong direction," he declared. "We've been assuming that the dead cop was the good guy, and the killer was bad. But suppose that the grave was meant for our campers."
Sarah's eyes grew big as she fit it all together for herself.