Stone Maidens (4 page)

Inside of a month the killer was caught buying Band-Aids, sterile gauze, and adhesive tape in a drugstore less than a mile from the bodies of a family of four who’d suffered at his hands. Mantowski’s own knuckles were a dead giveaway to an observant pharmacist. He had spotted the killer’s right hand—as swollen and battered as those of the victims in photographs released by Prusik’s team to area store owners on the basis of her hunch. Mantowski had beaten himself after every attack, just as Prusik had theorized, re-creating and ritualizing the childhood punishment that had been meted out to him for as minor an infraction as scuffing the floors with his rubber-soled shoes. His grandparents, who had raised him, were stern practitioners of an especially strict sect of Lutheranism, and they had routinely forced him to go before a pastor for admonishment after his transgressions. But the admonishments were never enough, and after each holy meeting, they would rap the boy’s knuckles repeatedly with a bronze-wire cleaning brush till his hands were bloody.

Mantowski’s remarkable capture had elevated Prusik to the position of senior forensic scientist, but never before had she functioned as the lead on a major investigation.

She entered the lecture room and marched down the aisle between rows of folding chairs to the easel set up beside a projection screen.

“Sorry for being late. Shall we get started?”

Seated to one side of an overhead projector was her core forensic team: five specialists skilled in the world of death, decomposition, and everything found near or clinging to a corpse. Like her, the men wore lab coats and ID badges. They were experts in chemical and materials analysis, DNA testing, latent prints, fiber identification, and computer technologies, and all of them were married to their work. Leeds Hughes and Brian Eisen were in their early thirties, contemporaries of Prusik’s. Leroy Burgess and Pernell Wyckoff, both gray and balding, had grandchildren and were within spitting distance of retirement but showed no signs of letting up. The last face was that of Paul Higgins, new to her team, a next-generation Internet ace whom Eisen, Prusik’s chief technician, had coaxed her into bringing on board. Prusik eyed the young man suspiciously. Right off, his long hair didn’t please her.

“Gentlemen, things are happening fast.” She looked directly at each of them. “It appears we have a serial killer. The Blackie Jane Doe’s death resulted from strangulation, a severe break of the third and fourth cervical vertebrae. Opposing clench marks across the throat are similar in size and degree to those on the Ryan girl.

“A cursory inspection of these slides”—she patted her lab-coat pocket—“leaves little doubt it’s the same man’s work. This man has strong hands. Calluses are built up over his medial finger pads, meaning he’s likely a farmhand, gas station attendant, or regular laborer of some kind. The job allows him to move around freely. He is efficient, gentlemen. No one’s reported seeing him yet. No one’s spotted a struggle.”

Prusik’s eyes landed on the greenhorn recruit. “Any computer matches, Higgins?”

The young man sat up straight. A long lock of dark hair fell across one eye. Tucking it back behind an ear, he skimmed through a pile of printouts.

“Including assaults with mutilations involving women and all known assailants from ages eighteen to forty-five, forty-one hits came back for the Midwest corridor between Chicago and New Orleans. Thirteen are confirmed incarcerated, leaving twenty-eight.”

“Yes, I know what forty-one minus thirteen equals, Mr. Higgins.” Prusik folded her arms across her chest. “What of the unaccounted?”

He glanced up from his laptop. “Who? Me?”

“Come on, Mr. Higgins.” Prusik motioned for him to continue.

Higgins clicked open a series of spreadsheets, one leg wiggling tensely. Eisen had warned him to be prepared. “I haven’t received confirmations on their whereabouts during the dates in question. Only four have existing last-known addresses in Indiana and Illinois.”

“And?”

Leroy Burgess cleared his throat loudly. Prusik glanced over at the chemist and the fiber expert, Pernell Wyckoff, sitting next to him. What they lacked in communication skills they usually made up for in delivering the goods on trace elements and identification of the finer grades of wool, cotton, and polyester fibers from various clothing manufacturers. So far this time, though, they had not come up with much more than metallic grit, possibly rust from a vehicle trunk or truck bed.

She looked back at the new guy. “And?” she repeated.

“Still waiting to hear back from local authorities on those, ma’am,” Higgins said. “No current or outstanding warrants are showing.”

She approached the man. “Higgins, you’re new here?”

“Eighteen months with the bureau, ma’am.” It was the wrong answer.

“But you transferred to forensics only last week, right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Deciphering evidence in your case depends on programming ability, knowing your way around Internet access codes. But you’re only good to me if you can produce results. Eisen here says you can. Can you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“When I report in from the field or, say, update you on a breaking development, I need to know you’re going to take that information and run with it. That means initiate without my asking,” she said in a lower voice. “Got it?”

Higgins nodded, his lips pursed uncomfortably.

“He’s been staying late, Christine,” Eisen underscored softly. “Like the rest of us.”

“Late is not good enough.” Without taking her eyes off Higgins, Prusik said, “It’s all about science with a sense of
urgency
, gentlemen. I work late. You work late. But we can’t afford to have our results be late. I am in charge of investigating this case. As long as my ass is in a sling, so are yours. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.” Color flooded Higgins’s cheeks and throat. “I mean ma’am.”

“He likes creeks, gentlemen.” She capped the pen and faced the room. “So he can clean up after. They say it’s a gift when a complete stranger knows how to find his way quickly into a young girl’s heart. This guy has charm in spades. He’s not skirmishing with them out in the open. This isn’t a boorish thug. His victims offer little or no resistance. They go willingly to their deaths in well-concealed places near water.”

Prusik glanced at Eisen. “Lights please, Brian.”

Eisen went to the light switch by the door while Prusik arranged the slides on the glass surface of the special overhead projector, which had 30X magnification capabilities. “These were taken yesterday by the local coroner’s office in Blackie, Indiana.”

Eisen flicked off the lights. The projector lamp flooded bright white against the screen, which transformed a second later into the nasty purple streaks of a ruptured throat. An abraded cheek showed partially under a browned oak leaf.

“He’s right-handed,” Prusik said, displaying the next slide, which showed the second victim’s abdomen. “He cuts while lying over them, which may explain the trace paint fragments recovered on the chest and lower abdomen. I’ll know more tomorrow.”

Prusik’s collecting team, led by Bruce Howard, would retrieve whatever clues they could find at and around the crime scene, including the leaf foundation surrounding the area in which the body had lain, as requested by Leeds Hughes, Prusik’s DNA expert. But she realized that with the body’s removal might have gone useful DNA evidence. Though genetic analysis was a rapidly advancing and sophisticated science, DNA was easily contaminated by rain or ungloved tampering. If Prusik’s team was lucky enough to uncover any uncontaminated DNA substance, it would be checked against those in the national indexing system, which included samples from most convicted felons. Following the postmortem examination, Prusik would intervene by federal preemption, taking jurisdiction from the local police, who had few resources for investigating the bizarre killings that now stretched over half of Indiana.

“Same abdominal technique?” Eisen asked, removing large-framed glasses too big for his pudgy face. He breathed on each lens and wiped them clear on his lab coat. Two horizontal purple dents scored his cheeks where the rims had rested.

“Yes.” She used a laser pointer. “Judging from the decomposition, it’s likely the girl was killed the same day she was abducted, making it around the Fourth of July. Entomology suggests he killed her where we found her and didn’t move the body. I’ll get to that a bit later. Notice the clench marks along the neck.”

Murmurs arose among the team. The next slide was taken from directly above the unclothed torso. The dazzle of leaf color
looked tarnished next to the vividness of the remains. It hushed the room. Following it was a side view of the torso that would have required the cameraman to lie prostrate at close range. Prusik dialed in 10X magnification along the long knife cut, which shimmered iridescently.

“What do you think, Pernell?” She upped the magnification thirty times, the maximum, and focused the lens on one particular organism. A nifty striped millimeter rule ran along the bottom edge of the frame to better gauge scale.

“Family of Calliphoridae for sure—its Latin binomial is
Lucilia sericata
—the green bottle fly, a common variety of blowflies that oviposit or lay their eggs under shade and next to running water. In July heat, it’s likely adult females would lay eggs within twenty-four hours of death, with pupae hatching maybe eight or nine days after. The larva there has darkened already, an advanced pupa stage, and looks to be around nine millimeters in length, which means it’s been anywhere from eighteen to twenty-six days since the adult female oviposited. Of course, until we take it back to the lab, it’s only a best guess.”

“Thank you, Pernell,” Prusik said. “So clocking the time of death by the stage of larval development of these maggots found feeding on the corpse puts it sometime during the first week of July, as I suspected.”

The next slide showed a mix of adult green bottle flies and larvae that were feeding along a gaping seam in the victim’s left side. The flies were gathered in a feeding frenzy as if they had been glued in place. The slit ran from the eleventh rib straight down to the hip bone.

Prusik ran the laser light over one fuzzy patch of nearly transparent larvae caught in the act of voraciously gobbling the cadaver—the fuzziness came from the fury of their motion.

“Blowflies have a remarkable appetite for human flesh, but so does our killer, which doesn’t leave the flies much to feast on inside.” Prusik displayed the next picture taken nearer the cut.

Higgins’s clipboard hit the floor. A muffled heaving was clearly audible. The young computer jock bumped into a few folding chairs before wrenching open the back door and disappearing down the hall.

In the dark, a small grin perversely made its way across Prusik’s face.

“Have you any better close-ups of the tissue around the neck lacerations?” Eisen poked his glasses up, concentrating. He was the best digital analyzer of crime photographs that Prusik knew. Eisen would digitally convert the images, overlaying any latent fingerprint or partial pattern retrieved against those in the FBI’s vast data banks. From the size of a clear thumbprint he had developed an ingenious technique to extrapolate the approximate height of a perp, often accurate to within a few centimeters. So far, no thumbprints had been lifted in this case.

“One is coming up,” she said. “I knew you’d be asking.”

The anthropologist’s eyes followed a series of deep contusions along the victim’s contorted neck that had resulted from an ugly wrenching. As everyone in the room studied the cruel markings, Prusik became aware of a throbbing in her palm. She took a breath and willed herself to relax her fist, clenched so tightly that two of her fingers were spasming. Then, abruptly, she flicked on the lights and returned to the front of the room.

Tapping a pencil against his front teeth, Eisen spoke first. “Stains along the incision on Betsy Ryan suggest the perp used a carbon steel blade.”

Higgins returned to the room and took a seat near the door.

“Should we be checking morticians, their helpers?” Hughes asked, vigorously rubbing the bridge of his nose.

“I assumed Higgins was,” Prusik responded. “Check morgue workers at area hospitals, too, Mr. Higgins.”

The computer jock stirred in his seat. “Yes, ma’am.” He cleared his throat. “What do you think he’s doing with their organs?”

Prusik shaded a hand over her eyes. “Good to have you back among the living, Higgins. In answer to your question, I don’t know. The utter absence of any internal organs at the crime scene is dramatic, suggesting he is removing them from the site. Water is nearby. It enables him to wash up. I believe that our killer’s fascination with their internal organs goes further. That his removal of them completes some inward process.” Prusik yearned to know what.

“In both cases, judging from the distance of the victims’ bodies from any road or point of easy access, I believe he is luring them, coaxing them to ride in a vehicle with him to a safer, preferred place. The police crime report from Blackie describes a trail of disturbed leaf piles down a steep-sided wooded ravine. I believe a key part of our man’s rules of engagement is in the chase, some kind of game he plays. Check psych records of felons released in the last five years with any history of cruelty to children or caught stalking them.” In a low, steady voice, Prusik continued, “In nature, the chase is a striking characteristic among predators. A mother cheetah always leaves her nearly full-grown adolescent cub to fend for itself. At first, the young cheetah is unable to kill. Why do you suppose that is, Higgins?”

Higgins’s head rocked loosely backward, revealing a glistening forehead. “In—inexperience...I guess?”

“The baby Thomson’s gazelle must run first. Running triggers the big cat. The kill instinct is tied to the run. The young cheetah must wait for the frightened gazelle to make its move before it can finish the job.”

She stopped a few feet short of the new transferee. “The gazelle must gather enough courage to make a mad dash for it. When it does, the cheetah will stop it with a biting hold. So long as the Tommy stays put, the big cat is stalemated. It
can’t
kill unless the Tommy runs. And maybe, just maybe, neither can our perp, Higgins. Maybe he needs them to run to kill. It’s what ignites him.”