Touching Evil (17 page)

“Oh, come on, Luce, tell them the truth.”  Pushing away from his stance against the counter, Gavin approached them.  “She really just wants to get done as much as she can before the other examiners arrive and she has to share the fun.”  To Cam he said, “We can stay busy for another hour before beginning.  But no more than that.  Neither of us got any sleep last night.”

The look Lucy was aiming at the forensic anthropologist should have flayed several layers of skin off him.  “You’re not in charge here, Connerly.  You weren’t even invited.  And I say…”

“As Lucy said, we examined all three victims,” he continued calmly, seemingly unconcerned by the woman seething at his side.  “All have been embalmed, although maybe not professionally.  “There’s embalming fluid leaking from two of them.  All were vaginally and anally penetrated, but the…ah…damage from the sexual assault, at least outwardly, appears to be less extensive than that sustained by the first six victims.”

Elbowing the man aside, Lucy marched to the computer atop a cart in the middle of the room and typed in a few commands.  Sophia was relieved—and more than a little amused—to see a PowerPoint display of photos detailing every step of the excavation.  The ME was notoriously OCD about keeping digital files of her work.  

Lucy scrolled to pictures that had obviously been taken in the lab.   Then slowed to display them.  “It’s not just the sexual assaults that appear to be less brutal.  The torture—while definitely evident—wasn’t as ferocious as the others, either.  You’ll note here,” she flipped to another set of photos showing the leathery dehydrated skin from the backs of the bodies, “that all three victims have been numbered.  If I enhance the pictures…rotate them…”  

Cam and Sophia moved forward to examine the photos more carefully.  “That looks like a seven.  Or a one.”

“Rhonda Klaussen, Vance’s first victim bears a one,” Cam said tersely.  His gaze was intent on the screen.

“A seven then.”  She peered more closely, felt more certain of her observation when Lucy highlighted the wounds in the photos using a tool to draw circles around each of them.  “It is a seven.  And the next…”  She swallowed hard.  Laid a casual hand on the nearby counter.  Gripped its edge tightly.  “Four.”  Without appearing to, she drew in a deep breath.  Released it slowly.  And struggled to keep a tight seal on the door against the memories that threatened to intrude.

It served no purpose to wonder about the number she would have borne if she hadn’t escaped from Vance.  Or to question the location chosen for the shallow grave her body would have been excavated from, had it been discovered at all.  

“What’s the next number…shit.”  

Cam’s voice succeeding in pulling Sophia from the nightmare that threatened to pounce.  She re-focused on the screen.  Hissed out a breath.  “Is that…”

“Yep.  This is the victim found a couple night’s ago when the sick fuck decided he was in the mood for romance.”  Lucy’s voice was hard.  And her eyes, like all of theirs were glued to the newest photo displayed on the screen.  “I had to enhance the pictures to be sure of the number, but anyone disagree that she’s number sixteen?”

*  *  *  *

“I’ve always wondered what that meant, that saying on the sign Lucy has sitting out.”  Cam parked the car in the lot of the Iowa State Patrol Post 1 building, where DCI Zone 1 field agents had their offices in Des Moines.  The IOSME shared a campus with the state crime lab in Ankeny.  Given the hour, they’d bucked traffic all the way here.   Cam and Sophia walked across the pavement to the structure.  “I know it’s hers because I never see it unless she’s the attending ME.  But I’m not sure what language it is.”

Sophia recognized the verbal distraction for what it was.  Her mind was furiously circling the ramifications of what the ME had revealed.  But the upcoming briefing would be soon enough to focus on that.  So she accepted the reprieve his conversational gambit provided even as she struggled to keep up with his longer strides.  Although not wearing the towering heels she usually favored, Sophia’s steps were shorter than his.  He unconsciously adjusted his stride to accommodate her.  The small gesture softened something inside her.  “The language is Navajo, I assume.  Lucy grew up on the reservation.”

He stopped in his tracks.  Stared.  “She’s Native American?”  Almost immediately he corrected himself.  “Sure she is.  She has the coloring.  I just never thought…  Actually I try
not
to think about Benally when it doesn’t directly involve a case.  That’s how I can sleep at night.”

Sophia gave a smug smile. “You two do seem to have a rather…caustic relationship.  Too much in common, I think.”  She shot him a sidelong glance.  “You share the same abrasive charm.”

“I’m officially offended,” he declared.  He squinted a little against the bright overhead sun.  The expression had tiny creases fanning from the corners of his eyes.  This wasn’t a man who was going to get less devastating over time, she realized.  In the ultimate unfairness of fate, every crease, every line to his face was only going to make him sexier.  And more and more, she was coming to realize that she wanted to be there to experience those years with him.  

The thought yielded a familiar flare of panic, one that took effort to extinguish.  She’d exerted careful control over every aspect of her life, including the men she allowed in it.  Her brief intimate relationship with Cam had been an aberration, one she’d been quick to correct when she’d felt too much for the man, much too soon.  But Mason Vance had shattered the allusion that any amount of personal control could truly keep a person safe.  And she was coming to recognize that some risks were worth taking.

Cam Prescott just might be one of them.

“Every time I’m in an autopsy suite with her, I leave feeling like she’s used the scalpels on me, rather than the victim,” he complained as they drew closer to the building.

“When I meet someone with a prickly exterior like hers, I immediately wonder what experiences have caused it.  Which is something she and I actually have in common,” she declared as she walked briskly beside him.  Women who wore wigs for health or other reasons would have her undying admiration in the future.  Already her head itched.  And the entire day still lay before her.  “I dissect personalities.  She dissects corpses.”

He grunted, checked his watch.  Whatever he saw there had him quickening his step.  “Not just corpses.  If Connerly spends too much time around her, he better watch his back.”

A smile played around the corners of her mouth at the thought of the two.  “Oh, I don’t think Gavin is threatened by Lucy.  Just the opposite.”

It obviously took a moment for him to grasp her meaning.  When he did he froze, his hand on the door handle to the entrance. “Are you saying…uh-uh.  No way.”

“Who’s the expert on people here, Agent, you or me?”  She reached out to pull open the door and he had to step aside or risk getting beaned by it.  

“You mean he…they…both of them…  Holy shit.”   He seemed ridiculously dazed at what she was suggesting.  “That would explain why he offered his services this time around, and pro bono at that.  But sleeping with Lucy Benally…”  Cam gave his head a little shake as if to clear it as they walked down the hallway to the conference room that would hold the briefing.  “Connerly’s got balls, I’ll give him that.  Probably not for long, since it’s Benally, but still.”

Her elbow caught him in the ribs.  “Stop.  I think they’re cute together.”

His golden brown eyes widened comically.  “Cute?  Sure, praying mantises are cute.  Right up until the female devours the male’s head.”  He opened the door to the conference room and waited for her to precede him.

His words were an almost jarring reminder of her earlier thoughts.  “And yet the male mantis takes that chance.  Proving that even in nature, love is never without risk.”

*  *  *  *

“So far the excavation has yielded two more bodies.”  Scanning the team members gathered in the conference room, Cam saw identical grim expressions stamped on every face.  “We know there’s at least one more.  All the bodies were embalmed, so none are skeletonized.  That’s going to be a huge help for us when it comes to identifying them, which is good because the embalming will make it real difficult to get a time of death.”

 The evidence team would have taken core samples from the soil as the digging continued, to look for plant life and other evidence that might give them hints about how long they’d been buried.  “The excavation is continuing.  The HRD team got three separate hits on the river.  I’ve alerted Department of Natural Resources. They’re bringing a boat with a side scan sonar.”

“You’ve summoned a scuba crew?”  

This from SAC Gonzalez, seated in the front row next to Sophie.  Cam scanned the crowd, failed to see any of the top brass in it.  And felt a measure of relief.   “I’ve got the Underwater Search and Rescue Team sending out a team this morning.”    

His sleep had been interrupted periodically with updates from the excavation crew, and none of the updates had contained good news.  After each call and text, however, he’d quickly fallen back asleep.  That could have been due to exhaustion, but he was more likely to credit Sophie.  What had started as a way to distract her from the PTSD-induced flashbacks had wound up as comforting to him as they had been to her.  And that realization made him more than a little uncomfortable.

“Doesn’t make much sense that he would dump them in the river, does it?”  The tips of Agent Robbins’ ears reddened after blurting out the question.  He slunk a bit lower in his seat as he fumbled to explain himself.  “I mean, why would he bury the ones at the cemetery and at this site, and then break routine with water dumps?”

“Since we’re heading into Dr. Channing’s territory now, I’ll let her answer.”   

At Cam’s words Sophie stood and turned to address the group.  “That’s a good question, Agent.  I can only make an educated guess at this point.  But I think we can assume that this second offender was subservient to Vance in some way.  He was an accomplice to at least one of the kidnappings, that of Courtney Van Wheton’s, and it’s probable that the partnership of the two men required this UNSUB to be in charge of the body dumps.”  

Sophie shifted slightly, angling her body so she could include Cam in her comments.  “Given what was seen at the burial site the other night, the man we’re seeking is most likely to be the one guilty of the post-mortem sexual assaults.  I think the river represents the same convenience the freshly-dug graves at the cemeteries did.  Ease of disposal.”

“With Iowa winters,” Cam inserted, “this guy wasn’t digging graves year round for the victims.  He might have looked for a way to get rid of them that was a whole lot easier.”

Sophie nodded.  “Once the ground hardened too much for digging, I’m guessing there was still open water on the river, which explains using both areas.  After what we just learned from the ME, I have more questions than answers about this offender.  The most pressing of which is why the bodies found at the river are embalmed and the first six discovered weren’t.  And the timing of the disposals interest me.  The ME and forensic anthropologist agreed that the bodies discovered in the cemeteries had been buried in the last year to eighteen months.  Identification of those victims verifies that estimate.  There’s no way to be certain at this point how long the bodies at the new site have been dead.  But we now know the recently discovered victim is likely the most recent.”

Cam took over.  “All three bodies found at the river site bear numbers on their backs, just as Vance’s other victims did.”  He waited for the murmur from the group to die down before adding, “The two found in the grave bore the numbers four and seven.  The one kept in the cave is sixteen.”

“That makes no sense.”  

Cam waited for Tommy Franks to go on.  He and the more senior agent were often on the same wavelength.  

“The ViCAP files don’t show any other crimes with the same details as those first six women we pulled out of cemeteries.”  The man’s scowl was fierce.  When Cam had needed fresh eyes to go through the copious information gleaned from the FBI’s database on similar violent crimes, Franks had done so.  And neither had come up with more victims than the ones discovered a few weeks ago.  “Are you saying he varies his victim selection?”

“I think that might be possible.”  Sophie folded her hands before her sedately, her voice pensive.  “Vance and his accomplice may not have partnered on all the crimes.  Or they could have alternated victim selection.  They may even have engaged in a sort of a…for lack of a better word…individual competition.  That would explain the difference in the severity of the attacks on the victims.  The medical examiner believes that while the new victims were also viciously sexually assaulted, the exterior damage to the bodies at least isn’t as great as the other six.”

The room went abruptly silent as Sophie’s words sank in.  Cam found himself leaning forward a bit, in anticipation of her next words.   She was given to movement when she addressed a group, and paced a little now as she continued.  “Vance’s prior employment tended to be manual labor, so these two didn’t meet on the job at a funeral home.  But something brought them together.  Maybe their pastimes.”

“So they met up at a support group for sadistic necrophiles?”  Micki Loring’s question had a chuckle rippling through the agents.  Cam could hear the answering smile in Sophie’s voice.  

“Possibly.  Although I don’t believe we’ll discover that Vance’s paraphilias ran to necrophilia, there is evidence of torture on bodies recovered from the cemeteries and the one discovered two nights ago.  We already know that we’re looking for a man in his late twenties, early thirties.  Given his predilection, I’m guessing we’ll find his name on an employee list—past or present—for a funeral home.  Other possible occupations are morgue attendant, orderly, cemetery attendant…”  

She broke off and glanced at Cam.  “Although that list was exhausted when we searched for Vance.”  Facing the group again she continued,  “Whatever his occupation, he’ll likely be underemployed and lacking in social skills.  Inept with women.  Living alone or with a single family member, likely a female.”