by Robb T White
When the three men got up to leave, he asked for his check, too, and left a modest tip on the table. He seemed to hesitate once outside the restaurant, like one of the hundreds of summer visitors in bright clothes en route to Lake Norfolk. He stood reading the plaque in front of the Boone County Courthouse while the three men rearranged some gear in the Ford’s super cab before piling in and taking off. Charley jaywalked across the street, his step casual, unhurried, to the rental Camry and waited for the pickup to clear the first intersection before following. Traffic in summer season was heavy, and he wouldn’t be noticed until they arrived at the park gates, if then. Stalking his prey made him come alive. He felt perspiration gather on his brow and his armpits were damp. His body’s excitement was matched by the focus of his mind, as if the true citadel of his being were taking command.
Chapter 3
SPECIAL AGENT JADE HUI was wrapping up her final PowerPoint of the long week. The ADIC who assigned her to this traveling seminar on spree, workplace, and serial killings wasn’t taking her calls. She had visited eight states and fifteen field offices across the Midwest. Going back to Chicago was the last stop before a week’s vacation.
She was less concerned this duty tolled the death knell to her career than when she had started out. Some agents’ careers skyrocketed right out of Quantico if the right wheels were greased and their mentors used clout in their favor. In her case, she had no wheels left to grease. Her career parabola peaked eight years earlier with a series of indictments and convictions against corrupt police in Cleveland and Detroit. The FBI has an expression for ambitious agents: they say they have ‘sharp elbows,’ a kind of left-handed compliment. They have no expression for agents who argued with their SACs. Instead, they get shifted around to FBI backwaters like South Dakota, where Indians off the Pine Ridge Reservation on a drunken toot are the main order of business, or they wind up being transferred to Kansas City, where they investigate Medicare fraud until they can pull the plug to retirement and a job in private security. Jade figured she was one more negative psych eval away, or—more likely, one more reprimand—from putting in the coordinates for KC in her Tom-Tom.
The attendees in the audience were bored and showed it. Through her own field office colleagues, she’d burned bridges with many of them over her cases. ‘Not a team player’ was the big rap. Many had their heads lowered or were checking emails. Texting like teenagers, she thought while she used her laser pointer to highlight a Venn diagram of psychological profiles of Kansas’s BTK Killer and Seattle’s Gary Ridgway. As she moved toward the screen, she had to step around a pair of legs belonging to Ed Carson, playing Solitaire on his iPhone.
Jade herself was on automatic pilot, clicking through the pages to speed things along without making too much of a farce of it. The Unit Chief from Behavioral Analysis Unit-2 was standing in back with her new Chicago supervisor, Kyle Waggoner. Both men had their arms crossed over their chests and didn’t look impressed. She was scraping bottom of the barrel now, stitching one cliché to another. Serial murders attract an inordinate amount of attention from the media, academia, mental health experts, and especially the public so it’s very important …
She couldn’t wait to get back to her room and spend the next week freed of FBI business altogether. She needed undistracted time; that’s all there was to it. She had a first-rate law degree, after all. A career switch wasn’t unheard of and she was in her prime. Pushing forty, however, was a phrase she was getting used to, and she knew it was now or never. Her marriage, long over and done, had left a pile of mental rubbish to be cleaned out but she’d done it, so she felt she was ready to face it. The Bureau wasn’t the boys’ gun club it used to be—many women were being appointed to top positions, were no longer window dressing, and while she had failed to get the Cyber Crimes position she lobbied hard for, it was another woman appointed to head the division.
The agent in the front, ‘the youngster,’ as other resident agents referred to him, had his hand raised again. She saw Carson look up and heard him groan at yet another delay in wrapping up her presentation. Carson was infamous for his ‘balloons’—going home early in the afternoon.
‘Agent Bookins?’ She cleared her throat to keep her voice even.
‘That’s Brookins, with an R, Agent Hui,’ he corrected.
She’d given up telling him to drop the formalities around the office and call her Jade. He was new and he was earnest.
‘You said there’s no evidence for assuming a group exists, but why is that so improbable in an age of social media? Isn’t it at least conceivable that such likeminded individuals could find one another in the web, connect, and then form into a cluster—or even several clusters—across the Midwest?’
Jade regretted including a page for the Smiley Face killings. This was looney internet stuff, not worth the time to debunk. She cautioned herself not to condescend, however, and kept her tone cordial like a teacher reproving a bright but recalcitrant student. She didn’t want to be guilty of the very thing her supervisor had written her up for, an ‘attitudinal issue with authority.’
‘You do have a point,’ she began, ‘however, the internet has changed the social dynamics of everything from the way teenagers hook up to the methodologies of criminal organizations and terrorist organizations.’
‘Yes, but—’
To hell with it, she had to get this over with. ‘It stands to reason that, if an international terrorist organization like ISIS can recruit disaffected young males all over the world, how difficult is it to assume that a deviant group like the supposed Smiley Face killers can organize and connect for the single-minded purpose of killing college-aged white males?’
‘You’re making my point for me, Agent Hui, so—’
She barged right through him. ‘Putting aside the motivations of the two detectives and the criminologist who originally championed the theory, we know from years of research—and I mean well-vetted psychological studies in reputable journals like Abnormal Psychology and the DSM-5—that it runs counter to all the received wisdom about this type of sexually aberrant individual …’
She regretted the lapse into jargon but decided she had to cut this off before everyone’s eyes glazed over like a dead bird’s.
Brookins, however, would not be stifled. He rehearsed for them all a summary of the sexual dynamics of those who achieved sexual gratification in waterboarding young white males they had picked up late at night on their way home from bars for the sole purpose of holding them hostage for days or weeks so that they could torture them by drowning them and reviving them.
Brookins, damn it, knew the Smiley Face history.
Brookins concluded his mini-lecture with a loaded question. ‘It seems to me, Special Agent Hui, the Bureau has an obligation to investigate. Don’t you agree?’
No, I don’t, she thought. But she had to reply; his expression was so earnest.
‘Sexual gratification,’ she said, slowly choosing her words, ‘achieved by possessing life and death control over victims is a big step up from getting a thrill by way of asphyxia or from having one’s head held under water by a sexual partner with a safe word to what is theoretically stranger abduction and murder. It’s unheard of in the journals.’
Lame, she realized.
While Agent Brookins took in her rebuttal, she saw Carson swivel around in his seat to face her. The glow from his iPhone illuminated a patch of checkered tie riding his belly.
Brookins wasn’t done apple-polishing.
‘All those smiley faces at crime scenes, Agent Hui,’ he said with even more passion in his voice, ‘ought to warrant some kind of formal acknowledgement as evidentiary proof of the Bureau’s concern, wouldn’t you agree to that much?’
He gave her surname a whistling effect Carson found amusing if his snort meant anything. She had humiliated him in a cocaine bust involving the Latin Kings and her report gave an honest appraisal of the tactical errors made in conducting it. She was snared in her own leghold tr
ap. Brookins ignored what she had just said to dispel the notion that smiley faces on tree stumps, sides of buildings, and retaining walls were evidentiary proof of anything other than the ubiquitous popularity of that wretched emoticon.
Jade’s voice took on a little edge now as she stood directly over Brookins. ‘Give me a half hour and I can find six of those icons in a ten-square block area of this building. To attribute the drowning deaths of over eighty young men across eleven states since 1998 to a band of organized lust killers operating in that time span and across that big a region flies in the face of probability statistics. There has never been a connection established to link any two crime scenes, period.’
Brookins’s face flushed, and she regretted goading him immediately. She now understood he was performing for the Quantico boss in the back and she had humiliated him.
‘Wait a minute, what about the 2009 drowning in the East River, wasn’t that linked to an upstate drowning in Cayuga Lake?’
Jade tamped down her tone to reply. ‘That was discredited when New York City detectives produced crime scene photos that showed contents of the victim’s wallet had floated to that very section of the wall. The writing was produced a year later by someone hoping to gain notoriety.’
Shoot. Blast it. Here we go, around and around, Jade thought.
Carson—it would be him—began muttering under his breath about ‘Red John’ and ‘the Baker Association,’ some programming series on Netflix or HBO, she guessed.
Then a new voice from the opposite end of the room.
Good, Jade silently begged, thank you, please bring us back to sanity.
A woman’s voice: Ariana Lambert-Bryan. Carson had dubbed her the ‘The Hothouse Flower’ because she rarely did field work, not that she shirked it, but it was understood she was being groomed, kept pure from the grittier assignments, for future advancement. Word had come down. Ariana’s idea of a bad day was a cracked cuticle.
‘Let me get this straight,’ Ariana asked, ‘you’re saying this kind of “aquatic sexual sadism” might well be an undocumented form of sadomasochism, the kind practiced by consenting couples on websites and BDSM lairs all over America?’
She hadn’t used that expression exactly that way, but Jade ignored the warning signal.
‘That is, yes, that is one way to put it,’ she admitted, reluctant to play the straight man to whatever was making the hairs on her neck tingle with anticipation.
‘So,’ continued Ariana in a deadpan tone, controlling the floor, ‘these “ASSes,” to use the acronym, might be as normal as the people in this room—’
Too late.
It was all over but the shouting—rather the hilarity. The hoots and guffaws rang around the room for an unbearable minute.
Ariana took a low palm slap from the agent behind her.
‘On that happy note, I think I’ll conclude this presentation,’ Jade said. ‘I hope I’ve been helpful—’
The sound of chairs scraping the floor ended her pain. Her own inner critic, always the toughest, mocked her for walking into it. So much for female solidarity. She shut down her computer and placed her notes back inside the file folder.
‘Agent Hui, if I might have a moment more of your time.’
Her supervisor, transferred the day before she was assigned to this traveling freak show.
Jade wondered if her reputation had preceded her in her absence from the office. The rumor mill had it he was going to be appointed to an important post in DC and Chicago was a temporary posting. Agents came and went, surpassed her despite her seniority, but the Bureau’s hierarchy expected her to be content with sideways appointments or dead-end assignments like the smiley face fiasco.
She entered the office but didn’t take a seat, and he didn’t beckon her to take one.
Waggoner told her, ‘Don’t take it personally. Brookins is new, like me, but I’ll have a word with him.’
‘Yes, sir,’ she said.
Have a word with that oaf Carson, too, she thought.
She waited for him to say something else; perhaps he was waiting for her to say something, maybe grovel over the humiliation back there. If that was the case, he was going to wait a long time, she thought.
‘I had a call from ADIC Michaelson in North Little Rock,’ Waggoner said. ‘It didn’t sound urgent so I didn’t want to interrupt your … presentation.’
Presentation, at least, was a notch or two above what he might have called it.
‘Thank you, sir. Is that all?’
‘That’s all.’
Out in the parking lot, the heat was building. No cooling breezes from Lake Michigan, which sometimes reached this far down the Miracle Mile. Looking northeast, the top floors of the Willis Sears Tower loomed over the waterfront and the Gold Coast. She remembered a peregrine falcon diving for a pigeon from the observation deck the day she’d been transferred from New York to the Midwest. If the higher-ups in DC had already decided her fate—to keep her moving on this carousel—she would make them pay for her comfort when she stopped moving. She thought of that hopeless pigeon, its heart exploded by the impact’s velocity; her eye could barely detect what had just occurred: a blur of wings, a small explosion of feathers, silent death behind the thick glass. The falcon hauled off its cargo still clutched in its talons. Feathers drifted in the wind. Then nothing, as if it never happened. Nature red in tooth and claw. What’s new?
She gave her identifying number and waited until she was patched through.
‘This is an unsecured line, Agent Hui,’ the ADIC intoned, the first words out of his mouth.
‘Yes, sir,’ she said. ‘Our SAC informed me the call was not urgent.’
She winced. That wouldn’t sound right.
‘You might reconsider when I tell you,’ Michaelson calmly began, ‘three men were found in a river in Northern Arkansas in a national park reserve.’
She hesitated what to say next. Park Rangers should get the case. National parks were their bailiwick, not the FBIs.
‘Yes, sir,’ she said and waited for the rest of it.
‘Liaise with Fayetteville. That’s in the northwest part of the state. We’re working with their state police on this. Report to SAC Darrell Gilker tomorrow morning, ten o’clock. He’s expecting you.’
‘Why not Little Rock, sir?’ Jade asked.
‘Because all three victims are from Fayetteville. Report to me as soon as you’ve checked in. One other thing, Agent Hui.’
‘What’s that, sir?’
‘They found a smiley face carved into a tree stump close to the crime scene.’
That blasted smiley face nonsense was like walking through a patch of burdock in bobbysocks—she couldn’t get the burrs out fast enough.
Jade wasn’t a typical FBI agent with a background in accounting or law and possessed of a few years in the armed services or law enforcement. True, she had a law degree from Cardoza and was named to the prestigious Law Review.
The famous phrase from Baudelaire came to her, as if she were being mocked for her own pridefulness after the snipe hunt fiasco she thought she had left behind: La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu’il n’existe pas. There was no one in the parking lot within earshot to hear her, so she said it to herself. It was a timely reminder that Agent Brookins was not alone in his fear and ignorance of the darker things haunting us: ‘The devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.’
Chapter 4
FRONT-LINE SOVIET TROOPS IN the Second World War had access to methamphetamine to combat exhaustion and cold. ISIS fighters are said to be tweaking in the name of Allah with their favorite form of the drug: Captagon. The dopamine release of meth is dangerous because the human body isn’t accustomed to handle a hundred times the normal pleasure stimulus provoked in the brain.
Wöissell had tried meth in his travels back home to New England years ago and found it interesting, especially for stamina in coitus, even better than the Mexican brown tar available on
every other corner between Bangor and Providence. But killing was in a league of its own. He was still basking in the glow of the Ozarks. It was part-sexual, part-mystical. It transported him. He let his mind drift while he drove like a hawk riding thermals with a mere flap of wing. But like meth, it was highly addictive. It had to be controlled.
He had one misgiving: the money he left for her, Tough Guy’s pregnant wife. He was certain no one saw him put the paper sack on the trailer’s stoop. The penciled note was a regrettable ruse: won this money in a hi-steaks poker game & wanted you to have it.
He thought it sounded colloquial enough, some redneck’s idea of decency. He figured she wouldn’t object to the $8,000 in various denominations banded inside the sack.
He glimpsed her just that one time, standing on the porch smoking an electronic cigarette. Coy Burchess—he’d acquired some background on his prey by then—was drinking at a bar called the Billy Goat or the Black Goat. The big stomach stretching out her tee made her belly button look about to explode, but it didn’t bring out the pity in him. He found her despicable, in fact, to have mated with an ape. He wondered what would happen if he approached her—say, a black-suited preacher from a tent revival with a stack of flyers. Would she let him into her messy trailer? One half-moon swipe with a scalpel would be all it would take to unleash the red fruit from its basket.
He drove aimlessly on the interstate heading east. He’d know when to exit, head north or south, stay eastward bound—it didn’t matter when he was awash in the blissful wake of accomplishment. One allowed for a certain amount of randomness. Luck, chance, fate—he was beholden to nothing other men swore allegiance to. Wöissell followed no set prescription in his movements back and forth across the country.