by Erik Carter
“Have any of your team ever worked with a park ranger before?” Ventress said.
“Not during my tenure, no.”
“And have any of your agents ever picked their own liaison before?”
“This would be a first,” Taft said.
“Unbelievable. You know, Taft, I think you’re just as culpable as anyone else here. If you hadn’t stroked Conley’s massive ego for so many years, letting him run around like a spoiled child, then he might not have flipped his lid and kidnapped the Lyndon girl.”
Taft leaned forward, putting one hand on the table and pointing at Ventress with the other. “You don’t know shit. None of us do. And like Harbick, I trust Conley’s judgement.”
“Of course you do,” Ventress said and rolled her eyes. She approached Nash again. “So you, Conley, and Plunkett formed your ill-fated team. What was the first course of action?”
“We went to see a body.”
Chapter Twelve
Dale walked with Nash, and Plunkett on the Bathhouse Row side of Central Avenue, the same sidewalk where he and Nash had been a couple hours earlier. And though it was still a lovely atmosphere, Dale didn’t feel quite as elated and wide-eyed as he had the first time.
Once someone tries to impale you with a massive piece of broken glass, it kinda sours you on a place.
The weather, too, had gotten worse. The temperature remained comfortable, but those gray clouds that Dale had noticed earlier had completely overtaken the sky. All trace of blue was now gone. Still, there were plenty of tourists out and about, and, likewise, Plunkett’s smile was also at odds with the gloom. He was waving his hand grandly left and right, and he’d been giving Dale and Nash an introduction to the city, repeating much of the information Dale had relayed to Nash earlier. Nash was probably bored out of his mind.
Plunkett had the ideal demeanor for this sort of thing—contagious enthusiasm and that big, lovable, toad-like smile—so much so that Dale began to wonder why Plunkett had chosen to become a law enforcement ranger. His temperament seemed more suited to an interpretive ranger. He would make a perfect one.
“…so while that side of the street is private property,” Plunkett was saying. “We’re on federal land right now. Even though the functioning spas are privately run, they belong to the government, leased out.”
“You lived here all your life, Ranger Plunkett?” Dale said.
“Oh, no. Not from here originally. I’m from Brainerd, Minnesota. I’ve been here a while, though. Fifteen years. And it’s Ernie. But don’t call me Ernie either. My friends call me Ern. You can call me Ern.”
Dale laughed. “Sure thing, Ern.”
“First names okay?”
“Of course. That’s my preference too. I’m Dale.”
Ern turned to Nash.
“Nash.”
Ern smiled.
They approached the spa in which Dale and Nash had chased the stranger. A couple law enforcement rangers were by the broken window, which was already covered with a sheet of plastic. One of the rangers was interviewing a woman, while the other inspected the window.
“That’s the Fordyce where you two had your little misadventure,” Ern said, looking at it as they walked by. “Beautiful, isn’t it? It had been the most elaborate and most expensive of the bathhouses. And then it ended up being the first one to shut down. Isn’t that always the way? Darn shame. Closed in 1962. I’ve heard rumors that we—the NPS, that is—are thinking about turning it into the visitor center. Wouldn’t that be something?”
He looked away from the Fordyce and to the other side of the street. He pointed to the left, once again in a very tour guide manner.
“Time to head to private property,” he said. “Time to see Jenna Mancini.”
After they had crossed over to the commercial side of the road, they continued on to the back end of the row of pretty boutiques and pastry shops and jewelry stores that lined Central Avenue and faced Bathhouse Row. There was a street back there—Exchange Street—so while it wasn’t a true alley, it had all the trappings: brick walls, steel utility boxes, barred windows, metal service doors, dumpsters and trash cans. On the opposite side of Exchange was a stone retaining wall and a hill with houses perched on top.
They went to the back side of an Italian restaurant called Allesandro’s, where they met with their contact, an HSPD detective. Crime scene tape squared off the area, blocking Exchange Street. The body was on the ground, covered by a blanket. A bloody knife was a couple feet away, and next to it was a yellow plastic evidence marker with the number 1 on it.
Detective Bill Sadler had smiled at the group when they approached, but it was clear that he was beginning to tire of the situation he’d found himself in and, perhaps, all the other agencies involved with a crime scene that would have been his alone under normal circumstances.
He was very short—about five-foot-seven—and his skin was tan in a natural, non-suntan oil sort of way. He must have been somewhere between thirty-five and forty, but he had one of those faces that looked older than it was—overly lean and a bit sunken. He had waves of dark blonde hair and bright blue eyes that Dale imagined were quite friendly on a normal, serial-killer-less day. His suit pants were dark brown corduroy, flared, and his tie was yellow, and all of it was cheap and wrinkled.
The group stood by the back wall of the restaurant, which was painted white. The paint was thick after years of reapplications. A message was painted in blood, which looked bold against the white paint. The letters were two-inches tall.
“The Axeman of New Orleans,” Dale said.
“Come again?” Sadler said. He had a Southern accent.
“Serial killer. Late 1910s. New Orleans. Six proven victims. After he’d gained a reputation and the city was in a state of fear, he published a note like this in the newspapers,” Dale said and pointed to the message on the wall. “He gave a date and time when he would kill again, but he said he’d spare anyone who was at a place where a jazz band was playing. As you can imagine, the whole city was alive with jazz that night. And no one was murdered.” He pointed at the message again. “Hence, Too bad she wasn’t playing jazz.”
Dale turned and glanced toward the body. The blanket rustled gently in the breeze. He looked from Nash to Ern and then to Sadler.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s do this.”
Sadler took a pair of latex gloves from his pocket and put them on as he stepped toward the body. He knelt down, placed a hand on the blanket—and paused. He looked up at them with a sad little shake of his head.
“Brace yourself.”
He pulled the blanket back.
Dale recoiled.
Plunkett stepped away.
And Nash just looked on.
Dale’s hand was on his mouth, and after he’d taken a couple breaths, he turned back around to find Nash still staring at the body. He was looking at it in the same way he’d looked at the photos of the first victim back at the NPS office.
A blank stare. No apparent reaction.
Dale turned his eyes away from Nash. But he didn’t look back down to the body. He looked up. Into the gray sky.
He was stalling.
Finally, he took another breath, held it for a moment, and looked to the ground.
The body was splayed about five feet away from the back door to the restaurant. The neck was cut completely through, all the way to the vertebra, and above this, there was a mangled mass of tissue and blood where the face had been. Concave. As though she’d been bashed in. From this destroyed area, spread out in all directions, was shiny, curly black hair.
The hair was long. It would have gone halfway down her back. It was bright and lustrous in a way that comes only from careful attention—expensive shampoos, the right hairsprays. Jenna Mancini’s hair surely had been one of her favorite features. At a minimum, she’d taken good care of it. Those small fingers—spread on the rough cement, nails painted red—had worked conditioner or mousse or something into that hair. Spreading it f
rom root to tip. Recently. Perhaps within the last twenty-four hours. There was a small ring on one of those fingers, the right pinky finger, and Dale wondered what it had meant to her. Sentiment or just fashion? Had it been a gift, or did she buy it herself? Did she get it in town at one of the many—
He brought his train of thought to a screeching halt.
It had been a while since Dale had worked a gruesome case like this, and one of the rules that he’d set up for himself—one of the standards he used to get through something like this—was to disassociate himself with the reality of a body, the person who been in the form. It was hard for Dale shut that part of himself down, but in a situation like this, he had to turn off his compassion to do compassionate work. It was a willful and purposeful paradox.
He glanced over at Nash again. Nash was still looking down at the body with that blank expression. Which bothered Dale. It was disturbing. Yet it wasn't the lack of expression that concerned Dale so much as the fact that the stare was uninterrupted.
He wasn’t even blinking.
Sadler had stood back up. He sighed, shaking his head again, as he looked down at the body. “It looks like our guy smashed her face in after he cut her throat.”
“Just like the Axeman of New Orleans,” Dale said. “The first pair of victims—a couple—were treated this way. Both throats slashed, the wife nearly decapitated. Both heads were bashed in, possibly trying to conceal the cause of death.”
“You keep saying our guy was imitating the Axe-man of New Orleans. That’s no axe,” Sadler said and pointed to the bloody knife on the ground a couple feet away.
“No, it’s not,” Dale said. “But I’m guessing it’s one of the knives from the restaurant’s kitchen.”
Sadler took a step closer to Dale, gave him a confused look. “That’s right. How do you know that?”
“The Axeman of New Orleans used implements that belonged to the victims themselves. Usually an axe. On the first victims that were treated like this,” Dale said, pointing down, “he used a straight razor.”
Sadler gave him a slow, impressed nod.
Dale nodded back and stepped over to the rear door of the restaurant. He looked at the hinges.
Nash approached. “What do you got?”
Dale didn’t turn to respond, just kept looking at the hinges. “Nothing at all, actually. The Axeman chiseled panels out of doors to get in. There aren’t any panels in this bad boy, obviously,” Dale said, rapping a knuckle on the solid metal door. “To get the knife, I’m thinking this door was either unlocked, or our guy knew Jenna Mancini.”
Dale looked away from the note and saw Ern, beyond the crime scene tape, several feet away on Exchange Street. Dale motioned to Nash, and then started toward Ern.
"Thanks for your time, Sadler,” Dale said as they ducked under the crime scene tape.
They walked down Exchange Street to Ern, finding him staring into nothingness, arms crossed over his chest. His skin looked clammy. His eyes still registered shock.
“You all right, Ern?” Dale said.
Ern turned, looking Dale in the eye. There was that same fearful expression Dale had seen when Ern stepped away from the body. Only for a moment. Then he brought out his standard smile, albeit with a bit more nerves than usual.
“Yeah, I’ve just ... never seen anything like that.”
Dale nodded, put his hand on Plunkett’s shoulder, and led the three of them back toward Central Avenue.
Chapter Thirteen
Dale had a collection of five creepy books spread out on the desk in front of him.
Two of them he’d brought with him. Two had come from the Hot Springs public library. And one was property of HSPD.
And they were all about serial killers.
As Dale had poured through the materials, his mind kept looping on the notion of people’s dark historical fetishes. There were plenty of people with a fascination for serial killers. There were also those who fixated on Nazi history. And then there were some who were intrigued by medieval torture. Of course, it was human nature to be scintillated by the seedier sides of life. And to Dale, this made sense when dealing with fictional works. Movies and novels. After all, many people contended that the villain of a story was invariably more interesting than the hero.
But when it came to real life, Dale became concerned with folks’ fascination toward evil. People could become enamored with other human beings’ pain. The thought of human suffering gave some people the warm-fuzzies. And this bothered Dale. But he tried to remind himself—or at least convince himself—that it was disassociation. People might not view Jack the Ripper’s victims as anything more than characters in a story because it happened “so long ago.” It was the short-sighted and arrogant part of human nature that believed nothing was real aside from the current moment, nothing was more important than what was going on right now. But everything that was written in history books had been a “right now” at one point. Jack the Ripper’s victims had been real people. Who suffered. Horribly.
And so too were the other people in the books Dale was reading.
He was at a desk in the now empty NPS office—the same desk he’d climbed atop and yelled out to the employees earlier in the day, as a matter of fact. The texts were limited in scope, but he’d been able to compile a bit of information regarding the two unidentified serial killers to whom the Hot Springs killer had made reference—the Cleveland Torso Murderer and the Axeman of New Orleans.
But there were two problems. First, Dale hadn’t found much information he didn’t already know. Second, and more importantly, he’d found nothing linking the two murders.
He had the desk lamp on, but the rest of the main office space was deserted and dark. It was about 6 PM. He’d been researching for nearly two hours. A bit of light came through the window of an office on the far wall where Nash, Ern, and Plunkett were. They’d given Dale the space he needed to do his work.
Dale heard the office door open, and he looked to see Ern striding toward Dale’s desk in his slightly awkward manner. As he did, the phone rang in the office behind him. Dale saw Higgins answer the call.
Ern put his hands in his pockets as he stopped by Dale’s desk. “Any luck?”
Dale pushed away from the books and leaned back in his chair, stretching his arms over his head. “It seems our guy is picking his targets in direct relation to the unidentified serial killers he’s paying homage to. So not only is he copying the killings, but he’s also emulating the victims. The first victim, Paula Willett, was poor. She had a low-paying job and issues with drugs. The Cleveland Torso Murderer prayed on the poor. The second murder was based upon the Axeman of New Orleans, who killed almost exclusively Italians. Jenna Mancini was Italian and worked at an Italian restaurant.”
“Okay,” Ern said. “But if both murders have emulated different unidentified serial killers, how can we predict the next one?”
“That’s the golden question,” Dale said. “And I’m afraid I don’t have a golden answer.”
Ern looked down at him, concerned, supportive. He patted Dale on the shoulder then motioned toward the office. “Listen, Higgins wants to call it a night. You and Nash already met Ricky earlier—why don’t you two come to my house for dinner, meet my other two? Connie won’t mind.”
Dale smiled, both at the graciousness and the prospect of free food. “I’d be delighted.”
There was a bang from the other side of the room. The office door flew open, and Higgins rushed out, heading their way.
“That guy you chased earlier, Conley,” he said. “He was wearing a navy blue sweatshirt, baggy pants?”
Dale stood up. “That’s right.”
“Someone matching that description was seen roaming the Barton Ridge community. That’s out on the north edge of town,” he said. “And they’re trying to figure out if we’ve got another victim.”
Chapter Fourteen
The interior of Ern’s International Harvester Scout 800 was dusty and smelled a bit
like mildew, but it got the three of them to the Barton Ridge neighborhood in no time flat via a combination of Ern’s outstanding driving skills and the extra-loud siren.
Dale hopped out of the passenger side. The gray sky had gone black and was now misting. Tiny little droplets. Not even a drizzle, just enough the collected on ones skin, got everything wet.
Nash climbed of the bench seat in the back. Dale stepped up to him.
“Why don’t you wait here? In the car. Anything could happen. You’re not armed, and you’re not a cop.”
Dale winced inwardly the moment the last words left his lips. You’re not a cop. He hadn’t at all meant to be rude. The words had just slipped out.
As it had been back at the Fordyce, it was clear that Nash wasn’t going to listen, that he was going to come along. But unlike before, he had something to say. Something snide.
“I’ll be fine. Thanks so much for your concern.”
He stepped past Dale.
They met up with Ern in front of the Scout. Ahead, a half dozen HSPD squad cars lined the street, and Dale caught glimpses of cops on foot stealthily running across yards and darting in and out of the forest that surrounded the neighborhood on all sides.
The Barton Ridge neighborhood was fully of stately homes, mostly two stories in height. The lawns were well tended, and the landscaping was fresh and tidy. It was also well-lit, not just from the streetlights lining the sidewalks but also from the windows of the homes. Almost every window in almost every home was alight. Dale reasoned that these homes wouldn’t be so lit-up on a normal night but were currently due to a combination of motivators: the squad cars on the street, the cops running about the neighborhood with guns drawn, and a serial killer on the loose. As Dale scanned the area, he saw many silhouettes, people peering outside, hands cupped against their windows.
The passenger side door of one of the squad cars ahead of them opened, and Detective Sadler stepped out. He scanned the area, and his gaze landed on Dale and his trio. He waved his hand, beckoning them over.