The Definitive Albert J. Sterne

by Julie Bozza

  “And I wish your conversation wasn’t so littered with clichés.”

  Fletcher cast him an amused glance. “Do you mind people associating you with death? I hardly ever see you except when we have a murder case up here - or when I stumble across another corpse.”

  “It’s a wonder the local murderers haven’t realized you spend half your life tramping around these forests. They could find more secure places to leave their refuse.”

  “I don’t have much luck, do I? I’ll have to find some other way of spending my weekends. Hiking has produced too many nasty surprises.” Silence for a while, then Fletcher said very low, “There are three graves. They’re shallow, maybe only two feet deep, in a patch of dirt by a river. One of them -” He paused for a moment before continuing, “The spring thaw has washed one of the graves partly open.”

  “You’re trying to tell me that one of the bodies is exposed.”

  “Yes.” Ash abruptly slowed the vehicle for no reason that was immediately evident, then turned onto a dirt track that appeared to their left. He frowned in concentration, as the track quickly became steep and burdened with rocks and potholes.

  “Whoever buried the bodies either brought them hiking - alive - or killed them and drove them here,” Albert postulated.

  “Yes. He’s likely to have camping equipment or a four-wheel-drive vehicle or both. Perhaps someone who fishes, or traps, or hikes. Mind you,” Fletcher added, “that doesn’t narrow it down. In Colorado every man, woman and dog owns a four-wheel-drive.”

  “Does he know this particular area?”

  “Well enough to have found the site - there wouldn’t be many suitable places to bury three bodies around here, it’s very rocky - and to return to it at least twice over a period of weeks. The snow would have hidden the graves in winter, though perhaps he didn’t foresee the river flooding in spring.”

  “Or perhaps he didn’t care.”

  “Yes. He may have figured that by the time the bodies were discovered or washed downstream they wouldn’t be any use to us.”

  “Naïve.”

  “He’s gotten away with murder three times at least. He probably thinks he’s too clever to be caught. Actually,” Ash continued, “I’m working on the assumption that he wanted the bodies to be found - because if he didn’t, the easiest thing to do is just drop them down an old mineshaft. There are plenty around here, and the bodies would never be seen again.” Ash pulled over to park behind a line of cars on the side of the track. “We’re here.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Once again, we have to walk the rest of the way. Told you this feels like déjà vu.”

  “Fine,” Albert said, all the more impatiently because the memories were indeed vivid. After five years he still found Ash as compelling as he was annoying. And Fletcher Ash was inevitably very annoying.

  Albert climbed down, hefted his metal case from the floor of the cabin to the ground, then paused to button his coat. Fletcher, already bundled up in a shabby-looking quilted jacket, headed off into the trees, glancing back once to ensure Albert was following. “If the bodies were carried in,” Albert concluded after a couple of minutes, “he’s strong - or there’s more than one offender.”

  “Strong as a bear,” Ash muttered.

  “What?”

  “I feel that it’s just one man. Built large, strong.”

  “I see.” And then there was the familiar bright yellow tape strung between the trees. Albert ducked under it to see the swollen river, which had retreated from the bare dirt surrounding an arm and shoulder. There was torn black plastic around the limb, and the usual flood-debris of leaves and twigs. The flesh was bruised and tainted. If that was the most recent body, then the two bare mounds further from the river would contain little more than skeletons.

  Albert could see why Ash had assumed there were weeks-long intervals between the graves. The one closest to the rock wall that sheltered them was only just visible - the dirt was old, the mound sunken. The site itself was well-chosen, tucked away underneath a cliff, with no reason for anyone to visit or even notice it. The other bank was only a few feet away, but the combination of rocks and the spring thaw made it virtually inaccessible. The river had washed mud and silt into the corner formed by the rock wall, so the dirt was damp and easy to dig. The river would also wash away any indication of who’d been there - though if the murderer had realized that, he’d have known the bodies might be uncovered at some stage.

  “He’s smart,” Albert said. “Other than the shallowness of the graves.”

  “Too smart,” a woman agreed from behind him.

  It was Agent Caroline Thornton, Ash’s supervisor at the Denver field office. She was wearing a female version of the FBI-approved suit, with far more style than Albert anticipated ever seeing in her subordinate. Albert nodded a perfunctory greeting.

  “I’m afraid he won’t have left anything useful,” Thornton continued, “especially with the weather recently. Fletch and I have been over the area with no luck.”

  Shrugging this off, Albert began a quick examination of the site himself, dictating notes to a miniature cassette recorder.

  It was a painstaking business, unearthing the bodies. Albert, as patient and thorough as ever, worked with a small trowel and tray. He let Ash and Thornton sift through the dirt for anything that could provide a clue to the offender, but kept an eye on their progress. The local cops clustered around, watching, but for once kept out of the way.

  After an hour’s work, Albert had uncovered the rest of the corpse closest to the river. It was encased in black plastic, the sort that might be used in gardens to control weeds, and was bound about the neck, waist and ankles with tape, in what originally would have been a careful parcel.

  “He took his time over this,” Thornton observed. “He’s a cool one.”

  “Cool, smart, strong, confident,” Ash listed.

  Albert had stepped back outside the crime scene tape to collect his camera from the case. “I assure you I’m smarter,” he said flatly.

  “You can include arrogant on both sides of the equation,” Thornton muttered, loud enough for them all to hear. The locals nervously chuckled.

  Several photos were added to those Albert had already taken of the undisturbed site. And then he carefully cut the bindings and pulled the plastic open.

  “First corpse is male,” Albert told the cassette recorder. “Apparently naked - no clothes, no watch, no jewelry. Facedown in the grave. State of the flesh indicates he’s been dead at least three months, though probably longer due to the cold conditions.” He turned to add to Thornton, “Have the coffins arrived yet? We’ll have to box this one up now or he’ll fall apart.”

  “Half an hour ago,” she informed him. The only signs of discomfort that betrayed her were a tightly pursed mouth and her position up-wind of the grave.

  By contrast, Ash looked a little green. But he also bore the determination that Albert had come to expect from him.

  “Tell them to bring a coffin over - but you and Idaho Joe carry it in.” No point in letting anyone other than the three of them invade the crime site.

  It was dusk by the time Albert was satisfied. The three had lifted the body from the grave, grasping only the plastic, laid it carefully on a clean sheet, wrapped it loosely, and placed the whole bundle into the metal coffin. Albert stuck FBI seals across where the lid met the box. “No one touches the stiff until I get there tomorrow,” he said, glaring around at his colleagues and the locals. “Put it on ice.”

  The cops looked annoyed but carried the box away without argument. Thornton went with them, soothing ruffled feathers.

  “You’re staying up here tonight?” Ash asked.

  “Unless you think there’s some urgent need to dig up the other corpses in the dark, or examine that one in town.” Albert waited with a sardonically raised eyebrow, though Fletcher Ash never argued with him about forensic procedure.

  “There seems little point in risking evidence, give
n the age of the bodies. The offender is long gone.”

  “Exactly. I intend to wait here and discourage the curious.”

  “It’ll get colder,” Ash warned, “once this fog clears.”

  Albert shrugged.

  “I’ll stay with you.”

  “I don’t want you here.”

  The young man looked at him. “I’m staying. We can take it in turns to catch some sleep in the truck.” Silence, which Ash ended up filling: “It’s not wise for you to stay up all night. We need your skills unimpaired over the next few days.”

  “Very tactful. Is everyone in Idaho as willful as you?”

  “No one. Not even close.”

  “Just what I thought. Well, if you can possibly avoid getting scared, you can stay.” He bit off those last words, unwilling to sound grateful.

  The early darkness closed in, the world still muffled by cloud. Albert stood, leaning back against a tree, with his arms crossed. To his right, maybe ten feet away, Ash was hunkered down on the ground, staring fixedly up at the gravesites.

  “What did you make of the fact,” Albert eventually asked, “that the stiff was planted facedown?”

  Ash was quick to answer, as if he’d been mulling over the same thing. Or perhaps he’d been expecting Albert’s interrogation. “If the killer was alone, then perhaps he rolled the body into the grave rather than lift it again, and didn’t bother trying to move it when it landed facedown. Or perhaps it shows a complete depersonalization of the victim, which would fit the standard profile of a disorganized killer. Or there is something else significant about it, especially if the others are also facedown - perhaps something sexual.”

  “And what does your infamous instinct tell you?” Albert prompted.

  “You don’t believe in that,” Ash reminded him. But when Albert just shrugged he continued, “Not the depersonalization - this one is organized. Mainly the sexual. Powerfully sexual.”

  “Powerful - as in overwhelming to you, or referring to his dominant behavior?”

  “Yes. Both.”

  “You get a kick out of this sort of thing, don’t you?”

  “No,” the young man said in a quiet little voice. Albert could read something of a lie in that; perhaps it was denial of a truth he disliked. Ash added, “I think you’ll find he raped them.”

  “Really. And you sound so unhappy about it, when I expected you’d be glad of this chance.”

  “Glad of this? What on earth do you mean?”

  “You’re ambitious, Special Agent.”

  Ash was glaring, but after a moment he turned back to his consideration of the graves and sourly agreed, “Yeah, ambitious and unhappy.”

  Silence again, until a tediously polite argument over who would sleep first on the front seat of the four-wheel-drive. Ash gave in, and left strict instructions to be woken in three hours. Albert agreed solely for the sake of avoiding another argument.

  CHAPTER TWO

  COLORADO and WASHINGTON DC

  MARCH - SEPTEMBER 1981

  A tap on the window, and Fletcher sat up too fast - still half asleep, it took him a moment to recognize Caroline Thornton. “Slowing up, Fletch,” she said, shaking her head in mock despair.

  He swung open the door of the four-wheel-drive. “Good morning.”

  “Rough night?”

  “Not so bad, considering I spent the small hours watching over three graves.”

  “I brought you some breakfast.” She forestalled his immediate question: “And coffee. Plentiful, hot, black and strong …”

  “… like I like my men,” he completed their old joke. “Yeah, yeah.”

  She laughed. “You’ll do, Fletch, and I don’t care who says otherwise.”

  “Do for what, though?” he asked rhetorically. He stretched. “Come on.” And, first collecting the precious thermos of coffee, Fletch led the way to the river.

  Albert was already working on uncovering the second grave. “It’s about time you showed up,” he said, impatient. “The morning is already half over.”

  Thornton sighed, and cast a glance at Fletcher. “Damn. I thought he was just a bad dream I had last night.”

  “No such luck,” Fletcher muttered. “Albert, Caroline brought us some breakfast, if you’d care to join us.”

  “Preferably before you open that one up, Mr Sterne, if yesterday’s stench is anything to go by,” Thornton added.

  It seemed for a moment as if Albert was going to subject them to another retort but he appeared to find the inner resources necessary to swallow the insult. And surely it was logical to eat right now, just as it had been logical to accept Fletcher’s company overnight. “That would be fine,” he eventually said as if the words tasted bitter.

  It was a familiar sight that Fletcher found both reassuring and ghoulish: Albert working alone in a morgue, surrounded by corpses. He had all three of the bodies out on the tables, rather than his usual procedure of dealing with them one at a time. Fletcher closed the door behind him, and asked, “Have you determined the cause of death yet?”

  “You’ll have my report tomorrow morning.”

  Ash stared at the man for a moment. “If you know now, I’d appreciate you telling me.”

  “The second one,” Albert said with exaggerated patience, indicating the corpse on the table he stood beside, “the offender hit too hard. Cause of death was coma due to this head injury.”

  “Compression of the brain,” Fletch interpreted as he walked over, remembering the grisly textbooks that had haunted him, “resulting from a depressed fracture of the skull.” Casting a quick look at the evidence, Fletch asked, “Are you implying he didn’t intend the boy to die like that?”

  “He didn’t want to kill the boy that quickly. The other injuries - the few on this stiff, and all of them on the first and third - were inflicted before the victims died.”

  “So he takes sadistic pleasure in hurting them.”

  “In slowly and systematically killing them,” Albert corrected. “Cause of death for the other two was anoxic anoxia.”

  “Asphyxia? What - he suffocated or strangled them?”

  “If you look at the X-rays, you’ll see the hyoid bone in each throat is fractured.”

  Fletch nodded. “Classic sign of manual strangulation.”

  “And, in this case, the evidence is not misleading. But the offender only killed them once he was finished. You’ll be pleased to know there is evidence that, as you suspected, at least those two were sodomized. I suspect this one wasn’t - the offender is not a necrophiliac. Now, if you’ll let me continue before they decay any further …”

  But Fletcher asked, “Any identification yet?”

  “No. I plan to search the dental records of local missing persons. The earliest one, for instance, used to have braces.”

  “Used to, sometime before he was killed? Or did the offender remove them to hinder identification? I guess he could have really hurt the boy, doing that, if pain was his main intent.”

  Albert cast him a surprised look. “You have a nasty imagination, Special Agent. The boy still has a correctional plate - I conclude that a qualified orthodontist removed the braces and replaced them with the plate.”

  “All right.” Refusing to react to the pedantic delivery of this information, Fletcher sat down in a chair over by the wall, and watched Albert return to work. “They aren’t as decayed as you anticipated.”

  “The bodies were securely wrapped, so the first two were well preserved, and they would have been kept very cold throughout the winter months. You might consider whether preservation was his intention or whether the plastic was simply to minimize the exchange of trace evidence. It was only the latest that was decaying badly because the wrapping was breached in the flooding.”

  After a while, Fletch said, “I thought I might go to HQ, start examining the files for similar crimes. I can’t find anything here, none of the police can recall anything similar. Caroline said she’d stay on and look into the identifications.”


  “You won’t find anything in Washington.”

  “He must have killed before. He was too cool about this.”

  “But he’s too smart to leave a trail.”

  “I assure you I’m smarter,” Ash said, quoting Albert’s words of the previous day. “I’m going to find this man.”

  “Really,” Albert said, with a patent lack of interest.

  “And you’re going to help me.”