Chasing Evil (Circle of Evil)

by Kylie Brant

  The color appeared again, a swift tide that came and went in her cheeks, and he immediately felt like an ass. The wonder wasn’t that she’d called a halt to their all-too-short involvement, but that it had ever started in the first place. Outside the occasional case, they had absolutely nothing in common.

  Which hadn’t mattered a damn for twelve exquisite nights after he’d happened upon her—pensive and not quite sober—on the outdoor patio of Mickey’s last month.

  He opened his mouth to apologize. He had his share of rough edges. They’d actually helped keep him alive in the long months he’d spent undercover on a federal task force a few years ago. Now that he was back to civilization, however, decades of his mother’s tutelage were easier to recall. But the doctor’s reaction forestalled an apology before he could formulate one.

  “Of course. I’ve been studying it while I arranged things at my practice.” Her face smoothed into professional lines, and she moved to the large map spread across a bulletin board. Unerringly, she placed one pink polished nail to the red pin, designating the location of the latest victim. “The cemetery in Milo was your last find?”

  Discussion of the current investigation beat a post mortem of their not-quite-a-relationship any day of the week. With a minor sense of relief he said, “Monday, yeah. The discovery finally pushed the assistant director into expending extra resources in this case.” One of those resources was Sophie herself. “I’ve still got agents poring over the obits for every small town in a ninety-mile radius of here. If you want to get town residents riled up, just bring in a team with ground penetrating radar and gas chromatography devices and tell people we’re going to dig up grandma’s grave. It’s a real popularity contest.”

  “You pushed to go ahead and look for other possible victims.”

  He moved his shoulders. If the Story County sheriff hadn’t tipped him off, he wouldn’t have known to do so. Would never have continued searching for more than that first one. Dumb luck. Most people didn’t realize how often that factored into an investigation.

  “Yeah, I’ve got plenty of victims. What I don’t have is ID. And without it I’m getting exactly nowhere on motive. And without that…”

  “I know.” Sophie tapped an index finger against her lips, something he’d noticed she did when she was thinking. “I started the victimology analysis, but it’s impossible to complete without more information about who the victims are and what they represent to this offender. Have you talked to the ME about the newest body yet?”

  He shook his head. “The victim didn’t look like she’d been dead as long as the other five. Less decomposition. Facial features were largely intact, if unrecognizable. Jenna’s working on a forensic drawing.” Jenna was also a trained forensic artist, and the agency used her talents wherever needed. “She and the consulting forensic anthropologist could also work on facial reconstructions as needed for the rest of them if the ME would agree to it.” But since the act would necessitate the severing of the skulls for each set of remains, the always-opinionated pathologist had already vehemently nixed that idea, at least for the foreseeable future.

  An expression of delight crossed Sophia’s face. “Forensic anthropologist? Gavin’s here? It will be lovely to see him again.”

  “It’s been delightful,” he agreed dryly. He tried--and failed--to imagine a scenario involving him that would elicit a similar reaction from her, short of falling off a cliff. Since he wasn’t the type of man to feel jealousy, he’d blame the burn in his chest to the breakfast burrito he’d wolfed down on the way to work.

  “How’s the victim identification coming so far?”

  He set the baseball back down in an ashtray on the corner of his desk. “Nothing but circumstantial ID. We’re spinning our wheels going through state, national and international databases with what we have at this point.” Which were hair color, gender, height and very approximate age and weight. That gave them a long list of possible matches across the country for each victim, but they needed a method of positive verification. “We’re also batting zero trying to match victim DNA and fingerprints with CODISmp and AFIS.” Which only told them that the victims had no criminal history and no family member had submitted DNA for a match to any of the missing person databases. Or if they had, the samples hadn’t been entered yet.

  “That could mean these are high risk victims,” Sophia pointed out. “The kind no one misses. What about the physical pattern you found with the others? I assume it was present this time, too.” She did sit then, crossing her legs in a graceful movement that drew his gaze. The suit she wore was the color of cotton candy. It was hard to reconcile the woman wrapped in delicate pastels with the same keen intuitive mind that would construct the offender profile on the deviant they were hunting. Her profiles never made for light reading. They were full of the type of details that a woman who looked like her shouldn’t even know about, much less analyze. And realizing exactly how sexist that thought was still didn’t make him feel guilty for it.

  Layers. That’s what was so damn fascinating about the woman. He was getting too damn old to appreciate shallow and transparent, regardless of the packaging. More’s the pity.

  “This one was tortured, too.” His cell vibrated. He took it from his pocket to glance at the screen, rose and headed toward the door. “You’re in luck. Come with me to the morgue and you can see for yourself.”

  “You get five minutes. Then you’re out of here, unless you have a hankering to watch the next autopsy.”

  Cam scowled at the petite medical examiner. What Dr. Lucy Benally lacked in stature she made up for in attitude. If he’d ever had a soft spot for raven-haired beauties with an enviable rack, it would have been dashed the first time she spoke. She had a mouth that would shame a sailor, a charm that wore thin quickly. “You called me, remember? At least let us get in the door.”

  “Us?” Benally looked up from the metal table, turning around swiftly. “There’s one too many people in here already. You’d better all be gowned. Oh, Sophia, hi. They drag you in on this one?”

  “Obviously,” Cam muttered, but waited impatiently as the women exchanged pleasantries. The ME actually seemed half human when she was conversing with the other woman. Sophie had that affect on people. He’d seen her conduct interviews with incarcerated murderers and coax information from them that law enforcement hadn’t. People responded to something in her. It was a trait DCI had cultivated on numerous occasions when they’d enlisted her services.

  He nodded at Gavin Connerly who was propped lazily against a stainless steel counter. Cam didn’t envy the forensic anthropologist his working proximity to the ME on this case. Not that the man seemed the worse for it. Nothing much seemed to bother the pony-tailed consultant. If anything he appeared amused.

  “I think she’s talking about me.” Connerly grinned. “As the one too many. Somehow my charm and affability always fail to win her over. Sophia, you’re beautiful as ever. Come back to California with me. We can live in sin exploring LA’s decadence.”

  “If I said yes you’d set a sprint record running back to California.”

  “Then say it.” Benally shot the man a look filled with dislike. “He never stops talking. Ever.”

  Glad the ME’s ire was directed at someone else for a change, Cam fingered the mask he’d grabbed. Having had enough stomach churning experiences in the morgue, he never failed to take one after gowning up. But the usual overpowering smells encountered in here were largely absent. Bodies that had been in the ground with no protection didn’t carry the usual stench of decomposition. They smelled like the soil they’d been buried in. Shoving the mask into the pocket of the protective gown, he went to the stainless steel table nearest him and studied their newest Jane Doe.

  “What do you think, Agent?”

  There was a gibe buried in Benally’s voice as she came up behind him. He drew back the sheet and looked the naked corpse over carefully. “She was dead or unconscious when she was buried.” He lifted one l
ifeless hand. “He cut the fingernails on this one like all the rest, but there’s no dirt on the tips that would indicate she tried to claw her way out.” None of the six victims had been buried in more than eighteen inches of soil. Just deeply enough to be pushed on top of the casket’s vault in the grave and then reburied. Had they been conscious, each might have been able to dig their way out.

  He peered more closely at the victim’s neck. “Most of the skin is intact, which makes me think this one was buried the most recently.” The skin had turned a mottled shade of burgundy and brown, making it impossible to determine bruising. “Need an autopsy to see whether she was strangled.” Certainly looking for petechial hemorrhage in the eyes wouldn’t help. Eyes were the first thing bugs attacked. He looked the body over carefully. “The skin shows much less than the expected insect activity. He probably doused this one with insecticide, too.” He threw a look at the ME. “The nails don’t look loose yet.”

  “He makes me so proud.” Straightening, Cam saw Benally pat her chest, addressing Sophie. “I’ve taught him all he knows. Of course, that’s not much.”

  Connerly ambled over to join Cam at the gurney. “This one might have only been in the ground a matter of days. And damn all the criminals watching CSI.” His expression was mournful. “That’s probably where he got the idea to spray them. Just to screw up the information we could get from the bug activity.”

  “Very possibly.” Sophia sounded pensive. “Certainly this subject is intelligent enough to kill half a dozen times without being caught. He takes the precaution to cut the nails, which might harbor his DNA if the victims marked him in any way. He washes down the bodies before burial, again, we can presume to rid them of any DNA he might have left behind. No traces of semen--” She raised her brows, throwing a quick look to the ME, who shook her head slightly. “So it would be logical for him to try and slow the entymological evidence. But the spray could also be all about him. To make the post mortem sexual attacks more pleasurable. It would allow him to assault the victims long after their deaths while keeping the insect activity delayed.”

  Gavin’s face looked queasy at that. “Jesus, Doc.”

  The ME strode over to the gurney and nudged between the two men. “Lean on your lab guys. By now they should have narrowed down the type of insecticide he used, which might be some help.”

  “It’d be better to prioritize the core soil samples,” Gavin argued. “Dead bodies release about four hundred different chemicals as they decompose, and an unprotected buried body is going to release them in the soil surrounding it. That’s going to give us our best chance of figuring out how long each of them has been in the ground.”

  Cam made a mental note to check on the soil samples and reprioritize the tests he’d ordered if necessary. They had no way of knowing how long the victims had been dead prior to their burial. And the decomposition of some of the bodies could have been slowed if they’d been buried when the ground was still frozen last year. That would also explain the temptation to use freshly dug graves through Iowa’s frigid winter this year. But learning when these victims had started disappearing would be the quickest way to accelerate the missing person search.

  Sophie rounded the gurney to stand over the victim, facing them as Benally spoke.

  “I checked first on the trifecta of victim injuries we documented earlier.” Lucy ticked off on her fingers. “Evidence of prolonged physical and sexual torture prior to death. Manual strangulation. Autopsy will show whether this victim’s hyoid bone was broken in the same manner of the other victims. Significant vaginal and anal tearing. Evidence of post-mortem vaginal and anal penetration. The killer hasn’t been careless enough to leave semen in her throat or stomach, but maybe we’ll get lucky this time around. There’s not much doubt this one’s connected to the other victims in this case, but I won’t say for certain until after the autopsy.”

  That was hardly surprising. Cam couldn’t recall a time that Benally had ever uttered a theory that wasn’t supported by ten different sets of facts. “How about the soap used to wash the body?”

  “Same ingredients were found on the skin.” Benally glanced at the clock on the wall while answering, clearly impatient to have them gone. “I understand the lab already gave you a positive ID on it.”

  He nodded. Mother’s Touch, a popular liquid soap advertised as being gentle enough for babies. The irony was appalling.

  “And the burn marks on the victim’s back?” Sophie asked.

  “Give me a hand,” the ME said to Cam. She reached into her lab coat pocket and took out a pair of latex gloves and slapped them to his chest. He raised his brows. They never bothered with gloves when they gowned up to come in here, because they were always under threat of dismemberment if they touched anything.

  He rounded the stainless steel table, pulling the gloves on and reached to help turn the corpse over. “Careful.” The pathologist’s voice was sharp. “Position your hands like mine. I don’t want to lose any skin.”

  Gingerly he helped her turn the corpse over to expose the backside. His gaze immediately went to the left shoulder blade. There were a dozen marks in all, a random scattering of burns that, at least in the case of the first five victims, had been determined to have been inflicted by a lit cigar.

  “The number of burns varies, doesn’t it?” observed Sophie. She leaned in to peer closely at the shoulder blade. “At least in comparing the pictures, there didn’t appear to be a set pattern to them.”

  “Maybe there’s one for each time he assaults the vic. Or each time she displeases him in some way,” Cam suggested. Sophie couldn’t have looked more out of place in the macabre setting. Like someone had set a fairy princess down in the steaming outskirts of hell.

  “That’s a good thought.” She moved away, going to stand at the foot end of the gurney. Cocking her head, she studied the corpse silently. “Whatever the reason, we can be certain the motivation for the act is about him, not her. It satisfies something inside him, and he acts for reasons rooted in his psychosis or childhood experiences. It seems to be part of his signature.”

  Cam shifted position uneasily. This was the part of having Sophie here that made him most uncomfortable. Despite the groundbreaking work done decades ago in the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, he still had a wait-and-see attitude to things like offender profiles. It required too much guesswork to his way of thinking, and he was an evidence kind of guy.

  But then he caught sight of something else and light bulbs started going off in his head. “Holy shit!”

  “Yeah, Super Agent I wondered how long it’d take you to catch sight of that.” Benally tossed her heavy braid over her shoulder with a practiced shrug and smiled smugly. “I was pretty pumped when I saw it. You just might get a positive ID on this one.”

  Excitement surging, Cam reached out a latex tipped finger and traced the tattoo lightly. It seemed to wrap around the back of the left ankle, but the length and width of it was made more difficult to determine by the extensive discoloration of the skin. “I’ll need exact physical locators and measurements on it. What is this?” He lowered his head to look more closely at it. “Bunch of flowers, right? Be too much to hope that there’s a name buried somewhere in the design.” An identifying mark gave them far more to go on than gender, height, weight and approximate age.

  Adrenaline was shooting through his veins. He knew they’d finally gotten their first real break in the case.

  “Way ahead of you.” The ME reached into her lab coat pocket again and withdrew a slip of paper, handing it to him.

  Cam looked from it to her, gaze narrowing. “You could have given me this information over the phone.”

  Her answer was smug. “But that would have ruined my fun.”

  “I wonder if I could ask you to do something for me.”

  Wincing, he tried to catch Sophie’s eye. He’d learned to never phrase a request as a favor with Dr. Lucy Benally. Favors had a way of costing a pair of Cubs tickets or, even worse, his f
ifty-yard line seats at Kinnick for the biggest Hawkeye game of the season. Commands worked slightly better with the doctor. The worst thing to happen was for her to get the upper hand.

  But it was too late. The pathologist had a familiar glint in her eye as she looked at Sophie. “You want a favor?”

  “A bit more of your time, perhaps. I know you’re busy. But you have all the photos taken of the victims on PowerPoint, don’t you?”

  Anyone who’d worked with Benally before knew that she did. The ME was notoriously OCD about things like that. Copies of the photos documenting every step of each body’s excavation, coupled by the ones taken in this lab would be arranged sequentially, along with photo documentation of the autopsy on each. Cam tried to head trouble off at the pass. “None of the other victims had identifying marks, Dr. Channing. As you saw in the file you were given.”

  “Of course not.” She didn’t even look at him. Her attention was on the diminutive pathologist. “Lucy would have found them immediately. The file said that not all of the skin on some of the bodies was intact. But it also documented the number of burns found. How can we know every victim had burns on their body or how many?”

  Cam winced at the imminent explosion. He’d been on the receiving end of Benally’s blistering response before when he’d questioned one of her findings.

  But amazingly, the pathologist beamed. “Good question. I’ll show you.” Swiftly she walked over to her computer, which stood on a rolling cart in the center of the room. A few minutes passed as she fussed with plug-ins and lowered a white projector screen. She opened the laptop and tapped in a few commands. Moments later the photos in question were displayed before them.

  “The victims are numbered in each picture according to the order in which they were found. We can’t yet say with complete accuracy the sequence in which they were killed or how long they’d been buried.”

  Wouldn’t say, Cam mentally corrected. The ME wasn’t one to make claims that hadn’t been verified and re-verified.