Bloodletting

by Michael McBride

  She wished she were back in Peru, where things made sense, far away from the modern world. There was no place for her in this country where the beauty of the passage of the spirit was stripped away and individual lives were sealed in matching boxes and buried in almost suburban anonymity, marked by ornate marble headstones or simple placards set into the grass, commensurate not with the value of their lives, but with the value of their assets.

  A commercial for a steel-framed truck no real man could do without followed the polished man at the news desk, and she wondered how a vehicle could warrant more of a viewer's time than the death of a man who had shaped countless young minds--albeit in more ways than appropriate--over the course of his distinguished career. It was symptomatic of a much larger disease, but at the moment it was purely a distraction to keep her from pondering her more pressing problems.

  All of her life she'd been ordinary. Smart, but never valedictorian material. Pretty, but never the most popular. Raised by a single mother in a house like every other in her neighborhood, abandoned by a father she had never known, of whom her mother had rarely spoken. Had there been a vote for "Most Likely to Become Invisible," she surely would have won hands-down, had she been memorable enough. Perhaps that was why she romanticized the rituals of death. She moved through life a ghost, the only mark of her existence footprints in a vast desert thousands of miles away, even now being erased by the wind. What could she have possibly done to bring her to this place and time?

  She racked her brain, approaching the problem from every conceivable angle, and yet she found nothing. Why would her presence at the site have been necessary, especially when her expertise was so quickly and easily proven unnecessary? How could someone have known nearly a decade prior how to prepare his victims in order to bring her running from halfway around the globe? What could she have possibly done to draw the attention of a serial killer? Had their paths crossed in the anthropology program at NAU? She hardly remembered her undergraduate years, let alone more than a few of her classmates. And what made the tapir so significant that someone had broken into her motel room to leave the figurine for her? If it was of anthropological significance, it was sending mixed signals. It was the Maya, and to a dramatically lesser degree the Inca, who prized and worshipped the tapir. It was an unusual mammal primarily indigenous to Latin America, where the Maya had built their great society. Its habitat barely overlapped the South American borders of the Inca nation.

  Nothing made sense. She wished she could call her mother, who had always seemed to know exactly what to say when she was sad or confused. Maybe Montgomery or Wilson could provide some insight.

  Voices rose in the other room.

  She eased off the bed, careful not to make the old mattress squeak, approached the doorway, and stopped where she could barely peer around the trim. All four men were in the corner of the room, surrounding a laptop, but the computer wasn't their current focus. Paxton stood a couple feet apart from the others, cell phone pressed to one ear, the palm of his free hand to the other. She couldn't read the expression on his face.

  "When did they last check in?" Paxton asked. He turned to the other men and mouthed words she couldn't quite make out. "Get me an address, directions, anything!"

  Ellie walked into the room, but no one appeared to notice. From the looks on their faces, whatever was transpiring on the phone was of far greater importance. Hawthorne closed the laptop, and both he and Locke donned their jackets.

  "I need every scrap of information you can find," Paxton said. He finally looked at her. He tipped the phone from his lips and mouthed for her to grab whatever she needed.

  She went back into the other room, slipped her shoes on again, and returned to find the others already heading out the door. Carver took her by the hand and hustled her along beside him.

  "The Dresden Sheriff's Department said their man hasn't been in contact in more than an hour," he said, nearly pulling her off the top stair in their frantic descent. "He checked in prior to meeting up with two Navajo cops at a remote property on the Little Colorado River, but didn't say why. The Navajo police in Winslow haven't been able to reach their officers either."

  "Just like the locals to try to take center stage," Wolfe said, throwing open the driver's side door of one of the vehicles.

  Hawthorne and Locke climbed into the other.

  The next thing Ellie knew, she'd been shoved into the rear seat behind Wolfe and she was scrambling to buckle her seatbelt as the car rocketed in reverse with a scream of smoking rubber. She squeezed the handle on the door and closed her eyes. The car swung in a half-circle, barely pausing long enough to shift gears, and then they were flying toward the highway.

  She didn't understand what was happening, but couldn't catch her breath to ask and could barely force her eyes open wide enough to see the freeway signs blinking past.

  The sedan continued to gain speed until it felt like an airplane reaching takeoff velocity and she suddenly realized how full her bladder was. She bit her lip to distract herself from the pressure, and watched the shadowed desert hurtle by beneath the low ceiling of stars.

  X

  28 Miles East-northeast of

  Flagstaff, Arizona

  There were already two police cruisers at the end of the long dirt drive when they arrived, though the officers still lingered nervously in the vicinity of their vehicles. The silhouette of one was visible in the driver's seat of the nearest cruiser, through the rear windshield. Carver assumed he was speaking to dispatch via the walkie-talkie. Swirling lights from the roofs cast a surreal red and blue glare across the front of the house that immediately reminded him of the one outside of Sterling where they had found Jasmine Rivers's dismembered body. The small ranch house, and especially the building beside it farther up the drive, were arrested somewhere in the process of deterioration, though far nearer the end than the beginning. As the cloud of dust was still settling ahead, diffusing their headlights, Carver could tell the responding units hadn't been there very long. It was only a moment before he understood their hesitance to approach the house.

  "You see them?" Wolfe asked, nodding his head in the direction of the decrepit house. Gravel growled under the tires when he braked, and the trailing wake of dust passed them from behind.

  "Yeah," Carver said, opening his door. He cast a glance back toward Ellie before climbing out. "I want you to stay in here and lock the doors. Don't open them for anyone but me."

  He watched her nod through the closing door and listened for the thunk of the automatic locks engaging. Beretta in hand and Wolfe at his hip, he weaved between the idling cars and passed three officers, two of whom had darker skin and presumably belonged to the more modern of the old vehicles with the Navajo Nation logo on the doors.

  "You don't want to go up there," one of the officers mumbled. Probably the same guy whose partially digested dinner stank from the swatch of dried grass beside the path.

  The gunshot sound of closing doors signaled the arrival of Hawthorne and Locke behind them.

  "Would you guys turn off those blasted cherries?" Wolfe called over his shoulder. "Christ. It's like trying to investigate at a carnival."

  The alternating red and blue glare made the path appear to shift in front of their feet, animating the shadows of cacti and yuccas, lending the impression of motion to the bodies sprawled across the porch, as though they were trying to crawl away.

  Carver crouched before the porch, eyeing the front of the house before producing his penlight and shining it down onto the bodies. The light reflected from the massive amounts of blood, which covered the weathered planks and dripped through the cracks between with soft, irregular plats.

  "He's long gone," Wolfe said, lowering his sidearm, but Carver noticed he didn't holster it.

  One of the corpses was crumpled on its side, facing the front door. What remained of the tattered, blood-stained uniform identified the man as Navajo police, his braided hair draped around his neck like a hangman's noose. Pale fa
ced and wide-eyed, the memory of shock was frozen on his chubby features. His fat neck had been torn open from the side by what looked to have been an animal, the edges raggedly lacerated, a strap of flesh oddly reminiscent of a tongue lolling from the front edge under his Adam's apple. A product of ripping, tugging, wrenching away in tightly clenched jaws. Blood still burbled from the deep wound, slowly, the same sluggish pace with which the congealing droplets rolled down the front wall and door from the wide arcs sprayed across the wood.

  The other man was taller, thinner, his body prone, face flat on the porch. White fragments of his front teeth marred the puddle beneath. His slender neck was a black mass of bruises, awkwardly swollen. Arms pinned under his chest, pistol at his side, legs hanging over the twin steps.

  Carver carefully leaned over the officer and sniffed the barrel of the gun, expecting to smell cordite, but inhaling only fresh oil. The same was apparent of the other policeman's gun, though it was still clenched in his fist. Neither weapon had been fired.

  "They were attacked from behind," Wolfe said. "Never saw it coming."

  "The one on the right had his neck broken; the one on the left his carotid severed," Carver said, rising and shining his light on the ground. "Multiple assailants?"

  "You think one could have done this?"

  Carver shook his head, unsure, scrutinizing the dirt for footprints. There were twin sets leading up to the porch, the uneven tread of cowboy boots to match those on the officers' feet. Another set of tracks led away from the main path, cutting across the unkempt yard in front of the house in the direction of the outbuilding. A single set. They were larger, size twelve, maybe thirteen. Deep, hard rubber tread, clearly defined. Work boots. Clear heel contact, no scoop of dirt from the toes. Whoever had left the tracks hadn't been running, but walking away from the carnage at a relaxed pace. They could have been old, however Carver thought not. They showed minimal signs of being altered by the wind, which even now chased the bloody cowboy hats on the porch up against the railing. No, these were recent, methodical, plodding.

  He followed them from the side, careful not to disturb them, skirting piles of rock and sharp cholla. All the while the aroma of smoked meat grew stronger. There was no doubt where the trail was leading him, inspiring the acidic mixture of excitement and dread stirring in his gut. This was what they had come here to find. If only the locals had called them first...

  The footprints led directly to the door of the old building, where a broken padlock lay partially buried in the dirt.

  He paused and inspected the structure. The ground surrounding the walls bore the marks of halfheartedly filled holes dug by coyotes trying to reach the source of the smell. Through the gaps between the slats he could see the room inside was dark, but little else through the dissipating mass of smoke.

  "Are we going to do this or what?" Wolfe asked.

  Carver looked back toward the house. Hawthorne and Locke approached their position from the road. Far in the distance, flashing lights announced the impending arrival of more police, their sirens only now becoming audible in the deep valley.

  "Yeah," Carver said, adjusting his grip on the Beretta. "Anything moves, shoot it."

  Holding his light in his left hand, he eased around the open doorway. The wind made the hinges squeal, and the door clapped against the wall. His beam barely penetrated the murk, taking the form of the smoke. He ticked it from side to side, highlighting the dark shapes of filthy aluminum buckets on the dirt floor, the vague outline of a brick stove straight ahead. A tarp against the wall to the left somewhat concealed fifty-pound bags of salt. The light reflected from stoppered glass vials filled with clear fluid, the origin of the faintly astringent scent of chemicals beneath the overriding aroma of wood smoke and meat.

  Nothing moved but the thick cloud, which shoved past him into the night, and the occasional streak of fluid striking the collection basins from above.

  He knew what he would see long before he looked up.

  Large, black iron hooks hung from thick ropes, attached to a system of pulleys and tied to the wall. A body was suspended directly overhead, folded naked into fetal position and bound by coarse rope, under which a pair of hooks had been looped to bear its weight. The skin was waxy, semi-transparent, beaded with cloudy fluid that dripped from the bare buttocks and feet. It was a woman, though now only slightly resembling human. Her deep black hair was wiry, disheveled, hiding her face. The skin on the backs of her arms and the undersides of her hips were so swollen with fluid they appeared ready to burst. Her knees and shoulders were knobby crests of bone. Another body hung beside her, a man who had obviously been up there in the smoke much longer, his form a constriction of skin on bone, his teeth visible through his desiccated cheeks. A third dangled beyond, from which fluid drained in a steady stream into an overflowing bucket. The ropes had been tied around it so recently the flesh was bruised. Its voided bowels announced themselves from the floor. Its head leaned back so far its neck opened like a second mouth parted in a silent scream, clinging to its body by the cervical spine alone. The muscles were heavily developed, undeniably male; the bloody handprints covering the thighs and upper arms still fresh.

  Carver directed the light at the ground beneath it, and caught the reflection from the man's badge on the haphazard pile of ripped clothing.

  A knot of wood snapped in the doused coals and Carver nearly fired a fusillade of bullets into the fire.

  Heart pounding in his ears, he backed out of the smokehouse, and nearly stumbled into Hawthorne, who brushed past him into the vile room. Carver turned to see Locke savor a deep inhalation before following the older man.

  Carver took a deep breath of the fresh air to combat the revolt in his stomach and blew it out slowly. Willing his heart to slow, his brain to concentrate, he noticed more footprints in the dirt, leading away from the building. He followed them over a small rise capped with junipers into a shallow arroyo, the limestone descent sheer and rugged. At the bottom, an antique police cruiser had been shoved nose-down into a dry creek bed. Its fender pointed into the air.

  He slid down a zigzagging trail of loose gravel, maintaining his tenuous balance on outcroppings with heavily needled things he couldn't see in the dark, until he reached the bottom, where the footprints resumed in the sand. Fresh tire tracks, wide and deep, had torn up the ground. Made by a truck he could only assume the murderer had already had waiting for him.

  Wolfe was right. The man was long gone.

  Carver bellowed in frustration. His voice echoed back at him from the canyon walls, the harbinger of the sound of sirens.

  He walked over to the abandoned Chevrolet Caprice and balanced on the edge of the dry bank to inspect the vehicle. A crimson handprint was smeared on the driver's side door as though someone had leaned against it, but for what purpose? Carver imagined himself doing the same, bracing himself on the door where the smudge was so he could lean farther out over the barren creek, reaching out with his left hand to--

  More smeared prints on the side mirror, carefully painted with the smallest fingertip into a single word he recognized with a gasp. He saw his own angled face in the mirror, haggard and shadowed, captured in a moment of surprise. Six letters across his forehead, obscuring his eyes.

  Killer.

  Chapter Four

  The very essence of instinct is that it's

  followed independently of reason.

  --Charles Darwin

  I

  Verde River Reservation

  Arizona

  Kajika momentarily considered exchanging the beer for coffee, and ultimately decided on both in a two-pronged assault on his liver and kidneys. He was physically tired enough to sleep, but couldn't seem to shut down his brain. Thoughts raced through his head at a million miles an hour, some related, others completely random. He figured he might as well strap in and see where they led him.

  He'd been aimlessly cruising the internet for more than an hour, unsure of exactly what he was hoping to find. H
e needed to approach this scientifically, form a concise question and from it generate a hypothesis, only his experience was in the physical and not the theoretical. He felt like he was hunting a ghost with a net, and perhaps that was precisely what he was doing.

  Every thought led back to Tobin. What had happened to his old friend in the months they had been apart? The Tobin Schwartz he knew was incapable of perpetrating the atrocities of which he was accused, a gentle man who had undoubtedly prayed for the souls of the animals he dissected in school, an empathetic man who made the pain of those around him his own. He hadn't been a saint by any stretch of the imagination, but neither had he been a monster. Maybe his libido had led him into trouble--Lord knows it wouldn't have been the first time--but the man he had known for what seemed like forever never would have been party to a situation involving the imprisonment and abuse of children in a cold, dank cell.

  And yet all signs pointed to the fact that this was exactly what he had done.

  No, Kajika simply refused to believe it. There had to be something, no matter how well hidden, in this unlimited bank of information to exonerate his friend, or possibly at least explain how he had ended up on the path to his own violent destruction.