Collecting the Dead: A Novel

by Spencer Kope

  Sad Face’s shine is on the door handle into the room; it’s on the purse where he grabbed it; it’s on the carpet in the shape of a knee print next to where Susan fell.

  Did he strike her?

  Push her?

  Did she stumble back and fall?

  If there are clues here, a story to tell, the shine is not giving them up … though it does whisper an even uglier truth—one more surprise for us to unfold. My stomach tightens into a clenched fist as my eyes follow the shine from the room. He’s pulling her, dragging her, as she continues to struggle. I can see it in the placement of her feet, the drag marks, the sudden jerks forward as he wrenches her along.

  And then the trail disappears under a closed door across the hall. The white six-panel door is like all the others in Susan Ault’s home, with one difference: This one is adorned with a pink teddy bear holding a little plaque of painted wood that reads SARAH.

  As Jimmy moves to the door, I hold my breath.

  The house is quiet but for the tiny squeal of the hinge as the door opens wide onto an orderly pink and white room with a large bin in the corner bursting with toys. The only thing out of place is a set of wooden alphabet blocks on the cream carpet; they’re shaped into a large circle with a single block for each eye, one for the nose, and five for the downturned mouth.

  Sad Face.

  Sarah is standing at the rail of her crib watching us, a small blanket clutched tight in her hands, a pacifier in her mouth, and the drying remnants of tears under each eye. She clutches me tightly when I lift her from the crib. My heart is breaking as she buries her face in my shoulder.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  July 5, 12:15 P.M.

  Jimmy is bent over in his chair when I enter the sheriff’s office conference room; his back is to me and his face is to the floor. Pressed to his right ear is his cell phone, while his left hand cradles his forehead. His shoulders are doing the rhythmic up-and-down bounce of someone in the middle of either a hard cry or a suppressed laugh, I can’t tell which.

  Bad news. It’s what I fear; it’s what we both fear.

  When he hears me behind him, Jimmy’s face turns up and I see his crooked smile. The muscles in my neck, my back, my gut instantly let go, and I relax. It’s good to see him smile. With the things we see and experience, like this morning’s unfortunate events, it’s often hard to laugh and smile. That’s probably why cop humor is frequently dark; it’s a way of taking the horrible, the unthinkable, and making light of it.

  “Genna left me a message an hour ago. You gotta hear this,” Jimmy says, placing the cell phone faceup on the conference table.

  Genna is Jimmy’s older sister in Houston. I’ve met her a few times, twice in Texas and three or four times on a cluster of trips she took to Bellingham over the last year. Divorced for five years, Genna wants to move closer to her brother so her son, Derek, will have a male role model. I was informed that the job of “role model” also applies to me, since Derek is somehow smitten by me and has set his mind on a career as an FBI tracker.

  Smitten.

  That’s the word Jimmy used, which was slightly confusing to me since I thought smitten is what happens to co-eds when they see the school quarterback, or what happens to young moviegoers when they see this year’s heartthrob on the big screen.

  Smitten.

  It’s one of those words that we all think we know until someone uses it in a way that doesn’t seem right. I looked it up, half expecting it to be some old Anglican abbreviation for “smacked with a kitten,” and found that Jimmy may have used it correctly after all.

  Derek isn’t in love with me, nor have I struck him with my hand or a stick, nor have I afflicted him with some deadly disease … but I have affected him mentally, it would seem. So much so, according to Jimmy, that all he talks about is the FBI, man-tracking, and solving crimes. He’s also gotten very good at tracking down information on the Internet, all kinds, shapes, and flavors of information.

  “Listen to this,” Jimmy says, jacking up the phone’s volume, hitting speakerphone, and then pushing the play button.

  Genna’s voice is weary, slightly amused, matter-of-fact, and ho-hum all rolled into one. “Hey, Jimmy,” she begins dryly, “you need to have a chat with your nephew. He’s been self-diagnosing himself on the Internet again and thinks he has Exploding Head Syndrome.” Jimmy’s shoulders are doing the laughing dance again and I start chuckling, too, but more from Jimmy’s reaction than from the call.

  “Apparently he heard a ringing in his ear earlier today and started looking online to see what could have caused it. I’ve never heard of Exploding Head Syndrome, but I looked it up and it’s real … not that your head actually explodes, it’s just loud bangs and noises that people hear inside their head.

  “I’m not taking him to the doctor, either, so don’t even start. You convinced me to take him in on that other one and they ’bout laughed me out of the office, so you need to call him tonight and tell him it’s perfectly fine to hear a ringing in your ear every once in a while. Okay, gotta go, Mr. Exploding Head is coming downstairs.”

  The phone clicks and Jimmy bursts into laughter.

  “That kid is going to give her gray hair before she turns forty,” he says.

  “Yeah, and you’re going to help him, right?”

  Jimmy tries to look indignant. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Sure,” I say with a laugh. “What was that ‘other one’ that Genna was talking about?”

  Jimmy looks surprised. “I didn’t tell you about that?”

  I shake my head.

  “I had to have,” he says, a perplexed look on his face. Then, in an instant, the lines on his forehead relax. “That’s right,” he says, smacking my left arm—I’ve been smitten—“we were on vacation … I can’t believe I didn’t tell you.”

  “You still haven’t.”

  Jimmy grins. “Last summer Derek was complaining of hot flashes. Mind you, this was Texas in the middle of summer—I think hot flashes go with the territory. After doing some research online, he was absolutely convinced that he had menopause.”

  “Oh, no,” I say, laughing. Then, in the next moment, my mouth drops open. “And you convinced Genna to take him to the doctor for it?”

  Jimmy’s shoulders are doing the laughing dance again.

  * * *

  Thirty minutes later, Jimmy’s good humor is gone.

  “Stop doing that!” he snaps, his voice strained, edgy. The command center is empty but for the two of us. Occasionally a Shasta County deputy will come in to drop something off or pick something up, but mostly they stay clear. They can sense the frustration, the anger.

  I’ve been checking Susan’s social media for the last hour, checking her friends list against registered sex offenders and looking for any odd or out-of-place comments. Susan has both a personal profile as well as a business profile, though most of the activity appears to be on her personal page.

  She’s an attractive woman.

  Her various online photo albums contain more than three hundred images; more than half are of Sarah.

  Pulling Lauren Brouwer’s necklace from my shirt pocket, I look at it quickly and then return it.

  “Will you please stop doing that?” Jimmy scolds. “You’re becoming obsessed.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “You can.”

  “No, I can’t. Think about it, Jimmy. He’s got two of them now; he never keeps two at a time, not for very long anyway. We’re running out of time.” I reach into my pocket and pull out the pulsing locket, shoving it toward him. “This is all I’ve got. As long as it keeps—” I gasp and jerk my hand back, as if bitten. The locket tumbles to the floor.

  Jimmy’s on his feet. He can’t see the shine, but he knows.

  Lauren Brouwer just died.

  I was holding her heart in my hand.

  * * *

  Walt bursts into the conference room like a whirlwind of energy, waving a thumb
drive in the air as he turns on the computer connected to the large flat-screen monitor on the wall. He doesn’t seem to notice the dejected look on my face, or Jimmy at the table with his head in his hands.

  It’s good he doesn’t notice.

  It would be hard to explain.

  “Susan Ault had a surveillance system installed in her home just two days ago. According to her neighbor, Mrs. Eden, she had the feeling that someone was watching her, and at one point thought someone might have been in the house.”

  Walt plugs the thumb drive into the computer and opens a file named Ault. “Butte County detectives noticed the cameras while processing the scene and found the recorder on one of the shelves below the TV in Susan’s bedroom. They just e-mailed a short video taken before the abduction, which shows a truck pulling into the driveway and then quickly leaving—maybe scared off by the motion-activated lights.” He hits play, and the thirty-three-second video begins to run.

  The time stamp reads 11:27 P.M. and the video is dark. There’s no activity for a second or two, then a white work truck with a black decal on the door pulls into the parking pad. Its headlights wash out the camera for a moment, but then they’re switched off and the camera refocuses. In the glow from the motion-activated light above the garage door, you can clearly see the Ford emblem in the truck’s grille. What’s more, you can read the license plate.

  “Steven Paul Swanson,” Walt says, pointing at the plate. “He lives here in Redding and owns an extermination business.”

  “Any history?”

  “We’re working that right now.”

  Jimmy retrieves his cell phone and hits speed dial. “Diane, I have a name for you: Steven Paul Swanson, DOB—” he turns away from the phone. “Walt, do you have his date of birth?”

  “Five/twenty-seven/sixty-five.”

  “Did you catch that, Diane…? No. May twenty-seventh, 1965 … Right … Will do. Call me as soon as you have something.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  July 5, 3:47 P.M.

  “Just let me go ring the doorbell,” I plead with Walt. “I’ll take some candy bars and pretend I’m raising funds for a mission to Haiti, or orphans in Bali.”

  “It’s not my call, Steps.” The sheriff is just as frustrated as I am and my pestering isn’t improving his mood, but I can’t help it. “Redding PD is geared up and prepositioned to hit the house in five minutes,” Walt adds. “I’ve talked to Sheriff Mendall in Butte County till I’m red in the face and he won’t back off. He’s putting pressure on Redding PD to hit the house now.”

  “But the chance of Swanson being Sad Face is minimal at best. He doesn’t have any criminal history, he has a happy marriage from all appearances, and three teenage boys at home. He sings in the church choir, for crying out loud—he’s a choirboy. That’s so ridiculously innocent that it’s … well … it’s ridiculous.”

  “I’ve got nothing to give them except your hunch.”

  “Sad Face doesn’t use his own truck. Period. It’s not just a hunch.” Jimmy puts his hand on my shoulder and I realize my voice has risen considerably.

  Walt drops his head in defeat. “I know, Steps. I know. But there’s nothing I can do. It’s out of my jurisdiction. Mendall’s getting a lot of pressure from his county council. Susan’s a rising star in the local business community and there are a lot of pissed-off people down there demanding action.”

  “Even if it’s the wrong action?” Jimmy says softly.

  Walt nods. “Even if it’s the wrong action.”

  There’s a long, uncomfortable silence.

  “Well, we’re FBI,” Jimmy says. “We don’t take orders from Sheriff Mendall, or Chief whatever-the-hell-his-name-was at Redding PD.” To me he says, “Grab your vest.”

  “Where are we going?” Like I don’t know.

  “Swanson’s. When the dust settles, you can go in and see if his—” He almost says shine, but then remembers Walt is standing next to him. He pauses. “You can see if his track matches Sad Face.”

  Slapping down the Velcro straps on my body armor, I make sure my Walther P22 is easily accessible and then throw on my black Windbreaker with FBI in large letters on the back.

  Jimmy pauses and turns at the conference room door.

  “You coming?” he says to Walt.

  “Hell, yeah, I’m coming,” the sheriff growls.

  * * *

  “Shots fired! Shots fired!”

  We’re still three minutes from the Swanson residence when the call comes out over TAC 3, the short-range tactical channel used by Redding PD for raids like this. We’ve been running with just lights up to this point, but now Walt hits the siren and the accelerator at the same time. We race through traffic, blowing through red lights and past parted traffic, wondering what kind of soup sandwich awaits us at the end of the road.

  It’s bad.

  The wail of an approaching siren sets the tone as we spill from the Expedition and onto the Swanson family’s front yard. The house is a typical middle-class two-story painted in earth tones with white shutters. A two-car attached garage is on the left, and the covered porch is wide enough for a pair of wooden rocking chairs.

  The impeccable landscaping has three recent additions: Mrs. Swanson and two of the boys are flex-cuffed and facedown on the grass, a mix of shock and horror on their faces.

  Inside the house, on the living room floor, seventeen-year-old Matt Swanson is fighting for his life. A silver universal remote control lies on the carpet two feet from his right hand. Steve Swanson is flex-cuffed on the carpet ten feet away. He’s in shock. His eyes are fixed on Matt, his eldest son. He’s oblivious to the whirlwind around him, to the shouted questions, to the drone of the arriving ambulance.

  His shine is a beautiful sky-blue with a texture as smooth as glass. It’s lovely to behold; mesmerizing. Perhaps a reflection of the soul parked under the skin.

  He’s not Sad Face.

  He sings in the choir.

  But some of us already knew that.

  July 5, 6:33 P.M.

  Jimmy answers the phone on the first ring, expecting Walt with an update on Matt Swanson’s condition. Jimmy made him promise to call before we headed back to the hotel. Shasta County isn’t on the hook for the shooting, but everyone is taking it pretty hard nonetheless. You don’t look down at a young kid bleeding out on his living room floor and not walk away with an empty hole in your chest.

  “Diane? Yeah, hang on. Let me put you on speaker.” He pulls the phone away from his ear, presses a button, and lays it down on the nightstand next to the alarm clock.

  “Go ahead, Diane.”

  “Janet Burlingame tried calling you earlier this afternoon. She couldn’t get through, so she left the message with me.”

  “Yeah, we were tied up.”

  “I know,” Diane says.

  “How do you know?” Jimmy replies.

  “Please!”

  “Right—the all-knowing super-analyst,” Jimmy chides, trying to project some humor with his words. It doesn’t work. He just doesn’t have it in him at the moment. “What did Janet say?”

  “The DNA from the blood sample doesn’t match Chas, so it’s got to be the suspect’s. The bad news is she ran the profile through CODIS and didn’t get a hit.”

  CODIS, the FBI’s Combined DNA Indexing System, is a comprehensive repository of DNA data from across the country. It holds not just DNA profiles of certain convicted felons and sex offenders, but profiles from unsolved homicides and rapes. This allows the FBI to link cases that they otherwise couldn’t.

  Say a murderer in Hawaii leaves behind his DNA at the crime scene and then ten years later he kills again in Maine. CODIS would automatically match the DNA from Hawaii to the new DNA from Maine, and investigators would know with certainty that the two cases are linked, though separated by a decade, a continent, and an ocean.

  But it’s still just a database, and databases are only as good as the data within.

  “No hit. You’re sure?�
�� Jimmy says.

  “Well,” Diane replies, “I didn’t run the test myself, but it’s a pretty simple hit-or-no-hit system, so, on Janet’s behalf, I’m going to say, yes, I’m sure.”

  She’s a little testy.

  “That just doesn’t make any sense,” I say. “Why would he go through all that trouble cleaning up, particularly using the bleach, if his DNA isn’t in the system?”

  “No, think about it,” Jimmy says. “Remember Valerie Heagle? He washed her down with bleach before dumping her in the cemetery, and I’m betting he did it to the others as well; we just weren’t looking for it in the autopsies. And if Valerie hadn’t been found right after she was killed, the coroner might not have picked up on it.”

  “That still doesn’t explain why,” I say. “He’s obviously not worried about us linking the cases together or he wouldn’t leave his twisted little signature behind.”

  “Right, but you know as well as I do that it’s a lot harder to prove a case without DNA or fingerprints, and he’s gone to great lengths to make sure we don’t have either.”

  “I have a better explanation,” Diane says through the speakerphone; I’d forgotten she was still with us. “There are, right now, hundreds of thousands of rape kits across the country that have never been processed for DNA due to lack of resources. Jails and prisons have also been collecting DNA for years, and the Supreme Court expanded that in 2013 when they ruled that DNA is no different from a fingerprint, and anyone being booked into jail on any charge can have their DNA collected. Of course, every jurisdiction is going to have different rules on how that’s carried out, but my point is that there is a huge backlog of DNA that has been collected and never analyzed—huge.”

  “And you think Sad Face’s DNA is in the backlog somewhere?” Jimmy asks.

  “It explains the bleach,” Diane replies. “He thinks he’s already in the system.”

  It’s sobering; frustrating.

  “Makes you wonder how many unsolved cases would be cleared if that backlog was caught up,” I say, each word biting, heavy with disappointment. “Imagine; we’d have a suspect right now. We’d know his name.”