Collecting the Dead: A Novel

by Spencer Kope

  Jimmy’s quiet, working it around in his head, processing it. When he eventually speaks, it’s classic Jimmy: “We’ll have to just do it the hard way,” he says.

  * * *

  At a quarter after nine Walt calls, and we brace for the news.

  “After three hours of surgery and a couple hours in the recovery room, Matt Swanson has been upgraded to serious. The doctor says he should make a full recovery. It’s just going to take some time.”

  “That’s the best news I’ve heard in a long time,” Jimmy says as we exhale a collective sigh. “Thanks, Walt.”

  Matt Swanson, an unlikely victim of Sad Face—and inadvertent victim. The serial killer may not have pulled the trigger himself, but he initiated the circle jerk that got the kid shot for doing nothing more than holding a remote.

  And there are other victims: mom, dad, and the brothers.

  There’s also the Redding PD officer who pulled the trigger when he saw a flash of silver in Matt’s hand swinging in his direction. He’s a different type of victim. He didn’t make the call to raid the Swanson house. He didn’t even know all the facts. All he was told was that a woman was missing in Butte County and that the license plate of a supposed serial killer named Steven Swanson was caught on surveillance video. He acted on the information he had.

  Regardless, his life will never be the same.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  July 7, 9:47 A.M.

  Days often fade into one another as a case unfolds; time becomes meaningless, unhinged. Jimmy says it’s because we’re focused on the mission, not on the clock, but it’s still hard to believe it’s been two days since Susan Ault disappeared so completely. Worse still, we’re no closer to finding her—or stopping Sad Face.

  On top of that, yesterday was a media disaster for Walt. He spent the better part of the day locked away in his office either talking heatedly on the phone or yelling at the TV as it broadcast repetitive, mind-numbing news stories about the Swanson family, Susan Ault, and the search for a serial killer who seemed impossible to find.

  As bad as it was for Walt and the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office, it was worse for Redding PD.

  “How much longer are you going to be in D.C.?”

  “Not long,” Heather replies. Her voice is sweet in my ear, soothing. Though three thousand miles separate us, I can almost feel her lips near my cheek, projecting whispered words toward my ear. “I should be able to wrap everything up in another couple days; a week at the most,” she adds.

  “Then back to Seattle?”

  “Yes, provided nothing else pops up. How about you?”

  I open my mouth, but the words don’t come. It’s an easy enough question, I just don’t know how to answer. Frankly, I don’t want to think about it. Sad Face has us up against the wall; he’s playing games with us, and the life of Susan Ault is the prize. It’s not a game we can forfeit. The pause drags into an uneasy silence, and then Heather’s voice is in my ear again.

  “That bad?”

  It’s only two soft words, but the compassion attached to them is palpable. I feel a sudden ache inside my chest—an emptiness in my gut—and all I have is the sweetness of her voice and the three thousand long miles between us.

  “Yeah.” I barely manage to get the word out, but once I force it past my teeth it’s like a logjam breaking loose and I pour out my hopes and fears in long breathless sentences strung together with angst. “It’s like Leonardo all over again,” I say at the end, then cringe at my own words.

  “Don’t do that,” Heather says.

  “Do what?” I say the words, but I know perfectly well what she’s going to say.

  I hear her sigh, and then her voice is soft again. “You break my heart sometimes, Steps. You have this yoke you wear around your neck with great bags hanging off each side and whenever you don’t solve a crime, or don’t find someone in time, it’s like you pick up the biggest rock you can find and put it into one of the bags. You punish yourself for something that was never your fault to begin with.”

  “I’m not punishing myself—”

  “You are.” The words are more forceful, direct. “And the greatest punishment of all is that you won’t let anyone help; not Jimmy, not me.” She lets the words sink in. “Your dedication to the victims, to all of them, is admirable, but you have to know when to let go or it’s going to break you. That yoke is going to drive you right into the ground and bury you. Remember where the blame lies, and that’s with monsters like Sad Face, and Mohawk, and Main Vein, and…” She pauses. “And, yes, Leonardo.”

  Leonardo.

  She’s right, of course; about all of it. My obsession with Leonardo, in particular, has turned him into a sort of bogeyman over the years; the one who got away; the twisted enigma who leaves his calling card upon the ground. Heather knows about him from her time with the unit. Even then, she told me I was obsessing over him too much, letting him get under my skin. She was right, of course. But I couldn’t let it go then, and I can’t let it go now. The fact that Leonardo’s shine keeps reappearing at Bellis Fair Mall only emphasizes my inability to identify and capture him.

  The phone is quiet as Heather waits.

  “Thanks … for listening,” I finally manage.

  “You’ll get him,” she says in that soft, soothing voice. I don’t know if she means Sad Face or Leonardo.

  It doesn’t matter.

  July 7, 1:13 P.M.

  Tami enters the conference room and lingers near the door. I can feel her eyes on us, but Jimmy and I barely stir from our reading. We’re determined to find some overlooked clue or seemingly innocuous tidbit tucked away in one of the case reports. Something—anything—that will guide us to Sad Face.

  The case narratives are starting to blur together and it seems I’ve read the same pages from the same reports a dozen times. Still, what else can I do? Lauren is dead, Susan is missing, and the Swanson boy is clinging to life in the hospital.

  We have nothing.

  As suspected, Sad Face stole the Swansons’ truck to carry out the abduction and then returned it to the driveway where he found it, once again leaving no prints and no clues. It’s maddening—frightening.

  I haven’t eaten much in the last couple days, and I’m just unwrapping a Snickers bar when my pocket rings. I set the candy bar aside and fish out the cell phone. There’s an odd tone to Diane’s voice when I answer. It’s a tone I’ve heard before and, like Pavlov’s dog, my heart responds to the stimuli, pounding—thump, thump, thump—louder and quicker in anticipation.

  This is it: the end, the last piece of the puzzle.

  I can tell.

  Diane is half Vulcan when it comes to masking her emotions, at least when she wants to, but she fails when she succeeds. When she solves a puzzle, the mask is ripped away and her emotions run raw and open, like a weeping wound. Her voice reflects every feeling: joy at solving the puzzle, sorrow for the wreckage of victims along the way, relief that the end is in sight, horror after staring too long into the abyss.

  “What is it?” I press, my voice husky and low, while in my head I’m screaming, WHAT IS IT, DIANE? WHAT IS IT?

  “I have something,” Diane repeats, “something that changes everything.”

  She pauses, probably because she can’t believe it herself, but my head is about to explode and I fight to control my words, my heart, my head as I say, “Go on,” in a quiet, settled voice. “You’re on speaker.”

  “I was staring at my ficus tree this morning,” she says, every syllable ripe with the tone. “Just sitting and staring at it,” she continues. “Not admiring its leaves or wondering why its trunk grows the way it does, not even wondering how many days it’s been since I watered it last, but staring at it and not seeing it. Have you ever done that, stared at something even though you’re not really looking at it?”

  “Sure,” I say. More than she will ever know.

  “Why did he switch his pattern?” she blurts.

  “What do you mean?”<
br />
  “Sad Face,” she says. “Why did he switch his pattern?”

  “You mean the cars?”

  “That’s what I was mulling over while I stared at my ficus: the cars, Jimmy’s analysis. Sad Face had a pattern going, an MO that seemed to work. The first five victims were abducted using their own vehicles. Then, after Ashley Sprague, he changes things up. How come? Why take the extra risk of stealing a car instead of using the victim’s?”

  Jimmy and I look at each other, and Jimmy says, “Well … there are probably a number of reasons—”

  “That was just rhetorical, dear,” Diane interrupts, and without pausing for breath she plunges on. “When he stopped using the victims’ cars and started stealing them it made me wonder if something happened that made him change, something that scared him or put him at risk or was more convenient. You wouldn’t believe the number and types of searches I’ve done over the last few days. I even checked all the new and used vehicles purchased in the Redding area during the three months between Ashley’s disappearance and Natalie Shoemaker’s disappearance, just in case he bought a car of his own to use before deciding to switch to stolen vehicles.

  “This morning—after staring at my ficus for the better part of an hour—it hit me. I ran Ashley’s license plate and there it was, right in front of me, where it had been all along.” She pauses, but only for a second. “On the night of her disappearance, well after midnight, Ashley’s car was stopped by CHP on State Route 36 about ten miles outside of Red Bluff.”

  “Did you find that in a citation, or an incident report?” I ask.

  “A citation: ten over the speed limit.”

  “Does the citation say where she was going, or where she came from?”

  “You mean he.”

  “He?”

  “He,” Diane repeats. “He claimed he had just dropped his daughter, Ashley Sprague, at the Arcata Airport in McKinleyville and was on the way back to their apartment in Red Bluff.”

  “That doesn’t fit,” Jimmy says. “Ashley’s father passed away when she was young.”

  “Good memory,” Diane coos, “almost as good as mine. Ashley’s father was Walter Sprague, who died in a boating accident when Ashley was seven. Her mother never remarried.”

  “So … who was in the car?” Jimmy’s voice is urgent, strained.

  Diane lets the question hang in the air, savoring the moment. I sometimes think she missed her calling as a stage actress or a politician.

  “Diane?”

  “His name is Arthur Zell,” she finally replies, “and he’s a very, verrrry bad man.”

  “Tell us,” I say.

  “In 1990 he was arrested for the murder of a woman in New Jersey after her badly decomposed body—and I’m talking bones and some skin—was found in the crawl space under his house. The body had been there at least a year. We know that because of a suspicious circumstance report filed by several neighbors in 1989. They complained of a foul smell coming from Zell’s property. Unfortunately, by the time they called the police, several of them had also complained directly to Mr. Zell.”

  “Let me guess,” I say. “He covered the body in lime and the police didn’t smell a thing. Case closed.”

  “Correct, and that brings us back to 1990 and the circumstances leading to Zell’s arrest. It seems his car was linked to the abduction of twenty-two-year-old Katie Stahl after a male was seen stuffing a bound woman into the trunk and then fleeing at a high rate of speed.

  “Police immediately respond to Zell’s residence but find the driveway empty and the house dark. While they wait, someone runs an address check and finds the suspicious circumstance report from a year earlier. They put two and two together and start to wonder if they have a serial killer on their hands—”

  “Which they do,” Jimmy interjects.

  “Which they do,” Diane confirms. “Meanwhile, the officer at the front door claims he hears a scream from inside, the door gets booted, and everyone floods in.”

  “I smell a but coming,” I say.

  “But,” Diane emphasizes, “the house was empty. Katie Stahl was found bound and blindfolded alongside the road about an hour after she was taken—claimed she never saw the suspect’s face. After he grabbed her and stuffed her in the trunk, he apparently drove around for at least a half hour, then, just as quickly as he grabbed her, he dumped her alongside the road.”

  “No rape?”

  “None. The report suggests he got cold feet.”

  “This guy doesn’t get cold feet,” I say quickly. “He’s calculating. Something else made him abort.”

  Silence. Then I hear paper whispering and shuffling on the other end of the phone.

  “There were several witnesses to the abduction,” Diane says. “Three, to be precise. One of them actually chased after the car, but he was on foot—he’s the one who got the license plate number. That could have been enough to give Zell pause,” she offers, “particularly if he had a police scanner in the car. Meanwhile, the officers back at Zell’s house started poking around—that foul smell from a year earlier still on their minds—and one of them decided to wiggle into the crawl space.”

  “Where they found Ms. Skin and Bones,” I say.

  Jimmy gives me a disgusted, reproachful glare.

  “What?” I hiss.

  “Where they found what little remained of Kathryn Wythe, a twenty-year-old part-time waitress and full-time student … and a brunette,” Diane adds. “Cause of death was strangulation, according to the medical examiner’s report.”

  “Fractured hyoid bone?” I ask, referring to the U-shaped neck bone that is broken in about a third of all strangulation homicides.

  “That would be putting it lightly,” Diane replies. “The ME said it looked like someone tried to squeeze her head right off her body. There was also evidence pointing to rape, but no DNA. Zell claimed that she died during consensual, albeit rough sex, and he just freaked out and put her in the crawl space until he figured out what to do.”

  “Yeah, that’s a perfectly normal reaction,” Jimmy scoffs.

  “That’s only the half of it,” Diane says. “He cried a long sob story about how he’d been sexually abused as a child by his brother-slash-uncle—”

  “His brother-slash-uncle?” Jimmy blurts.

  “Yeah, apparently his brother was also his uncle. Don’t ask me how that works, because I really don’t want to know.”

  “His bruncle,” I say.

  Jimmy gives me a queer look.

  “Bruncle.” I give him a shrug. “Brother-slash-uncle.”

  “The problem is you don’t know what a jury’s going to believe,” Diane continues. “Just look at the O. J. Simpson trial. In this case, because the search of the house was questionable, the prosecutor’s office got cold feet and offered a plea of twenty years with a minimum of fifteen behind bars and the balance on probation.”

  “Which the defense jumped at,” I say disgustedly.

  “Correct. And now he’s killing women in California.”

  The phone is silent as that sinks in; the room is silent.

  “So,” Jimmy says at last, “where is he?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  July 8, 8:23 A.M.

  Wayward Road is a remote tar-and-gravel two-lane dead-end road west of Redding that’s maintained by Shasta County Public Works, but only just barely. Snaking its way north off Placer Road for the better part of a mile, the road branches off into seven secluded driveways, the last of which is 1407 Wayward Road, which has an eight-foot-high fence along the road made from a patchwork of worn metal siding and rippled metal roofing. A gate at the driveway is of similar material, though slightly shorter.

  “It’s a regular compound,” Detective Troy Bovencamp says as he points to the overhead image and circles the ten-acre parcel with his finger. “Coming up the road there’s no way to conduct surveillance without being exposed, so we humped in through the trees to the west and then circled back and came in from the north.”


  He tosses a number of eight-by-ten photos on the table and straightens them into three neat rows of seven. “On the west side of the property, where the driveway comes in, is a barricade wall that looks like something out of a Mad Max movie, so that’s a no-go. The north, east, and south boundaries of the property, however, are unfenced.” He points to each picture in turn. “Though the south and east sides have some formidable underbrush and a good stretch of rough terrain, making infiltration and exfiltration problematic.” He points to several more photos.

  “Leaving just the northern edge of the property,” Sheriff Gant clarifies.

  “Yes, sir. The property’s a regular junkyard: dozens of old cars, piles of scrap, mountains of tires and rims, even a junkyard dog. The good news is all that junk should give us plenty of cover coming in.” Picking up one of the photos, Detective Bovencamp holds it up so everyone can see. “This single-wide trailer is Zell’s primary residence, but there are also four travel trailers on the property. The newest is probably twenty years old.”

  “Good places to hold someone captive,” Jimmy says.

  “My thought exactly.” Troy swallows a mouthful of microwave-warmed coffee and sets his mug back on the table. His auburn hair is cut high and tight; his woodland camouflage fatigues are starched and look almost new but for the fresh dirt and grass stains at the knees and elbows.

  You couldn’t tell by the look of him, but he and two other members of the SWAT team had set up surveillance on Zell’s compound the previous afternoon and hunkered down for the night. They didn’t exfiltrate until eight this morning, and only just arrived back at the S.O., or sheriff’s office.

  Bovencamp likes those words: Infiltrate, exfiltrate, and S.O.

  He uses them repeatedly.

  I think he likes infiltrate and exfiltrate because they’re military terms, and the acronym S.O. because it’s short and it sounds cool. He’s a former Marine, so I figure he can say pretty much whatever he wants.

  “He didn’t return to the house until almost ten last night and spent about twenty minutes off-loading a bunch of scrap metal from the back of the truck: old tire rims, a broken wood-burning stove, the rusted hood off some seventies- or eighties-model car, even an aluminum ladder, which I’m pretty sure was stolen.” Looking right at me, he says, “No one throws away a perfectly good aluminum ladder.”