“When you got to the scene, was she positioned in any particular way?”
“Yeah. A modified cross, I guess you’d call it. Arms straight out to the sides, legs flared out as well.”
“Head facing any particular direction?”
“Her head was facing due east, toward Newport Beach.”
“Nothing was touched? Moved?”
“Like I said, we got a fixed point of reference after snapping on the gloves. Man, that was tough. You ever tried to get a point of reference in California’s back country with nothing to look at but native weeds and cactus for miles around?” He muttered something under his breath that she couldn’t make out. Closing his eyes, he could see the victim, a young girl…could be his daughter for all he knew, same age, height. Slim, delicate build, wrists the size of sparrows.
They’d found her after a hiker spotted something up in the hills, he said to Cat. Daring not to get any closer, the hiker had doubled back his tracks and called the Irvine Police Department from his Woodbridge home. Neither McGregor nor his partner, Darrell Stevenson, had much relished the thought of climbing up in the woods to see what was back there. But, as much out of their jurisdiction as it was, it was their job. Unbelievably, McGregor got to her first. Maybe he hadn’t lost all the athleticism from his days as a Mater Dei star football linebacker, he told Cat.
They’d found animal droppings, although the mountain lions hadn’t got to her. “Maybe the acid stink scared them away,” he reasoned. “Anyway, she’d been placed under a sycamore bush; the only part of her immediately visible was her left hand. Only thing I disturbed was a purse we found about ten steps away from her, one of them Chanel, Gucci types. Had to check inside for her ID. Find out who she was.”
He bowed his head, as if in reverence for the dead.
“At the time, Orange County Sheriff’s Office was glad to turn the case over to us, although it was way out of our geographic jurisdiction. They had their plates full with other stuff.”
“I understand,” Cat said, not just patronizing him. She did understand how finding a body so mutilated and disfigured could do dire harm to the psyche. Even after years on the force, Jim McGregor was no less immune to that.
The man rubbed at his temples. “You gotta understand, she was all torn up. Her skin, it didn’t look like skin. Maggots were already working away at her insides, like a cesspool, just doing their thing. She’d been made to suffer like an animal. Then left out there for dead. It ain’t no way to go. Alone and naked like that.”
He raised his face to her. There were pools in his eyes. Visibly, he pulled himself together, straightened up in the chair. “Anyways that’s how we got the first case. Didn’t really think nothing much of it at the time. Figured the girl had been beat up by a boyfriend. She had a boyfriend who worked in Chapman’s bio-lab, had access to that weird chemical shit. We just figured a fight and the thing escalated. Got out of hand. That’s why we didn’t call you guys in sooner.”
“There’s no need to apologize, really,” Cat said. “There’s no way you could have known what you were looking at, at that time. You did all the right things, bagged her hands right off the bat, preserved any trace evidence at the scene.”
She wanted to reach for his hand but knew it would be inappropriate. “By photographing the body, exactly where it lay, exactly in the condition you found it, you provided me an invaluable tool, for which I am grateful.”
He continued to stare at the dregs, his voice quivering. “She was my kid’s age. It was real tough telling her dad. The mom remained stoic, couldn’t think that something like that could happen to her little girl. Mrs. Marsh, well, she was better at, you know, dealing with reality. But Dr. Marsh…the guy, he just crumbled right there in front of me when I gave him the news. Started sobbing and hitting things. Couldn’t take it. Mrs. Marsh, she clammed up, wouldn’t say a word, wouldn’t look at anyone. It took them a while to get over it.”
He fell silent.
“Naw, you know what? I’ll take that back. They’re still getting over it.”
“From the looks of it, you are too.”
“I guess. Cops ain’t supposed to be affected by these things. Tough guy and all that stuff, like that show on TV, NYPD Blues. Those guys always running round shooting stuff up, never affects them. Never shed a tear.”
Cat understood the demand. Loneliness, isolation, depression all went with the territory. How could a detective or an FBI field agent expect the normal nine-to-fiver to understand? They simply couldn’t. It was impossible. The job demands weren’t the same. In one you deal with paperwork, the other life and death.
Feeling like she had established trust with the cop, she pulled out the grisly crime scene photos—the carnage that was Nancy Marsh laid out in front of them in black and white, skin butchered, the body bloated from the expanding gases within the corpse. Flesh on her fingers up to the knuckles had been eaten away. Arms out to the side, legs splayed open as if the killer wanted to embarrass or discredit the girl by placing her in this revealing position. Posing the victims was part and parcel of this type of killing, Cat knew.
Many killers lined their victims up just so, displaying them in a line, like trophies stacked up on a shelf. John List, who had been on the FBI’s most-wanted list for eighteen years, had been such a killer, murdering five members of his family, then lining them up on sleeping bags, like trophies, before he made his escape.
Many of the gashes gaped open, the gas below causing the skin to warp and stretch. Nancy Marsh’s face was untouched, her fine features distorted by death’s ravages, hair laid to one side purposefully by the madman. Even beyond the death mask, Cat could tell she had been a pretty girl, hair the color of a Southern California beach, eyes blue and big, freckles lining the bridge of her nose.
McGregor sucked in a long breath, seeing the photos again.
“We’ve tested what Dr. James pulled from under her fingertips.”
“Anything?”
“No. No hairs, no fibers. The skin was her own. Probably scraped it trying to get the acid off.”
“Tell me something, McGregor.” She called him by the name he preferred. “From what I can see here, no defensive wounds. None noted on the autopsy report either. Is that right?” Cat was looking for the defensive wounds—cuts to the dorsal side of the arms and palms of the hands that occur as a victim tries to defend herself.
“Didn’t find none. Nope.”
“So she either knew her assailant and the stabbing was so quick that she didn’t have time to react, or she may have been unconscious at the time the stabbing began.”
McGregor nodded.
“No knife found at the scene?”
“Nope, we combed the place pretty thoroughly. Couldn’t find nothing.”
“From the autopsy report, no sexual penetration. Semen found on the naked body. Anything else you saw that might suggest a sexual motive to the killing?”
“Nope. Some of the semen had dried up on her chest. It was right in the middle of her chest, right here”—he put his hand square in the middle of his burly chest— “but other than that, she wasn’t raped or nothing.”
“Any signs of injury to the neck, was her head at an odd angle, anything like that?”
“Nope. Why you asking me all these questions anyway?”
“The third victim, the one we autopsied yesterday, her larynx was severely injured, not crushed exactly, but injured badly enough that it would have been difficult for her to speak.”
McGregor listened, then sat silent for a moment.
“Wasn’t nothing like that on Nancy Marsh, I can assure you.”
“Can you take me to the place where you found the body?”
“Sure, not right away though. I got some paperwork to finish up. I swear they’re gonna turn me into a regular desk jockey. The damned standardized report paperwork just keeps getting longer and longer.”
Cat’s lips curved up in a grin. At least he was thinking of something other than
Nancy Marsh.
“What time then?” he said, rising from the chair, heading to a beat-up metal file cabinet the color of cooked okra.
“I’ll be at the FBI office.”
“I’ll pick you up at 1:30.”
“Fine,” Cat said, satisfied she had gotten some answers.
SIX
I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
—William Blake, “A Poison Tree”
Cat checked in at the office, found David Binder on the telephone. Seeing her, his eyebrows shot up. She could hear him hurry to get off of what was, from the sound of it, a personal call.
“Yeah, I’ll pick up something for dinner on the way home.”
He said nothing, listening to a response.
“You don’t have to cook. I’ll grab some takeout Chinese.”
Silence for a short while again.
“How does Pick Up Stix sound? All right then. It’s settled. I’ll be home around seven.” He blushed, glancing Cat’s way. “I love you too,” he whispered into the receiver and hung up. “Sorry about that, recently married. You know how that goes. Can’t stand it when I’m gone, can’t wait for me to get back. Calls the office five times a day. All the guys do around here is give me sh—” David caught himself. “Uh, I mean, grief about it. They call me the newlywed, how do you like that?”
“It’s all right. My life was once like that.” Saying it, Cat realized it had been like this for her a long time ago. It had been a long time since she let anyone get inside her head, much less her heart.
Now the only object of her affection was Joey. As tired as she had been last night, she called him. He had been half asleep, with the three-hour time difference, almost midnight his time, but he had still managed to relay an interesting story about a lizard he had caught, named Charlie. Cat told him that she would love to meet Charlie when she returned home, though at this point she didn’t know when that might be. With the lack of physical evidence, a shortage of fingerprints, bodies turning up, it was likely she would be here for a long time. Nevertheless, she assured Joey that Mom would be home soon.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she apologized, only now realizing she’d been staring into space. “Have we checked to see if there’s a pattern to these cases? Do they correlate with anything from any other offices? Maybe this guy is more than what he seems… more than just after mutilating pretty girls with acid, in a city full of them.”
“Huh?” David gave her a blank stare. Maybe he was a rookie.
“Maybe this guy’s done this elsewhere. The most recent victim shows evidence of an escalation of his violence. Maybe there were others before Nancy Marsh, just not in Orange County. Perhaps there’s more to his MO than there appears.”
“You sure are obsessing over this, aren’t you?”
Cat could hardly control herself, feeling the blood rush to her head. She got down in the young agent’s face. “What I am doing is not obsessing. We have three unsolved murders here, all horrible, none of them giving us much of an answer. Certainly not giving us anything remotely concrete that could narrow the killer down from, let’s say, half the population of the United States,” she said, breathing hard, “and nothing so far that would make the FBI look good under the circumstances.”
“I’m sorry.”
“The police here have called us in to help them out. FBI’s got the best crime lab backed up by the best behavioral specialist in the world. We’ve got nothing to go on right now. You hear me? Nothing. How do you think it will look if we can’t stop this guy? You think it’ll be good for you? For me? Hell, if we can’t bring this guy in we might as well…we might as well apply for a job at the takeout Chinese place you were just jabbering about.”
“Shit.” David’s eyes were wide; he shook his head.
“Now why don’t you get up off your ass and make some calls. I want calls into the San Francisco, New York, Boston, Chicago, and Miami field offices. Find out if they’ve got anything similar to our case, any multiple slashing or stabbing of young women along the same lines. Also check if they have any cases involving acid, anything homicide or not. Then check on sulfuric acid in particular. Go back twenty years if you have to.”
He had picked up a pen and was scribbling the instructions on a pad.
“Check the same with Euronet and Interpol. Anything fitting this guy’s MO. Twenty years again.”
He took a long, aggravated breath, still scribbling.
“One other thing. I want a rundown of all the uses of sulfuric acid. I know you can get hold of it in medicine, but where else. Where could someone get it, and in what concentrations?”
His note-taking continued.
“You got that?”
“Yeah, I got it.”
“And while you’re at it, why don’t you pick up some lunch. I saw a decent looking Italian place across the street. Any good?”
“Yeah, but it ain’t cheap.”
Cat handed him forty bucks. “Don’t worry about it. I’m paying.”
His frown warmed up just a bit as he walked out.
SEVEN
A lie is an abomination unto the Lord
and an ever-present help in time of need.
—John A. Tyler Morgan, Comment to the US Senate
It was a foggy morning when Joey sprang awake, wondering what his mom was doing. His second thought was how Charlie was doing. Thankfully, when he looked at the lizard in the now empty ten-gallon aquarium, it was chomping away on a lettuce leaf Joey had left the night before. The lettuce looked gross and slimly, but to Charlie it appeared a good meal.
“How you doing there, buddy?” he asked the lizard.
It bobbed its head up and down, the way lizards sometimes do, as if understanding his question.
“Guess things in the new home aren’t too bad?”
The lizard continued its agitated movements.
Joey lay back in his Ferrari race car bed, putting his hands in the air on a make-believe steering wheel. “Vroom, vroom,” he said, eyes staring at the ceiling, now transformed magically into the Indianapolis speedway. Picturing Dale Searnhardt, Jr., as he called him, on his bumper, Joey turned a quick left, cutting him off. “You can’t get me. I’m going to win this race.” In his head, a checkered flag appeared and he took it by ten car lengths, sticking out his tongue to Dale in mockery.
“Hey,” Dad interrupted the vision. “Hey sport, I thought I heard a race going on in here.”
“Oh, Dad. Don’t stand there. You ’barass me.”
“Sorry. Just wondering what you wanted to do today.” It was Saturday, Joey’s favorite day, when he could do whatever he wanted.
The boy rolled out from his bed and jumped. “Chuck E. Cheese, Chuck E. Cheese!”
Mark Powers folded his arms, shifted his weight to one foot. “Again?”
“Chuck E. Cheese, Chuck E. Cheese,” came the answer.
“Can’t we do something different, sport? It’s the third time this month we’ve been there.”
“I know, but it’s my favorite.” Joey put on his puppy-dog eyes, complete with pout. “Come on, Dad, pleeease.”
“All right, you win. But next weekend, if your mom’s back, she is not taking you to Chuck E. Cheese’s. I’ll make sure of it and—”
Before Mark could finish, Joey let out a holler, jumping up and down, hands in the air. “Yay, yay, Chuck E. Cheese, Chuck E. Cheese!”
Suddenly he stopped jumping and was strangely quiet. “Dad?”
“Yes, Joey,” Mark said, his hand on the doorknob.
“Where’s Mom?”
Mark stopped and sat on the bed, taking the boy on his lap. “Now, Joey, remember we had this talk before. Mommy has a very important job. She works with the police, like we see on TV…”
The child had a faraway look. “And like my cars?”
Mark nodded. “Yes, son, like your police cars
. Except she works for the police of the whole United States.”
“Uh-huh,” Joey said, remembering.
“And sometimes, because her job is so important, she has to go on trips away to make sure everything is all right where other people live. She makes sure other little boys and their dads are safe too.”
“And she has to go for a long time sometimes, doesn’t she?”
Mark nodded again. “Yes, sometimes she has to go for a long time.”
“Will this be one of those times, Dad?”
“I don’t know, son, I don’t know.” Mark tousled Joey’s hair into an even bigger mess. “Now Sport, how about I see you downstairs for some Cap’n Crunch cereal.”
“Okay.” Joey started to lift his pajama top over his head but stopped midstream. “Dad, is Mom safe?”
“I don’t know for sure, son, but I think so.”
Everything hit the fan on August 27, as far as Craig Gray was concerned. Slamming a fist down on the desk, he shouted at FBI Director Carlos Sanchez, “How in the hell did she pull this assignment?”
“Look, I don’t know. When they needed FBI, they went straight through Washington. She was assigned from Quantico. One of their best from what I hear.”
“I don’t give a damn if she’s Gandhi,” Gray seethed. “She is in our backyard, assigned to the biggest case to hit this area this year, and we weren’t informed?”
“That appears to be it.” Sanchez wasn’t going to buy into Gray’s ire. He knew the man liked to blow things out of proportion, just to get his opinion heard. This was no different. “What do you want me to do?” Sanchez turned to face the window, staring out at the federal courthouse across the street. All around downtown LA, skyscrapers seemed to cloak the human life that lived in the city. People, looking like ants, scurried in and out of towering monstrosities, moving at a blinding pace, never stopping to look at one another, interact, communicate. Sanchez wondered why he had taken this position. He liked Boston’s streets much better, the hominess, the cleanness of that city. This was a living cesspool.
The Burning Man Page 5