Chapter 6
Okay, so it was early May and the weather had begun to turn mild almost everywhere along the northeast, but not here. Saranac Lake, New York, was still cold and raw. It was evening by the time I arrived at the village police station on Main Street, and I was immediately blasted with a chill as freezing, icy wind raced by. I had not come equipped for the intense cold. I was wearing jeans, a lightweight leather jacket, and a pair of suede Piloti driving shoes, which I imagined I had already ruined along the short walk through the slush on my way from my rental car to the police station. For me it wasn’t about fashion, it was about function, and for driving shoes the Pilotis were as comfortable as they get. The idea of the supple suede drying out and getting salt stained … not so great. I mean I still spit-polish my shoes as I had in my days with the corps, and once any item of dress no longer looked sharp … In any case, I had survived worse and was determined not to get bent out of shape over some nasty weather.
Suck it up, Mather. Rub a little dirt on it.
The police station was cheap with the heat. I figured it would be warm and toasty, but it wasn’t.
At least it’s dry.
It was a no-frills small-town office badly in need of a face-lift, but then law enforcement is not about pretty, it’s about results, and I was here hoping to get some.
The desk officer looked up when I entered. His nametag read Tanner. “You’re not from around here, are you?” he asked.
The locals have me pegged already? Gee, that’s bad. I wasn’t wearing an arctic parka, heavyweight gloves, or a fur-lined hat like most of the citizens of Saranac Lake I had passed on my way into town. I suppose Officer Tanner’s observation was fairly obvious. “Can’t say I am.” I dug into my pocket and fished out my FBI ID. “Special Agent Chloe Mather here to see Chief Titus Sparks. He handy?”
“Ty said you’d be by about now. He just got in—waiting for you in his office.” He rose from behind his desk and extended his hand. “I’m Roscoe Lee Tanner. Follow me. I’ll show you back to the chief’s office.”
Cool beans.
“You find us okay?” Tanner asked as we walked to the chief’s office. “We’re something of a hole in the wall.”
“No sweat. GPS took me straight to your door.”
“Good. You got a place to stay yet?” Tanner’s accent wasn’t Southern, but it was colloquial in a unique-sounding way.
“Not yet but I’m not fussy about that kind of thing.” I meant it. I’d spent so much time sleeping in trenches that all I needed from a hotel was a roof over my head and a mattress.
“I’ll call over to The Point and see if they’ve got any availability. It’s a real nice place, but it’s not very big. If they’re full, we’ve got a Best Western too.”
“That’ll do. I’m not looking for anything extravagant.” Wow, is this guy a police officer or a personal assistant? He was certainly going out of his way to be nice. There’s something to be said about the people from Small Town, USA. They’re a lot friendlier than most big-city types. My guess was that Saranac Lake did not see a lot of serious crime, well, not until now, anyway.
Tanner rapped on the chief’s door and pushed it open for me. Chief Sparks was hardly a kid. He was a man of at least sixty and maybe then some. He was bald and wore wire-rim glasses. His stern initial appearance and his smile were discrepant. He gave me a robust greeting and presented a paw the size of a catcher’s mitt. “Special Agent Mather, welcome to Saranac Lake, home of ice, snow, and more snow.”
“Thanks for a warm reception to a bitterly cold town, Chief Sparks.”
He chuckled. “Happy to have the help. It won’t take you long to find out that our beer is cold and our people are warm. Anyway, we don’t get a hell of a lot of homicides up here—not like this one, anyway. Your boss, Bill Wallace, phoned me to say you were coming. He tells me this case may be tied to an ongoing investigation. That right?”
“Very possible. I only had about an hour to review the case file in Monticello before driving here. The details are still sinking in.”
“You get set up at a hotel all right? We don’t have an abundance of lodgings around these parts, and well, I’d hate to see you spend the night shivering in your car.”
Wow, they certainly are concerned about finding me adequate lodgings. “Not yet. This was my first stop.”
“Gettin’ to it while the evidence is still fresh, are you?”
“As fresh as possible—raw would be just fine with me.”
Sparks gestured to a chair. “Well then, have a seat.”
I sat down and pulled a case file out of a large envelope I had acquired at the Monticello Sheriff’s Office. “I understand the victim’s been dead for quite some time.”
“That would seem to be,” Sparks said. “Based on the condition of the body, the victim was probably dead at least a month, maybe longer. The body has been transferred to the coroner’s office in Franklin County. You seen the pictures?”
“Only the scanned images on a computer screen. It was hard to make out all the detail.”
Sparks opened a file on his desk and slid a folder toward me. “I like glossies a hell of a lot better myself. All them retina displays and Hi-Def dang-fangled gizmos may be well and good for the college kids and video game junkies, but for my money, the Polaroid is still king. Say, you want some coffee? If I say so myself, it’s pretty good for police station java.”
I hadn’t eaten in hours and was happy for the opportunity to put something into my belly. “Sure. Black is fine.”
I figured he’d buzz someone for the coffee, but no, he popped out of his chair quick as a bunny and left the room to retrieve it, leaving me to begin looking through the pack of glossy photos. The first photo was of a truck that had been backed into a storage compartment. The compartment was just wide and deep enough to accommodate the truck. It appeared to be just one of many compartments in a one-level building divided by firewalls and enclosed by roll-up overhead doors. Visible through the windshield was the victim, a man with his head hanging to the side and duct tape covering his mouth. He looked youngish, in his thirties I guessed at first blush, but accuracy was difficult because the flesh had begun to decompose, and his face and neck were completely covered with small bloody wounds.
The next photo had been taken through the open driver’s door. Both hands had been zip-tied to the steering wheel, and his neck zip-tied to one of the headrest posts. As mentioned, his face and neck were covered with dozens of small wounds. I only knew what they probably were from reading the case history. They were likely bite marks. There was one last area of exposed skin that had also been badly bitten. His pants were down around his ankles, and the sight of his penis almost caused me to retch. It had been sliced lengthwise down the middle, splayed, with the two mutilated halves lying to the sides.
Chapter 7
I was surprised to find that I still had an appetite after viewing those gruesome photos in Sparks’ office, but I hadn’t eaten since noontime in Monticello, and I was ravenous. I scored a take-out Reuben and sweet potato fries at the Eat ’n Meet Grill just before it closed for the evening and watched The Wolf of Wall Street on the hotel’s pay-per-view channel. There was a great deal more sex and nudity than I had expected to see—to be more precise, there was about three hours of nudity, and after watching all of that debauchery … Well, I kind of wished that Liam had been there with me. All of the cavorting and carrying on made me think about flicking the old lady bean, but I was exhausted from car racing, the long drive to Saranac Lake, and one hundred-eighty minutes of thinly veiled pornography, so I went out hard on the king-size, ultra-plush mattress, feeling as if I had hiked twenty miles through the mud wearing a full pack.
Dr. Bae Park, the Franklin County coroner, was casually dressed in a red V-neck sweater and chinos when I arrived the next morning. His large noggin reminded me of North Korea’s Supreme Leader, and he sported a genuine Kim Jong-un haircut, the one that looked as if his sidewalls had been b
uzzed with a Weedwacker.
There was an open box of donuts on his desk, and they looked freshly baked and amazing. I hoped that he was as friendly and accommodating as Sparks and Tanner had been. Turns out that he was. The stocky Korean offered me my pick, and I enjoyed a humongous bear claw before my visit to the morgue. What can I say? A girl’s got to eat.
The victim was on an autopsy table covered by the requisite white modesty sheet. Park uncovered the body. The cadaver was pretty gruesome, in a state of partial decomposition and littered with blood smears and puncture marks. Most of the puncture marks were on the neck, arms, face, legs, and groin. The victim was emaciated. His ribcage was prominent against tightly pulled dry and cracked skin. The stench was awful. I mean, I really had to fight to keep my immense donut from coming back up. I don’t like visiting the dead, but it goes with the territory, and sometimes you just have to bite the bullet. Yeech.
“Cause of death?” I asked.
“Starvation. The loss of blood from the small wounds was inconsequential. Some of the puncture sites show signs of infection, but that’s not uncommon with animal bites and certainly was not the cause of death. Extreme emaciation in the size and weight of the internal organs, the absence of any subcutaneous fat whatsoever, small brown heart with empty chambers, empty bladder—no, ma’am, not much question about what killed him.”
It seemed odd to me that this young Korean man would call me ma’am, but I guess when in Rome …
The victim had yet to be identified. The Ram truck he had been found in was a stolen vehicle taken from a used car dealership in Goshen, New York. He had no ID and except for his shirt, slacks, and shoes—no other personal effects whatsoever. He was the third male victim to be found in this condition, confined within a vehicle, covered with small bites, and dead from starvation. He, like the others, had been securely bound within the vehicle and had starved to death because he was unable to escape. Without food or water death results in ten to twelve days. I couldn’t imagine dying that way, restrained, helpless, and starving for food and water as your life forces dwindled and dissipated. I’ve been told that it is one of the most terrible and agonizing ways for a person to die.
There was another unifying clue, the one I had mentioned. The UNSUB had dissected the victim’s penis. It had been splayed in half lengthwise, butterflied like a fantail shrimp.
If this case was consistent with the others, I already knew how the small bites had been inflicted. Animal urine and guano had been found on two of the three victims and in their cars. All the while these victims were dying of starvation, vampire bats nipped at their skin and slurped their blood.
Chapter 8
Back in Dr. Park’s office and away from the cadaver, I felt myself returning to normal. Believe it or not, I was staring at his desk and pondering the wisdom of eating a second donut. Restraint, marine. Show some damn discipline, I told myself and tried valiantly to block the temptation of the high-carb munchies from my thought process. “Any forensic evidence of note?” I asked.
“I found traces of human blood under the victim’s fingernails.”
The assailant’s? Could we possibly be that lucky? “Have you checked DNA?”
“Yes, but neither the victim’s blood nor the blood found under the victim’s fingernails were a match to anyone in the National Missing Person’s Database.”
“Male blood?”
“No. Female, and we also found female pubic hairs mixed in with his. Genetically speaking, the pubic hair DNA matches the blood DNA we found under the victim’s fingernails. So I suppose we have a possible motive.”
Park was not a detective, but he had an intriguing personality. He spoke with authority, and I was curious to hear his thoughts on the subject. “For instance?”
“Our victim may have gotten caught hiding the salami where he shouldn’t have and paid the price—you know, an outraged husband … a boyfriend perhaps.”
Hiding the salami? Why is it that every man, regardless of race, creed, or color, has mastered the age-old art of sexual metaphor? “So a crime of passion is what you’re suggesting?”
“A crime of passion with a particularly nasty twist,” Park added. “Crimes of passion don’t normally involve sexual mutilation.”
“That’s true, doctor. The issue is that we have two other reported cases of men murdered in exactly the same way. What are the chances that three different men all got lucky with the same woman and paid with their lives because of it?”
Park twisted his lips and rubbed his chin as he came to terms with the fact that his theory was half-baked. “Not very likely, I guess.”
An idea popped into my head. “Unless it’s a team effort. Let’s say the female lured in each of the three victims and her partner played the role of the executioner.”
“A psychopathic partnership?” he asked disbelievingly. “Does that actually happen?”
“Rarely, but yes. Some cases have been documented.”
“Can’t you trace the bats? I mean, it’s not as if vampire bats are indigenous to North America. How did our UNSUB get them into the country?”
“We’re not sure. They’re normally found in Mexico and South America, and usually feed off livestock. They don’t consume enough blood to kill their prey; they just eat their fill and then fly off and return to their caves. We’ve been looking into that connection ever since the first body was found about a year ago. It’s not a real simple thing for the authorities to trace. Unfortunately they’re not very big. The bats weigh all of about an ounce apiece, so they’re pretty easy to hide. For all we know someone could be breeding them right here in the States.”
“So, using the bats?” Park asked.
“Torture. I guess it’s pretty obvious—is that what you’re getting at?”
Park nodded.
“Same presumed MO in all cases. The bats weren’t found in the storage facilities, so the UNSUB had to come back to remove them at some point. It’s only from forensic studies of the urine, guano, and wound sites that we were able to identify the parasites. It appears to be our perp’s signature.”
“Along with the incised penis,” Park added.
“Right, along with that. I’m guessing our psychopath is either into anger-retaliation or anger-excitation.”
Park seemed confused. “So we’re looking for a woman?”
I was barely twenty-four hours into the investigation. At that point I didn’t have a solid theory or even a starter theory to build on. The bureau had an extensive behavioral analysis department, and I had planned on chatting up one of the profilers as soon as I could. “That’s hard to say, doctor. My first thought is that a man wouldn’t mutilate another man’s penis, but I can’t rule it out either—not this early on in the investigation.” I always have a moment of pause when I think about a woman subduing a man, especially a young man like this victim had been. On the other hand, I had been a pretty capable marine—even today I wouldn’t think twice about taking on a man if push came to shove. Of course, a smart combatant has to know his or her limitations, so even though I might be willing to go hand-to-hand with your average Joe, I wouldn’t be stupid enough to sign up for a steel cage match with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. “So let’s get back to forensics—was the victim’s genitalia mutilated while he was alive or postmortem?”
Park squirmed in his chair. “The victim was very much alive and must have been in excruciating pain, not to mention the psychological torment of being castrated. The vampire bats fed off the warm blood flowing through the severed tissue. There are three main pairs of arteries and two veins that provide blood flow to and from the penis, and with a nice-size gash like that …”
“It must’ve been like an all-you-can-eat buffet for those furry little ghouls.” I wrinkled my nose. “Man, that’s pretty nasty stuff.”
“You seem to be fairly well briefed on your bat zoology, Agent Mather. How long would the feeding go on, generally speaking?” Park asked.
This is interesting; I
seem to know more about this than the coroner. “Vampire bats feed for about twenty to thirty minutes or until they consume roughly an amount equal to their unfed body weight—so they’re at about two ounces when they’re done feeding. The question I haven’t figured out yet was how long were the bats in the storage rooms with the victims? The bats have to feed at least once every forty-eight hours, so it’s conceivable that they went back for seconds, thirds, and maybe even fourths before the victim died and they were released.”
“They wouldn’t feed after the victim expired.”
“My information tells me that they only feed off living hosts. Of course, if they were starving and the corpse was the only source of blood available …” I shrugged. “Well, then who knows what those hungry little critters might have done.”
Chapter 9
There were only a few scattered chunks of ice left on the surface of Saranac Lake. The sun had come out, and the temperature had just breached fifty for the first time in months. Merle and Sylvia Portnoy were enjoying early spring fishing. It was illegal to fish for lake trout before April 1st, but April Fool’s Day had come and gone. They loved the sport and fishing for their dinner, so each year they always set out on the water as soon as weather permitted.
Sylvia had already pulled up several trout, but only one had been large enough to keep. Although it was frustrating to throw back fish measuring almost twenty inches, her solitary keeper measured almost twenty-five, which with some filling side dishes was more than enough to make a meal for the two of them.
Merle had reeled in two small ones, runts that he didn’t even measure. He was growing bored when he felt a heavy one on the hook. “Yessir,” he shouted with glee. “I hooked a whale. Sylvia, get the net.” Merle tugged on the line. “My goodness, he’s a big one,” he said and began to reel it in. It only took a few moments before the experienced fisherman realized that he didn’t have a fish on his line, and his smile dropped. “Probably snared a hunk of lumber or some such. Oh well, let’s see what we’ve got.”
The Mather Triad: Series Boxed Set (Chloe Mather Thrillers) Page 27