Glutt’s eyes bulged and her mouth opened to reveal a large clump of partially masticated hamburger.
Charming. Now that’s something I really didn’t need to see.
“You’re kidding?” Glutt asked. “Goshen?” She quickly washed down her food with a swig of beer. “I’m trying to picture a map. That’s near Claryville, isn’t it?”
I wasn’t sure. “Why?” I was truly thrilled that the conversation had moved onto the case crime case and away from queer rabbis and ritual cleansing baths.
“This is why,” she said and quickly pulled up a new file on her computer. “Read this,” she said excitedly. “Start where it says Rules of the Kill.”
Chapter 15
Pictured on the report was a bear vault, a clear seven-hundred-cubic-inch polycarbonate container with a twist-off top—about nine inches in diameter and a foot or so tall. For all intents and purposes, it was a large peanut butter jar without the stuff inside that sticks to the roof of your mouth. A bear’s olfactory bulb is five times as large as a human’s, and their sense of smell is twenty-one hundred times as sensitive. A bear vault is used to prevent bears from smelling your food and raiding your camp. I know they’re helpful, but I also know that a bear is capable of detecting a dead carcass twenty miles upwind; so if you’ve brought any particularly pungent grub along with you, the bear will smell it and come after it, trust me. The bear vault had been excavated from the woods outside of Claysville, New York, by an overzealous hunting dog named—wait for it … Scratch. The photo depicted the bear vault on the ground alongside the hole it had been excavated from. Within I could see its contents: ration bars, a bone-handle hunting knife, a box of bullets, and a sheet of paper.
The second document shown was a scan of the sheet of paper from within the bear vault. It was entitled: Rules of the Kill. The rules were concise:
Victim: Female
Height: Slight
Weight: Approximately 100 pounds
Age: No more than thirty years old
Method of the kill: Blade or Bullet
Disposal: By Water
Forcible Rape: Allowed
Points: 100
“Jesus! This is a game, a fucking game?”
“A game or a mission of sorts. Either is completely horrific.” Glutt was still chewing through her beef patty, gnawing at it with the determination of a beaver. “And another tiny little cherub bites the dust. Now you see why I was so excited to cover a male mutilation case.”
I slid a file folder out of my briefcase and searched through the photos until I found the picture of Maisy Grant along with her physical description. She was twenty-four years old. Hair: blond. Height: 5’ 2”. I rummaged through some of the other photos in the file. Maisy was slight of build, a mere tea sandwich of a woman. “I don’t believe it—this could be her. Someone killed this woman to win a game. Son of a bitch.” I had only taken one bite of my burger, but I couldn’t eat any more. I pushed my plate away.
“Oh, come on, Mather. You’re not going to let a delicious meal go to waste on account of a homicide, are you? When I grew up I was taught that food was not to be wasted.”
“And I was taught that life was not to be wasted. If you’re that hungry, you can have mine too.”
“Ouch!” Glutt winced and put down her sandwich. “Are you going to dredge the lake?”
“Oh, you betcha. Chief Sparks has already called in the New York State Police SCUBA Unit. If there’s anything at the bottom of the lake, they’ll find it.” Aided by the scent of charbroiled sirloin, my reserve quickly returned—I dipped a French fry into ketchup and made fast work of it. “So now I’ve got two cases to investigate instead of one. How lucky can a girl get?”
“Perhaps if we understood more about the Rules of the Kill game, it would help us to find Batman,” Glutt said.
Funny, isn’t that what you’re here for? Where’s all the insight, babe? Start profiling, for crying out loud.
She rubbed her chin. “I’m going to have to go back to my textbooks on this one. Someone who kills for sport … that’s a full twenty-two out of twenty-two on the evil scale.”
She was referring to Most Evil, a forensics TV program in which Columbia University’s Michael Stone, a psychiatrist, rated psychopaths on a scale of one to twenty-two, twenty-two representing the worst of the worst, the Attila the Huns and Hitlers of the world. Let’s not forget Vlad the Impaler. “Category 22 represents psychopathic torture-murderers, where torture is the primary motive, doesn’t it? In most cases, the crime has a sexual motivating factor. So in that respect, both UNSUBs, if there are two, are twenty-twos.”
“You are accurate, Mather. They’re both at the top of the evil scale. Neither is capable of empathy. If you scanned their brains, you’d see that they have few or no mirror neurons.”
A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another. That’s why you flinch out of compassion when you see someone bump his or her shin, or you notice when a friend wrinkles up their face in disgust while tasting rotten food and suddenly your own stomach reacts to the thought of eating. Apparently Glutt didn’t have any of those appetite-recoiling mirror neurons because she was still going at her burger. But that was all good because she was finally quiet, and I needed time to figure out why women were being murdered and men tortured to death. Moreover, I had to get Glutt out of the restaurant before Mike returned with her hard pickle.
Chapter 16
I wandered through a natural corridor of trees. It was shady, dark, and cool—almost cold. I could see the lake through the clearing at the end of the tree-lined path. A few steps more and Saranac Lake opened up before me. The air was warmer, and the sound of buzzing insects was almost too loud. The lake was beautiful indeed, like an ebony chasm upon which the sun’s rays bounced and scattered, reflecting glare in every direction. I heard a bubbling sound and turned to see the head of a fish break the surface of the water. I watched as the ripples it cast widened out and grew larger and larger until they finally disappeared.
I walked a short distance from the tree clearing to the edge of the lake, crunching on the small rocks that made up the shoreline. A moorhen ran off along the water’s edge to distract me from her nest, and a kestrel swooped lower at the sound of the disturbance to check out the stranger. Looking out at the still water set before the backdrop of majestic pines and budding winter trees, I never would have suspected that a body might be sitting at the bottom of the lake. It was like a magician practicing sleight of hand—look where I want you to look and nowhere else—a flash here, a distraction there—the lake had taken me under its spell, mesmerizing me with its beauty and distracting me from the tomb-like bottom where Maisy Grant may have rested.
The air was heavy with the fragrance of water and ozone, and warmth, and living. As I peered into its depths, my attention was at first taken by buzzing insects and pondweeds, but as I continued to stare, the lake slowly revealed more and more of its mystery to me, illuminating its secrets one layer at a time. The first few inches beneath the surface were well lit, and I saw a few minnows darting back and forth. As I probed more deeply, I noticed a larger fish, a trout perhaps. I shielded my eyes to get a better view and saw that the fish was staring back at me, curious, just as the kestrel had been. I finally became aware of the murky bottom and the silt moving back and forth with a life of its own.
A new distraction seized my attention. I heard a splash and looked further out into the water, where I saw the top of a diver’s hood break the surface. Almost immediately the diver’s entire head was out of the water as he trudged toward the shoreline. His head and shoulders were now above the water, and as the waterline fell below his chest, I could see the orange Hunter logo on his dry suit, a suit used for cold-water diving. The waterline fell below his waist before he reached up with his dry-glove-clad hand and stripped away his facemask.
I shook my head in dismay as he approached. “Dear God,” I sh
outed. “How will you ever find a body in there?”
“It’s never easy,” he said. “But we’ll get it done.” He continued out of the water, unclipping some of his paraphernalia as he advanced. It took a few moments for him to remove his dry-gloves and thermal liners. He shook my hand as soon as it was free. “Ken Morrison, State Police Dive Team.”
“SA Chloe Mather, FBI. How’d you do out there?”
I waited for Morrison to answer as he removed his dry suit hood and hood liner. He had wavy gray hair and a matching mustache—he looked like a rough and ready kind of guy. He unclipped his tanks and regulator, and gently lowered them to the ground. “That’s a big goddamn lake out there. Most of it is less than thirty feet deep, but there are spots that drop off to fifty. We’re checking the most likely areas where the body might be found. We were told that this woman disappeared in January, so we’re looking in the areas where ice fishing camps were set up. Of course, that wouldn’t prevent an ambitious psychopath from cutting a hole just about anywhere he wanted to. It all depends on how much trouble was taken to make sure the body wouldn’t be found.”
“How many divers are out here?”
“Seven so far, but there are more coming, and I’ve requested the side scan sonar unit. We’ll use it in conjunction with GPS to make thorough sweeps of the lake bottom. We’ll find her if she’s here, but it’s a time-consuming effort. It’s much easier when there’s an eyewitness or some other way to narrow down the area where the victim went into the water.” He puffed out his cheeks and sighed. “Do you mind?” He glanced down over his shoulder. “I need help getting out of this straightjacket.”
“Yeah, sure.” He turned around, and I unzipped his dry suit to the waist.
“That’ll do.” He pulled at his sleeves until he was free from the top of it and let it hang in front of him like a big clunky apron. He wore a fleece sweat suit beneath the dry suit, which was emblazoned with an odd logo, a black stylized octopus with the words New York State Police SCUBA Divers imprinted in gold. “These dry suits work like a charm in the cold water, but once you’re out of the water and the sun is shining down on you … they’re like an oven. Ten minutes in strong sun and you can bake a soufflé in one of these things.”
“Funny. So where’s your command post?”
“Just south of here—not far away. We’ll explore this area thoroughly and then check out another spot tomorrow.”
“What are the chances that the body is still intact after all this time?”
“Pretty good, I’d say. Decomposition is slow in water this cold, and there are no large predatory fish. I’m not making any promises, but those factors improve our odds of finding the body. At the very least we should be able to recover the victim’s skeleton.” He pulled out his waterproof radio and called for a launch to pick him up before addressing me again. “I’ve been in the water all morning and it takes a lot of calories to stay warm even in a dry suit. Why don’t you ride back with us? The other divers should be checking in about now, and if you haven’t already heard, diver chow is in a class by itself, far better than that pigswill firefighters are always bragging about.”
I laughed. “Them sounds like fighting words.”
“Diver chow is worth fighting for.”
Must be a well-guarded secret. “Count me in. My cell phone won’t pick up a thing out here. I can’t find a signal.”
“Not to worry, we’ve got broadband up the wazoo back at basecamp.”
“Great, because I want to check in with my people for updates.”
I heard the hum of an outboard engine. A small police boat materialized on the lake a moment later.
Morrison flagged it down.
Another diver was at the wheel. He was attired identically to Morrison with his dry suit half off and hanging. He cut the wheel, and the motorboat sped towards us.
He reached for my laptop bag. “Hand me that. I assume there’s a computer inside?”
“You assume correctly, Ken.”
“You may want to take off your shoes and roll up your slacks,” Morrison said as he gazed down at my feet. “It’s a boat, not a hovercraft.”
“That’s all right. A little water never hurt anyone.”
He smiled. “You know, somehow I had you pegged for the rugged type.”
“Ken, you’ve got no idea.” I winked at him and slipped off my shoes.
Chapter 17
“What’s for lunch, Grady?” Morrison asked the cook as we approached basecamp. The smell of grilled meat was fragrant in the air; so enticing it made my mouth water.
The guy standing over the grill was wearing his fleece sweat-skivvies, the type that’s worn beneath a dry suit for warmth. His dark hair was matted and plastered against his skull, but his dark goatee was perfect, trimmed, washed, and probably dyed because it had an odd bluish hue when the sun hit it at just the right angle.
“Venison kabobs marinated in my signature brown mustard sauce.” Grady turned the kabobs and licked some errant sauce from his fingertips. “Who’s our visitor?”
“Chloe Mather,” I offered. “I’m a food critic with the New York Times.” I turned to Morrison and winked. “I’m doing a piece on diver chow.”
Grady frowned. “For real?”
I nodded. “Yes, for real. I’m here to dispel the myth that firemen are the best cooks.”
“You shitting me?” he asked and glanced at Morrison to corroborate the story.
“Geez, Grady, I sure hope this shit is good. Our reputation depends on it,” Morrison said and pointed to their mobile command post. “Mather, you can get Radio Free Europe in there if you need to. We’ve got secure Internet as well.”
“Why are you giving her access?” Grady asked.
Morrison escorted me over to the truck. “She’s got an important deadline to make, and she can’t get a wireless signal. I mean, she’s with the New York Times, for Christ’s sake.” He pointed at the grill. “Better not fuck up, Grady.”
We were in the truck with the door closed before we spoke again. “That was good.” I snickered. “Thanks for playing along.”
“No worries. Grady is good enough to teach courses at the French Culinary Institute. You’re in for a real treat.”
“Cool beans. Now how do I get connected?”
~~~
It had been a quiet twenty-four hours. Glutt was busy researching her husband-cheating fingers to the bone but hadn’t yet provided me with a useful profile for either of our two UNSUBs, not for the one who had mutilated the three men or the one who presumably had murdered Maisy Grant. While I awaited Grady’s critically acclaimed luncheon, I used the time to review the video that had been sent to the wife of Leon Drade. I watched it three times, and it was no less ghastly after the third viewing. The sheer terror in Drade’s eyes when he saw the cage of bats being released into the passenger compartment of the car was absolutely abhorrent. It’s one thing to investigate murder and quite another to be the victim, especially one that had been mentally and physically tortured and knew that things were only going to get worse.
Maisy Grant’s photo sat atop a folder. The divers needed it in order to make positive identification. Alas, I knew the possibility existed for the divers to find more than one body down there, and I was praying that wouldn’t be the case.
I heard a knock on the door and hit the pause button on the video playback.
The door opened, and Grady looked inside with a sheepish expression. “We’re waiting on you for lunch, Ms. Mather. Ismaeli isn’t back yet, but he’s always late, and we know better than to let our food get cold waiting on that slow-moving Samoan.”
I opened my eyes wide. “If you say so. Here I come.” I shut the lid on my laptop. “Nothing like freshly grilled meat.”
“Morrison has a freezer full of meat at home. He’s an avid hunter and has trouble storing everything he kills, so he’s pretty generous with the team. Are you hungry?”
“Starving. I’m always hungry, and the smell coming
off the grill is pure heaven.”
Grady smiled. “Think you can keep up with a half-dozen ravenous SCUBA divers?”
“Just watch me.”
The divers were all friendly guys. I learned that Grady was a retired diving instructor and that Morrison had been a Navy S.E.A.L. He certainly looked like it. He was burly and muscular. He looked like he could move a mountain if push came to shove.
Grady handed me a plate piled high with skewered meat and waited patiently while I sampled his creation. “How’s the venison?” he asked eagerly.
One of the other divers smirked because I took a good deal of time before uttering a comment. Morrison had obviously let everyone else in on our little scam.
“Grady,” I complained, “this is the chewiest slab of rancid dog meat I ever sank my teeth into.”
Grady’s jaw dropped.
Morrison tried to play it cool, but I saw that he was caving. Within a moment everyone was laughing, everyone but Grady, of course.
“What?” Grady snapped as he looked around at his hysterical colleagues. “What the hell is so funny?”
One of the divers blurted, “She’s not a food critic, you dope.”
“She’s not?” Grady seemed bewildered. “Then why …”
“Because it’s funny,” another diver said. “Gee whiz, Grady, want to buy a bridge?”
“Sorry, Grady, I know I’m a real jerk, but your venison really is the best I’ve ever had, and the mustard glaze is out-of-this-world good.”
“She’s a fed.” Morrison cackled. “She’s here for the same reason we are.”
It appeared that Grady didn’t mind being the butt of our joke. “So you really like it?” he asked imploringly.
“Yes,” I replied. “I really and truly like it. I’d kill to be able to cook as good as you do.” The truth be told, cooking was not up there on my list of talents. In fact, Grace actually cringes every time I step foot in her kitchen. She keeps her good kitchenware under lock and key because I’ve ruined more than one of her expensive French sauté pans.
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