In the limo ride to the hotel, she stared out through tinted windows at a city she had visited only twice before, the last time for an interagency conference at the FBI’s Hoover Building. On that visit, she had arrived at night, and she remembered how awed she’d been at the sight of the memorials, aglow in floodlights. She remembered a week of hard partying and how she’d tried to match the men beer for beer, bad joke for bad joke. How booze and hormones and a strange city had all added up to a night of desperate sex with a fellow conference attendee, a cop from Providence—married, of course. This was what Washington meant to her: The city of regrets and stained sheets. The city that had taught her she was not immune to the temptations of a bad cliché. That although she might think she was the equal of any man, when it came to the morning after, she was the one who felt vulnerable.
In line at the Watergate Hotel registration desk, she eyed the stylish blonde ahead of her. Perfect hair, red shoes with sky-high heels. A woman who looked as if she actually belonged at the Watergate. Rizzoli was painfully aware of her own scuffed and cloddish blue pumps. Girl-cop shoes, meant to be walked in, and walked in a lot. No need for excuses, she thought. This is me; this is who I am. The girl from Revere who hunts monsters for a living. High heels are not what hunters wear.
“May I help you, ma’am?” a clerk called to her.
Rizzoli wheeled her bag to the counter. “There should be a reservation. Rizzoli.”
“Yes, your name’s right here. And there’s a message from a Mr. Dean. Your meeting’s scheduled at three-thirty.” “Meeting?”
He glanced up from his computer screen. “You didn’t know about it?”
“I guess I do now. Is there an address?”
“No, ma’am. But a car will be here to pick you up at three.” He handed her a key card and smiled. “Looks like you’re all taken care of.”
Black clouds smeared the sky, and the tingle of an approaching thunderstorm lifted the hair on her arms. She stood just outside the lobby, sweating in the rain-heavy air, and waited for the limo to arrive. But it was a dark-blue Volvo that swung into the porte cochere and stopped beside her.
She peered through the passenger window and saw it was Gabriel Dean behind the wheel.
The lock clicked open and she slid into the seat beside him. She had not expected to face him so soon, and she felt unprepared. Resentful that he appeared so calm and in control while she was still disoriented by the morning’s travel.
“Welcome to Washington, Jane,” he said. “How was the trip?”
“Smooth enough. I could get to like riding in limousines.” “And the room?”
“Way better than I’m used to.”
A ghost of a smile touched his lips as he turned his attention to driving. “So it’s not all torture for you.”
“Did I say it was?”
“You don’t look particularly happy to be here.”
“I’d be a lot happier if I knew why I was here.”
“It’ll be clear once we get there.”
She glanced out at the street names and realized they were headed northwest, in the opposite direction from FBI headquarters. “We’re not going to the Hoover Building?”
“No. Georgetown. He wants to meet you at his house.”
“Who does?”
“Senator Conway.” Dean glanced at her. “You’re not carrying, are you?”
“My weapon’s still packed in my suitcase.”
“Good. Senator Conway doesn’t allow firearms into his house.”
“Security concerns?”
“Peace of mind. He served in Vietnam. He doesn’t need to see any more guns.”
The first raindrops began to patter on the windshield.
She sighed. “I wish I could say the same.”
Senator Conway’s study was furnished in dark wood and leather—a man’s room, with a man’s collection of artifacts, thought Rizzoli, noting the array of Japanese swords mounted on the wall. The silver-haired owner of that collection greeted her with a warm handshake and a quiet voice, but his coal-dark eyes were direct as lasers, and she felt him openly taking her measure. She endured his scrutiny, only because she understood that nothing could proceed unless he was satisfied by what he saw. And what he saw was a woman who stared straight back at him. A woman who cared little about the subtleties of politics but cared greatly about the truth.
“Please, have a seat, Detective,” he said. “I know you just flew in from Boston. You probably need time to decompress.”
A secretary brought in a tray of coffee and china cups. Rizzoli curbed her impatience while the coffee was poured, cream and sugar passed around. At last the secretary withdrew, closing the door behind her.
Conway set down his cup, untouched. He had not really wanted it, and now that the ceremony had been dispensed with, he focused all his attention on her. “It was good of you to come.”
“I hardly had much of a choice.”
Her bluntness made him smile. Though Conway observed all the social niceties of handshakes and hospitality, she suspected that he, like most native New Englanders, valued straight talk as much as she did. “Shall we get straight to business, then?”
She set down her cup as well. “I’d prefer that.”
Dean was the one who stood and crossed to the desk. He brought a bulging accordion folder back to the sitting area and took out a photograph, which he laid on the coffee table in front of her.
“June 25, 1999,” he said.
She stared at the image of a bearded man, sitting slumped, a spray of blood on the whitewashed wall behind his head. He was dressed in dark trousers and a torn white shirt. His feet were bare. On his lap was perched a china cup and saucer.
She was still reeling, struggling to process the image, when Dean laid a second photograph next to it. “July 15, 1999,” he said.
Again the victim was a man, this one clean-shaven. Again he had died sitting propped up against a blood-splattered wall.
Dean set down a third photograph of yet another man. But this one was bloated, his belly taut with the expanding gases of decomposition. “September 12,” he said. “The same year.”
She sat stunned by this gallery of the dead, laid out so neatly on the cherry-wood table. A record of horror set incongruously among the civilized clutter of coffee cups and teaspoons. As Dean and Conway waited silently, she picked up each photo in turn, forcing herself to take in the details of what made each case unique. But all were variations on the same theme that she had seen played out in the homes of the Yeagers and the Ghents. The silent witness. The conquered, forced to watch the unspeakable.
“What about the women?” she asked. “There must have been women.”
Dean nodded. “Only one was positively identified. The wife of case number three. She was found partly buried in the woods about a week after that photo was taken.”
“Cause of death?”
“Strangulation.”
“Postmortem sexual assault?”
“There was fresh semen collected from her remains.”
Rizzoli took a deep breath. Asked, softly: “And the other two women?”
“Due to the advanced state of decomposition, their identities could not be confirmed.”
“But you had remains?”
“Yes.”
“Why couldn’t you I.D. them?”
“Because we were dealing with more than two bodies. Many, many more.”
She looked up and found herself staring directly into Dean’s eyes. Had he been watching her the whole time, awaiting her startled reaction? In answer to her silent question, he handed her three files.
She opened the first folder and found an autopsy report on one of the male victims. Automatically she flipped to the last page and read the conclusions:
Cause of death: massive hemorrhage due to single slash wound, with complete transection of left carotid artery and left jugular vein.
The Dominator, she thought. It’s his kill.
She let the pag
es fall back into place. Suddenly she was staring at the first page of the report. At a detail she had missed in her rush to read the conclusions.
It was in the second paragraph: Autopsy performed on 16 July 1999, 22:15, in mobile facility located Gjakove, Kosovo.
She reached for the next two pathology files and focused immediately on the locations of the autopsies.
Peje, Kosovo.
Djakovica, Kosovo.
“The autopsies were done in the field,” said Dean. “Performed, sometimes, under primitive circumstances. Tents and lantern light. No running water. And so many remains to process that we were overwhelmed.”
“These were war crimes investigations,” she said.
He nodded. “I was with the first FBI team that arrived in June 1999. We went at the request of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. ICTY, for short. Sixty-five of us were deployed on that first mission. Our job was to locate and preserve evidence in one of the largest crime scenes in history. We collected ballistic evidence from the massacre sites. We exhumed and autopsied over a hundred Albanian victims, and probably missed hundreds more that we couldn’t find. And the whole time we were there, the killing was still going on.”
“Vengeance killings,” said Conway. “Completely predictable, given the context of that war. Or any war, for that matter. Both Agent Dean and I are ex-marines. I served in Vietnam, and Agent Dean was in Desert Storm. We’ve seen things we can’t bring ourselves to talk about, things that make us question why we human beings consider ourselves any better than animals. During the war, it was Serbs killing Albanians, and after the war, it was the Albanian KLA killing Serb civilians. There’s plenty of blood on the hands of both sides.”
“That’s what we thought these homicides were, at first,” said Dean, pointing to the crime scene photos on the coffee table. “Revenge killings in the aftermath of war. It wasn’t our mission to deal with ongoing lawlessness. We were there specifically at the Tribunal’s request, to process war crimes evidence. Not these.”
“Yet you did process them,” said Rizzoli, looking at the FBI letterhead on the autopsy report. “Why?”
“Because I recognized them for what they were,” said Dean. “These murders weren’t based on ethnicity. Two of the men were Albanian; one was a Serb. But they all had something in common. They were married to young wives. Attractive wives, who were abducted from their homes. By the third attack, I knew this killer’s signature. I knew what we were dealing with. But these cases fell under the jurisdiction of the local justice system, not the ICTY, which brought us there.”
“So what was done?” she asked.
“In a word? Nothing. There were no arrests, because no suspect was ever identified.”
“Of course, there was an inquiry,” said Conway. “But consider the situation, Detective. Thousands of war dead buried in over one hundred fifty mass graves. Foreign peacekeeping troops struggling to keep order. Armed outlaws roaming bombed-out villages, just looking for reasons to kill. And the civilians themselves, nursing old rages. It was the Wild West over there, with gun battles erupting over drugs or family feuds or personal vendettas. And almost always, the killing was blamed on ethnic tensions. How could you distinguish one murder from another? There were so many.”
“For a serial killer,” said Dean, “it was paradise on earth.”
TWENTY-TWO
She looked at Dean. She had not been surprised to hear of his military service. She’d already seen it in his bearing, his air of command. He would know about war zones, and he’d be familiar with the scenario that military conquerors had always played out. The humiliation of the enemy. The taking of spoils.
“Our unsub was in Kosovo,” she said.
“It’s the sort of place he would thrive on,” said Conway. “Where violent death’s a part of everyday life. A killer could walk into such a place, commit atrocities, and walk out again without anyone noticing the difference. There’s no way of knowing how many murders are written off as mere acts of war.”
“So we may be dealing with a recent immigrant,” said Rizzoli. “A refugee from Kosovo.”
“That’s one possibility,” said Dean.
“A possibility you’ve known all along.”
“Yes.” His answer came without hesitation.
“You withheld vital information. You sat back and watched while the dumb cops ran around in circles.”
“I allowed you to reach your own conclusions.”
“Yes, but without full knowledge of the facts.” She pointed to the photos. “This could have made the difference.”
Dean and Conway looked at each other. Then Conway said, “I’m afraid there’s even more we haven’t told you.”
“More?”
Dean reached into the accordion folder and took out yet another crime scene photo. Though Rizzoli thought she was prepared to confront this fourth image, the impact of the photograph struck her with visceral force. She saw a young and fair-haired man with a wisp of mustache. He was more sinew than muscle, his chest a bony vault of ribs, his thin shoulders jutting forward like white knobs. She could clearly see the man’s dying expression, the muscles of his face frozen into a rictus of horror.
“This victim was found October twenty-ninth of last year,” said Dean. “The wife’s body was never found.”
She swallowed and averted her gaze from the victim’s face. “Kosovo again?”
“No. Fayetteville, North Carolina.”
Startled, she looked up at him. Held his gaze as the heat of anger flooded her face. “How many more haven’t you told me about? How many goddamn cases are there?”
“These are all we know about.”
“Meaning there could be others?”
“There may be. But we don’t have access to that information.”
She gave him a look of disbelief. “The FBI doesn’t?”
“What Agent Dean means,” interjected Conway, “is that there may be cases outside our jurisdiction. Countries that lack accessible crime data. Remember, we’re talking about war zones. Areas of political upheaval. Precisely the places our unsub would be attracted to. Places where he’d feel right at home.”
A killer who moves freely across oceans. Whose hunting area knows no national borders. She thought of everything she’d learned about the Dominator. The speed with which he’d subdued his victims. His craving for contact with the dead. His use of a Rambo-type knife. And the parachute fibers—drab green. She felt both men watching her as she processed what Conway had just said. They were testing her, waiting to see if she would measure up to their expectations.
She looked at the last photograph on the coffee table. “You said this attack was in Fayetteville.”
“Yes,” said Dean.
“There’s a military base in the area. Isn’t there?”
“Fort Bragg. It’s about ten miles northwest of Fayetteville.”
“How many are stationed at that base?”
“Around forty-one thousand active-duty. It’s home to the Eighteenth Airborne Corps, Eighty-second Airborne Division, and Army Special Operations Command.” The fact that Dean answered her without hesitation told her this was information he considered relevant. Information he already had at the tip of his tongue.
“That’s why you’ve kept me in the dark, isn’t it? We’re dealing with someone who has combat skills. Someone who’s paid to kill.”
“We’ve been kept in the dark, just as you have.” Dean leaned forward, his face so close to hers that all she could focus on was him. Conway and everything else in the room receded from view. “When I read the VICAP report filed by the Fayetteville police, I thought I was seeing Kosovo again. The killer might as well have signed his name, the crime scene was so distinctive. The position of the male victim’s body. The type of blade used in the coup de grâce. The china or glassware placed on the victim’s lap. The abduction of the wife. I immediately flew down to Fayetteville and spent two weeks with the local authorities, assist
ing their investigation. No suspect was ever identified.”
“Why couldn’t you tell me this before?” she said.
“Because of who our unsub might be.”
“I don’t care if he’s a four-star general. I had a right to know about the Fayetteville case.”
“If this had been critical to your identifying a Boston suspect, I would have told you.”
“You said forty-one thousand active-duty soldiers are stationed at Fort Bragg.”
“Yes.”
“How many of those men served in Kosovo? I assume you asked that question.”
Dean nodded. “I requested a list from the Pentagon of all soldiers whose service records coincide with the places and dates of the slayings. The Dominator is not on that list. Only a few of those men now reside in New England, and none of them have panned out as our man.”
“I’m supposed to trust you on that?”
“Yes.”
She laughed. “That requires a pretty big leap of faith.”
“We’re both making a leap of faith here, Jane. I’m betting that I can trust you.”
“Trust me with what? So far, you haven’t told me anything that justifies secrecy.”
In the silence that followed, Dean glanced at Conway, who gave an almost imperceptible nod. With that wordless exchange, they agreed to hand her the vital piece of the puzzle.
Conway said, “Have you ever heard of ‘sheep-dipping,’ Detective?”
“I take it that term has nothing to do with real sheep.”
He smiled. “No, it doesn’t. It’s military slang. It refers to the CIA’s practice of occasionally borrowing the military’s special operations soldiers for certain missions. It happened in Nicaragua and Afghanistan, when the CIA’s own special operations group—their SOG—needed additional manpower. In Nicaragua, navy SEALs were sheep-dipped to mine the harbors. In Afghanistan, the Green Berets were sheep-dipped to train the mujahideen. While working for the CIA, these soldiers become, essentially, CIA case officers. They go off the Pentagon’s books. The military has no record of their activities.”
The Rizzoli & Isles Series 11-Book Bundle Page 59