“Hello again.” She half rose to shake. “How was your trip?”
“In a word: relaxing.”
“Excuse my enthusiasm last night,” Hunter said as Luke sat across from her. “I guess I was freaking out a little.”
“No harm in a little freaking out,” he said. “Jesus had a freaking out with some money changers, as you might recall. Whipped them right out of the temple.”
“Good. Makes me feel better.”
Luke smiled.
“Anyway, you were right,” she said. “There are three cases now. Three that we know about.”
Luke waited. Hunter’s seemingly unquenchable intensity was, again, a little contagious.
They ordered coffee and bagels. After the waitress left, Hunter began telling him about the Jane Doe case in West Virginia, then opened one of the file folders and slid him photos. They showed a bullet wound on the left side of the woman’s head, just below the ear, and the exit wound through the top of her right ear. Then the numbers on her lower back.
“Guess this scuttles the grand jury plans,” Luke said.
“It’s probably a few hours from becoming a federal case,” Hunter said. “I’m just being careful how I proceed. I’m a little concerned about sheriff and the deputy.”
“What could they do now?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t trust Calvert. I know he wants to come out of this benefiting somehow. In a big way, if possible. And he’s been talking with the state’s attorney.” Luke turned the photos face down as the coffee and bagels arrived.
“Of course, we’re still missing a few of the essentials,” Hunter said, reaching for her bagel.
“You don’t know who the woman I came upon is, in other words. Or why she was left in the church.”
“Yes, those essentials.” She spread cream cheese on half a toasted bagel. So, tell me more about Jackson Pynne,” she said. “Is he a violent man?”
“Violent? Not really.” Luke thought about it as he tipped sugar into his coffee. “He has a temper. But it tends to percolate awhile before boiling over—although then it can be pretty scary.” He sipped his coffee. “Which isn’t to say that I think he did this.”
“Because you don’t think he did.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because of who he is. And because of how he acted when we talked.”
“But what if he was pushed—if his temper boiled over.”
Luke tilted his head, as if to say, It’s possible, but not likely.
Hunter told him about the new evidence found at the cottage on Oyster Creek—the cigarette butt and the shoe prints, both seeming to link Jackson Pynne to the killing.
Luke listened, surprised but unconvinced. Too obvious, he thought.
Why would someone want to frame Jackson, though?
He was trying to find a less obvious thread linking the different cases, some kind of unifying motive that would reveal not only what the perpetrator wanted them to find but also what he didn’t want found.
He wondered, too, if Hunter was weighing the question of disclosure. If they released information about the Psalms now, could it prevent another murder? Or would it just prompt the killer to become smarter and change his M.O.? Or spook him into disappearing, spoiling whatever chance they had of catching him?
“It’s odd, though, isn’t it?” he said.
“What is?”
“The dissimilarities. I mean, if the numbers were calling cards, why were they left in such inconsistent ways?”
Hunter hunched forward, elbows on the table. “Okay, what are you thinking, then? That it’s not the same person?”
“Or maybe this is just the way that he’s decided to reveal what he’s doing.”
She nodded for him to go on.
“I mean, look at the three calling cards we know about. The second one we found—paint on a corner of the glass—was more subtle than the numbers carved into her hand.”
“Okay.”
“And the third even more so than the second.”
“So maybe that’s a deliberate pattern, you’re saying?”
“It could be. I mean, if these are calling cards, it’s highly unlikely that detectives in Delaware would have looked at those numbers on the glass and thought anything about the Book of Psalms. It’s just not something that would have ever entered their minds.”
“Okay, agreed.”
“And probably less likely in West Virginia. You said the local officials there didn’t think the numbers meant anything. They thought they were a tattoo. It sounds like they never would have said, ‘Gee, I wonder if that could be a reference to the book of Psalms.’ ”
Hunter nodded. “Okay, so, in other words, without first knowing what happened here, there’s no way of figuring out the other two.”
“That’s right.”
“And you’re saying it was done that way intentionally—progressively apparent, so to speak. So that they would only become calling cards after the fact?”
“It’s an idea.”
“Why, though?”
Luke shrugged, handing back the photos. That was the question. “I guess because he doesn’t want the pattern to be discovered until later.”
“Maybe not until after he’s stopped.”
“Maybe.”
Neither of them spoke for a while. A gregarious couple from church came over to say hello, and Hunter closed the file folder. She opened the other folder as soon as they walked away.
“This is Virginia,” she said. “John Doe. I wanted you to see it. One of our investigators talked with the lead detective there. There was no number left behind in this case. But, I don’t know— I have a funny feeling about it. There’s one very odd detail, which seems to be a different sort of calling card. Have a look.”
Luke skimmed through the printouts in the case file.
John Doe. White male. Age 45-55, 5’ 10”, 193 pounds. Spotted by a motorist in the woods beside a rural highway in north-central Virginia. Wearing dark suit pants, a white dress shirt and a print tie.
On the surface, he saw little linking this to the Tidewater case, except that the victim had been mutilated and his identity was unknown. The nature of the mutilation seemed meant as a message: the man’s upper and lower lips had been sliced off with a sharp blade, maybe an X-Acto knife, according to the medical examiner, and his tongue had been cut out. The state police investigator told Fischer the killing was probably drug-related.
“Detectives in West Virginia think their Jane Doe was drug-related, too,” Hunter said. “An assumption that probably kept them from casting a wider net.”
“So maybe the perpetrator wants it to seem like a drug case?”
“Possibly. Which would mean less chance of connecting it with the other murders. At least for a while.”
Luke nodded, figuring if the Tidewater Jane Doe came from somewhere else, the others might have, too. Maybe the dump sites were selected randomly. Another way of obscuring what the perpetrator was actually doing. Whatever that was.
He glanced out at the parking lot and noticed that an unmarked Crown Vic was now parked in the space between Hunter’s car and his. The driver, sitting behind the wheel, seemed to be watching them.
“Don’t look now,” he said, closing the file, “but I think your friend the deputy is outside.”
Hunter waited before glancing, discreetly.
Beak Stilfork elaborately got out of his patrol car and looked carefully at the other cars in the lot, as if counting them. He came into the restaurant with his peculiar, stiff-legged gait. Taking a quick inventory of the patrons, half nodding as his eyes moved past Luke.
He talked to the waitress behind the register without smiling—ordering coffee to go, most likely—showing his long-nosed profile. Finall
y, he walked over.
“Sergeant,” he said. “Pastor.”
Luke stood and shook his hand, then sat down again..
“Good crowd this morning.”
“Yes, it was,” Luke said, good-naturedly. “Much larger than I’d have expected.”
Stilfork’s eyes went to the folder on the seat bench beside Hunter. Then to the other file on the table.
“Here for lunch?”
Luke smiled. “Just coffee and bagels.”
Hunter raised her eyes. “How’d you make out with the vandals last night?”
“Say what?”
“I saw you parked outside my apartment building at about two-forty in the morning. I assume you were staking out vandals?”
Stilfork’s eyes turned to Bowers’s. Then he nodded goodbye and left without saying another word . He paid for his coffee and returned to the patrol car.
Luke waited until he finally drove off before opening the case file.
Images of the crime scene and victim were in a separate envelope inside. Eight were crime scene photos, six from the medical examiner’s office. Hunter was right. There were no numbers, or any other sort of calling card, besides the mutilation itself. But he recognized two similarities between this case and the others. There was only a small amount of blood at the scene, and the wounds had been postmortem, according to the medical examiner. “So he was killed and mutilated somewhere else and dumped here.”
“Yeah. That’s the odd detail,” she said. “That’s why it feels connected.”
Hunter sipped her coffee. She set the cup back in the saucer.
The front-on photos were gruesome—the man’s mouth open grotesquely, an oval of coagulated blood where his lips had been. Dried trails of blood down his neck and shoulder. Eyes closed.. The victim didn’t look like a drug dealer, let alone an addict. His appearance suggested an attorney or an accountant.
Luke imagined what the killer had done: parking somewhere off the highway, carrying the man’s body into the woods, propping him against a tree. But the Virginia victim was a big man; it would have required two people, probably, to carry him. Surprisingly, he saw nothing in the report about shoe-print evidence.
“Wait,” Hunter said, touching his wrist. She flipped back through the photos and pulled one out: the man’s clothing and watch, laid out on a stainless steel table at the medical examiner’s office.
“My God,” she said. “I completely missed that.”
“What.”
“Look at these two pictures. This one was probably taken several hours after the first.”
Luke studied the images she’d set side by side in front of them.
“Do you see what’s wrong with them?”
At first he didn’t. Then it became obvious.
“The wristwatch.”
“Yeah. The wristwatch. The watch shows the exact same time in both pictures.”
Meaning it had stopped. Or been stopped. Luke drew a breath.
“Let me see what this says about the watch.” Luke waited as Hunter paged through the CSI case report, her eyes intently scanning lines of text; he felt her energy like heat off a summer pavement.
“ ‘Wristwatch, stopped, twelve twenty-three. Watch intact,’ ” she read.
That was all. None of the local detectives had attached any significance to it. Just a stray oddity. But Luke already had his phone out and was Googling Psalm 12.
Chapter 26
TWELVE TWENTY-THREE.
Luke scrolled through the verses of the Twelfth Psalm.
But there was no verse 23.
Psalm 12 consisted of only eight verses.
He scrolled to the top and read the summary: “Man’s Treachery and God’s Constancy.” The author, once again, was David.
He read from the beginning, stopping after the third verse. Feeling a chill race through him. He looked at Amy Hunter, her light brown eyes fastened on his, rotated the phone and handed it to her.
“Psalm 12,” he said. “Verses two and three.”
He watched as she read.
They speak idly everyone with his neighbor; with flattering lips and a double heart they speak.
May the Lord cut off all the flattering lips And the tongue that speaks proud things.
Luke glanced out at the gray, scudding sky above the 1960s movie marquee and the slanted awnings and brick facades of Main Street. Hunter pulled the photo of John Doe’s arm from the folder and looked at it again.
“Shit,” she said finally. “And it fits your theory, too.”
Yes. It traced the pattern back one more notch: the earliest, and subtlest, of the four John/Jane Doe messages. Progressively apparent, as she had called it. Any lingering sense that this might be some bizarre coincidence had just evaporated, Luke realized. Clearly, they were dealing with a serial killer, someone who had carried out his crimes in a brilliantly methodical fashion.
“Shit!” she said again. “This is what he wants, isn’t it? This is exactly how he wants us to discover this.”
“He?”
“The Psalmist. That’s who this is. That’s how he wants us to perceive him. He’s playing us. This is really twisted.” Her eyes were wild with energy now. “And it’s big, much bigger than Tidewater County.”
“What are you going to do?” Luke asked.
“I’m going to end the grand jury talk, first,” Hunter said. She pushed the photos back into the envelope and closed the folder. “Then call the FBI. Have a profiler come out. They’ll bring in a team from Behavioral. It’s a new game now. It’ll be a federal case probably by tomorrow morning.”
“Okay.”
She stood. Revved up. Already off to somewhere else in her thoughts.
“Let me call you later, okay?” she said.
“Sure. All right.”
They shook hands, Hunter’s grip firmer than before, as if she were more directly engaged with life now. Luke sat back down. He touched the stem of his coffee cup and thought about another bagel as he watched Hunter drive off, wheels spinning through the gravel.
Closing his eyes, he considered the four cases again. The same person had committed four murders. Leaving behind clues so subtle, clever, and interconnected that they would never have been identified individually. Why? Who was intended to see them, and for what purpose?
Chapter 27
HUNTER STRODE DOWN the long corridor to the state’s attorney’s office, her thoughts narrowed to this: four sets of numbers, four Psalms verses. It was the only evidence that seemed to matter anymore; they were like a blinking buoy light just before dusk, the thing you couldn’t take your eyes away from.
Wendell Stamps’s administrative assistant, Connie Elgar, with her jowly bulldog’s face, looked up as she came in.
“Is Mr. Stamps in?” she asked.
“No, honey, I’m sorry. He’s not. Do you have an appointment?”
“Could you ask him to please call me as soon as he gets in?”
Connie Elgar smiled, amused by Hunter’s urgency, and lowered her eyes instead of answering. Hunter walked back to her office. She closed the door, hung her jacket on the coat stand and called the FBI field office in Washington. She left a message for John Marcino, saying she needed his help on a serial killer case. Marcino was a criminal profiler she’d worked with on two prior homicide investigations. She trusted him and wanted him to be her first point of contact with the federal government. Marcino was good about calling back; Hunter figured she’d hear from him within an hour.
He told her he would bring out a team and the Bureau would take the lead. She knew she’d have to accept that, though she felt deeply invested now and wanted to stay with the case. She wanted to see the investigation unwind; to learn what might have motivated someone to kill four human beings so elaborately and cruelly. Marcino would prob
ably allow that. For now, though, she felt restless, involved finally in a complicated multistate case but at the mercy of other people’s schedules, strategies, and whims. It was the part of her job she didn’t like.
Waiting, unable to connect with anyone, Hunter reviewed all four of the killings. She studied the photos of the crime scene at Oyster Creek. Then those from the Methodist church—wondering again what might have led this victim, and killer, to Tidewater County. She imagined, as she had many times before, how Luke had felt walking into the sanctuary early Tuesday and discovering the dead woman in a pew, thinking at first that she might be praying.
Then she saw the blur of the state’s attorney, his navy three-piece suit whooshing past.
Hunter put away the photos and walked back to Stamps’s office. Before she had a chance to speak, Connie Elgar said, “I’m sorry, sweetie, he’s on a call. I can have him phone you.”
“I’ll wait.”
Lowering her eyes, Elgar pursed her lips disapprovingly. Hunter stood by the door of the state’s attorney’s plush office. “No, no, I understand,” she heard Stamps saying. “That’s good work, Clay. Right. Let me go now. All right. Good job. Right-o. Thanks, Clay.”
When he hung up, Hunter was inside his doorway. Stamps’s impassive eyes widened, as if he were mildly amused by the intrusion.
“Hunter.”
“Talk?”
He nodded once and she sat.
“I just want you to know what’s happening, sir. That our Jane Doe case is about to become a federal investigation.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. So whatever information the sheriff may have, or thinks he has, this is no longer a local crime. We’ve found connections now to three other homicide cases, in three other states. We’re evidently dealing with a sophisticated serial killer.”
What might have been a smile flitted across his face.
“The numbers in the victim’s hand were a calling card, not a red herring,” she went on. “We’ve found similar calling cards in those three other cases. We’re just beginning to understand what it means.”
The Psalmist Page 14