A Bustle in the Hedgerow (CASMIRC Book 1)

by Ben Miller

  Friesz, apparently detecting her mockery, glanced at Camilla from the corner of his eye. “Both phrases are rather simple, with very literal translations. They do not display the subtlety of either language. A linguist, in my estimation, would relish the opportunity to use these languages to their fullest. It seems much more likely to me that the person who wrote these notes used a translation dictionary, or, more probably, an online translation application. There are dozens available for free, including Google, Yahoo!, and other popular search engines.”

  “If this were done online, then, could it be tracked?” Harringer said from his post at the front of the room.

  “Unfortunately no,” Friesz answered dismissively. “We’ve run into this issue with some other crimes before. If we had the individual’s computer, we could trace back to find out the input into the websites. However, it’s impossible for Yahoo! to search its output from its translator application, except by individual entry. In other words, we can’t go to Yahoo! and ask them to search for which computer entered a search for ‘I do not really hate you’ into Serbian. All they can do is go through their output, one by one, to find which one it is. They get around half a million hits to their translator every day. Then there’s Google, Bing, and other sites. So, even if you had someone working full time on this, it would be virtually impossible to find your guy this way.”

  The room fell quiet for a few moments, the collective excitement dying down from this lost potential lead. The silence broke when the laconic Charlie Shaver said in a low monotone, “What if it’s not the phrases that’s important?”

  The group turned to face him, sitting on the far left end of the front row. A quizzical expression filled every face but his.

  “We have been assuming that these phrases are meant to explain his motivation. But, what if it’s code for something else? Or what if it’s the original languages themselves that contain the message?” he continued, still in his usual droning delivery, looking down at his notebook in his lap, where he had written the phrases both in their original language and with their corresponding English translations.

  After another pause, Harringer pressed. “Keep going.”

  Shaver finally looked up from his notebook at Harringer, then at the rest. He introduced some welcomed inflection into his voice. “I don’t know.”

  Reilly walked over behind Harringer in the front right corner of the room, grabbed the easel they had used for previous meetings, and brought it over to the center of the room beside the dry erase board. He flipped back the cover page on the oversized tablet to reveal the Thai phrase that Friesz had written during their meeting two days earlier. He put two short dashes to the right of it and wrote, “THAI.” Underneath the phrase he wrote the English translation, “I want to be somebody.” Reilly flipped the page back to reveal a fresh blank one. He turned to face the others, holding the pen towards Friesz. “Terry, do you mind writing the first phrase?”

  “Sure,” Friesz said, as he stood and approached the easel. He took the pen from Reilly, and wrote the first phrase found on Stephanie McBurney on the sheet, again from memory. He followed Reilly’s format by scribbling two dashes before the word “Serbian,” and underneath the English translation, “I do not really hate you.”

  “So, this one was first, yeah?” Shaver asked.

  “Right,” Reilly replied.

  “OK, so we have Serbian first, then Thai. Maybe he’s writing a message with those, like the letters ‘S’ and ‘T’. Maybe he’s trying to spell a phrase. His name, maybe? Steve something?”

  “Christ, I hope not,” Harringer spouted. “That means he’s planning on killing a lot more victims to spell out his entire name.”

  “Or could the phrases be code,” Amanda posited. “Maybe we’re supposed to crack some code that reveals a hidden meaning to the phrases.”

  Harringer shrugged, shaking his head a little. “I suppose that’s possible, but why embed them in another code— a different language? That’s seems like too many layers to be realistic to me.”

  “Maybe,” Amanda admitted.

  Reilly, who had been jotting down these thoughts in abbreviated sentences on the dry erase board, tried to bring the thinking back towards their original theory. “I feel that these messages carry so much meaning on their own that we don’t necessarily need to think of them as code. Perhaps he used the foreign languages to show off how smart he is—or at least how smart he thinks he is.”

  Quietly sitting in her chair, taking this all in, Camilla finally spoke up. “What if it was just to get to us?”

  Harringer turned his shoulder’s to face her. He had always valued Camilla’s contributions, so he felt excited to hear her hypothesis. “Explain.”

  “Local PD’s don’t have linguistics departments, and I doubt most state PD’s do either. If our killer is smart or savvy enough to be aware of this, by using foreign languages to write his little notes, he basically insured that his case would get to the FBI. If he really does desire notoriety, getting the FBI involved in his case would seem to naturally escalate things on a broader level, right?”

  Amanda’s eyes lit up as she jumped on this bandwagon. “It would also create a quicker link between the two murders. If we hadn’t gotten involved, I think it’s unlikely that the detectives in York and Frederick would have linked the two so quickly.”

  “And it’s that link that led to the article in The Post today, which presumably is exactly what he wanted,” Camilla finished.

  “Though I’m sure the content wasn’t to his liking,” Reilly chimed in proudly.

  “This makes a lot of sense,” Harringer declared. “OK, what about the timing of everything?” He wanted to move on, and he felt that Reilly was beginning to lose control of the tempo of the meeting.

  “Well, they were both killed three weeks apart. He’s not working on a lunar cycle or anything batshit like that,” Reilly answered.

  “They were both Mondays, right?” Shaver offered.

  “OK. Why?” Harringer posed to the group. “Why Mondays? And why did it start now?”

  “Maybe he has off work on Mondays,” Amanda said.

  “Does he work?” Reilly asked.

  Amanda turned her hands up. “I don’t know. Don’t we assume he has some sort of income? We assume he has a car to get to the sites, he has internet access, the means to plan these acts out...”

  “Perhaps he’s independently wealthy,” Reilly countered.

  “Or recently laid off,” Freisz said from the back of the room. In the current economic crisis, several of his former colleagues in Academia—along with thousands of other Americans—had lost their jobs as their employers favored less experienced, and thus less expensive, workers.

  “Sure. Maybe that was the inciting event that sparked the killing spree,” Shaver said. “Maybe he got caught looking at kiddie porn at work, got fired— on a Monday, no less— so now he’s taking out his rage on little girls.”

  Reilly’s eyes lit up at this new, seemingly cohesive theory, but Harringer could sense the facetiousness of Shaver’s comment. “Charlie?” Harringer admonished.

  Shaver sat up straight in his chair. “Sorry, sir, but I think we leave profiling to the BAU. We could sit here and imagine every possible scenario and create a profile of our un-sub with any number of characteristics based on little nuances of the case. But the reality is that it’s all horseshit until we can put together the evidence that leads us to someone. It’s one thing to review the evidence, like the notes, but I think now we’re sailing without a compass.”

  “Your opinion is noted,” Harringer said.

  Reilly agreed. “But I think considering the timing could be important. Obviously we want to catch this guy before another kid ends up dead. If there is any pattern to the timing, then maybe we have some kind of a shot.”

  Now Camilla felt the team going off on an unproductive tangent. “But how can we get a pattern out of only two events? And with such disparate locations—York, PA and F
rederick— how are we ever going to predict where he might strike next?”

  Of course, they all had no way of knowing that their Predator had already struck again.

  35

  Outside the room and down the hall, Jack sat at his desk, presumably for one of the final times. Most of the files within his drawers and file cabinet would have to remain with CASMIRC, but he wanted to sort through them himself. When Harringer passed by earlier on his way to the meeting, Jack told him he was organizing them. He didn’t share that he also took some pleasure in going over some of those memories, despite the grotesqueries of the cases. Jack often—but not always— found pride in their solution, or at least in his approach to finding one. Not surprisingly, the Lamaya Hollows case left him with the most complex mix of emotions of any case he had ever worked.

  He leafed through the manila folder with photos of the site where the trash men discovered her body. He vividly recalled sitting in an interview with Lamaya’s French teacher, Mrs. Smith—What an oddly boring name for a French teacher, he remembered thinking—when his cell phone rang with news of the body’s discovery. While other agents interviewed parents and other school personnel, Jack assigned himself the duty of interviewing all of Lamaya’s past and present teachers at the school. The mundane Mrs. Smith embodied his twelfth interview of the day, and he had begun to grow a little weary. After the brief and exhilarating phone call, he excused himself from the interview, which he never did complete, and drove to the crime scene.

  Several local officers, including the soon-to-be-replaced lead investigators Detectives Wegener and Min from Missing Persons, had already arrived on the scene when Jack arrived. Local media had just begun to gather, and national media was not far behind. A forensics team of at least a dozen people stood and crouched in the perimeter around the body, still shrouded in white. Jack walked toward Wegener and Min, who stood speaking with two tall, well-dressed men in one corner of the driveway, about twenty feet from the corpse. The four stopped speaking and turned toward Jack; it was the first unspoken gesture signifying that this case belonged to him.

  “Detectives,” Jack said as he shook hands once again with Wegener and Min.

  “Special Agent Byrne,” Wegener said as she grasped his hand. “This is Detective Bennett McIlhenney and Detective Brian Minert from Homicide.” She nodded to each of the two men in turn as she introduced them.

  Jack shook their hands, trying surreptitiously to study their faces. They looked so much alike—both tall, thin, pale white men with short-cropped dark hair and long, flat faces— Jack predicted he would have difficulty telling them apart. “Call me Jack,” he invited. “What do we know here?”

  “OK, Jack. People call me Mac.” McIlhenney spoke first, in one of the deepest bass voices Jack had ever heard. Jack’s initial apprehension about confusing the two detectives immediately abated. “We have a positive ID on the body over there as Lamaya Hollows,” McIlhenney began. “She was discovered shortly after eleven hundred this morning by sanitation workers who had come to empty this dumpster. The same two men had been here on Friday and did not see anything over there.”

  Jack turned to his right to look at the location of the body. “No way they’d have missed it.”

  “Exactly,” McIlhenney bellowed. “One of the men pulled back the top layer of the sheet—wearing gloves, thank God—recognized the face, and called 9-1-1.”

  Jack turned to his left to look at the back of the strip mall. His eyes moved up to the top of the wall, and he scanned the entire façade from right to left.

  McIlhenney witnessed this and confirmed Jack’s observation. “No video surveillance in the back of the building.”

  Jack turned back to face the detectives. “What about the front of the building?”

  “There’s a small camera at the entrance of each store, but only 4 of the 8 cameras are activated because not all of the available spaces have been leased yet,” McIlhenney answered.

  “We don’t think they’ll be helpful, though,” added Minert, his somewhat nasally baritone lacking the unique timbre of his partner’s voice. “We looked at them real quick. They cover very little of the parking lot.”

  “We have officers interviewing all of the stores’ employees right now,” McIlhenney said. “So far, nothing.”

  As it turned out, the last employee to leave the strip mall the day before had left at 6 pm, though she left through the front. No one had come out of any of the back entrances of any of the stores since about 5:20 pm. That employee, one of the instructors from the Yoga studio, had thrown out some trash into the dumpster. She swore that she did not see anything in the hillside on the other side of the driveway. No one employed at the building admitted to seeing anything or anyone suspicious the entire day before.

  Now at his desk, Jack flipped through the photos in the folder in his hands. With each snapshot of the scene, the memory of seeing it with his own eyes flashed in his mind. He could even recall the chemical odor coming from the dumpster, overpowering the freshness of the spring air.

  Deeper into the folder, the autopsy photos followed the collection from behind the dumpster. This brought with it first the memory of a completely different smell, one all too familiar to Jack. As he thought about the experience now, he mostly recalled his struggles with writing about the autopsy findings in his book. He wanted to include sufficient detail to accurately and completely tell the story without providing so much detail that he would lose those readers with weak stomachs. He must have rewritten that section a dozen times, possibly the most of any section in the book. He spent so much time on it that he could nearly recall the passage verbatim.

  The first thing apparent to any observer was how peaceful she looked. Her hands had been placed on her abdomen, the right over the left, and, if she weren’t so ashen gray, it might appear as if she were sleeping. Along with the ceremonious wrapping in the white sheet, which was 700-count white Egyptian cotton, the careful placing of the hands indicated to me immediately that Lamaya Hollows’ killer had known her personally. On some level, he had cared about her, though not enough to stop himself from killing her.

  Her skin had a light white film over her entire body, accentuating how pale she looked, especially given the naturally darker tone of her skin. Technicians performed scraping and examination of the film, which turned out to be dried chlorine bleach. In an attempt to eliminate any trace of his DNA, the killer had bathed her in a diluted bleach solution prior to dumping her body.

  At first inspection by the medical examiner, there were no obvious outward signs of trauma: no lacerations, no bruising, and no deformities. There was also no indication of any decomposition. As such, the medical examiner initially determined that, though she had gone missing 14 days prior to the discovery of her body, she had likely died within the previous 48 hours.

  A more careful examination led to the discovery of a small puncture wound on the left side of her neck, likely the site of an injection into her left jugular vein. This led us to later assume that our killer was right-handed, as fluid distribution suggested she had been killed while lying supine on her back. Toxicology reports would later confirm the presence of formaldehyde, ethanol, methanol, and other chemicals in Lamaya’s blood and tissues. The killer had prepared a homemade version of embalming fluid, and this injection had turned out to be the cause of death. This in turn created some equivocation about time of death, as the fluids may have kept her body preserved for longer than several days prior to its discovery.

  Her stomach contents included partially-digested cheese and ham, along with pieces of almond and a chewed piece of gum. Her parents had documented that she had gone to school with a Ham and Cheese Lunchables on the day she had gone missing; her dessert had been a Hershey bar with almonds. This information changed the time of death determination significantly, suggesting that she likely had been killed merely hours after her disappearance.

  During the autopsy, several areas of bruising were found. She had mild bruising and
skin irritation at both her wrists and ankles. We surmised that this was caused by soft ligatures, such as a thick scarf or padded handcuffs, than had been used to tie her down in one place. She also had a very small amount of bleeding into the lower layers of the skin at the back of her scalp, indicating that her head had banged against a hard object. The absence of any brain injury or underlying bone contusions led us to believe that this injury may have been self-inflicted, as if she threw her head against a wall or headboard in an attempt to avoid her captor, or possibly to render herself unconscious.

  The gynecological exam revealed tissue damage consistent with forcible rape. The pattern of blood pooling within the tissue suggested to the medical examiner that she had been raped several times while alive and likely also after her death. She also had small tears at the corners of her mouth indicating that she had been sodomized. No DNA could be recovered from her vagina or mouth, likely due to denaturing from the bleach bath; small traces of bleach were found in the vaginal opening and on her teeth.

  The examiner searched for fingerprints on the body, including her fingernails, toenails, corneas, and teeth, but none were recovered. However, in sum the autopsy turned out to be extraordinarily helpful. The story it told us about our killer—a right-handed pedophile who knew Lamaya and had the intelligence and resources to make home-made embalming fluid and bathe his victim in bleach prior to leaving the body in an area in which her body would surely be discovered—turned out to paint a very accurate picture. At the time we felt very confident that these conclusions would lead us down the investigative path that would eventually end at the doorstep of our killer.

  Jack placed the manila folder on his desk and leaned back in his chair, a vision of Mervin Young, Lamaya Hollows’ murderer, filling his head. He had once heard the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe Ted Bundy and serial killers like him who blend in with the rest of us as seemingly normal people; whenever he thought of Mervin Young, he found himself reminded of this phrase.