“A billionaire’s socialite wife is a pretty big prize.”
“That might not be why she would be a bigger prize to him. Her status and wealth may have nothing to do with why he targeted her. More likely it has to do with what she represented and what that triggered in him,” I answer, and I should be concerned about the FBI in my conference room and how late I’m going to be.
But I have other troubling matters on my mind. Murdering Howard Roth may have been expedient, as Benton described. But it also was poor judgment. It was impulsive. It probably wasn’t necessary, and I fear it is a harbinger of things to come. If someone crosses the killer’s path, that person may be next.
“But if Mildred Lott was his first victim, I can’t help but feel that she’s important to him, that he has a stronger attachment to her,” I say. “Which might be why her body hasn’t been found. He may still have it.”
“Possibly a drug he slipped into their food or drink,” Phillis considers. “Saying she met her killer in a restaurant or some public place.” She’s talking about Peggy Stanton. “Maybe someone she met on the Internet, on Craigslist, Facebook, Google Plus. On one of those dating sites, what I’m constantly telling my kids not to do, for God’s sake.”
“I really doubt it,” I reply. “I can’t imagine Peggy Stanton, or Mildred Lott, for that matter, hooking up with strangers on the Internet, and there’s no evidence they did. But to be safe we should screen for Rohypnol, gamma-hydroxybutyrate, ketamine hydrochloride.” I go through the list of date-rape drugs, despite my conviction that the killer has an MO, a method of operation, that he repeats, and it doesn’t include having a date or even a social encounter with whoever is on his violent radar.
Mildred Lott was a dominant, assertive, yet extremely cautious woman who was quite tall and worked out diligently in the gym. She would not have made it easy for someone to take her anywhere she did not want to go, and her husband was adamant that if anyone tried to harm her, she would resist.
After listening to what he said about his wife and knowing what I do about Peggy Stanton, I’m convinced the killer finds a way to incapacitate his victims and likely uses the same method each time. I don’t think these women went anywhere willingly with him. I think they were ambushed and abducted.
“Poppers, snappers, whippets, fumes people sniff and huff or inhale from bags.” I suggest volatiles typically abused in cases we see. “Aromatic and aliphatic hydrocarbons, solvents found in Magic Markers, adhesives, glues, paint thinners, propane, butane, or alkyl halides in cleaning fluids. But hard to use any of these as a means to subdue someone for purposes of abduction, I should think.”
“There are any number of volatile organic compounds that could render someone unconscious,” my chief toxicologist says. “Toluene, carbon tetrachloride, one-one-one-trichloroethane, tetrachloroethylene, trichloroethylene, provided you use high enough levels.”
“Almost anything can be a poison or render someone unconscious if administered the wrong way, in a deliberately harmful way.” I ponder what she’s describing. “But it’s a matter of what’s practical and accessible, and what might occur to a perpetrator and what he might be comfortable with.”
“Basically, what can be used as a weapon.”
“Exactly,” I reply. “And I’m not sure you’d douse a cloth with paint thinner or dry-cleaning fluid and clamp it over someone’s nose and mouth, for example, if your intention is to incapacitate that person instantly. And you certainly wouldn’t try it if you’re not sure it would work.”
“Diethyl ether, nitrous oxide, and chloroform.” She names the three earliest known general anesthetics. “Chloroform is easily acquired if one is involved in an industry or works in a lab where it’s used as a solvent. Unfortunately, as the whole world now knows, it’s also possible to make it at home. All you need are chlorine bleach powder and acetone, the recipe available on the Internet.”
She’s alluding to what was sensational news not long ago, the highly publicized trial in Florida when Casey Anthony was acquitted for the murder of her two-year-old daughter, Caylee. Televised testimony claimed the Anthony home computer was used for Internet searches on how to make chloroform and that traces of it were detected in Casey Anthony’s car trunk. While none of this resulted in a conviction, it could have planted a diabolical idea into a demented person’s head. One can shop at the hardware store and find instructions online to mix up chloroform in the garage or kitchen or workplace and use it to incapacitate or kill.
“Maybe he knocks them out.” Phillis continues to offer possibilities. “Drives off with them in his car trunk so if they come to in transit, they can’t pose a problem, can’t struggle with him.”
“He may use a boat,” I reply, recalling what was said to me.
Mildred Lott was so afraid of a kidnapper or someone else with criminal intentions mooring a boat behind the Gloucester mansion that she inquired about insurance and asked that the deep-water dock be removed, a request her husband denied because of his yacht. Who, in addition to him and key members of his staff, knew she was consumed by this worry? It would be a dangerous suggestion to make to the wrong person.
Don’t announce what you fear could happen or someone evil might make it come true.
“Brain’s going to be your best bet. Chloroform binds to proteins and lipids. It infiltrates neurons,” I say to Phillis, as I get up from my desk and notice the two SUVs that were picked up on security cameras moments ago as they waited for the gate to open.
The black Yukon driven by Channing Lott turns east on the street below, perhaps returning to his headquarters in Boston’s Marine Industrial Park. It interests me that he is alone with his young, attractive CFO, while Galbraith, in a silver Jeep with a mesh grille, heads the opposite way toward Harvard.
“Assuming the victim wasn’t kept alive long after it was used,” Phillis Jobe lets me know. “Two or three hours, maybe four. After that, we might not find it.”
Kept alive for what? An assault of some type that may not be physical, and I think of Peggy Stanton’s undigested food. I imagine her eating dinner somewhere that April night and being grabbed or knocked out as she was returning to wherever she was parked, then driven someplace, possibly in her own car. What I’m certain of is at some point she was conscious long enough to break her nails and step in red-stained wooden fibers that got embedded in the bottoms of her feet, and I recall the inside of her closets and dresser.
I envision the neatly folded clothes hanging and on shelves and in drawers, slacks and pantsuits, sweaters and blouses, old and unstylish, and not a single pair of nylon stockings, yet her dead body had on torn pantyhose. I imagine her waking up in a nightmare, inside the place he held her, a place where he had no fear of discovery and could completely control her.
I wonder if he had dressed her in hose, a skirt, a jacket with antique buttons by then, if she regained consciousness in clothing that didn’t fit and wasn’t hers. Or did he force her to dress herself in a costume that means something to him, perhaps garments that once belonged to the original source of whom and what he hates?
Peggy Stanton had a cluster of contusions on her upper right arm, what appear to be fingertip bruises, and I think of Luke’s speculation that they weren’t inflicted through clothing but rather by someone gripping her bare skin. He theorized that the killer terrorized and humiliated her by stripping her nude the same way prisoners of war are tortured, and I don’t think that’s it.
I don’t believe the killer wanted her naked. I think he wanted her dressed for the role he sadistically cast her in, and months after she was dead and desiccated he adjusted the wardrobe, the jewelry, so it didn’t fall off her mummified body when he pushed it overboard into the bay. I explain all this to Ernie Koppel as I continue making evidence rounds by phone.
“I need to rule out that she was dressed this way when she left her house,” I say to him. “If at all possible, I’d like to answer that. This is a bad one, Ernie.”
“I k
now.”
“And I’m pushing everyone.”
“Imagine that,” he says sportingly.
I ask him about fibers he recovered from inside Peggy Stanton’s Mercedes, explaining that I saw no clothing inside her house remotely similar to what she had on when I recovered her body from the water.
“I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to take a look,” I then say, and it’s my way of acknowledging I’m persistent and always in a hurry. “Any chance the fibers you collected from her car could have come from the clothing she had on? If she was dressed that way for some unusual reason when she went out last, most likely this past April twenty-seventh?”
Specifically, I want to know if fibers recovered from the floor, the seats, and the trunk might have come from the dark blue wool Tallulah jacket, the gray wool skirt, the purple silk blouse, and Ernie says no.
“Carpet fibers, synthetics,” he says, and then he gets to the wood fibers he thought were mulch.
“They’re not,” he lets me know. “I’m not saying I know what this stuff is used for, but it wasn’t made by feeding wood or bark through a tub grinder and spraying it with a dye.”
He says he used gas chromatography–mass spectrometry, GC–MS, to analyze what he recovered from the driver’s area of the Mercedes, and the red-stained wood debris has a specific cyclic polyalcohol profile consistent with American oak.
“Characterized by a richness in deoxyinositols, especially proto-Quercitol,” he explains. “A very interesting way of identifying the botanical origin of natural woods used in aging wine and spirits, obviously to guarantee authenticity. You know, some winemaker or distributor claims a red wine was aged in French oak barrels and GC–MS says nope, it wasn’t. It was aged in American oak barrels, so there’s no way what you’re about to pay a fortune for is a Premier Grand Cru Bordeaux. Quite a science to it, and you can imagine why. If a distributor is trying to sell you a young wine they’re passing off as a fine one?”
“Bordeaux?” I ask. “What’s this got to do with wine?”
“The wood fibers from her car,” he replies.
“You think they’re from wine barrels?” I can’t imagine what that might mean.
“Common oak, white oak used in cooperage to make barrels, and also a secondary source of tannic acid, or the tannins you find in red wine,” he says. “In your case we’re talking American oak stained a red-wine color, with trace elements of burned wood, most likely from what’s known as toasting or charring the inside of the barrel, and sugar crystals and other derivatives such as vanillin, lactones.”
“A woody debris that looks like mulch but isn’t. Wineries or some place that makes use of wine barrels,” I think out loud. “But not where the barrels themselves are made, because new barrels wouldn’t be stained.”
“They wouldn’t be.”
“Then what?”
“It’s frustrating as hell,” he says. “I can tell you the origin of this stuff likely is wine barrels, but I can’t tell you why it’s shredded, absolutely pulverized, or what it was used for.”
He mentions that it is a common practice for people to cut old wine barrels into pieces, char them, and toss them into whiskey they’re aging.
“But this stuff’s way too fine for that, fine like dirt,” he says. “Doesn’t look like it was from planing or sanding, either, but I suppose the debris could be from someplace where old wine barrels are being recycled or reused for something.”
I’m aware that barrels no longer suitable for aging wine can be handcrafted into furniture, and I recall some of the unusual pieces inside Peggy Stanton’s house, the table in the entryway, where her car key was found, the oak table in the kitchen. Everything I saw was antique and certainly not recycled from used barrels, and there was no evidence she collected wines or even drank them.
“What about the woody fibers from the bottom of her feet and under her nails?” I inquire. “Same thing?”
“American oak stained red, some of it charred,” he answers. “Although I didn’t find sugar crystals and some of these same derivatives.”
“They would have dissolved in the water. It’s probably safe to assume what was on her body and tracked into her car came from the same source,” I decide. “Or better put, possibly the origin of the debris likely is the same location.”
“You can assume that,” he agrees. “I was thinking of checking with some wineries around here to see if they know what this wine barrel debris might be—”
“Around here?” I interrupt him. “I wouldn’t.”
thirty-six
IT IS ALMOST FOUR P.M. WHEN I WALK INTO THE WAR room, as it’s called, where experts and investigators, including scientists and doctors from the military, convene face-to-face both in person and remotely. Here behind closed doors we wage battle against the enemy using high-definition video and CD-quality audio, and I recognize who is speaking.
I hear General John Briggs’s deep commanding voice saying something about transport on an Air Force plane in Washington state. A C-130, he says, and he’s talking about someone I know.
“He just took off from McChord, will land in about an hour.” The chief of the Armed Forces Medical Examiners, my boss, fills integrated LCDs around the geometrically shaped computer conference table.
“He won’t supervise, of course. He’ll be there to observe,” Briggs says, and displayed on the deep blue acoustical upholstered walls are scene photographs that are unfamiliar to me, a skull, scattered bones, and human hair.
I take a chair next to Benton and across from Val Hahn, who is in a khaki suit and a serious mood, and she nods at me. Next to her is Douglas Burke, in black, and she doesn’t give me so much as a glance. Turning on the HD display in front of me, I look at Briggs’s rugged face on my monitor as he explains what the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Edmonton, Alberta, is doing as a courtesy because we don’t have jurisdiction.
“We could argue it, but we won’t.” Briggs has a way of assuming authority and making people believe it. “We’re not going to have a pissing match in a case where it’s an ally capable of conducting a competent forensic investigation. This isn’t Jonestown or American missionaries murdered in Sudan. It will be a fully coordinated effort with our Canadian friends.”
I can tell from the military coin and memorial flag displays on the shelves behind him that he’s sitting at his desk inside his port mortuary office at Dover Air Force Base. He’s in scrubs because his work isn’t done, a planeload of flag-draped transfer cases scheduled to arrive by the end of the day, I know from the news. A chopper shot down. Another one.
“His role is to observe, to be a conduit between them and us,” Briggs is saying, about the AFME’s consulting forensic pathologist in Seattle.
“I’m sorry I’m late.” I speak to my monitor, and Briggs is looking at me and he’s looking at everyone.
“Let me fill you in, Kay.” He informs me that Emma Shubert is dead.
Her decomposing remains have been found not even five miles from the Pipestone Creek campground where she was last seen by her colleagues on the night of August 23. Dr. Ramon Lopez is being flown to Edmonton, and the AFME consultant, the retired chief of Seattle, a friend of mine, will be in touch with me as soon as he has information.
“Some kids looking for dinosaur bones.” Briggs describes for me what he’s already explained to everyone else. “Apparently, they were exploring a wooded area off Highway Forty-three and noticed several small bones. They thought at first they’d discovered another bone bed, and they had, in a sense. Only these bones weren’t petrified or old. Small human bones of the hands and feet, most likely scattered by animals. Then a human skull near a pile of rocks accompanied by a foul odor.”
“When was this?” I again apologize for what he has to repeat.
“Yesterday late afternoon. Most of the body was under rocks that someone obviously piled on top. So she’s not completely skeletonized, as you can see.”
Briggs clicks through an
array of photos that are large and graphic on the wall-mounted flat screens. Small human bones, carpals, metacarpals, and phalanges, what look like white and gray stones in a dry creek bed overwhelmed by trees, and a skull wedged under a shrub as if it rolled there or perhaps an animal nudged it.
A pelt of matted grayish-brown hair at the edge of piled rocks, and then the shallow grave is exposed, revealing the remains in situ, a body in a blue coat and gray pants curled up on its side. Areas not protected by clothing, the head, the hands, the feet, likely were preyed on and gnawed on by insects and wildlife, and were disarticulated and scattered.
“What about boots or shoes?” I inquire.
“Not on the clothing inventory I’ve received.” Briggs types on a keyboard I can’t see and puts on his glasses. “One blue rain jacket, one pair of gray pants, a bra, a pair of panties, a silver metal watch on a blue Velcro band that believe it or not is still ticking.”
“No shoes or socks,” I comment. “Interesting, because at some point before she died, Peggy Stanton was barefoot.”
“Psychological hobbling,” Benton says, and I wonder how long he’s known. “Rendering the victim submissive and dominated.”
“And also making it harder to run,” Douglas Burke says to him and no one else.
Her wide-eyed stare brings to mind a wild animal, a rabid one.
“It was a cool and rainy summer in northwest Alberta.” The most powerful forensic pathologist in the United States resumes briefing me. “And of course it’s been quite cold during the month of October. So two months out and most of the body is reasonably intact because of temperatures that almost mimic refrigerated conditions, and also clothing and rocks protected it somewhat. If she’s a stabbing, a shooting, blunt force, possibly even strangulation, there may be enough soft tissue for us to tell. ID by dental charts has been confirmed, and we’re awaiting DNA, but there doesn’t seem to be a doubt it’s her.”
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