Missy suddenly realized it wasn’t her own breathing growing louder, but her chaser’s, from directly above her on the bank. She looked up, blinked.
“Thought I’d lost you for a minute.”
Confusion spun the contents of Missy’s mind as she tried to make sense of what she was seeing. The man was reclining, arms crossed and utterly relaxed, on the fallen tree that had sent her flying to the ground. His face was covered by an elaborate feathered mask.
He tucked the mask back over the top of his head and gazed at her sympathetically. “Got a little hung up, didn’t you?” His hand flopped over the side of the trunk, pointing out her torn shirt. A stone of some kind dangled from his neck.
She crossed her arms over her ripped shirtfront and stepped backward into the cool water, warily maintaining eye contact with him. She’d lost her sneaker during her mad dash, and her one bare foot slipped on creek stones coated with algae. She had been badly mistaken. Jasper wasn’t the name of the student from science class, and the face gazing down at her wasn’t anything like that of the shy boy she’d known in high school.
CHAPTER TWO
A knock came at the door. A slim woman with gray hair pulled primly back poked her head in. “Christine, they’re waiting.”
“Just a sec, Margaret,” said Christine Prusik, chief forensic anthropologist of the FBI’s Midwest Forensic Sciences Laboratory. Its jurisdictional responsibilities took in most of the central corridor from the Great Lakes to the borders of the Gulf Coast states, which were handled by New Orleans forensics teams.
Prusik tucked her short chestnut hair behind her ears, revealing two gold studs—the only piece of female hardware on the special agent—and continued to scan her field notes with practiced eyes. Of medium height and well proportioned from years of swimming the backstroke—she’d been a county champion when she was in her early teens—she was adept at rebuffing the advances of men who hadn’t correctly read what she tried to make eminently clear through her body language: Hands Off.
Her mammoth desk—a fortress of piles, with no surface free on which to jot even a note—was still insufficient a space to display all the materials she needed to ponder a case and its possible permutations. On the floor wreathing around her desk were open field notebooks, forensic-ruled photographs, and postmortem summaries underscored and starred with Magic Marker blues and pinks. Prusik’s dynamic intelligence at once focused in on the most diminutive detail and nuance of trace evidence and panned out to the wide screen, factoring in the significance of geographic location, crime scene patterns, and any similarities and differences with other potentially linked cases.
To Prusik, working a case meant all information had to be at hand, to be positioned or repositioned on the floor as she stood hunched over, scanning downward like some bird of prey on patrol, intently searching for a telltale sign, something—anything—odd or out of place or deliberately wrong.
Wind buffeted the building. Slanted streaks of rain raced across the large-paned windows of her sixteenth-floor office overlooking downtown Chicago. Prusik leaned back in her chair, holding a color slide up to the light. Hurriedly she skimmed the stack sent by overnight courier, looking for one in particular, the angle shot of the neck. She preferred holding actual slides to toggling through an array of digital images on a flat screen. To her, a photographic positive was crisper on close-ups than on the digital counterparts from the new Canons most field agents preferred.
She propped a brown, crepe-soled oxford shoe on the edge of her desk. Her free hand tugged a tuft of her hair, snagging loose a few strands in the process, as she mulled one particular close-up of a gaping purple wound—a vicious cut—that perversely mimicked the contours of an open mouth along the abdominal cavity. Just then an itchy panic took hold of her, and the photographic slide slipped from her fingers onto the floor.
Prusik fumbled open the desk drawer and grabbed the small pewter pillbox she kept there. Many years ago it had belonged to her grandmother, and Christine had wondered what pills her mother’s mother would have kept in it. Swallowing one Xanax tablet dry, she lofted the Bose headset over her ears and flipped the lever of the CD player on the credenza. She closed her eyes in the hunt for calm, waiting for the near-trance-inducing chords of Bach’s Partita for Keyboard no. 1 to return things to order. She tightened her right fist, squeezing her pinkie against her palm. Pills couldn’t erase the fact things were getting worse.
Within a few minutes, the combination effect had worked—the modern miracle of neurochemistry acting in consort with Bach’s genius. Her breathing had slowed; her heart rate no longer frightened her.
The office phone rang, destroying her peace and startling her forward in the chair. It was Margaret, her secretary, nudging her again. But she wasn’t ready yet. She refocused on the short stack of slides in front of her and hunted for any forensic anomaly that might cast light on the killer. The pictures had been taken the preceding day, July 27. Three whole months had gone by since the first corpse had turned up—nearly three whole months without delivering a positive ID of the killer or even one iota of incriminating evidence. The body of the first victim, a teenage runaway named Betsy Ryan, was found in water, near Lake Michigan and protected shore lands. Very private, with no residences nearby housing someone who might have heard her cries for help had she made any.
This latest victim, a Jane Doe, had been found two hundred and fifty miles south of Chicago in Blackie, Indiana, a coal-mining district southwest of Indianapolis, a region dominated by dense forests and steep-sided ravines. The victim’s body had been discovered partially exposed under some leaves near a creek bank; she wasn’t a floater or submerged like Betsy Ryan had been. Ryan’s body had surfaced in the third week of April, snagged on the anchor line of an outgoing skiff on the Little Calumet in Gary, Indiana—practically Prusik’s doorstep. The Ryan girl had been washed clean; nipping minnows and crustaceans had made sure that no foreign DNA had been left behind. But one thing remained that no amount of washing could erase, and it tied the first crime irrefutably to the second—a vicious ventral slit running the length of the left side of the victim’s abdomen. All the internal organs had been removed, leaving the bodies literally eviscerated. And both killings had occurred near water.
The office door cracked open again.
Without looking up, Prusik said to her secretary, “Yes, Margaret, I know.” Christine’s boss’s plane to Washington would be leaving in one hour, his car to the airport in fifteen minutes.
“No, you don’t know,” Margaret scolded in a stern whisper. Margaret eased herself all the way into the office. “It’s Thorne. He’s calling again.” She paused for emphasis, though none was needed. “He’s got a plane to catch.”
“Tell him to keep his shirt on for chrissakes.” In her ten years with the bureau, Prusik had acquired a reputation for gruff impatience, which she exhibited at inopportune times with superiors and subordinates alike. Driven by high expectations of herself, she had little room for work or effort that was, in her opinion, second rate.
Prusik took a deep breath. “You can tell Mr. Thorne—”
Their eyes met, calculating the possibilities and silently rejecting most of them. Calmer now, Prusik said, “Thank you, Margaret. Tell him I’m on the way.”
Christine watched as her secretary’s face relaxed and she left the room, carefully avoiding focusing on any of the gruesome photographs pinned to the corkboard behind the desk. The blowups of Betsy Ryan, the first victim, looked more like color abstractions than the barely recognizable remains of a young human. Ryan was a fifteen-year-old runaway who’d been living with an aunt in Cleveland. The girl’s trail had gone cold shortly after she had hitched a ride on March 30 with an Allied Van Lines mover. The driver had let her off at a Portage, Indiana, truck stop. His fuel receipt checked out. So did the absence of any incriminating forensic evidence in the cab of his truck. Three weeks later, on April 21, her body had been recovered off the boat anchor, cruelly hooked throug
h the manmade pocket along the victim’s left side, not far from the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, where the killer would have been able to savage her with plenty of cover. Cellular analysis disclosed that the remains had likely been underwater several weeks, which Prusik figured meant her attacker had probably spotted her shortly after the driver—the last known eyewitness—had dropped the girl off at the truck stop.
She fingered another slide from the Blackie crime scene. This one showed a man’s boot print, approximately size nine. The local police had found it in the mud beside the creek and made a quick-dry plaster kit impression. The killer liked to do his cutting by water. She swallowed hard. Time was ticking.
Damp weather had inundated the Midwest for most of the spring and early summer—conditions appalling for the preservation of evidence, accelerating the decomposition of flesh. Prusik knew that it was unlikely she’d find anything worthwhile on the latest victim’s body or in the area surrounding the crime scene. The Blackie woods, a great stomach of damp forest, had surely already digested her case, eating with it whatever evidence the killer might have left behind.
Tucking the slides into her lab-coat pocket, she stepped quickly around the desk, resolving not to let the case get away from her. She hustled past her secretary’s partition and walked briskly down the hall. “Back soon,” she called over her shoulder as an afterthought.
Outside the lecture room, Prusik’s hand froze on the doorknob at the unmistakable sound of Roger Thorne clearing his throat a few feet behind her.
She turned and met Managing Director Thorne’s piercing gaze over his tortoiseshell glasses. His fine navy-blue suit made Prusik feel frumpy in her so-so stretch knit, which had more than a few tired sags and stains from stooping and studying remains in situ. Its last excursion had been to another field agent’s crime scene, where a local deputy had done a miserable job fending off the weather with an umbrella, letting the small of her back become a nice rain catch.
“Christine, may I speak to you for a moment?” Thorne’s tone was studied, formal. He bent his forearm, purposely displaying the gleaming new chronograph watch he was so proud of—a Montblanc, the same brand as the smart-looking fountain pen clipped to his shirt breast pocket. He tapped the watch crystal.
“It’s getting late.” Thorne straightened his cuff back over the shiny chronometer, then arranged the jacket he frequently wore for his Washington trips, the chosen type of garment of all men who sat behind desks behind doors with brass name placards at the FBI. “I just got off the phone with headquarters. Told them about the second one, we think.”
She nodded. “I’m on my way to update the team. There are important forensic similarities between both cases. The forensics will yield us results, I am confident.”
Thorne smiled into her eyes. “Good, good. I’m confident you will succeed, Christine. It’s why I assigned you these cases in the first place. Stick-to-itiveness is one of your finer qualities.” He squeezed her shoulder. She stiffened at his touch, and he dropped his hand. “You are an astute scientist, one of our best. You know how much I respect your able observational skills. I doubt there’s another managing director in the agency whose forensic unit is superior.”
She returned his smile, pleased by the compliment yet expecting to hear a “but” coming next. “Thank you for saying so, Roger.” Christine always appreciated hearing his praise. Thorne’s sincerity in acknowledging her accomplishments as a forensic scientist was unquestionable. That, his good looks, and sharp dressing style were all it had taken for her to fall in love with him.
His straw-colored eyebrows rose a notch higher over the tops of his glasses. “So, now that you’re in charge, I can speak frankly.” His eyebrows lifted again. “I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you that they’re a bit concerned I let you take the lead on such a high-profile case.” He put up his palm before she could respond. “Hear me out. You’ve been a prominent head of the forensic lab, doing a damn fine job for ten years—until now, that is. It’s your first lead, and their concerns are understandable given that you have no demonstrated experience managing all aspects of a case: the logistics, directing personnel from different offices, interfacing with local police and political officials. You know what I’m talking about, Christine.”
Let me take the lead? She bit her lip, trying to remind herself that Thorne was only doing his job. Still, she knit her brow and spoke defensively. “You know I’ve put together the best team. They’re working around the clock on this. No one has slipped up unless you count the local and state police foul-ups.”
“So is that it then—police foul-ups?” Thorne clearly wanted some significant news. “I need progress to report, Christine. Progress is what gets noticed. I know your team is diligently processing fragmentary information, looking for clues. Give me something to prove to Washington I made the right decision putting you in charge of this case. Management needs to be kept informed of a case’s progress and be assured that appropriate assets are being committed to bring about an effective resolution. Believe it or not, Christine, a cost-benefit analysis figures into everything we do.”
“I believe it.” Budgetary cutbacks in 2010 meant Prusik’s lab had had to take on more responsibility in 2011 while receiving no increase in resources. It seemed that Management 101 for the FBI mirrored the strategy that private enterprise, stymied by the severe economic downturn, was employing: make your people do more with less, then expect miracles.
“Roger,” she fought to keep the frustration out of her voice, “let me put it this way. The body found in Blackie bears the killer’s trademark. It’s most definitely the same perpetrator, most certainly a man, given the sheer physicality of the crime, the strength involved in the nature of the killing. Unfortunately, judging from the slides, the body’s state of decomposition suggests exposure to the elements for at least a month.”
Thorne nodded once, almost imperceptibly. “What do you make of this profile so far?”
She found it easier to focus on Thorne’s perfectly knotted tie than on those mustard-brown eyes that still disarmed her. His undeniable good looks and the memory of the intimacy they had shared caused her face to flush. She hoped he didn’t notice.
“He travels. Picks his victims carefully. The first was a runaway. This Jane Doe we think may be a local, a young woman who went missing from an amusement park a couple of miles away over the Fourth of July. We’ll be taking dental impressions and an X-ray set of her jaw tomorrow, of course. Tell headquarters the suspect is very likely in his early twenties, fit, living alone or staying by himself most of the time, perhaps odd-jobbing. He’s private, a good site planner. Doesn’t tolerate the prospect of interference, which explains why the victims aren’t found soon after. Both bodies were located well away from any neighborhoods where someone might accidentally intrude. He needs time for what he does to them.”
“And what exactly is that?” Thorne cupped an elbow, listening intently to what she was saying.
“You’ve already read my detailed report on the condition of Betsy Ryan’s corpse. The Blackie victim was strangled, similarly cut open—a single slash wound longitudinal and ventral. The internal organs were completely removed, and there was no recovery of them, according to the local coroner’s report.”
Their eyes met. His mouth cinched shut. The tendons on either side of his neck tightened. She whiffed Thorne’s cologne, and her breathing momentarily stopped. After a couple of months of lunchtime rendezvous, their affair had abruptly ended, nearly six months earlier. Prusik had grown uneasy; she couldn’t take the intimacy and had broken it off with him. Thorne had wasted no time in retreating to a marriage that he had intimated to her was at most a comfortable truce. All these months later she was mostly over it, but sometimes she still missed their charged encounters, the feel of his gaze on her body. And he had a discerning mind, even if he did sometimes buy into the Washington bullshit. She missed talking over the puzzling details of a case in the lazy aftermath of lovemaking.
> In a softer voice, Prusik said, “My team is doing everything humanly possible to identify this perpetrator. They’re waiting for me right now.” She glanced back at the door.
“One more thing,” Thorne said, clearing his throat. “Check with Bruce Howard on these profile particulars you’ve developed. I assume Howard will be leading the field technicians to the Blackie site? Frankly, he’s got excellent leadership qualities with a team, Christine. Knows how things should be handled. Hits the ground running, you know what I mean. You’re going to need his help. This is a much larger area of focus now.” Thorne peered over his tortoiseshell rims. “Cooperation and teamwork are the keys to success in this organization—in any soundly run organization.”
Christine felt the sharp slap of his words on her face. “I have Mr. Howard and the field unit well in hand, sir,” she said tightly.
Thorne glanced at his watch, then looked back at her, making no move to leave. “There’s nothing more you can tell me, Christine?”
She blushed under his intent gaze and was irritated with herself for doing so. “The killer is quite sophisticated with a knife, sir. What he does to his victims is highly invasive. He’s a repeater, suggesting a ritualistic pattern of some kind. The predilection for gutting is quite extraordinary, unlike that of any felon we’ve so far checked on any of the interstate violent persons’ data banks. The blood around the incisions appears minimal, not coagulated. Meaning he cleans them shortly after death. I’ll know better tomorrow.” Almost subconsciously, Prusik picked polite code for the unspeakable truth, in deference to Thorne’s vulnerability. He detested gory forensic details.
“Ritualistic, did you say?”
“Neither victim appears to have been sexually assaulted,” she explained. “He does not tamper with their faces. The victim’s cranium in each case is intact. I’d say that catching them is an intensely personal experience for him.” Prusik looked directly into Thorne’s eyes.
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