To Prusik it was too fantastic—a serial-killer family in the wilds of New Guinea. She read and reread the savage tale of Maleek Ga-Bong Ga-Bong, each time drawn to the tantalizing conclusion Beaumont himself had speculated upon—that the Ga-Bong men suffered from an inborn predilection to murder. Were the Ga-Bong Ga-Bongs proof that psychopaths existed among primitive peoples? Or that the drive to kill was not just cultural, but hereditary?
The Ga-Bongs always stuffed a charm or magic stone inside their victims’ remains, a ritual taken from an earlier age, usually out of respect for a deceased victim’s ancestors. But the Ga-Bongs could hardly consider inserting the sacred stones a virtuous act, Prusik thought.
Beaumont’s bizarre story struck a chord in Prusik. From his passages on the Ga-Bong clan, she devised her own thesis proposal: to study deviant behaviors among reformed highland villages in New Guinea where cannibalism was officially outlawed in modern times. She was dying to learn whether any Ga-Bong clansmen still roamed the Katori rain forest. Six months after her first avid reading of Beaumont’s field notes, Prusik stepped off a 747 into the blazing heat of the Turama River basin.
Prusik closed her eyes. Gooseflesh tightened the skin over both her forearms. With her right hand she felt along her left side, below the ribs, tracing her fingertips along the length of the ridged scar that ran nearly to her hip. Years later, during her short-lived affair with Roger Thorne, when he’d asked her about the scar, she’d lied to him, said it was from a freak accident at college, walking through a plate glass door.
She was certain the lie had affected their relationship. He’d never doubted her word, but she felt the gulf between them every time he touched the scar.
The pitch of the plane’s engines shifted, rattling the paneling overhead. The commuter plane began its descent, causing her ears to pop. She gazed out the porthole window. In the distance, the shimmering lights of Chicago’s tallest buildings jutted upward like a phosphorescent reef against the dark horizon. A patchwork of streetlights suddenly materialized beneath the wing, apparently as orderly as an integrated circuit board. Yet that was so far from the truth. Chaos reigned everywhere, it seemed. The Tribune and Herald only tapped the surface, reporting the latest homicide, drug deal, gang shoot-out, or abuse scandal. For Prusik, all of it was wallpaper, a noisy backdrop to her own current part of the bedlam. And her unshakable past.
The pilot’s voice came over the intercom, announcing that they’d be landing at O’Hare shortly. Prusik clutched her briefcase. She closed her eyes, craving the quiet of the lap pool. She could almost smell the chlorine-soaked warm air of the dim-lit amphitheater of the downtown club where she swam, often well after midnight. The late-night sessions were her favorite, when she had the pool to herself, swimming lap after lap until she’d lose count. Losing count was best.
The United Express’s tires chirped down on tarmac, and air brakes squealed as it came to a halt. The pilot cut the engines. Prusik opened her eyes, tasting her fillings; she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Her mind suddenly flashed on the girl’s body—the sharp, deep cut running the length of her side. There had been no hesitation in the execution. She’d been gutted and left as empty as a stolen purse. Except for the carved stone deliberately placed by the killer in her windpipe. The carved stone that was now tucked away in a vial in Prusik’s briefcase.
She stepped off the commuter plane and quickly moved past a queue of incoming passengers that stretched all the way out through the automatic doors that led to the street. Outside the terminal, exhaust from a dozen idling buses washed across her face. Prusik scurried past a line of waiting taxis parked bumper to bumper along the concourse. The FBI sedan with white government plates was straight ahead.
Prusik slipped across the backseat and greeted the driver, Bill, with a weary nod.
“Tough day, Special Agent Prusik?”
“You don’t know the half of it, Bill. How’s Millicent?”
“Oh, she’s coming along. She’s coming along.” Millicent, the driver’s wife of thirty-one years, had still been working at the bureau as a secretary in the communications department when Christine had started there. She had retired early, two years ago, only to be diagnosed with lung cancer six months later. She’d never even smoked.
“Please tell her I was asking after her.”
“That I will. She’s a big fan of yours, you know. She knows what it takes for a woman to get ahead in this organization. And I guess I do, too, since she’s always telling me.”
They both laughed, and Christine felt somehow lighter. She keyed AUTO DIAL on her cell phone for Brian Eisen.
“Brian?” Prusik’s voice was all business again when she heard Eisen pick up. “It’s our man, all right. She was in an awful state. The epidermis practically slipped off just heaving her onto the examining table. Second-generation maggots were pupating in the body bag. Adult flies emerged all over the place after I unzipped her.” A huge airliner rocketed down the runway parallel to the exit ramp, drowning out all other sound. “What was it you said, Brian?”
“Rather unexpectedly it showed up,” he repeated.
“What exactly?” She leaned her cheek against the cool glass of the side window. Outside, the traffic on the interstate whizzed by, careening toward downtown.
“A misplaced evidence bag…”
Eisen’s deliberate hesitation, she realized with a start, was his expecting to be chastised by her. Not good. It wasn’t the kind of leader she wanted to be. She modulated her voice. “Continue, Brian.”
“It contained fragmentary evidence recovered from the first victim. Embedded in Betsy Ryan’s hair—minute flecks of gilt paint. This guy could be a painter, or at the very least had been painting recently.”
Eisen sounded cautiously optimistic. Prusik could hear the tapping noise that meant he was striking a pencil against his front teeth. A good sign that meant he had something important to share. Ryan’s body had been underwater for nearly a month. Paint would have had to be fresh to stay stuck to her hair for that long.
“What checks have you run?”
“Here’s the good part,” he said. “Wyckoff’s gas chromatograph reading detected some very unique chemical properties.”
“Translation?”
“When he applied the electrode to the sample, it yielded a higher than expected presence of gold and silver. I’m pretty sure this paint is a specialty brand used for fancy sign painting.”
“Good, Brian. Have Higgins run checks on every high-end paint store in the area right away. As in now.”
“He’s been on it for the last four hours, Christine,” Eisen said, not bothering to hide his annoyance.
“I have something important, too.” She described the forensic exam and her discovery of the intricately carved stone figurine wedged inside Missy Hooper’s esophagus.
“The bastard’s decorating them, Brian. He’s using the stone as a marker, letting us know it’s him. We’ll need to exhume Betsy Ryan to check her windpipe for abrasions to the esophageal tissue. My money says the stone fell out of her body while she was submerged.”
She paused. “Brian?”
“I’m here.”
“About this stone business.”
The stone wedged in the torn throat of a Midwest girl—what could New Guinea highland rituals possibly have to do with these Indiana deaths? It was inexplicable, pure craziness to even think it was anything but coincidence. Yet…
“Yes? You were saying about this stone?” Eisen said, matter-of-fact.
Prusik exhaled a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. “Never mind. Later. That seed expert from the museum? Has she called back with her findings?”
“Not yet. Oh, and you’ll want to know we picked up another missing person report on a girl from Crosshaven, Indiana. Apparently she disappeared while walking home from a friend’s house. Her name’s Julie Heath. It’s probably nothing, but given the proximity to Blackie, I thought—”
“Jesus, Brian! You cou
ld have called sooner, left a message on my voice mail. That’s less than an hour’s drive from Blackie, for crying out loud!”
Prusik pounded the padded car ceiling with her free hand. Bill turned his head. She shrugged her shoulders, then drew her fingers through her hair, which had lost its mousse-tousled effect hours ago.
“The bastard.” She felt certain the killer had struck again, adding queasiness to the empty pit of her stomach. “OK, OK. Where’d you say that report was filed? The missing person report?”
“Crosshaven Sheriff’s Department reported it,” Eisen said. “A state police barracks is not too far away. Do you want me to follow up?”
“Yes…no.” She thought of the foul-ups by the Blackie police. “I don’t want local law enforcement involved any more than necessary unless there’s a damn good reason. You’re right—most missing children do eventually turn up. Sorry I jumped down your throat. I’ll be at the office in a half hour,” she said as the Chicago traffic suddenly slowed.
Prusik clicked off her cell. She couldn’t just swim her way out of this one. Maybe that was her problem—no lap-pool victory lay in sight.
She gently rocked forward as the car came to a halt in three-lane traffic on the expressway. Up ahead she could see flashing blue lights against the high buildings along the lake. She was relieved for the moment to be stalled in traffic. Out the left side window a sudden gap in the lights appeared and grew into a vast plain of darkness stretching in all directions: the great lake. A few ship lights twinkled on the horizon of Lake Michigan’s western shore.
Her cell phone trilled. “Special Agent Prusik.”
“Hi, Christine. It’s me.”
Thorne’s voice sounded soft and cozy against background chatter and clinking glasses—one of his wife’s social events in the ritzy North Shore suburb of Lake Forest, no doubt. It bugged Prusik the way he still acted casually intimate with her. And tugged at her heart, too.
“Hi, Roger. Just got off my flight. I’m going to the office right now.”
“I was curious to learn what you found down in Indiana. Anything to report yet? From Blackie, is it?”
“Without a doubt, it’s his latest victim, the same calling card. Gutted the same way.” Prusik divulged what she knew as thoroughly as she could. “It’s too early to say whether we can pick up any trace DNA, nab him on CODIS.”
The Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, was a nationwide database of more than six hundred and fifty thousand convicted offender DNA profiles and nearly thirty thousand forensic samples to match against any recovered biological material.
“I see.”
“She’s been exposed to the elements for over a month,” Prusik said. “A lot of rain has fallen in the Blackie area. She was practically mulched in with the leaves. I did find some paint particles. And Pernell Wyckoff recovered paint fragments embedded in Betsy Ryan’s hair.”
She didn’t mention Eisen’s latest news about another missing girl report. It could be nothing.
“Paint chips are pretty common stuff,” Thorne said. “It’s been nearly four months, Christine. Washington isn’t going to sit still for much longer on little more than paint fragments at this stage of things.”
Someone interrupted him, and he covered the phone with his hand. Prusik listened intently, trying to hear what Thorne was clumsily attempting to block.
“Say, listen,” Thorne said, “I’m really sorry about the other day. I would like us to get along better. But I will need more than paint chips by the Wednesday conference call. Washington already has a team prepared to fly out and take over. Sorry to be breaking it to you like this.”
In the shadows of the backseat, Prusik’s face registered shock. “But we’re close, Roger. I’ve gathered crucial evidence linking the victims. By Wednesday we should have more details.” She hesitated. “And I’ve got something else—something I’m not completely ready to brief you on. It will satisfy Washington that I am qualified to handle this case.”
Prusik stopped for a breath. Thorne remained silent. A hot flush shot down the front of her neck between her breasts. How could he so casually drop the bombshell that Washington had another team waiting in the wings? Surely he understood how crucial collecting little bits of evidence was to nailing a killer. It was practically everything.
“Still there?” Thorne said in his best just-back-from-Washington voice.
“Still here,” she replied. She composed herself. “As I said, I do have something more to report. I’m just not prepared to give you a thorough analysis from the backseat of the car.”
“Come, come. Let me hear what you have, Christine.” More laughter from the partygoers. Thorne covered the mouthpiece and replied in a muffled voice to someone calling out his name.
Prusik knew her job was on the line. At the same time, she was furious at the blasé way Thorne was handling her call while guests partied around him. Couldn’t he have picked a quieter place to call her from, someplace free of such lighthearted distractions? Or had he deliberately called her from the party to give her fair notice before she got back to the lab to find Howard in charge and her team shut out?
“Sorry, I’m being called back to the table. My wife’s giving a speech,” he said.
“Would you rather wait on it till morning?” Prusik asked.
“Good idea,” he said. “I’ll look forward to your report first thing tomorrow.”
Thorne’s apparent disinterest in her new evidence was not a good sign. It implied that her command of the case was past being in jeopardy. “I think you should know that I’ve uncovered another apparently ritualistic aspect,” she blurted. “It’s pivotal information, Roger. The killer inserted a carved stone into the torn esophagus of the Blackie victim. It’s his calling card. It opens up a whole new avenue of inquiry.”
“Carved stone, did you say?” Thorne’s voice was interested again.
“A little over three centimeters in height, about the size and shape of a chess piece. Hand carved,” she said. “Quite good work.”
“Fascinating. Better check with Howard on this. Confirm your observations with him when he and the field unit get back from Blackie.”
Prusik bit her lip. “Sorry?” she said. “There’s a bad accident out my window. It’s hard to hear.” Was Thorne suggesting that she, the forensic anthropologist, should check out the meaning of her observations with Howard, a paper pusher?
“It’s late, Christine. Get some sleep. You did good. I’ll look forward to your complete report in the morning.”
“But, Roger, I did research—”
The phone clicked off before she could say “in New Guinea.”
Reflexively, she tightened her fist in her lap, bearing down on her pinkie. Not now, Christine. Don’t. Christine groaned in frustration over the conversation just concluded. She didn’t know whether she was more upset by the professional disregard or the personal one. The way Roger flipped back and forth between the soft and intimate “It’s me” on the phone and the patronizing “Better check with Howard on this” kept her off balance. She wondered what she meant to him at this point, if anything. Certainly it couldn’t be much or he’d stand up for her in Washington a little more.
Oh, grow up, Christine, she chided herself. So he was your first lover in years, so you trusted him, so you thought he loved you. Enough already. It’s time to move on. She gazed out the car window at the Chicago night. Traffic from the accident was starting to clear. Ten more minutes and she’d be back at the office.
If she were taken off the case as lead investigator, so be it. She wasn’t a man’s man and she couldn’t play politics, but she could get to the bottom of these murders. If Howard took over her job, she would still do her best to help him bring the killer in. If he and Thorne didn’t appreciate her contributions, she would make the contributions anyway.
But she wouldn’t give up her role without a fight. She needed to solve this case. It was in her body now. It was in her bones. It was in her throat.
He couldn’t keep blood hidden for long—at any moment someone might spot the police tape on Old Shed Road. McFaron figured he had an hour or two at most before Bob Heath would come demanding to know why the area was roped off. He would counsel the man in his best police voice, keeping a stiff upper lip all the way; he’d have to. The last thing he wanted was the whole town flying off half cocked. He needed more time.
It was seven o’clock. McFaron drove toward the Templetons’ with the truck identification book. The road dipped sharply, enshrouding the sheriff’s Bronco in mist. He turned on the wipers. The Templetons’ mailbox appeared in the dull yellow of his headlights.
“It’s a rotten morning to be out and about, Sheriff,” Elmer Templeton welcomed McFaron from the porch.
“Joey up yet?” McFaron rubbed his hands together, the truck book tucked under his arm.
“Brushing his teeth.” Elmer motioned with his head, then said in a hushed voice, “Any word on the Heath girl?” His tired eyes searched McFaron’s face.
McFaron hesitated. The all-night search had yielded nothing, but the sheriff didn’t feel comfortable talking about that with anyone but the Heaths. Not yet. “No,” he said simply.
“My lands, Joey!” Elmer said as the boy raced downstairs and onto the porch. “You keep on like that and you’ll run out of gas before the day gets going.”
Joey stuck out his hand and the sheriff shook it. “I thought that might be your truck out the window,” Joey said, shoving his glasses into place.
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