Frozen Stiff

by Patrick Logan

  In the back of her mind, she had expected to see dozens of police cars, an ambulance, maybe, and a Crime Scene Unit on scene, or in the very least, some pomp and circumstance that warranted FBI involvement. But as Floyd brought the car to a slow, she saw nothing but more snow and trees.

  Eventually, the familiar shadows of two vehicles jutted from the horizon. One, a Girdwood PD cruiser, lights off, and a dark-colored, unmarked vehicle.

  She instinctively knew that the latter belonged to FBI Agent Martinez, who Floyd had mentioned back at the airport, and while she was excited to meet the man who had called her up in the early morning hours, she was disappointed that her first assignment didn’t have her paired with Agent Stitts. Still, as they approached the scene, most of her mind was occupied with running scenarios of what she was about to see.

  The snow, the remoteness of the location.

  The number roads in, roads out. The one cop car at the scene.

  Why call in the FBI? Why not get Anchorage PD out here?

  Chase wouldn’t have to wait long to have at least some of her questions answered, it appeared, as Floyd parked behind the unmarked car and quickly hopped out.

  She reached for the handle, but Floyd had already opened the door for her.

  “I’ll get it,” he said.

  The cold was biting, and it shocked the last vestiges of drowsiness from her system. It had been a long, trying day already, but now that she was on scene, Chase felt her adrenaline start to flow.

  Pulling the front of her suit jacket tight, she felt ridiculous, and knew that she must look even more absurd than she felt stepping out into the snow in Jimmy Choo’s without a proper coat. Her only saving grace was the fact that the sun shone brightly overhead, offering some solace from the biting wind.

  What a first impression, she thought glumly.

  No sooner had she taken three steps into the snow, did two men approach. In the lead was a man in a black parka, large, aviator style sunglasses that weren’t that much unlike her own pair—which had been conveniently packed in her suitcase—and perfect posture. He was of medium height and build, and looked to be in his mid-forties, with tanned skin and dark hair parted on one side. A frown was etched on his otherwise handsome face.

  Behind him was Floyd’s uncle, Girdwood’s Chief of Police. Unlike Agent Martinez, he was tall and had a thick gut that hung over the belt of his beige pants. The wind wreaked havoc on his thinning hair, but despite these differences, he had a striking resemblance to her driver.

  Agent Martinez gave her a once over as he approached.

  “Lost your luggage?” he said with a grin as he neared. “Not the best first impression, huh?”

  Chase raised an eyebrow, unsure if the man was referring to her appearance or her impression of Anchorage.

  She decided it didn’t matter and held out her hand.

  “Chase Adams.”

  “Special Agent Chris Martinez,” was the reply. Martinez shook her hand hard, then moved to one side. “And this is Frank Downs, Girdwood Chief of Police.”

  The burly man strode forward, a smirk on his face.

  They shook hands.

  “Not this cold in New York, is it?”

  “Sixty-eight and cloudy,” Chase replied.

  “I’ve got an extra coat in the car,” Martinez offered. “You’re going to need it.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Despite their differences in stature—Agent Martinez was at least six inches taller and sixty pounds heavier than her—his spare jacket, a red, down-filled parka, fit Chase fairly well. She put it on, and immediately felt her body start to warm. Her eyes fell on the black box in the trunk, and she was about to say something, when Martinez took the words right out of her mouth.

  “Let me guess: your service revolver was also lost?”

  Chase nodded.

  “They forced me to check it.”

  Martinez reached for the box and handed it to Chase.

  “You can borrow my spare,” he said. Chase opened the clasp and peered inside. A midnight black Glock .22 sat embedded in foam. She took it out, quickly checked the clip then reached beneath the coat and slid it into the holster on her hip. That, at least, hadn’t been checked.

  Martinez stared at her for a moment.

  “No-nonsense. I like that.”

  Chase nodded, then looked around.

  Floyd had parked at the side of the road, maybe thirty yards from the edge of a heavily wooded area. As far as she could see in either direction, there were no houses or cabins and, thankfully, no dogs or dogsleds.

  “Come with me,” Martinez instructed, walking away from the parked vehicles. Chase followed him down a small embankment to a spot that had been disturbed by the snow.

  “This is where the bodies were found: two girls, both sophomores at University of Alaska, Anchorage,” Martinez said in a voice reminiscent of someone reading a script. “Yolanda Strand and Francine Butler. Both girls were found here yesterday by a trucker shipping goods north to the Valdez-Cordova region. Immediately called it in.”

  Chase stared at the two indentations in the snow. The area was much larger than should have been made by just two bodies, and she assumed that the rest of the disruption must have been made either by the trucker or CSU.

  “Where are the bodies now?”

  “At the morgue,” the Police Chief answered. “Been there since yesterday.”

  “And the trucker?”

  “Well known in the neighborhood. His name is Trent Ford, but everyone around here calls him Big Rig.”

  “And the girls? How did they get here?”

  Martinez shook his head.

  “Don’t know—went missing two days ago. Their bodies were discovered before anyone actually reported them missing—they were rooming at the university and when they didn’t show up to class, it was assumed that they had partied too hard the night before. Both had just written their final exam for…” Martinez paused as he thought about this for a moment, “… Eastern Philosophy, I believe.”

  Chase continued to look around as Martinez spoke. Aside from the indentations in the snow, there was nothing else out of the ordinary, so far as she could tell in this foreign landscape.

  “I brought you out here to get a scope of the scene, of the lay of the land. I wanted you to see how secluded the area was.”

  Chase nodded, and found her eyes returning to the forest. She was reminded of the two girls that she had found in the barn in Larchmont County, the ones with the lips painted in blood, and the forest that extended from the rear of the barn.

  “Frank and his men have already searched most of the forest,” Martinez said, following her gaze. “Didn’t come up with anything useful.”

  “Two college-aged girls…” Chase muttered, partly to herself, “How were they killed? Any evidence of sexual assault?”

  Martinez shook his head.

  “Not as far as we can tell. Things move a little more slowly here than you might be used to in NYC. These two murders were the first in Girdwood in over fifteen years.”

  Chase lifted an eyebrow, but it was Chief Downs who continued.

  “Two homicides occurred on a reservation, and before that there were only three others on record. Those are thought to be drug-related.” Downs had a hard expression on his face as he spoke, and Chase got the impression that he was none too happy that these were still unsolved, despite the fact that given his age it was unlikely he was in charge when they had taken place.

  “How were the girls killed?” Chase asked again.

  Chief Downs shifted uncomfortably, his thick boots crunching snow beneath his heels.

  “Exposure and blood loss,” Martinez said.

  Chase thought of her own outfit, prior to taking Martinez up on the offer of using his extra parka. It was cold out, but not so cold that she wouldn’t have been able to make the trek back to Girdwood. She would be frost-bitten, surely, but wouldn’t die from exposure, she didn’t think.

  “Why didn�
��t—”

  “Their feet were cut off,” Chief Downs said, a far off look in his eyes.

  Chase blinked.

  “What?”

  Downs turned to face her then, and she saw that it wasn’t just the fact that murders were unsolved that bothered him, but he took this personally. She had the sudden impression that the large man took everything that happened in Girdwood and the surrounding areas personally.

  “The two girls were naked and their feet were severed. Best we can figure it, this is a secondary location. Their feet were removed elsewhere, and they were dropped here,” Downs extended his finger beyond the disturbed snow. “We think that this is where they were dropped, but managed to make their way to here.”

  Chase’s mind started to whir.

  Made their way? Without feet?

  “How do you know?”

  The Chief’s expression grew stern.

  “That’s where their clothes were found.”

  Chase swallowed hard.

  And this is why the FBI was brought in, she thought, not with pride, but with something akin to disgust.

  And yet, despite these disturbing facts, they weren’t the only thing that struck her as odd.

  “Where’s the blood?” she asked. “If their feet were removed… where’s all the blood?”

  Chief Downs’s frown became a scowl.

  “That’s the thing, Agent Adams… there isn’t any.”

  CHAPTER 7

  “It’s called paradoxical undressing,” the Medical Examiner informed them. Girdwood didn’t have its own morgue, so after observing the scene, Chase, Agent Martinez, and Chief Downs had made the trek back to Anchorage.

  The ME was a thin, wiry creature that pretty much filled every cliché of a doctor who was squirreled away in a hospital basement: small, beady eyes, a twitching nose, bald head covered in freckles. When he spoke, the words came out in a flurry as if he so infrequently came into contact with other humans that he was worried he had forgotten how to formulate a complete sentence.

  “Pardon?” Chase asked as she observed the bodies. Lying side-by-side on metal gurneys were the two victims. Yolanda Strand was African-American, with hair pulled back in corn rows. Francine Butler, on the other hand, was pale, but judging by the white patches forming the familiar outline of a bathing suit on her pubic region and covering her small breasts, she had clearly made efforts to try to change that.

  The ME sighed as if this conversation was boring him, which it probably was.

  “Paradoxical undressing: when a person is close to freezing, they suddenly feel warm and take off all their clothes.”

  Chase took this in stride, her eyes drifting down the bodies.

  Both girls were in fairly good shape, and other than the pallor of their skin, they looked relatively healthy.

  “It happens in—” the doctor continued, but Chase held up a finger, stopping him mid-sentence. She could sense Chief Downs and Agent Martinez staring at her, likely with eyebrows raised, but she didn’t lift her gaze from the corpses.

  Her breathing suddenly slowed, and she allowed her eyes to defocus, the bodies of the two girls merging as one, cocoa-colored amalgamation.

  Use your gut, Chase. Millions of years of evolution have made your body sensitive to cues that your conscious mind is too preoccupied to notice. Allow your mind to drift. Reverse engineer the crime.

  Agent Jeremy Stitts’s words flowed through her mind, not like an echo, but like a leaf carried in a slow-moving stream.

  Her hand suddenly slipped from her side and grazed Yolanda’s still frozen shin.

  Let the cues wash over you, put yourself in the victim’s shoes.

  “Let us go… please. We haven’t done anything to you,” Yolanda spat. Her lips were trembling, her hands shaking. She glanced over at Francine, but her friend had tucked her head between her knees and hadn’t spoken for some time.

  “I’ll… I’ll do anything you want,” Yolanda said, her voice changing, becoming softer. She reached out with her hands, which were bound at the wrists, and brushed a finger against the man’s calf. His back was to her, and he was crouched, routing through something in a bag just out of sight. The van was still running, and the heat was on, but Yolanda could see the snow starting to pick up outside.

  Dressed only in a thin dress, she knew that she wouldn’t last long out there if their captor decided to release them.

  The strange smell in the van, like the scent of a stove after someone had just finished deep-frying chicken wings, made her think, however, that this might be the least of her worries.

  “Please.”

  Her fingers teased at the fabric of his pants, and he turned.

  And then he started to laugh.

  “Anything,” she pleaded. “I’ll do anything as long as you let us go.”

  The man moved something into view then, something that gleamed brightly under the van’s dome light.

  “You beg just like she did—like she pleaded for someone to help, to free her.”

  Yolanda’s eyes widened as confusion washed over her.

  “Oh, I’ll let you go alright. But I don’t think you’ll get very far.”

  It was only then that Yolanda realized the gleam was from a handsaw, and she started to scream.

  Chase stumbled, the dizzy spell that hit her so strong that she felt close to vomiting. Her hands splayed out in front of her, and thankfully the gurney on which Yolanda’s corpse lay caught her fall.

  “Chase? You okay?” a voice asked, but it seemed so far away that she failed to recognize it.

  Chase breathed deeply in through her nose and closed her eyes, trying to fight the spins. She wasn’t sure what had happened, but it felt for a moment as if she were Yolanda, like Chase had somehow been transported inside the woman’s head just before the killer—

  A hand fell on her back.

  “Get her some water! Doc, get her some water!” she heard Martinez say. “Go!”

  Chase straightened, and opened her eyes. With one final breath, she felt the last of the nausea pass.

  “I’m okay,” she said dryly.

  Martinez’s grip on her tightened.

  “You sure? What happened?”

  Chase’s eyes began to focus again, and she found herself staring at Yolanda’s wrists. Even though the skin was frozen, she thought she could make out the faintest pattern from a braided rope.

  Did I see this before when I was looking at the bodies, but it didn’t register?

  Chase was still confused as to what had happened—one minute she was recalling Agent Stitts’s words about instinct and gut feelings, the next she was bound and frightened—but tried to recall what she had seen before it was forgotten.

  They were in a van… a cargo van.

  She turned to Martinez.

  “Were there… tire tracks at the scene?” she asked. Martinez finally relinquished his grip on her shoulders and took a step backward. One of his eyebrows twitched slightly.

  “Yes… the truck driver who pulled over to the side of the road.”

  Chase shook her head.

  “No, not that big. Something smaller, but bigger than a car…” she tried to think back to the indentations at the scene. Had she seen tire tracks there? From a cargo van? Or had she just made that up?

  The entire vision had been so vivid, so pristine, that just thinking about it threatened to make her ill again.

  “I’m not sure,” Martinez said at last. “We took some casts of whatever we could find at the scene, but with the snow… I don’t think there’s anything usable. I’ll put a call in, however. You—you sure you’re okay, Chase?”

  Chase ignored the last part, and turned her attention back to Yolanda.

  Her eyes moved from her wrists, to her painted fingernails, then down the exterior to the thighs.

  The legs ended too soon: the feet were gone, replaced by a scarred and blackened mess where they should have been.

  The killer had cauterized the wounds, she re
alized.

  Chase suddenly shook her head, remembering the question that she had asked at the scene.

  “The killer didn’t sexually assault them,” she said in a quiet voice. “But he did watch them… he watched them suffer.”

  CHAPTER 8

  “So, you gonna tell me what the hell that was all about?” Martinez asked, finally breaking the ice.

  Chase was having a hard time reading the man. She thought that she had a good idea of who Agent Jeremy Stitts was, what made him tick, what made him tock, but with Martinez? He was elusive, holding his cards close to his chest. In fact, if it hadn’t been for her rather candid interactions with Stitts, she would have expected that Martinez was the prototypical FBI Agent.

  But Stitts had broken that mold, and now nothing seemed to fit.

  Guided by her vision, or whatever the hell the episode Chase had was, Martinez had sent another CSU crew out to Girdwood to see if they could gather any evidence of the presence of a large van. Although Chase was skeptical that they could have combed the entire scene during the day, day and a half between when the bodies had been discovered and she had arrived, Martinez cautioned her not to mention her apprehension to Chief Downs. The man was sensitive to anything that might be considered a slight on either him or his department. Right now, their relationship was amicable, and Chief Downs’s limited experience with these types of murders made it clear that they needed the FBI’s help. Agent Martinez, who clearly had a long-standing relationship with the man, was the one who floated the idea that CSU return to the scene to look for evidence of a van.

  Chief Downs had reluctantly agreed, but not without muttering something derogatory about ‘clairvoyance’. Still, despite his grumblings, he had ordered a crew back out to the scene.

  “I don’t know,” Chase said at last. “It’s never… it’s never happened to me before. It was like…”

  She let her sentence trail off as she searched for the right words.