Thus the role models presented to our children as proper behavior were the mentally ill, specifically sought out and put on display. I didn’t have much confidence that, culturally, the United States and United Kingdom would last for very much longer as leaders of the free world.
“You’re going, aren’t you?” she said.
“He’s sending me the reports. I’m going to have a look and see if I can help.”
She was quiet a long time.
“You never talked about him. Who was he?”
“A really old friend that helped me out when I needed. Our families used to go on vacation together. That seems like a different lifetime now.”
“Jon….”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
She didn’t say anything for a while and then got up and went into the bathroom and I heard the shower running. My phone buzzed and I saw I’d received a new email. Going to the Mac on my desk in the corner of the living room, I opened it.
The police reports were barely three pages in length. Three pages for the life of someone who’d hunted monsters so the rest of the world could sleep at night. The reports were terribly written, filled with misspellings and incorrect usage of forensic terms. I skimmed them and went to the reports by the special agents in the Salt Lake field office. I found nearly twenty pages of drawings, analysis, graphs, summaries, narratives and a preliminary blood report showing higher than therapeutic levels of hydrocodone in his system.
I looked at the photographs. They were high definition and color. David was laying facedown on the linoleum, a pool of congealed blood around his head like a crimson halo. His hands and shirt and pants were soaked with it. It had taken nearly twenty-five minutes for a staff member to come upon the carnage.
Both the nurse and David had died the same way: a slice across the throat, deep enough to sever the carotid artery.
Looking at his blank face, his eyes glossed over, his mouth open with a dry, lifeless tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth, I thought he looked like a deer that had just been slaughtered. My uncle had taken me hunting once and forced me to kill a deer even though I didn’t want to, and it’d had the same expression on its face.
Though the special agents had done a great job, there was almost nothing to go on. The person who did this left nothing behind, and the only witness was killed as well. It was brilliant in its calculation. At that time of night the staff would be sparse. He’d gone in knowing he would kill anyone else that was there, though he probably didn’t know how many people that would be.
He had to have brought a gun too. There were too many unknowns and he couldn’t be certain he wouldn’t need it.
The image of David on the floor came back to me and tugged at my guts. He was one of the best friends I’d ever had and a good mentor. I pictured me retired and fishing with him on his boat. Not deciding whether to help find the man that killed him.
I was lost a moment and only the sound of the shower turning off and the frosted glass door opening brought me back. I closed the reports and went out onto the patio. The sun was still a few hours away from setting and I watched a ship out on the horizon. Pleasure yacht it looked like, white with black lettering. I kept my eyes on it and tried to follow the imperceptible movement as it slowly glided on the sea far away from shore.
Was Emma right? Could you not change who you were? Modern research suggested that change is possible to a certain age. As a child and teenager and young adult, your core personality is malleable. But when you hit thirty that flexibility disappears and you’re left with who you are. I was a homicide detective at thirty working seventy-hour weeks. The thought that that was who I was now, stuck frozen in a snapshot of my life, filled me with a cold fear that the warmth of the sun couldn’t touch.
“Jon?”
“Yeah?” I said, looking behind me.
“I’m going out for a while with Rebecca. Shopping and dinner. Are you going to be here when I get back?”
I looked to the ocean again. “No.”
5
I took a red-eye from Honolulu International to LAX with a one hour layover. I sat in the terminal and sipped Diet Coke to stay awake and sent a text to Emma letting her know that I loved her and would be back soon. She didn’t respond. And I didn’t blame her.
We had moved to Hawaii to get away from this. To get away from death and blood and thinking that led me down dark pathways. She knew, somehow, how the thinking affected me and she hated it. She didn’t want to be around it. I didn’t want to be around it either but I didn’t have a choice. Sometimes it would overtake me.
Once, I was at a crime scene and the next thing I knew I was back home in bed. I had no idea how I had gotten there and asked my wife several times if she had driven me or if someone had dropped me off. I thought I had suffered a head injury or maybe had taken some narcotics I shouldn’t have, but there was nothing like that. Part of my life had simply slipped away. The thinking had overtaken me and everything else turned to a blur.
The flight into Salt Lake City was quick, and when I stepped off the plane to the terminal a sense of icy fear touched my stomach and made me queasy. I went to the snack shop and bought some Tums and took three before going upstairs and retrieving my bag and renting a car. The clerk was an older Indian man who didn’t look me in the eyes. I could tell he had taken the nightshift very purposely, attempting to get away from the interactions with people which would invariably come with the day. He handed me my keys and papers and said that someone would bring the car around front.
I went out and the night air was cool and the sky was clear and a half moon hung there like someone had taken a bite out of it. I’d been to Utah several times. As a Mormon, it held a special fascination for me to think of those pioneers trekking across frozen tundras to get away from the executions and the rapes and destruction.
Governor Lilburn Boggs of Missouri issued the Missouri Executive Order 44 in 1838. It was an extermination order, stating that Mormons were enemies of the state and could lawfully be executed on sight. Their women were raped and the children beaten to within an inch of their lives, if they were lucky. The men were usually hung or shot.
It was a classic tactic of tyranny: create an us and them and the mind can repress any outrage committed against the them. What people never realized was that the us became them arbitrarily and the torturers routinely became the tortured.
Reports from Stalin’s gulags surfaced after the Cold War that torturers would burst into tears during the torture of a prisoner, exclaiming that “It’s you now, but it’ll be me next.” Infringing on the human rights of others always led to a loss of one’s own human rights. You couldn’t hurt someone else without hurting yourself. But people, it seemed, rarely learned from the past.
The car, a white Dodge Ram truck, came to the curb and a young man had me sign a release stating that I didn’t see any damage anywhere. I signed it without reading and got in.
Heber was a good drive away and I thought about renting a hotel room somewhere and making the drive in the morning, but I wanted to go to the hospital now. David had been killed at three in the morning and that’s how I wanted to see the hospital. How he had seen it.
The bright lights of downtown Salt Lake City soon turned to the dark canyons of Summit County. The air was unlike anywhere else I had been. It was cold and clean, refreshing, and I wondered just how odd it was that I should marvel at fresh air.
The road widened and narrowed sporadically and as I got off the exit and began winding down the mountain I had just climbed, I could see Heber. Few lights as it was a minor city, and because of this the surrounding forests looked like they were about to swallow it up and wipe it from existence.
I descended into the city at nearly 2:30 A.M. and found the hospital not far from Main Street. I parked out front and waited.
It was quiet, the monotony of sound broken only occasionally by the hum of an engine on the street. The hospital itself was nearly empty. I could see through t
he glass entrance to the emergency room and the one security guard, probably posted only after this incident occurred, was falling asleep with his feet up on the desk.
At 2:58 A.M., I got out of the truck and walked to the front entrance. I stood there a long time before walking in. I could see him looking here. Feeling the prickly sensation of excitement and fear.
My prey is upstairs on the second floor and there’s no one here to stop me.
I walked past the security guard. His head is tilted back and he’s so fast asleep that he doesn’t even notice me.
I get to the elevators. I make sure my gloves are on even though there are so many prints everywhere that it will be impossible to distinguish mine. Still, I want to be careful.
I go up to the second floor and wait a moment before stepping off. I’m listening to see how many people are here. I get off and walk to the desk and there’s only one nurse on duty. I walk right around the desk and take her from behind. The knife gashes across her throat and I fling her down, standing over her to make sure she’s not getting back up.
I walk down the corridor, glancing into each room. And there, to my surprise, is David. He’s not in a room. He’s out in the hall.
I hide just off to the side so my prey can’t see me. David walks out. I jump out and grab him and see that he’s much stronger than the nurse. We fight but I slash him. I slash him again and again in the back and he goes down.
I want to savor this. I want to take my time. So I walk up quietly and bend down over him. I lift up his head like a deer and I can’t help myself, I have to see his eyes. I look down into them and the fear of death is there. It’s there for everyone at this moment, no matter how tough or how many times they’ve been in life threatening situations. This moment is the great equalizer of us all.
I rip his throat open, so deep that a spatter of blood goes flying over the desks and papers of the nurse’s station. I don’t care. There’s no one here to see it anyway.
I stand over him and watch as he bleeds out. And then I turn and leave.
“Hey!”
My heart jumped into my throat and I turned around to see the security guard.
“What the fuck are you doing up here?” he shouts.
“I was asked to come out here.”
“Asked by who?”
“I’m helping with the investigation into David Lines’ death.”
“Lemme see some ID.”
I pull out my wallet and hand it to him. He takes the driver license. “Don’t move, I’m callin’ the sheriff.”
6
Everything was more difficult at night. And trying to sort out that I was actually here to help was no exception. The sheriff, who was roused from sleep only after a half hour of constant calls, had to call down to the Salt Lake field office for the FBI to verify who I was, but no one was available at three in the morning. She then had to call the main line at Behavioral Science and get someone to wake one of the special agents here to verify my identity.
The entire process took two and a half hours and the sun was rising in the sky by the time I met the sheriff.
She walked in to the little security room I was being held in. Attractive and middle-aged, she wore her workout clothes and must have been going to the gym as she wasn’t sweating yet. I could see the muscles in her shoulders ripple, and her calves were tight and firm.
“You caused quite a stir,” she said.
“Sorry. I was going to call you but it was late.”
“So you come wandering up to the site of a murder and don’t think security might have a problem with that? What kinda jackass are you?”
“David was my friend. I’m here to help.”
She exhaled and sat down across from me. “Sorry. I’ve been up since three trying to sort this out. Your buddies from the FBI are coming up later today.”
“Am I free to leave?”
“Sure. Where you going?”
“Some breakfast sounded good.”
“Well,” she said, standing, “you might as well take me too. And you’re buyin’ for getting me up so early.”
We sat at a café on Main Street and I ordered hash browns with eggs and an orange juice.
“They got some’a the best ham in the state up here,” she said.
“I’m trying to cut back on my meat. My fiancé thinks I’m going to get high blood pressure.”
“I’ve never met a cop that doesn’t have high blood pressure. The job takes a piece of you with it everyday.”
“I’m not a cop anymore.”
She leaned back in the seat. “So the FBI people said you were some consultant. You must be pretty special to be the expert the FBI calls when they need help.”
“I was just his friend and he trusted me.”
“You know, not three weeks ago, I sat in this very café with him and we talked. I liked him.”
“He was a good man.”
“He never told me how … well, how his wife died.”
I took a bite of hash browns and didn’t say anything. “I haven’t seen the reports from the initial investigation that he was out here on.”
“Tiffany and her boyfriend?” I nodded. “Why do you want those?”
“Because that’s how we’re going to find him.”
“The person that killed David? Wouldn’t be better to investigate his actual murder?”
“In this person’s mind, this was a necessary killing. He felt David was too close to him. This killing wasn’t what he needed. It’s not an expression of himself. Tiffany Ochoa’s killing is the purest expression we have of his unconscious. That’s how we’re going to find him.”
“An expression of his unconscious? You think he’s some sort of artist?”
I nodded. “In some ways it’s the same thing. It’s the same mechanism in the brain. A painter leaves things in his art that he doesn’t want there. That he doesn’t want to show the world. But he can’t help it because, at least with good painters, it’s the unconscious that’s doing the work and it chooses what it wants and doesn’t want. It’s the same thing with the man we’re after. He’s left something of himself behind that he didn’t want to. We just need to find what it is.”
She was quiet a moment. I let the eggs run over the hash browns and dipped a forkful in ketchup before taking another bite.
“The FBI guys have a room set up at my office. You should probably see it.”
7
I stood in the little storeroom at the back of the Wasatch County Sheriff’s Office and stared at the photographs on the wall. They lined the room in a circle and hung above two desks that were cluttered with papers. I saw the autopsy reports for both victims and David, and several supplemental narrative reports that I hadn’t received. They were laid out on desks the way I used to lay out flashcards to study in college.
The sheriff left the door open behind me and I closed it. I pulled out a chair and sat in the middle of the room and stared at the photos. Glossy and large, full of vivid color with black blood and choppy, red organs.
The girl would have been pretty, extraordinarily so, except for the thick black ooze stuck to her chin, seepage from the wound in her mouth where her tongue had been cut out. She was nude, her legs were spread, and a branch, about three feet in length with sharp edges and leaves, was thrust into her vagina. It had gone in so far it ruptured her birth canal. It was sticking out like some macabre ornament and the ground underneath it was caked in blood.
I saw him standing there, raping her with it. The more she screamed the harder he thrusted. That’s what it was about. That’s why he didn’t kill her quickly, why he used a branch. The screams. They made him laugh several times but he couldn’t tell if the laughs were from joy or pain or pleasure. He was sexually excited, but he didn’t rape her. No semen was found anywhere in the scene. Pubic hair and latex burns were found, but not from rape. That was purposeful. He wanted me to think he could rape her. That he was able to perform.
This wasn’t for sex: it was
for the screams. So why cut out her tongue?
I saw him as he watched her blood in the moonlight. Blood appears as black as oil under the moon. This fascinated him. It explained many things to him. That something wasn’t what it always appeared and all you had to do was change the context and it was something else.
He wouldn’t be able to resist taking a part of her with him. The fingers were cut off according to the autopsy report. Would he keep them as trophies? Strip the flesh and make a necklace of the bones? Maybe. But no … that’s not what it was. That was too public. He didn’t want public. This death occurred in the woods away from the public. He wanted something private, something permanent that was just between the two of them, something that would mean she was always a part of him.
He ate them.
“You must be Jon.”
I snapped out and for a moment, forgot where I was. I saw a young woman, maybe thirty, standing at the doorway. She wore a suit and had an FBI badge dangling from a blue lanyard. Her hair was dirty blonde and she was smiling at me.
“Yeah,” I said, swallowing, “yes. I’m Jon Stanton.”
She walked toward me and held out her hand. I shook it and it was smooth with lotion. “Melissa Harding.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“You too. Kyle talked you up quite a bit.”
A man came in behind her, also wearing a suit and an FBI badge. His hands were in his pockets and he stood behind her and looked at me. He didn’t say hello and didn’t stick out his hand.
“This the guy?” he said.
“This is Adam. Don’t mind him,” Melissa said, “he just lost a hundred bucks on a Lakers game.”
“So you’re the guy who’s going to solve this mess, huh?”
“No,” I said calmly. “No I’m not here for that. I’m just here to look at evidence and see if I can help. David was my friend.”
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