Finishing School

by Max Allan Collins

  A deputy for nearly twenty-four years, and a detective for the last fifteen, the fifty-year-old Garue was stocky, his neck a short, efficient swivel for a block-sized head. His wavy black hair, worn much longer back on the rez as a kid, had gone mostly gray, and pouches had formed in his cheeks.

  But any criminal who ran into Garue would testify that he was still a man not to be trifled with. After a four-year hitch in the Army, where he had been an MP, Garue attended Bemidji State University as a wrestler. He graduated with a degree in criminology and immediately got on as a deputy with Beltrami County. Married to Anna Yellow Hawk, his childhood sweetheart from the nearby Red Lake Indian Reservation, north of Bemidji (where they both grew up), Garue had settled into what was, for him, the ideal life.

  The sun was still low in the southern sky, noon at least a couple of hours off. Garue’s stomach was already growling. His wife always insisted he and their two kids start each morning with a ‘‘good, healthy’’ breakfast. Unfortunately for Garue, over the last twenty years, Anne’s idea of a good, healthy breakfast had shifted from bacon, eggs, and pancakes to muesli, yogurt, and fresh fruit. Seemed like the detective was hungry all the time now.

  He had been eating breakfast at home when he’d heard the dispatch call over his walkie. Three hunters had found something in Bassinko Industries forest number four, southeast of Bemidji. ‘‘Something’’ was as far as the description had gone. . . .

  Now, two hours later, the call had come in that the deputies on-site wanted a detective. Sheriff Ewell Preston had naturally wanted his best investigator, and sent Garue.

  The detective was supposed to be on comp time today, to make up for the overtime he’d put in on a series of meth lab raids over the last two weeks, but the discovery in the forest had changed that.

  Though a plainclothes officer, Garue was not in his usual work attire of shirt and tie and sport coat. Well, the jeans were normal, but the rubber-soled black Rockys he wore on the job were replaced by boots, and his regular button-down shirt had been left on the hanger this morning, in favor of a Minnesota Vikings sweatshirt. Used to the just-above-freezing temperatures this time of year, he wore no coat.

  Garue took U.S. 2 south out of Bemidji, then turned east on a county road leading to another two-lane running south through Bassinko’s forest number four. The road was wet, the flurries from last night having melted off in this Indian summer day. Ahead, on the right, a service road cut back to the west, and Garue saw three squad cars lined up on it; behind them was a van from the regional office of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension—the state crime lab.

  As Garue pulled in, a deputy stepped forward to hold up a hand in ‘‘stop’’ fashion. Garue braked to a halt, then powered the window down as the deputy approached—a broad-shouldered blond kid, a rookie named Swenson.

  The deputy smiled at Garue. ‘‘Sorry, sir—didn’t recognize your car.’’

  ‘‘Just doing your job,’’ Garue said. ‘‘These are my wheels, son, no reason you should make ’em. . . . You first on the scene?’’

  ‘‘Yup,’’ Swenson said with a nod. ‘‘Me and Sergeant Condon. He was right behind me.’’

  ‘‘When did the crime lab get here?’’

  ‘‘About half an hour after us.’’ Swenson checked his watch. ‘‘Make that a little over an hour ago.’’

  ‘‘They find anything?’’

  Shrugging, Swenson said, ‘‘Dunno. I been out here. . . . Park on the side, would you, and you can just follow the crime scene tape. Should take you right to ’em.’’

  ‘‘Thanks, son,’’ Garue said.

  The detective pulled in behind a squad car, climbed out and started tramping up the service road into the woods. He had gone maybe fifty yards when he saw crime scene tape wrapped around the trunk of an aspen.

  The forest wasn’t as thick here. This plot had been harvested within the last ten years; the Bassinko outfit cut down plots of forty to eighty acres at a time, then allowed the plot to grow back over the next forty to sixty years before harvesting there again.

  Looking deeper into the woods, Garue could see a strip of crime scene tape on another aspen ten yards on, then another, and another.

  He was almost a quarter of a mile into the woods when he heard voices on the other side of a small hill. Over the short rise, Garue found a handful of men spread out in a semicircle, backs to him, and off to one side, three men in camouflage, obviously hunters, with a deputy. Those four men turned to see him as he approached.

  The deputy, tall, rail-thin with hair as white as Garue’s, wore no jacket despite the chilly morning. The tan shirt, with the three-tiered stripes of his rank, and brown uniform pants were freshly ironed, his shiny silver badge reflecting the sunlight.

  Craig Condon was old enough, and certainly had enough time in, to retire. He hadn’t, though. His wife was ill, and Condon needed the health insurance that came with the job, so he stayed on. Maybe longer than he should have, Garue thought.

  Condon bestowed a solitary nod in the detective’s direction—more greeting than he gave most people. The deputy’s pinched face and long chin made him look serious, even on those rare occasions when the sergeant found something humorous. Today would not likely be one of those rare days.

  Next to Condon stood the human cannonball that was Daniel Abner, and seeing Abner gave Garue a sick feeling, damn near a wave of nausea that had nothing to do with the breakfast his wife had served him.

  Fifteen years ago, the disappearance of Abner’s ten-year-old daughter, Amanda, had been among the first cases Garue had drawn as a detective. Garue and the entire Beltrami County Sheriff’s Department, the Bemidji PD, and the regional state crime lab had worked ceaselessly for over a year before the little girl’s body had been found buried in the crawl space of a house on the edge of town.

  The house was owned by Abner himself, but had been rented to a former mental patient, Herbert Berryman, who had just up and left town about six months after Amanda’s disappearance. No one, not even the federal boys, had ever tracked the man down.

  Garue nodded toward Abner, but the guide, cigarette dangling absently, was staring into nowhere. Lewis Garue got the sense he wasn’t going to like whatever these hunters had found here today.

  The semicircle of men hovered around a device that looked like Rube Goldberg’s idea of a push mower. Out front was a single tire that might have been appropriated from the BMX bike of Garue’s twelve-year-old. A three-foot shaft ran back from the wheel and rode about a foot off the ground. A frame at the rear end attached atop the shaft, and within the frame were two boxes. Running up at an angle from the frame was a T-shaped handle. Garue had seen the contraption before—ground-penetrating radar.

  The man running the machine was tall, broad-shouldered and in his mid-thirties—Fletcher Keegan. A graduate of the National Academy at Quantico, Fletch had been at the Bemidji office of the regional crime lab for the last four years. He and Garue were friends as tight as the aspens across the edge line of the forest.

  Two of the other guys were also crime lab, though Garue didn’t know their names. Two more were deputies, a kid whose name Garue had not learned yet, and Andy Salyard, a seven-year vet of the force.

  When Keegan saw him, the crime scene tech waved, then shot Garue a no-rest-for-the-wicked glance, and went back to running his machine. Garue nodded to the rest, then joined Condon, who stepped away from the hunters to meet him.

  ‘‘Bad day?’’ Garue asked Condon.

  Nodding, the sergeant said, ‘‘Looks to be.’’

  ‘‘Anybody talk to the hunters yet?’’

  ‘‘I did,’’ Condon said.

  ‘‘Which one found it?’’

  Jerking his head toward a scrawny-looking hunter, Condon said, ‘‘That one. Name’s William Kwitcher. Billy.’’

  Garue began his interviews with the guide, Daniel Abner. The bald man looked stricken. The murder of Abner’s daughter had hit both parents hard. His wife, unable to co
pe with the loss of their only child, eventually divorced him and moved out of state. The guide had spent years getting his life back together.

  Garue asked, ‘‘What did you see?’’

  Abner told about Kwitcher stumbling onto the skeletal hand. As the guide spoke, Garue couldn’t help replaying in his mind the details of the Abner tragedy.

  Tweed and Kwitcher echoed Abner’s account. Everything seemed to check out, but something about Kwitcher’s attitude bothered Garue. The skinny man seemed more nervous than shocked about his grisly discovery, but something else, too—scared? Guilty, even? Garue let it pass, for now; still, something about Kwitcher definitely got a blip going on the lawman’s radar. When Garue finally let the trio go, however, Kwitcher was first to split. And the blip-ping increased. . . .

  Fletcher Keegan came over to Garue and Condon. He took off his BCA ball cap, ran a hand through the brown stubble that passed for a haircut. Keegan had honest brown eyes, a square jaw, and wide shoulders—near as Garue could tell, an all-American guy.

  ‘‘What?’’ Garue asked, in response to Keegan’s frown.

  ‘‘We’ve got ourselves a problem.’’

  All the healthy food that Anna had fed him for breakfast felt like it might actually burn through his stomach lining. ‘‘What, don’t tell me it’s just the hand, nothing else?’’

  Shaking his head, Keegan said, ‘‘No, it’s definitely a grave, all right.’’

  ‘‘Okay,’’ Garue said. ‘‘That’s the bad news—what’s the really bad news?’’

  Plucking his cell phone off his belt, Keegan said, ‘‘The GPR found three graves.’’

  ‘‘Three?’’ echoed Garue.

  ‘‘Oh yeah,’’ Keegan said, punching some buttons on his phone. ‘‘Somebody made a personal cemetery out here.’’

  Garue asked, ‘‘Who you calling?’’

  ‘‘FBI,’’ Keegan said. The two men’s eyes locked. ‘‘One of my guest instructors at the National Academy? He’s with the BAU.’’

  ‘‘The what?’’

  ‘‘Behavioral Analysis Unit.’’

  ‘‘The profilers, you mean?’’

  ‘‘Yeah. Guy I’m calling is kind of the king of the profilers—maybe you heard of him.’’

  ‘‘Yeah, who?’’

  ‘‘David Rossi.’’

  ‘‘When we were children,’’

  Madeleine L’Engle said,

  ‘‘we used to think that when we were grown-up,

  we would no longer be vulnerable.

  But . . . to be alive is to be vulnerable.’’

  Chapter One

  Quantico, Virginia

  Jennifer Jareau studied the photos she’d just downloaded to her laptop.

  ‘‘JJ’’ to her friends and colleagues, the long-haired blonde in her late twenties had been with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Behavioral Analysis Unit for the last five years, and had seen photos far more gruesome than these. But something about these victims—mostly skeletons now because of decomposition—engaged her interest.

  Obviously, the three victims had been interred in their shallow graves near Bemidji, Minnesota, for some time. Exhumed over the weekend, the three bodies displayed levels of decomposition indicating burials over the course of at least several months.

  She checked her watch, then printed the pictures and loaded them into a file folder with her notes as well as other documents from the investigators in Minnesota. She’d been accumulating information almost since the moment Supervisory Special Agent David Rossi had phoned her to say a call would be coming from a Minnesota investigator named Fletcher Keegan, apparently an old acquaintance of Rossi’s.

  Her fellow agent’s heads-up had come so late that Keegan had called while Jareau was still on the line with Rossi. She spoke at length with Keegan, who in turn put her in touch with Detective Lewis Garue, lead investigator.

  Of course, at this point, with the autopsies not done, the crime was the illegal disposition of bodies—a misdemeanor. But everyone on the Minnesota end felt they had a serial killer, and, judging by the strands of blond hair clinging to the skulls of the three corpses, that seemed likely; but the BAU could not get involved in a misdemeanor.

  Her team, already in the office, was waiting for a briefing on what their next case would be, but first Jareau wanted confirmation on the causes of death.

  Jareau was just about to inform her boss, Special Agent in Charge Aaron Hotchner, that the briefing would have to wait until after lunch, when the phone rang.

  The call was from the Beltrami County coroner. Jareau spent half an hour taking down all the information and incorporating it into her briefing materials.

  She called Hotchner and brought her boss up to speed.

  ‘‘Don’t rush yourself,’’ Hotchner said. ‘‘We can schedule the briefing for after lunch.’’

  ‘‘That would probably be better,’’ she admitted.

  Better if for no other reason than Jareau could keep working through lunch, which today, like so many other days, would be at her desk. She had long since learned to eat without qualms while perusing the most grotesque write-ups and photographs of forensics evidence.

  A PowerBar, a banana, and a container of yogurt from the break-room refrigerator kept her going as she prepared for the presentation. By the time she finished her lunch by downing a bottle of water, Jareau was ready.

  When she entered the conference room, the others were already seated around the long, oval table. To the left, windows with venetian blinds let in November sunlight. A copier and fax machine on a sidebar shared the wall with the door. At the far end, a flat-screen monitor dominated.

  Seated at the head of the table was team leader Aaron Hotchner, in an immaculate gray suit with a white shirt and striped tie—he might have been the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, not one of the top criminal profilers on the planet. His black hair was parted on the side, his well-carved face stern and businesslike, his eyes locked on the man to his right, David Rossi.

  Fiftyish, with black hair showing signs of gray, Rossi was one of the originators of the BAU—along with the retired Max Ryan and Jason Gideon, he’d been among the unit’s first superstars. After stepping down himself, then writing a series of true-crime best sellers, Rossi had made a small fortune on the lecture circuit before coming back to the BAU, in part to finish a case he’d walked away from. Today, Rossi wore a gray suit with a blue shirt and a tie with geometric shapes.

  Next to Rossi, Derek Morgan, with his killer features and stylish stubbly beard, might have been a model for GQ and not a top federal agent. He wore a black mock turtleneck shirt with black slacks, and the only thing spoiling the male-model look was the nine-millimeter pistol holstered on his right hip. The son of an African-American police officer (killed in the line of duty) and a white mother, former college quarterback Morgan had spent time with the ATF, later serving as a hand-to-hand combat instructor here at Quantico.

  Across the table from Morgan sat Dr. Spencer Reid, youngest member on the team. Reid had a distracted, little boy lost quality that endeared him to Jareau, the next youngest, and which belied the sharp focus he brought to every case, every moment. The lanky Reid had a mop of long hair, dressed like a prep school student, and was, judging by IQ scores, the smartest person in this or any room. With his eidetic memory, Reid seemed to have every fact in the world ready and waiting.

  On Reid’s right, SSA Emily Prentiss looked typically crisp in a sharp navy business suit, her black hair perfectly combed. Before the return of Rossi, she’d been the ‘‘newbie’’ on the team, but those days were over—Prentiss had long since proved herself a valuable addition. Tough and smart, with a sly, dry sense of humor, she was fitting in with the team on a personal level equally well.

  No one said a word as Jareau set her materials down. They would wait patiently for her to start laying out facts. Once she did, however, well, the room would be far from quiet. . . .

  Jareau centered herself, then beg
an. ‘‘Saturday, three hunters in the woods outside Bemidji, Minnesota, found this.’’

  She touched a button on her remote and the first photo appeared on the flat screen. This and subsequent images had been provided by the team’s digital intelligence analyst, Penelope Garcia, who had used her considerable computer skills to enable Jareau to display images from her laptop onto the screen in the conference room. (Jareau couldn’t have managed this feat herself, but she didn’t have to—she, like everyone on the team, was just glad Garcia made all their jobs easier.)

  The image was a stark, even grisly one: a skeletal hand sticking out of patchy snow and dead leaves, a small bloodstain nearby.

  Reid was the first to interrupt, though there was nothing rude about it—give-and-take was normal here. ‘‘That hand,’’ he said, eyes narrowed, ‘‘is far too decomposed to be the source for the blood on the ground.’’

  Jareau nodded. ‘‘The blood is apparently from a wounded buck the hunters were tracking.’’

  Reid nodded back.

  Jareau continued: ‘‘The hunting guide used his cell to call 911. The Beltrami County Sheriff’s Office responded with two squad cars. The county seat is Bemidji. . . .’’

  Hotchner said, ‘‘They have one of the state’s two regional crime labs.’’

  ‘‘That’s right,’’ Jareau said. ‘‘So investigators from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension were sent out as well.’’

  The team sat quietly as Jareau switched to a photo that showed police tape outlining the burial site, the hand still visible near one edge. In the background were two more tape outlines.

  ‘‘This is why they’re asking for our help,’’ Jareau said. ‘‘When they used ground-penetrating radar to find the parameters of the first grave, they found two more.’’

  Morgan frowned. ‘‘Two more graves?’’

  ‘‘Total of three,’’ Jareau confirmed. ‘‘Here’s where it gets interesting—the coroner said they were not buried at the same time, but rather over the course of as much as a year.’’