The Body Farm by Patricia Cornwell
No one responded.
“If you don’t give me these things I’ve requested, I can do nothing more for him,” I flatly stated.
Bear went over to a desk and got on the hostage phone. He said we needed ice and more drugs. I knew Lucy and her team had better act now or I probably would be shot. I moved away from Hand’s spreading puddle, and as I looked at his face it was hard for me to believe that he had so much power over others. But every man in this room and those in the reactor and on the barge would kill for him. In fact, they already had.
“The robot’s bringing the shit. I’m going out to get it,” said Bear as he looked out the window. “It’s on its way now.”
“You go out there you’re probably going to get your ass shot off.”
“Not with her in here.” Bear’s eyes were hostile and crazed.
“The robot can bring it to you,” I surprised them by saying.
Bear laughed. “You remember all those stairs? You think that tin-ass piece of shit’s going to get up those?”
“It’s perfectly capable,” I said, and I hoped this was true.
“Hey, make it bring the stuff in so no one has to go out,” another man said.
Bear got Wesley on the hostage phone again. “Make the robot bring the supplies to the control room. We’re not coming out.” He slammed the receiver down, not realizing what he had just done.
I thought of my niece and said a prayer for her because I knew this would be her hardest challenge. I jumped as I suddenly felt the barrel of a gun against the back of my neck.
“You let him die, you’re dead, too. You got that, bitch?”
I did not move.
“Pretty soon, we got to sail out of here, and he’d better be going with us.”
“As long as you keep me in supplies, I will keep him alive,” I quietly said.
He removed the gun from my neck and I injected the last vial of saline into their dead leader’s IV line. Beads of sweat were rolling down my back, and the skirt of the gown I had put over my clothes was soaked. I imagined Lucy this minute outside the mobile outpost in her virtual reality gear. I imagined her moving her fingers and arms and stepping here and there as fiber optics made it possible for her to read every inch of the terrain on her CRTs. Her telepresence was the only hope that Toto would not get stuck in a corner or fall somewhere.
The men were looking out the window and commented when the robot’s tracks carried him up the handicap ramp and he went inside.
“I wouldn’t mind having one of those,” one of them said.
“You’re too stupid to figure out how to use it.”
“No way. That baby ain’t radio-controlled. Nothing radio-controlled would work in here. You got any idea how thick the walls are?”
“It’d be great for carrying in firewood when the weather sucks.”
“Excuse me, I need to use the bathroom,” one of the hostages timidly said.
“Shit. Not again.”
My tension got unbearable as I feared what would happen if they went out and were not back when Toto appeared.
“Hey, just make him wait. Damn, I wish we could close these windows. It’s cold as shit in here.”
“Well, you won’t get none of that clean, cold air in Tripoli. Better enjoy it while you can.”
Several of them laughed at the same time the door opened and another man walked in who I had not seen before. He was dark-skinned and bearded, wearing a heavy jacket and fatigues, and he was angry.
“We have only fifteen assemblies out and in casks on the barge,” he spoke with authority and a heavy accent. “You must give us more time. Then we can get more.”
“Fifteen’s a hell of a lot,” Bear said, and he did not seem to care for this man.
“We need twenty-five assemblies at the very least! That was the arrangement.”
“No one’s told me that.”
“He knows that.” The man with the accent looked at Hand’s body on the floor.
“Well, he ain’t available to discuss it with you.” Bear crushed out a cigarette with the toe of his boot.
“Do you understand?” The foreign man was furious now. “Each assembly weighs a ton, and the crane has to pull it from the flooded reactor to the pool, then get it into a cask. It is very slow and very difficult. It is very dangerous. You promised we would have at least twenty-five. Now you are rushing and sloppy because of him.” The man angrily pointed at Hand. “We have an agreement!”
“My only agreement is to take care of him. We gotta get him on the barge and take the doctor with us. Then we get him to a hospital.”
“This is nonsense! He looks already dead to me! You are lunatics!”
“He’s not dead.”
“Look at him. He is white as snow and does not breathe. He is dead!”
They were screaming at each other, and Bear’s boots were loud as he strode over to me and demanded, “He’s not dead, is he?”
“No,” I said.
Sweat rolled down his face as he drew the pistol from his belt and pointed it first at me. Then he pointed it at the hostages, and all of them cowered and one began to cry.
“No, please. Oh please,” a man begged.
“Who is it who needs to use the john so bad?” Bear roared.
They were silent, shaking as hoods sucked in and out and wide eyes stared.
“Was it you?” The gun pointed at someone else.
The control room door had been left open, and I could hear the whirring of Toto down the hall. He had made it up the stairs and along a catwalk, and he would be here in seconds. I retrieved a long metal flashlight that had been designed by ERF and tucked into the medical chest by my niece.
“Shit, I want to know if he’s dead,” one of the men said, and I knew my charade was over.
“I’ll show you,” I said as the whirring got louder.
I pointed the flashlight at Bear as I pushed a button, and he shrieked at the dazzling pop as he grabbed his eyes and I swung the heavy flashlight like a baseball bat. Bones shattered in his wrist, the pistol clattering to the floor, and the robot rolled in empty-handed. I flung myself down flat on my face, covering my eyes and ears as best I could, and the room exploded in blazing white light as a concussion bomb blew off the top of Toto’s head. There was screaming and cursing as terrorists blindly fell against consoles and each other, and they could not hear or see when dozens of HRT agents stormed in.
“Freeze, motherfuckers!”
“Freeze or I’m gonna blow your motherfucking brains out!”
“Don’t anybody move!”
I did not budge in Joel Hand’s icy grave as helicopters shook windows and feet of fast-roping agents kicked in screens. Handcuffs snapped, and weapons clattered across the floor as they were kicked out of the way. I heard people crying and realized they were the hostages being taken away.
“It’s all right. You’re safe now.”
“Oh my God. Oh thank you, God.”
“Come on. We need to get you on out of here.”
When I finally felt a cool hand on the side of my neck, I realized the person was checking for vital signs because I looked dead.
“Aunt Kay?” It was Lucy’s strained voice.
I turned over and slowly sat up. My hands and the side of my face that had been in water were numb, and I looked around, dazed. I was shaking so badly my teeth were chattering as she squatted beside me, gun in hand. Her eyes roamed the room as other agents in black fatigues were taking the last prisoners out.
“Come on, let me help you up,” she said.
She gave me her hand, and my muscles trembled as if I were about to have a seizure. I could not get warm, and my ears would not stop ringing. When I was standing, I could see Toto near the door. His eye had been scorched, his head blackened, the domed top of it gone. He was silent in his cold trail of fiber optic cable, and no one paid him any mind as one by one all of the New Zionists were taken away.
Lucy looked down at the cold body on the floor, at the water and IV
, the syringes and empty bags of saline.
“God,” she said.
“Is it safe to go out?” I had tears in my eyes.
“We’ve just now taken control of the containment area, and took the barge the same time we took the control room. Several of them had to be shot because they wouldn’t drop their weapons. Marino got one in the parking lot.”
“He shot one of them?”
“He had to,” she said. “We think we got everyone—I guess about thirty—but we’re still being careful. This place is wired with explosives, come on. Are you able to walk?”
“Of course I am.”
I untied my soaked gown and yanked it off because I could not stand it anymore. Tossing it on the floor, I pulled off gloves and we walked quickly out of the control room. She snatched her radio off her belt and her boots were loud on the catwalk and the stairs Toto had maneuvered so well.
“Unit one-twenty to mobile unit one,” she said.
“One.”
“We’re clearing out now. Everything secure?”
“You got the package?” I recognized Benton Wesley’s voice.
“Ten-four. Package is a-okay.”
“Thank God,” came a reply unusually emotional for the radio. “Tell the package we’re waiting.”
“Ten-four, sir,” Lucy said. “I believe the package knows.”
We walked fast beyond bodies and old blood and turned in to a lobby that could not keep anyone in or out anymore. She pulled open a glass door, and the afternoon was so bright I had to shield my eyes. I did not know where to go and felt very unsteady on my feet.
“Watch the steps.” Lucy put an arm around my waist. “Aunt Kay,” she said. “Just hold on to me.”
Unnatural Exposure
PATRICIA CORNWELL
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
UNNATURAL EXPOSURE
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1997 by Patricia Daniels Cornwell
This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.
For information address:
The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is http://www.penguinputnam.com
ISBN: 978-1-4295-4176-3
A Berkley BOOK®
Berkley Books first published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
Berkely and the “B” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.
First edition (electronic): July 2001
http://us.penguingroup.com
TO ESTHER NEWBERG
Vision, No Fear
Table of Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Epilogue
And there came unto
me one of the seven
angels which had the
seven vials full of the
seven last plagues . . .
REVELATION 21:9
One
Night fell clean and cold in Dublin, and wind moaned beyond my room as if a million pipes played the air. Gusts shook old windowpanes and sounded like spirits rushing past as I rearranged pillows one more time, finally resting on my back in a snarl of Irish linen. But sleep would not touch me, and images from the day returned. I saw bodies without limbs or heads, and sat up, sweating.
I switched on lamps, and the Shelbourne Hotel was suddenly around me in a warm glow of rich old woods and deep red plaids. I put on a robe, my eyes lingering on the phone by my fitfully-slept-in bed. It was almost two A.M. In Richmond, Virginia, it would be five hours earlier, and Pete Marino, commander of the city police department’s homicide squad, should be up. He was probably watching TV, smoking, eating something bad for him, unless he was on the street.
I dialed his number, and he grabbed the phone as if he were right next to it.
“Trick or treat.” He was loudly on his way to being drunk.
“You’re a little early,” I said, already regretting the call. “By a couple of weeks.”
“Doc?” He paused in confusion. “That you? You back in Richmond?”
“Still in Dublin. What’s all the commotion?”
“Just some of us guys with faces so ugly we don’t need masks. So every day is Halloween. Hey! Bubba’s bluffing,” he yelled out.
“You always think everybody’s bluffing,” a voice fired back. “It’s from being a detective too long.”
“What you talking about? Marino can’t even detect his own B.O.”
Laughter in the background was loud as the drunk, derisive comments continued.
“We’re playing poker,” Marino said to me. “What the hell time is it there?”
“You don’t want to know,” I answered. “I’ve got some unsettling news, but it doesn’t sound like we should get into it now.”
“No. No, hold on. Let me just move the phone. Shit. I hate the way the cord gets twisted, you know what I mean? Goddamn it.” I could hear his heavy footsteps and a chair scraping. “Okay, Doc. So what the hell’s going on?”
“I spent most of today discussing the landfill cases with the state pathologist. Marino, I’m increasingly suspicious that Ireland’s serial dismemberments are the work of the same individual we’re dealing with in Virginia.”
He raised his voice. “You guys hold it down in there!”
I could hear him moving farther away from his pals as I rearranged the duvet around me. I reached for the last few sips of Black Bush I had carried to bed.
“Dr. Foley worked the five Dublin cases,” I went on. “I’ve reviewed all of them. Torsos. Spines cut horizontally through the caudal aspect of the fifth cervical vertebral body. Arms and legs severed through the joints, which is unusual, as I’ve pointed out before. Victims are a racial mix, estimated ages between eighteen and thirty-five. All are unidentified and signed out as homicides by unspecified means. In each case, heads and limbs were never found, the remains discovered in privately owned landfills.”
“Damn, if that don’t sound familiar,” he said.
“There are other details. But yes, the parallels are profound.”
“So maybe the squirrel’s in the U.S. now,” he said. “Guess it’s a damn good thing you went over there, after all.”
He certainly hadn’t thought so at first. No one really had. I was the chief medical examiner of Virginia, and when the Royal College of Surgeons had invited me to give a series of lectures at Trinity’s medical school, I could not pass up an opportunity to investigate the Dublin crimes. Marino had thought it a waste of time, while the FBI had assumed the value of the research would prove to be little more than statistical.
Doubts were understandable. The homicides in Ireland were more than ten years old, and as was true in the Virginia cases, there was so little to go on. We did not have fingerprints, dentition, sinus configurations or witnesses for identification. We did not have biological samples from people missing to compare to the victims’ DNA. We did not know the means of death. Therefore, it was very difficult to say much about the killer, except that I believed he was experienced with a meat saw and quite possibly used one i
n his profession, or had at one time.
“The last case in Ireland, that we know of, was a decade ago,” I was saying to Marino over the line. “In the past two years we’ve had four in Virginia.”
“So you’re thinking he stopped for eight years?” he said. “Why? He was in prison, maybe, for some other crime?”
“I don’t know. He may have been killing somewhere else and the cases haven’t been connected,” I replied as wind made unearthly sounds.
“There’s those serial cases in South Africa,” he thickly thought out loud. “In Florence, Germany, Russia, Australia. Shit, now that you think of it, they’re friggin’ everywhere. Hey!” He put his hand over the phone. “Smoke your own damn cigarettes! What do you think this is? Friggin’ welfare!”
Male voices were rowdy in the background, and someone had put on Randy Travis.
“Sounds like you’re having fun,” I dryly said. “Please don’t invite me next year, either.”
“Bunch of animals,” he mumbled. “Don’t ask me why I do this. Every time they drink me outa house, home. Cheat at cards.”
“The M.O. in these cases is very distinctive.” My tone was meant to sober.
“Okay,” he said. “So if this guy started in Dublin, maybe we’re looking for someone Irish. I think you should hurry back home.” He belched. “Sounds like we need to go to Quantico and get on this. You told Benton yet?”
Benton Wesley headed the FBI’s Child Abduction Serial Killer Unit, or CASKU, for which both Marino and I were consultants.
“I haven’t had a chance to tell him yet,” I replied, hesitantly. “Maybe you can give him a heads-up. I’ll get home as soon as I can.”
“Tomorrow would be good.”
“I’m not finished with the lecture series here,” I said.
“Ain’t a place in the world that don’t want you to lecture. You could probably do that and nothing else,” he said, and I knew he was about to dig into me.
“We export our violence to other countries,” I said. “The least we can do is teach them what we know, what we’ve learned from years of working these crimes . . .”
“If you don’t give me these things I’ve requested, I can do nothing more for him,” I flatly stated.
Bear went over to a desk and got on the hostage phone. He said we needed ice and more drugs. I knew Lucy and her team had better act now or I probably would be shot. I moved away from Hand’s spreading puddle, and as I looked at his face it was hard for me to believe that he had so much power over others. But every man in this room and those in the reactor and on the barge would kill for him. In fact, they already had.
“The robot’s bringing the shit. I’m going out to get it,” said Bear as he looked out the window. “It’s on its way now.”
“You go out there you’re probably going to get your ass shot off.”
“Not with her in here.” Bear’s eyes were hostile and crazed.
“The robot can bring it to you,” I surprised them by saying.
Bear laughed. “You remember all those stairs? You think that tin-ass piece of shit’s going to get up those?”
“It’s perfectly capable,” I said, and I hoped this was true.
“Hey, make it bring the stuff in so no one has to go out,” another man said.
Bear got Wesley on the hostage phone again. “Make the robot bring the supplies to the control room. We’re not coming out.” He slammed the receiver down, not realizing what he had just done.
I thought of my niece and said a prayer for her because I knew this would be her hardest challenge. I jumped as I suddenly felt the barrel of a gun against the back of my neck.
“You let him die, you’re dead, too. You got that, bitch?”
I did not move.
“Pretty soon, we got to sail out of here, and he’d better be going with us.”
“As long as you keep me in supplies, I will keep him alive,” I quietly said.
He removed the gun from my neck and I injected the last vial of saline into their dead leader’s IV line. Beads of sweat were rolling down my back, and the skirt of the gown I had put over my clothes was soaked. I imagined Lucy this minute outside the mobile outpost in her virtual reality gear. I imagined her moving her fingers and arms and stepping here and there as fiber optics made it possible for her to read every inch of the terrain on her CRTs. Her telepresence was the only hope that Toto would not get stuck in a corner or fall somewhere.
The men were looking out the window and commented when the robot’s tracks carried him up the handicap ramp and he went inside.
“I wouldn’t mind having one of those,” one of them said.
“You’re too stupid to figure out how to use it.”
“No way. That baby ain’t radio-controlled. Nothing radio-controlled would work in here. You got any idea how thick the walls are?”
“It’d be great for carrying in firewood when the weather sucks.”
“Excuse me, I need to use the bathroom,” one of the hostages timidly said.
“Shit. Not again.”
My tension got unbearable as I feared what would happen if they went out and were not back when Toto appeared.
“Hey, just make him wait. Damn, I wish we could close these windows. It’s cold as shit in here.”
“Well, you won’t get none of that clean, cold air in Tripoli. Better enjoy it while you can.”
Several of them laughed at the same time the door opened and another man walked in who I had not seen before. He was dark-skinned and bearded, wearing a heavy jacket and fatigues, and he was angry.
“We have only fifteen assemblies out and in casks on the barge,” he spoke with authority and a heavy accent. “You must give us more time. Then we can get more.”
“Fifteen’s a hell of a lot,” Bear said, and he did not seem to care for this man.
“We need twenty-five assemblies at the very least! That was the arrangement.”
“No one’s told me that.”
“He knows that.” The man with the accent looked at Hand’s body on the floor.
“Well, he ain’t available to discuss it with you.” Bear crushed out a cigarette with the toe of his boot.
“Do you understand?” The foreign man was furious now. “Each assembly weighs a ton, and the crane has to pull it from the flooded reactor to the pool, then get it into a cask. It is very slow and very difficult. It is very dangerous. You promised we would have at least twenty-five. Now you are rushing and sloppy because of him.” The man angrily pointed at Hand. “We have an agreement!”
“My only agreement is to take care of him. We gotta get him on the barge and take the doctor with us. Then we get him to a hospital.”
“This is nonsense! He looks already dead to me! You are lunatics!”
“He’s not dead.”
“Look at him. He is white as snow and does not breathe. He is dead!”
They were screaming at each other, and Bear’s boots were loud as he strode over to me and demanded, “He’s not dead, is he?”
“No,” I said.
Sweat rolled down his face as he drew the pistol from his belt and pointed it first at me. Then he pointed it at the hostages, and all of them cowered and one began to cry.
“No, please. Oh please,” a man begged.
“Who is it who needs to use the john so bad?” Bear roared.
They were silent, shaking as hoods sucked in and out and wide eyes stared.
“Was it you?” The gun pointed at someone else.
The control room door had been left open, and I could hear the whirring of Toto down the hall. He had made it up the stairs and along a catwalk, and he would be here in seconds. I retrieved a long metal flashlight that had been designed by ERF and tucked into the medical chest by my niece.
“Shit, I want to know if he’s dead,” one of the men said, and I knew my charade was over.
“I’ll show you,” I said as the whirring got louder.
I pointed the flashlight at Bear as I pushed a button, and he shrieked at the dazzling pop as he grabbed his eyes and I swung the heavy flashlight like a baseball bat. Bones shattered in his wrist, the pistol clattering to the floor, and the robot rolled in empty-handed. I flung myself down flat on my face, covering my eyes and ears as best I could, and the room exploded in blazing white light as a concussion bomb blew off the top of Toto’s head. There was screaming and cursing as terrorists blindly fell against consoles and each other, and they could not hear or see when dozens of HRT agents stormed in.
“Freeze, motherfuckers!”
“Freeze or I’m gonna blow your motherfucking brains out!”
“Don’t anybody move!”
I did not budge in Joel Hand’s icy grave as helicopters shook windows and feet of fast-roping agents kicked in screens. Handcuffs snapped, and weapons clattered across the floor as they were kicked out of the way. I heard people crying and realized they were the hostages being taken away.
“It’s all right. You’re safe now.”
“Oh my God. Oh thank you, God.”
“Come on. We need to get you on out of here.”
When I finally felt a cool hand on the side of my neck, I realized the person was checking for vital signs because I looked dead.
“Aunt Kay?” It was Lucy’s strained voice.
I turned over and slowly sat up. My hands and the side of my face that had been in water were numb, and I looked around, dazed. I was shaking so badly my teeth were chattering as she squatted beside me, gun in hand. Her eyes roamed the room as other agents in black fatigues were taking the last prisoners out.
“Come on, let me help you up,” she said.
She gave me her hand, and my muscles trembled as if I were about to have a seizure. I could not get warm, and my ears would not stop ringing. When I was standing, I could see Toto near the door. His eye had been scorched, his head blackened, the domed top of it gone. He was silent in his cold trail of fiber optic cable, and no one paid him any mind as one by one all of the New Zionists were taken away.
Lucy looked down at the cold body on the floor, at the water and IV
“God,” she said.
“Is it safe to go out?” I had tears in my eyes.
“We’ve just now taken control of the containment area, and took the barge the same time we took the control room. Several of them had to be shot because they wouldn’t drop their weapons. Marino got one in the parking lot.”
“He shot one of them?”
“He had to,” she said. “We think we got everyone—I guess about thirty—but we’re still being careful. This place is wired with explosives, come on. Are you able to walk?”
“Of course I am.”
I untied my soaked gown and yanked it off because I could not stand it anymore. Tossing it on the floor, I pulled off gloves and we walked quickly out of the control room. She snatched her radio off her belt and her boots were loud on the catwalk and the stairs Toto had maneuvered so well.
“Unit one-twenty to mobile unit one,” she said.
“One.”
“We’re clearing out now. Everything secure?”
“You got the package?” I recognized Benton Wesley’s voice.
“Ten-four. Package is a-okay.”
“Thank God,” came a reply unusually emotional for the radio. “Tell the package we’re waiting.”
“Ten-four, sir,” Lucy said. “I believe the package knows.”
We walked fast beyond bodies and old blood and turned in to a lobby that could not keep anyone in or out anymore. She pulled open a glass door, and the afternoon was so bright I had to shield my eyes. I did not know where to go and felt very unsteady on my feet.
“Watch the steps.” Lucy put an arm around my waist. “Aunt Kay,” she said. “Just hold on to me.”
Unnatural Exposure
PATRICIA CORNWELL
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
UNNATURAL EXPOSURE
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1997 by Patricia Daniels Cornwell
This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.
For information address:
The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is http://www.penguinputnam.com
ISBN: 978-1-4295-4176-3
A Berkley BOOK®
Berkley Books first published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
Berkely and the “B” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.
First edition (electronic): July 2001
http://us.penguingroup.com
TO ESTHER NEWBERG
Vision, No Fear
Table of Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Epilogue
And there came unto
me one of the seven
angels which had the
seven vials full of the
seven last plagues . . .
REVELATION 21:9
One
Night fell clean and cold in Dublin, and wind moaned beyond my room as if a million pipes played the air. Gusts shook old windowpanes and sounded like spirits rushing past as I rearranged pillows one more time, finally resting on my back in a snarl of Irish linen. But sleep would not touch me, and images from the day returned. I saw bodies without limbs or heads, and sat up, sweating.
I switched on lamps, and the Shelbourne Hotel was suddenly around me in a warm glow of rich old woods and deep red plaids. I put on a robe, my eyes lingering on the phone by my fitfully-slept-in bed. It was almost two A.M. In Richmond, Virginia, it would be five hours earlier, and Pete Marino, commander of the city police department’s homicide squad, should be up. He was probably watching TV, smoking, eating something bad for him, unless he was on the street.
I dialed his number, and he grabbed the phone as if he were right next to it.
“Trick or treat.” He was loudly on his way to being drunk.
“You’re a little early,” I said, already regretting the call. “By a couple of weeks.”
“Doc?” He paused in confusion. “That you? You back in Richmond?”
“Still in Dublin. What’s all the commotion?”
“Just some of us guys with faces so ugly we don’t need masks. So every day is Halloween. Hey! Bubba’s bluffing,” he yelled out.
“You always think everybody’s bluffing,” a voice fired back. “It’s from being a detective too long.”
“What you talking about? Marino can’t even detect his own B.O.”
Laughter in the background was loud as the drunk, derisive comments continued.
“We’re playing poker,” Marino said to me. “What the hell time is it there?”
“You don’t want to know,” I answered. “I’ve got some unsettling news, but it doesn’t sound like we should get into it now.”
“No. No, hold on. Let me just move the phone. Shit. I hate the way the cord gets twisted, you know what I mean? Goddamn it.” I could hear his heavy footsteps and a chair scraping. “Okay, Doc. So what the hell’s going on?”
“I spent most of today discussing the landfill cases with the state pathologist. Marino, I’m increasingly suspicious that Ireland’s serial dismemberments are the work of the same individual we’re dealing with in Virginia.”
He raised his voice. “You guys hold it down in there!”
I could hear him moving farther away from his pals as I rearranged the duvet around me. I reached for the last few sips of Black Bush I had carried to bed.
“Dr. Foley worked the five Dublin cases,” I went on. “I’ve reviewed all of them. Torsos. Spines cut horizontally through the caudal aspect of the fifth cervical vertebral body. Arms and legs severed through the joints, which is unusual, as I’ve pointed out before. Victims are a racial mix, estimated ages between eighteen and thirty-five. All are unidentified and signed out as homicides by unspecified means. In each case, heads and limbs were never found, the remains discovered in privately owned landfills.”
“Damn, if that don’t sound familiar,” he said.
“There are other details. But yes, the parallels are profound.”
“So maybe the squirrel’s in the U.S. now,” he said. “Guess it’s a damn good thing you went over there, after all.”
He certainly hadn’t thought so at first. No one really had. I was the chief medical examiner of Virginia, and when the Royal College of Surgeons had invited me to give a series of lectures at Trinity’s medical school, I could not pass up an opportunity to investigate the Dublin crimes. Marino had thought it a waste of time, while the FBI had assumed the value of the research would prove to be little more than statistical.
Doubts were understandable. The homicides in Ireland were more than ten years old, and as was true in the Virginia cases, there was so little to go on. We did not have fingerprints, dentition, sinus configurations or witnesses for identification. We did not have biological samples from people missing to compare to the victims’ DNA. We did not know the means of death. Therefore, it was very difficult to say much about the killer, except that I believed he was experienced with a meat saw and quite possibly used one i
“The last case in Ireland, that we know of, was a decade ago,” I was saying to Marino over the line. “In the past two years we’ve had four in Virginia.”
“So you’re thinking he stopped for eight years?” he said. “Why? He was in prison, maybe, for some other crime?”
“I don’t know. He may have been killing somewhere else and the cases haven’t been connected,” I replied as wind made unearthly sounds.
“There’s those serial cases in South Africa,” he thickly thought out loud. “In Florence, Germany, Russia, Australia. Shit, now that you think of it, they’re friggin’ everywhere. Hey!” He put his hand over the phone. “Smoke your own damn cigarettes! What do you think this is? Friggin’ welfare!”
Male voices were rowdy in the background, and someone had put on Randy Travis.
“Sounds like you’re having fun,” I dryly said. “Please don’t invite me next year, either.”
“Bunch of animals,” he mumbled. “Don’t ask me why I do this. Every time they drink me outa house, home. Cheat at cards.”
“The M.O. in these cases is very distinctive.” My tone was meant to sober.
“Okay,” he said. “So if this guy started in Dublin, maybe we’re looking for someone Irish. I think you should hurry back home.” He belched. “Sounds like we need to go to Quantico and get on this. You told Benton yet?”
Benton Wesley headed the FBI’s Child Abduction Serial Killer Unit, or CASKU, for which both Marino and I were consultants.
“I haven’t had a chance to tell him yet,” I replied, hesitantly. “Maybe you can give him a heads-up. I’ll get home as soon as I can.”
“Tomorrow would be good.”
“I’m not finished with the lecture series here,” I said.
“Ain’t a place in the world that don’t want you to lecture. You could probably do that and nothing else,” he said, and I knew he was about to dig into me.
“We export our violence to other countries,” I said. “The least we can do is teach them what we know, what we’ve learned from years of working these crimes . . .”