“Yes, ma’am.” Hess signaled to a member of her forensic team, and they wheeled the body into the exam room.
“This doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Why would he hide the method of death?”
“Because he doesn’t want us to know,” said Potash.
“Yes,” I said, “obviously. But why not? Start asking the right questions.”
“Somebody find my son!” yelled Elijah.
“Get him back into interrogation,” said Ostler, gesturing brusquely to a nearby cop. “Find out where Mercer’s car broke down and get someone on the scene ASAP.”
“And check to see if her car was tampered with,” I called after them as they left the room. Diana looked at me quizzically. “Maybe The Hunter sabotaged it,” I said. “He’s not the kind to leave things to chance.”
“Get Dr. Trujillo on the phone,” Ostler snapped to another officer. “He’ll need to update his psych profile with this new information.”
“This destroys the profile,” I said. “Nothing we thought we knew about The Hunter makes any sense anymore.”
“He’s meticulous,” said Ostler. “He’s precise. That all still holds. Trujillo’s profile even theorized he was a doctor or a scientist, and this injection story corroborates that.”
“The only thing we have to change is the method,” said Nathan. “We thought it was mind control, now we know it’s not; that’s only one detail—”
“That’s everything,” I said again. “We thought we were looking for a Withered who stunned people and ate them. Standard predator behavior, regardless of the method itself. Now we’re looking for a Withered who’s actively deceiving us about his own nature. Why would he do that?”
“Maybe he’s trying to spook us,” said Nathan. “A needle in the back isn’t nearly as frightening as a mind-controlling monster, so he’s making himself look more frightening. Everything about his letters was intimidation—this is just one more piece.”
“Only if he could predict that we’d guess that he could mind control people,” I said. “There’s no way he could control any of that; it’s too many leaps of logic.”
“Unknowns are always more frightening than knowns,” said Potash. “The specifics don’t matter.”
“What did he do that he didn’t have to do?” I asked, thinking out loud. “He ate the needle marks because he…” I was grasping at straws. “He was ashamed of them because a Withered shouldn’t need to sedate people. Or he hated them because he felt guilty for what he did, so he wanted them destroyed.”
“The man who wrote those letters doesn’t feel guilty about anything,” said Ostler.
“I know,” I said, “I’m just trying to think.”
“Maybe the injection isn’t a drug at all,” said Nathan. “Maybe it was butter and herbs, like you’d inject in meat before you cook it.”
“That wouldn’t knock her out,” said Diana.
“If that were the case we’d see more signs of food preparation,” I said. “A guy this meticulous should be carving off slices and pairing them with wine. If he were doing anything to add flavor, we’d see evidence of it somewhere. Ketchup stains at a minimum. Instead he’s just … taking bites.” I frowned. “Almost at random.”
“Maybe the injection is the whole point,” said Nathan. “Maybe he’s proud of it, like it’s a sign of his own power, so he started to fetishize it, and eating kind of grew out of that.”
“That’s…” I paused. Not bad. “That’s the best idea you’ve had yet.”
“And that’s one of the worst compliments I’ve ever gotten,” said Nathan.
“Maybe all of these discrepancies stem from the fact that he’s not a cannibal,” I said. “Not innately. He’s not eating because he’s hungry or because he wants to consume the victim or anything like that. Maybe he’s eating because it’s a sign of power—not his power over the victim, but a symbol of his own ability to act. That would mean he’s not trying to hide the wound, he’s just making other wounds to commemorate the first one.”
“We need Trujillo,” said Ostler again.
“This doesn’t make sense with the hunting imagery,” I said, trying to regain their attention. But the room was already in motion.
A cop handed Ostler a phone, and she started filling in Trujillo on the situation. Nathan hunched over a counter and started pounding out notes on his computer. Diana answered her phone. Only Potash was looking at me.
“Anything else you want to tell us?” he asked.
“You look great in that suit,” I said. “It brings out your eyes.”
“Cops are en route to the husband and son,” said Diana, putting away her phone. “They’ve got the location of the car, but no one to spare on it.”
“Looks like us, then,” said Potash. “Come on, John.”
I checked my phone as we drove, logging in to the webmail server to look at the dummy account.
“Looks like they found it already,” said the e-mail. “I’ll send my official correspondence tomorrow. Anything you want me to leave out?”
Was he threatening to expose our connection? It was only the second e-mail he’d ever sent me. Or was he talking about something else?
I logged out of the server, cleared the browser history, and power cycled the phone. I might need to lose this one soon, too.
The car was abandoned on the side of the freeway; Kristin Mercer lived near the center of town, but Elijah had told the cops she drove to the outskirts to shop in the warehouse stores. We parked behind it, being careful of the cars racing by in the next lane, and it didn’t take long to find the problem: the front right tire was completely flat.
“The valve stem’s been cut,” said Diana. “It’s not a gaping slash, but it’s bigger than a thorn in the treads would have been. She probably got a few miles before she noticed.”
“And The Hunter was following the whole time,” I said. He must have slashed the valve stem while she was … dropping off her son at the neighbors? How did he do that without anyone seeing him? I looked at the cars speeding past. “The only witnesses here were going too fast to see anything, but we can ask in her home neighborhood.”
“He’s lucky she stopped here,” said Potash. “There’s no way to control exactly when a tire will go flat, and even less control over when a driver will stop because of it.”
“He had good odds that she’d stop somewhere on the freeway,” said Diana. “It’s a long drive from one exit to the next.”
“Good but not perfect,” I said. “But that might be part of his plan, too. If she’d stopped in a better place, he might have just kept going and tried to create another opportunity on another victim.” I looked at the wide, flat road, stretching out in front and behind us. “At least now we know a little more about how he thinks.”
Diana’s phone rang, and she plugged her other ear when she answered, blocking out the sound of speeding cars. “This is Agent Lucas. Okay, hang on.” She motioned us toward the car. “It’s Hess, they have some blood work back. Get in where we can hear.” We climbed back into the car, Potash taking the wheel so Diana could hold the phone. “Okay, Hess, I’m putting you on speaker.”
“It’s a sedative called etorphine hydrochloride,” said the coroner. Her voice was quiet over the speakerphone, and Diana turned up the volume. “We never would have found it if we weren’t looking for it—it’s a drug that works in incredibly small doses, and there’s barely any left in her system. But she was definitely drugged.”
“I haven’t heard of it,” said Diana. “Is it common?”
“Common but restricted,” said Hess. “It’s a synthetic opium, basically, like a superconcentrated morphine. It’s mainly used for large animals, like bear or bison. Makes sense for an attack like this because it works in seconds. Sale is restricted to veterinarians, and it gets used a lot in zoos. Around here it’s more likely to show up in the parks service, maybe a ranch—anyone who might need to sedate a moose really, really urgently.”
“Glad
to know we don’t have the weirdest jobs around, then,” said Diana. She looked at Potash. “A veterinarian who works with park rangers—that’s a pretty good lead.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” I said.
“You keep saying that,” said Diana.
“Because it doesn’t,” I said. “Now we’re looking for a Withered who eats people, and sedates people, and ritualizes the sedation wound, and is also a veterinarian and a park ranger, and stalks women who go shopping, and—come on. It’s too much. Why go to all that trouble?”
Diana rolled her eyes. “People do weird things, John.”
“No, they don’t,” I insisted. “People do rational things based on normal reasons that we haven’t found yet. None of this makes sense, which means we haven’t found the right reasons.”
“We don’t need to find the reasons,” said Potash, “just the killer.”
“You keep asking the same question,” said Diana. “What does he do that he doesn’t have to do? Why did he try to hide the injection marks? This is your answer: because they’re a massive clue that will help us find him.”
“But it doesn’t hang together,” I said. “Ms. Hess, are you still there?”
Her voice was tinny over the phone. “They’re right about this one, John—”
“Why is the sale of this sedative so restricted?” I asked.
“I told you,” she said, “it’s incredibly potent.”
“And how much do you need to knock out a human? Especially a small one like Kristin Mercer?”
She gave a curt laugh. “According to the product specs it takes around five milligrams to knock out an elephant, about three milligrams for a rhino—the closest thing I could find to a human dose is in the safety notes, where it says even scratching the skin with the needle could be enough. There’s a huge risk of accidental exposure.”
“So think about that,” I said, and turned back to Diana and Potash. “This drug is so powerful even touching it could knock a man unconscious, and we’re supposed to believe this guy injects it into his food?”
There was a moment of silence, eventually broken by Diana’s uncertain voice: “Maybe he’s immune. A Withered who can eat anything, like … that kid from the comics. Matter-Eater Lad.”
“You’re stretching,” I said. “Anything might be correct with a supernatural killer, but the simplest explanation is still always the best.”
“I know,” she said, and looked back out at the stopped car. “Damn.”
“We know this guy’s trying to deceive us,” I said. “He wants us to think he’s killing them one way, when really he’s killing them in another.”
“It seems to be,” said Potash.
“So which is more likely?” I asked. “The cannibal who’s feral yet meticulous, who’s magic but also uses sedatives, who’s a park ranger but also a veterinarian, who defies our profiling attempts at every turn because nothing he does makes sense, who not even our two Withered insiders have ever even heard of? Or a man who’s killing people in a bizarre, indecipherable way specifically to throw us off?”
“Start driving,” said Diana. “I’m calling Ostler.”
13
“He’s sent a letter after every victim,” Ostler told us on the phone. “We don’t have much time before he sends the next one.”
We got the address for the Mercer family and joined the cops already on the scene. The father was holding his boy tightly, crying in shock while detectives scoured his home for clues. The boy, about six years old by the look of him, seemed disturbed by his father’s crying and by the strangers in his house, but mostly he was curious. They hadn’t told him about his mother yet.
“It doesn’t look like anybody came inside,” Detective Scott whispered. “There’s no signs of forced entry, and the attack itself took place on the highway.”
“We’ll start talking to the neighbors,” said Diana.
I checked my phone again, but The Hunter hadn’t written back.
Nobody was home at the first house. The woman in the second house hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary and said that the guy from the first house left for work at five every morning.
“Define ‘nothing out of the ordinary,’” I said. “Did you not see anything, or did you see the same people you see all the time?” If the killer lived on this street, he might be one of the ordinary things this woman had seen and not thought twice about.
“Who’s the kid?” asked the woman.
“He’s one of our investigators, ma’am,” said Diana. “Can you tell us exactly who you saw this morning, if anyone?”
“Seems awfully young to be a policeman,” said the woman. She was older, with her gray hair dyed brown, and wearing some kind of shapeless bag with a floral print. “How old are you?”
“I’m forty-seven,” I said.
“You don’t have to get sassy about it.”
“Please, ma’am,” said Diana, “can you answer the question?”
“Do I have all morning to sit and stare out my window?” she asked, her eyes wide with indignation. “Sure, I saw Kristin take her boy over to the Smith place, which I told her not to do because I don’t trust the Smith family. Look at their yard! And Mr. Smith was already gone by then, of course, because he works in an office downtown, though I figure he can’t make much money from it or they’d fix up their house a little.”
“Did you see anything else?” asked Diana.
“The Mexican man in 2107 left to go to his job at eight, but then he came back at nine, or maybe a little after nine, so he may have gotten fired. He left again by 9:30: I know because my show hadn’t gone to commercial yet, and it always goes on the half hour.”
“Kristin Mercer took her son to Margaret Smith at 10:15,” I said, reading from my notes. “That’s the house across the street from you, correct?”
“And just look at it,” said the woman, waving toward it disdainfully.
“Did you see anyone near her car while she was inside?” I asked.
“Should I have?” asked the woman. “Has something happened to Kristin? It was that Mexican man, wasn’t it?”
“Please answer the question,” said Diana.
“No, I didn’t see anyone near her car,” said the woman. “What am I, some kind of a spy with nothing better to do than watch my neighbors all day?”
“Thank you,” said Diana. “We’ll get back to you if we need any more information.” She closed the door, and we walked to the next house. Potash met us coming the other way.
“They don’t know anything,” he said. “Nobody does.”
My phone rang; I hadn’t put any contact numbers in it yet, so I was surprised to hear Trujillo on the other end.
“John,” he said, “any luck at the Mercer house?”
“Nothing yet,” I said. “Ask Elijah if Kristin stopped anywhere else before getting on the freeway.”
“He already said she didn’t.”
“Ask again,” I said. “His memory’s terrible.”
“I want to talk about your theory,” he said. “It’s interesting, but it doesn’t hold water.”
Yes it does. “You think we’re chasing a ten-thousand-year-old veterinarian park ranger cannibal scholar who’s well-spoken and careful except for when he’s not?”
Trujillo sighed. “Is that really any more ridiculous than a ten-thousand-year-old plague goddess who packs a gun she never uses and makes sick kids sicker so she can hide in a hospital?”
“Yes,” I said. “Mary Gardner had solid reasons for everything she did. We don’t have that for The Hunter.”
“We don’t have it yet,” said Trujillo. “That doesn’t mean we never will.”
“So how does he not pass out from the sedative?” I asked. “He can’t inject it into their bodies and then eat them. Especially not Kristin Mercer—we found her hours after she died, but if he ate a sedative in her shoulder he’d have been too asleep to finish the attack, let alone dump the body.”
“We know he in
jected her,” said Trujillo, “and we know he ate her. We have clear evidence of both.”
“You don’t know it was him,” I said, and began to grow excited as I thought more about it. “That would actually explain a lot: what if he has an accomplice? Or a pet, I don’t know what you’d call it—someone he brings bodies back to, and then they eat them. That gives us the meticulous mastermind and the feral cannibal, in a way that makes sense.”
“And then the pet falls asleep instead of the mastermind,” said Trujillo, as if mulling the idea over in his head. “Still doesn’t work: whoever eats the body will fall asleep before they’re finished, unless they’re immune to the sedative, in which case we don’t need two people, we’re back to just one. Simpler is better. And the bite wounds are still too … deliberately random. They don’t follow a normal eating pattern, the way you’d expect from a feral accomplice like you’re suggesting. The best theory is still Nathan’s: that this killer somehow fetishizes the sedative—possibly because he’s immune to it—and then takes weird bites out of the corpse.”
“The best theory is mine,” I insisted. “That the reason this doesn’t make sense is because it’s intended to confuse us.”
“But that theory doesn’t solve any problems,” said Trujillo. “It denies all of our other answers without positing any of its own: it doesn’t solve the sedative eating, it doesn’t tell us how he slashed the tires without being seen, it doesn’t give us anything new we can work with.”
“It tells us our other answers are wrong,” I said. “We have to give them up and start over.”
“I have to go,” he said. “Ostler needs something.”
I hung up without saying good-bye. Why was he being so stubborn? He was so determined his profile was correct that he wouldn’t see any alternatives.
We were back at the Mercer house, and Detective Scott met us at the door. “Good, we were just about to look for you two, we figured you’d want to be here when we questioned the husband.”
Two? I looked at Potash and Diana, then down at myself before looking back at Scott. Typical.
“Hey, John,” he said, “can you do me a favor? We’re going to ask some rough question, it’s … not good a situation for a kid to be in.”