Memory Man

Bogart looked at the frames and then turned back to Decker.

“Okay, it’s a woman getting out of a car. The waitress from the bar. Leopold’s accomplice. Maybe this Belinda Wyatt person. She certainly looks like a woman to me.”

“Did you notice how the person got out of the car?”

Bogart glanced at the screen. “You said it was a guy masquerading as a woman. But now that we know Wyatt has this intersex condition, we don’t really know what she is, male or female. So it could just be her being a woman because she is a woman. Maybe she never had the operation.”

“That’s right. She may be exactly what she was twenty years ago. We know Leopold couldn’t have committed the murders. If Wyatt is involved with him, that leaves her. She’s the shooter.”

“Okay, but I’m not getting what you mean about her climbing out of the car. She swung her legs out and stood up. Like a girl or a guy would.”

“No, not like a guy would. Nothing like a guy would.”

“I’m not following.”

“Turn to the side and stand up, like you’re getting out of a car.”

“What, now?”

“Yes, now.”

“Decker!”

“Just do it.”

Bogart looked put out, but he turned to his side and put his legs out into the aisle. He was about to stand when Decker stopped him.

“Look at your legs.”

Bogart stared down at his splayed legs. “What about them? I swung them out into the aisle, which I have to do in order to stand up. The person on the screen did the exact same thing.”

“Look at the distance between your thighs.”

Bogart stared down at the large gap between his legs. “So what?”

“Look at the screen.”

Bogart glanced at the screen. There the person’s thighs were nearly touching.

“Look at the hand,” added Decker.

Bogart looked at the person’s hand. It was knifed into the narrow crevice between the thighs, edging the skirt down.

“Your legs were spread out and your hand was nowhere near your legs.”

“Well, she’s wearing a dress, I’m not.”

“Doesn’t matter. You’re a guy and, wearing a dress or not, you wouldn’t do it. You’d spread your legs and stand. And the person’s in an alley. No one is there to catch a glimpse up the dress. So why keep the legs together? Why place your hand there for added security to prevent prying eyes?”

“I give up. Why?”

“It’s the difference between being raised female and male. Women do that motion automatically. It’s ingrained in them from an early age, as soon as they start wearing a jumper and tights, and then a dress or skirt. My wife taught our daughter that motion when she was just a little girl. Every mom does. But a guy would never think to do it. Never. Dress or no dress. Guys don’t worry about people looking, because guys are always the ones who are looking.”

Bogart stared down at his legs, and then at his hand, and lastly over at the screen where the frozen image showed explicitly everything that Decker had just explained. He looked at Jamison, who had been following this conversation closely. Before he could say anything, she swung her legs out into the aisle. She was wearing a skirt. Her knees were pressed together and her hand was in the same position as the person on the video.

“It is hammered into us, Agent Bogart,” she noted. “Just like Decker said. It’s just automatic, especially when one is wearing a skirt.”

Bogart exclaimed, “So let me get this straight. Are you saying that our shooter is a woman, Decker?”

“I’m saying that if our shooter is Belinda Wyatt—and I believe she is—then she has retained the muscle memory from when she was raised as a girl. Whether she’s now a man after having surgery, I don’t know. Ironically enough, she may like that, after having been considered a freak for straddling genders, because she’s now able to use it to her full advantage. She’s a chameleon gender-wise. She can play both roles. It makes for very effective cover.”

Bogart swung his legs back in and rested his elbows on the table. Jamison did the same.

“Why do you think she killed Sizemore?” asked Bogart.

“That’s the other reason I started to focus on Wyatt. She was his favorite. He made that clear to me. He never told me about her background, but he spent a great deal of time with her.”

“Okay, but why would she kill him, then?”

Decker gazed at Bogart with a look of disappointment. “It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? He seduced her and had sex with her while she was at the institute.”

Jamison and Bogart stared at him goggle-eyed.

“Damn,” said Jamison. “That does make sense. Sizemore was a slimeball. He got kicked out of the institute for doing that very same thing with another female patient.”

Bogart said, “So he seduced this physically and emotionally battered teenager when she was at her most vulnerable just so he could get laid? Some favorite.”

Decker said nothing to this. He had returned to gazing out the window.

“You don’t miss much, do you?” noted Bogart.

“So long as I see it or hear it, then it’s always with me.”

Jamison said, “But what if someone tells you a lie? You remember it, but not necessarily as a lie, right?”

“Unless I’m told something else that doesn’t align with the earlier statement. Then I can start to figure out what’s true and what’s not. Small things tend to lead to big results. People don’t mess up on the big details. They fall down on the small ones.”

“What about Leopold? How did those two hook up?”

Decker looked back out the window and watched the clouds pass by.

He had no answer to that question.

He might never have an answer to that question.

Belinda Wyatt and Sebastian Leopold. Two of the most unlikely partners ever. But like the two killers in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, people paired together could do things unimaginable to each of them acting alone.

And he wondered what they were plotting right now.





Chapter


53


THE ADDRESS IN Colorado was at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, up a long paved road that had only a single house at the end that one reached through a motorized gate. But it was a substantial home, an estate really.

The SUVs slowly made their way up. An FBI team from Denver had met them at the private airport where the jet had landed. There were eight agents plus Bogart, Jamison, and Decker. Local law enforcement was down below keeping guard over the road.

“It’s out of the way,” said Bogart as the large two-story home came into view.

“Did you expect it not to be?” said Decker.

When they pulled to a stop Bogart looked at Jamison. “You stay put.”

“Come on. Decker wouldn’t let me go in Sizemore’s place either.”

“Well, I’m pleased to be considered in the same league with Mr. Decker,” retorted Bogart. “Until we get the all clear, you stay right here.”

They climbed out of the SUVs and the team quickly surrounded the house. A large separate building that looked to be a four-car garage was set off to one side. There was a pool in the rear grounds, covered now for winter. There were no other buildings. And there were no cars visible either.

“Place looks abandoned,” said Bogart. “For such a nice residence, the grounds are pretty let go.”

“We’ll see,” replied Decker.

The air was cold and everyone’s breath was visible.

Two agents went toward the garage while the others headed for the house. Three went to the rear, and the other half covered the front. With Decker next to him, Bogart knocked on the front door, identified himself, said that he had a search warrant, and asked to be let in. All he got in answer was silence.

He gave the countdown over his phone to the team in the rear.

Both doors were blown in by hydraulic battering rams.

The agents swarmed inside, clearing the rooms one by one until they came to the stairs. They headed up, cleared six bedrooms, and then stopped at the last one.

“Holy shit,” said one of the agents, lowering his weapon.

Bogart and Decker entered the room and stared down at the two chairs situated in a sitting room off the main bedroom area.

There was a body in each chair, entirely wrapped in plastic that was compressed tightly around their figures. The faces visible through the plastic were of a man and a woman.

“Mr. and Mrs. Wyatt, do you think?” asked Bogart.

“Anything is possible,” replied Decker.

* * *

Eight hours later the forensic team and ME had finished their work. The bodies had been identified as Lane Wyatt and his wife, Ashby. Their time of death was hard to pin down because they had been embalmed.

“Damnedest thing,” said the ME. “But it’s well done. Whoever did it had some experience doing it.”

“So all the blood removed and the fluid pumped into them?” said Bogart.

The man nodded. “And then they were wrapped in the plastic, and it looks like someone used a heat source to compress and then seal the plastic. Probably used a hair dryer. That and the embalming really preserved the body. No air could get in. The bodies are in remarkable shape.”

“And they could have been here a long time or a short time?”

“I’ll try to work up a TOD window for you, but it won’t be easy.”

Bogart said, “The cars in the garage are between two and four years old and the registrations are still current. And the food in the fridge, while expired, is not that old. And the house is in reasonably good shape. I don’t think they’ve been dead for years, unless someone has been living here while they’ve been in their ‘packages.’”

He looked at the ME. “Cause of death?”

“Not particularly evident. No visible wounds on the bodies. Could have been poison, but obvious signs would be long gone. There might be some trace of it in their tissue. And I might be able to get some blood out of them. There’s usually some left even with embalming.”

“Find what you can,” urged Bogart.

The ME nodded and left.

Bogart turned his attention to Decker and Jamison, who were sitting at the kitchen table going over some papers they’d taken out of a shoebox. Bogart sat across from Decker.

“Well, at least there were no cryptic messages to you painted on the walls.”

Decker nodded absently and said, “I doubt they expected us to get to here. Which is actually a good thing.”

“Why?”

“It means they’re fallible. And it means we’re closing the gap. The tortoise and the hare? Remember?”

“But why leave the bodies like that? They must have assumed someone would find them.”

Decker looked at him. “According to what your people found out, the Wyatts were retired. They had no family other than their daughter, and no friends. They kept to themselves.”

“So folks might not have missed them,” said Bogart. “At least for a while.”

“We should check to see if they used a pool service company. The pool was probably only winterized a couple months ago. If they came up to do it, they might have seen the Wyatts.”

“Good idea.”

Decker said, “The Wyatts had money. This place is over ten thousand square feet. And there’s a Range Rover, Audi A8, and Mercedes S500 in the garage.”

“Money can’t buy you happiness,” remarked Jamison.

Bogart looked back down at the papers. “What do you have there?”

Jamison said, “Letters from Belinda to her parents when she was at the institute. Your team found them in that shoebox stuffed under some junk in a closet upstairs.”

“What do they say?”

Decker said, “To sum it up, they’re letters from a frightened young woman imploring her parents to come see her. To come take her home.”

“Marshall said they never visited her.”

“So her letters went unanswered.”

“Marshall said they were part of the ignorant folks and really didn’t care about her. I wonder why they kept the letters?”

“Because of this,” said Decker.

He and Jamison laid the reverse side of all the letters out on the table side by side. Each page had a single capital letter written on the back. When read together and combined into words they spelled out something.

“‘I WILL KILL THEM ALL,’” read Bogart. “So she will kill them all. Meaning her attackers?”

“Or people who dissed her,” said Decker, glancing up at Jamison. “Or people associated with the one who dissed her.”

“And you still don’t know why Wyatt would think you did that to her?”

“No. But my wife and Special Agent Lafferty were both violated. Not raped, but sexually mutilated.”

“But Belinda was raped. And Mrs. Wyatt wasn’t mutilated.”

“She wouldn’t be. This didn’t start with her. And she’s not connected to me.”

“Comes back to you again. Always you.”

Jamison looked at Bogart. “Decker said you used to be an analyst at Quantico?”

“That’s right.”

“I have a friend at ViCAP.”

“She has lots of friends,” commented Decker dryly.

Bogart said, “Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. I was assigned there for two years.”

Jamison said, “Then you must have seen things like this before.”

Bogart nodded. “I’ve pretty much seen it all.”

“Okay, so walk us through it. What would the mutilation symbolize?”

Bogart clasped his hands in front of him. “Actually, mutilation of the female genitalia can have a lot of reasons behind it. It’s like a cornucopia of psychoses. Freud would have had a field day with it. I’ve seen a number of cases, all serial killers, where it was employed.”

“Then give us some examples of reasons,” said Decker.

Bogart leaned in, and while his voice grew softer, it also grew firmer. “It can be symbolic of a hatred of women and what they represent—being mothers, giving birth. The female genitalia are the gates to the birth canal, to be a little crude about it. I’ve seen killers do that to women because their mothers abandoned them. Or let them be abused by others. Mothers are supposed to protect their children, always be there for them. When a mother doesn’t do that it can lead to some really messed-up minds. The mutilation is a way of closing those gates, shutting off the birth canal permanently—not that murder didn’t already do that. But in their minds they’re actually doing something positive.”

Decker said, “Meaning another child can’t be born to that woman? And won’t be abandoned or abused?”

“Exactly.”

Jamison interjected, “Well, Belinda’s parents abandoned her to her fate at the institute. They never visited her there. They ignored her pleas to come and get her. And could she have seen the rape and beating she endured as her mother’s not protecting her?”