“That’s mighty generous,” Grigg said, impressed.
“That include investigators?” Ring grinned.
“I don’t care who solves it.” Kitchen wasn’t smiling as he turned to me. “Now you tell me what I can do to help you, ma’am.”
“I understand you use a satellite tracking system,” I said. “Is that what these diagrams are?”
“I was just explaining them,” Kitchen said.
He slid several of them to me. Their patterns of wavy lines looked like cross sections of geode, and they were marked with coordinates.
“This is a picture of the landfill face,” Kitchen explained. “We can take it hourly, daily, weekly, whenever we want, to figure out where waste originated and where it was deposited. Locations on the map can be pinpointed by using these coordinates.” He tapped the paper. “Sort of similar to how you plot a graph in geometry or algebra.” Looking up at me, he added, “I reckon you suffered through some of that in school.”
“Suffer is the operative word.” I smiled at him. “Then the point is you can compare these pictures to see how the landfill’s face changes from load to load.”
He nodded. “Yes, ma’am. That’s it in a nutshell.”
“And what have you determined?”
He placed eight maps side by side. The wavy lines in each were different, like different wrinkles on the face of the same person.
“Each line, basically, is a depth,” he said. “So we can pretty much know which truck is responsible for which depth.”
Ring emptied his Coke can and tossed it in the trash. He flipped through his notepad as if looking for something.
“This body could not have been buried deep,” I said. “It’s very clean, considering the circumstances. There are no postmortem injuries, and based on what I observed out there, the Cats grab bales off the trucks, smash them open. They spread the trash on the ground so the compactor can doze it with the straight blade, chopping and compressing.”
“That’s pretty much it.” Kitchen eyed me with interest. “You want a job?”
I was preoccupied with images of earth-moving machines that looked like robotic dinosaurs, claws biting into plastic-shrouded bales on trucks. I was intimately acquainted with the injuries in the earlier cases, with human remains crushed and mauled. Except for what the killer had done, this victim was intact.
“Hard to find good women,” Kitchen was saying.
“You ain’t kidding, brother,” Ring said as Grigg watched him with growing disgust.
“Seems like a good point,” Grigg said. “If that body had been on the ground for any time at all, it would be pretty chewed up.”
“The first four were,” Ring said. “Mangled like cube steak.” He eyed me. “This one look compacted?”
“The body doesn’t appear crushed,” I replied.
“Now that’s interesting, too,” he mused. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
“It didn’t start out at a transfer station where it was compacted and baled,” Kitchen said. “It started in a Dumpster that was emptied by the packer.”
“And the packer doesn’t pack?” Ring dramatically asked. “Thought that’s why they were called packers.” He shrugged and grinned at me.
“It depends on where the body was in relation to the other garbage when the compacting was done,” I said. “It depends on a lot of things.”
“Or if it was compacted at all, depending on how full the truck was,” Kitchen said. “I’m thinking it was the packer. Or at most, one of the two trucks before it, if we’re talking about the exact coordinates where the body was found.”
“I guess I’m going to need the names of those trucks and where they’re from,” Ring said. “We gotta interview the drivers.”
“So you’re looking at the drivers as suspects,” Grigg said, coolly, to him. “Got to give you credit, that’s original. The way I look at it, the trash didn’t originate with them. It originated with the folks who pitched it. And I expect one of those folks is who we need to find.”
Ring stared at him, not the least bit perturbed. “I’d just like to hear what the drivers have to say. You never know. It’d be a good way to stage something. You dump a body in a place that’s on your route and make sure you deliver it yourself. Or, hell, you load it into your own truck. No one suspects you, right?”
Grigg pushed back his chair. He loosened his collar and worked his jaw as if it hurt. His neck popped, then his knuckles. Finally, he slapped his notebook down on the table and everybody looked at him as he glared at Ring.
“You mind if I work this thing?” he said to the young investigator. “I’d sure hate not to do what the county hired me for. And I believe this is my case, not yours.”
“Just here to help,” Ring said easily as he shrugged again.
“I didn’t know I needed help,” Grigg replied.
“The state police formed the multijurisdictional task force on homicides when the second torso showed up in a different county than the first one,” Ring said. “You’re a little late in the game, good buddy. Seems like you might want some background from somebody who’s not.”
But Grigg had tuned him out, and he said to Kitchen, “I’d like that vehicle information, too.”
“How about I get it for the last five trucks that were up there, to be safe,” Kitchen said to all of us.
“That will help a lot,” I said as I got up from the table. “The sooner you could do that, the better.”
“What time you going to work on it tomorrow?” Ring asked me, remaining in his chair, as if there were little to do in life and so much time.
“Are you referring to the autopsy?” I asked.
“You bet.”
“I may not even open this one up for several days.”
“Why’s that?”
“The most important part is the external examination. I will spend a very long time on that.” I could see his interest fade. “I’ll need to go through trash, search for trace, degrease and deflesh bones, get with an entomologist on the age of the maggots to see if I can get an idea of when the body was dumped, et cetera.”
“Maybe it’s better if you just let me know what you find,” he decided.
Grigg followed me out the door and was shaking his head as he said in his slow, quiet way, “When I got out of the army a long time ago, state police was what I wanted to be. I can’t believe they got a bozo like that.”
“Fortunately, they’re not all like him,” I said.
We walked out into the sun as the ambulance slowly made its way down the landfill in clouds of dust. Trucks were chugging in line and getting washed, as another layer of shredded modern America was added to the mountain. It was dark out when we reached our cars. Grigg paused by mine, looking it over.
“I wondered whose this was,” he said with admiration. “One of these days I’m going to drive something like that. Just once.”
I smiled at him as I unlocked my door. “Doesn’t have the important things like a siren and lights.”
He laughed. “Marino and me are in the same bowling league. His team’s the Balls of Fire, mine’s the Lucky Strikes. That ole boy’s about the worst sport I ever seen. Drinks beer and eats. Then thinks everybody’s cheating. He brought a girl the last time.” He shook his head. “She bowled like the damn Flintstones, dressed like them, too. In this leopard-skin thing. All that was missing was a bone in her hair. Well, tell him we’ll talk.”
He walked off, his keys jingling.
“Detective Grigg, thanks for your help,” I said.
He gave me a nod and climbed into his Caprice.
When I designed my house, I made sure the laundry room was directly off the garage because after working scenes like this one, I did not want to track death through the rooms of my private life. Within minutes of my getting out of my car, my clothes were in the washing machine, shoes and boots in an industrial sink, where I scrubbed them with detergent and a stiff brush.
Wrapping up in a robe I kept ha
nging on the back of the door, I headed to the master bedroom and took a long, hot shower. I was worn out and discouraged. Right now, I did not have the energy to imagine her, or her name, or who she had been, and I pushed images and odors from my mind. I fixed myself a drink and a salad, staring dismally at the big bowl of Halloween candy on the counter as I thought of plants waiting to be potted on the porch. Then I called Marino.
“Listen,” I said to him when he answered the phone. “I think Benton should be here for this in the morning.”
There was a long pause. “Okay,” he said. “Meaning you want me to tell him to get his ass to Richmond. Versus your telling him.”
“If you wouldn’t mind. I’m beat.”
“No problem. What time?”
“Whenever he wants. I’ll be down there all day.”
I went back to the office in my house to check e-mail before I went to bed. Lucy rarely called when she could use the computer to tell me how and where she was. My niece was an FBI agent, the technical specialist for their Hostage Rescue Team, or HRT. She could be sent anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice.
Like a fretful mother, I found myself frequently checking for messages from her, dreading the day her pager went off, sending her to Andrews Air Force Base with the boys, to board yet another C-141 cargo plane. Stepping around stacks of journals waiting to be read and thick medical tomes that I recently had bought but had not yet shelved, I sat at my desk. My office was the most lived-in room in my house, and I had designed it with a fireplace and large windows overlooking a rocky bend in the James River.
Logging on to America Online, or AOL, I was greeted by a mechanical male voice announcing that I had mail. I had e-mail about various cases, trials, professional meetings and journal articles, and one message from someone I did not recognize. His user name was deadoc. Immediately, I was uneasy. There was no description of what this person had sent, and when I opened what he had written to me, it simply said, ten.
A graphic file had been attached, and I downloaded and decompressed it. An image began to materialize on my screen, rolling down in color, one band of pixels at a time. I realized I was looking at a photograph of a wall the color of putty, and the edge of a table with some sort of pale blue cover on it that was smeared and pooled with something dark red. Then a ragged, gaping red wound was painted on the screen, followed by flesh tones that became bloody stumps and nipples.
I stared in disbelief as the horror was complete, and I grabbed the phone.
“Marino, I think you’d better get over here,” I said in a scared tone.
“What’s wrong?” he said, alarmed.
“There’s something here you need to see.”
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sit tight, Doc.” He took charge. “I’m coming.”
I printed the file and saved it on my A drive, fearful it would somehow vanish before my eyes. While I waited for Marino, I dimmed the lights in my office to make details and colors brighter. My mind ran in a terrible loop as I stared at the butchery, the blood forming a vile portrait that for me, ordinarily, wasn’t rare. Other physicians, scientists, lawyers and law enforcement officers frequently sent me photographs like this over the Internet. Routinely, I was asked, via e-mail, to examine crime scenes, organs, wounds, diagrams, even animated reconstructions of cases about to go to court.
This photograph could easily have been one sent by a detective, a colleague. It could have come from a Commonwealth’s Attorney or CASKU. But there was one thing obviously wrong. So far we had no crime scene in this case, only a landfill where the victim had been dumped, and the trash and tattered bag that had been around her. Only the killer or someone else involved in the crime could have sent this file to me.
Fifteen minutes later, at almost midnight, my doorbell rang, and I jumped out of my chair. I ran down the hall to let Marino in.
“What the hell is it now?” he said right off.
He was sweating in a gray Richmond police T-shirt that was tight over his big body and gut, and baggy shorts and athletic shoes with tube socks pulled up to his calves. I smelled stale sweat and cigarettes.
“Come on,” I said.
He followed me down the hall into my office, and when he saw what was on the computer screen, he sat in my chair, scowling as he stared.
“Is this what the shit I think it is?” he said.
“Appears the photograph was taken where the body was dismembered.” I was not used to having anyone in the private place where I worked, and I could feel my anxiety level rise.
“This is what you found today.”
“What you’re looking at was taken shortly after death,” I said. “But yes, this is the torso from the landfill.”
“How do you know?” Marino said.
His eyes were fastened to the screen, and he adjusted my chair. Then his big feet shoved books on the floor as he made himself more comfortable. When he picked up files and moved them to another corner of my desk, I couldn’t stand it any longer.
“I have things where I want them,” I pointedly said as I returned the files to their original messy space.
“Hey, chill out, Doc,” he said as if it didn’t matter. “How do we know that this thing ain’t a hoax?”
Again, he moved the files out of his way, and now I was really irritated.
“Marino, you’re going to have to get up,” I said. “I don’t let anybody sit at my desk. You’re making me crazy.”
He shot me an angry look and got up out of my chair. “Hey, do me a favor. Next time call somebody else when you got a problem.”
“Try to be sensitive . . .”
He cut me off, losing his temper. “No. You be sensitive and quit being such a friggin’ fussbudget. No wonder you and Wesley got problems.”
“Marino,” I warned, “you just crossed a line and better stop right there.”
He was silent, looking around, sweating.
“Let’s get back to this.” I sat in my chair, readjusting it. “I don’t think this is a hoax, and I believe it’s the torso from the landfill.”
“Why?” He would not look at me, hands in his pockets.
“Arms and legs are severed through the long bones, not the joints.” I touched the screen. “There are other similarities. It’s her, unless another victim with a similar body type has been killed and dismembered in the same manner, and we’ve not found her yet. And I don’t know how someone could have perpetrated a hoax like this without knowing how the victim was dismembered. Not to mention, this case hasn’t hit the news yet.”
“Shit.” His face was deep red. “So, is there something like a return address?”
“Yes. Someone on AOL with the name D-E-A-D-O-C.”
“As in Dead-Doc?” He was intrigued enough to forget his mood.
“I can only assume. The message was one word: ten.”
“That’s it?”
“In lowercase letters.”
He looked at me, thinking. “You count the ones in Ireland, this is number ten. You got a copy of this thing?”
“Yes. And the Dublin cases and their possible connection to the first four here have been in the news.” I handed him a printout. “Anybody could know about it.”
“Don’t matter. Assuming this is the same killer and he’s just struck again, he knows damn well how many he’s killed,” he said. “But what I’m not getting is how he knew where to send this file to you?”
“My address in AOL wouldn’t be hard to guess. It’s my name.”
“Jesus, I can’t believe you would do that,” he erupted again. “That’s like using your date of birth for your burglar alarm code.”
“I use e-mail almost exclusively to communicate with medical examiners, people in the Health Department, the police. They need something easy to remember. Besides,” I added as his stare continued to pass judgment on me, “it’s never been a problem.”
“Well, now it sure as hell is,” he said, looking at the prin
tout. “Good news is, maybe we’ll find something in here that will help. Maybe he left a trail in the computer.”
“On the Web,” I said.
“Yeah, whatever,” he said. “Maybe you should call Lucy.”
“Benton should do that,” I reminded him. “I can’t ask her help on a case just because I’m her aunt.”
“So I guess I got to call him about that, too.” He picked his way around my clutter, walking to the doorway. “I hope you’ve got some beer in this joint.” He stopped and turned toward me. “You know, Doc, it ain’t none of my business, but you got to talk to him eventually.”
“You’re right,” I said. “It’s none of your business.”
Three
The next morning, I woke up to the muffled drumming of heavy rain on the roof and the persistent beeping of my alarm. The hour was early for a day that I was supposed to be taking off from work, and it struck me that during the night the month had turned into November. Winter was not far away, another year gone. Opening shades, I looked out at the day. Petals from my roses were beaten to the ground, the river swollen and flowing around rocks that looked black.
I felt bad about Marino. I had been impatient with him when I had sent him home without a beer last night. But I did not want to talk with him about matters he would not understand. For him, it was simple. I was divorced. Benton Wesley’s wife had left him for another man. We’d been having an affair, so we might as well get married. For a while I had gone along with the plan. Last fall and winter, Wesley and I went skiing, diving, we shopped, cooked in and out and even worked in my yard. We did not get along worth a damn.
In fact, I didn’t want him in my house any more than I wanted Marino sitting in my chair. When Wesley moved a piece of furniture or even returned dishes and silverware to the wrong cabinets and drawers, I felt a secret anger that surprised and dismayed me. I had never believed that our relationship was right when he was still married, but back then we had enjoyed each other more, especially in bed. I feared that my failure to feel what I thought I should revealed a trait that I could not bear to see.