“So your department sent you here,” Watson spoke up. “Why? To be a watchdog? To magically prevent another crime? You didn’t even make anyone aware of your concerns.”
Mac shot the man a look. “For the record, I told everybody who would listen about my goddamn concerns. But let’s face it, around here, cold cases are a dime a dozen; everybody comes bearing that one investigation that’s still keeping them up at night. Best I could do was get a preliminary meeting with a forensic linguist in the BSU—Dr. Ennunzio—and show him the letters to the editor. What he thinks, however, I don’t know ’cause he’s been dodging my calls ever since. And now here we are. I got a good lead a bad way, and you’re barking up the wrong tree, you paranoid piece of shit.”
“Well, that summarizes things nicely,” Rainie said.
Watson’s face had developed a red mottled look above his regulation red tie. Mac just kept staring him in the eye. He was angrier than he should be, making enemies when he needed allies. He didn’t care. Another girl was dead, and Mac was tired of standing in an office, discussing a case these guys would never understand in time to make a difference.
“I still see no compelling evidence between this body and what happened in Georgia.” Kaplan spoke up finally. “Did the caller tell you this so-called Eco-Killer was going to strike this week?”
“Not specifically.”
“Did he tell you it would be at the FBI Academy?”
“Can’t say that he did.”
“Did he give you a reason why this killer has done nothing for three years?”
“Nope.”
“Or why he would move from Georgia to Virginia?”
“Nope.”
“In other words, the caller has told you nothing at all.”
“You got me, sir. That is the major weakness of our investigation. Five years later, we still know nothin’, and today hasn’t changed a thing. So maybe we can wrap this up now, so I can get back out there and, you know, do something.”
The former Marine ignored him, turning his attention to the rest of the suits instead. “So what we’re really left with is a letter to the editor written six months before the body was found today. It’s too far-fetched,” he said flatly. “Some Georgian serial killer, who does nothing in three years, suddenly delivers a body to Quantico grounds, while only notifying a National Academy student. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Should he have called you instead?” Rainie asked. Her voice held just the barest hint of sarcasm and Mac liked her immensely for it.
“That’s not what I’m saying—”
“Or maybe he should’ve explained himself better in one of his notes?”
“Now that’s not a half-bad thought! If this guy is leaving notes, where’s the one for this body? Seems to me he likes to take credit for his crimes. So where’s the ownership?”
“It’s been three years,” Rainie said. “Maybe he’s had a change of heart.”
“Listen,” Mac interjected tightly. He could feel the urgency growing in his voice. Vainly, he tried to swallow it down. But he just didn’t have time for this. They didn’t understand; without the proper paperwork and memos, they never would understand. And maybe that’s what the Eco-Killer grasped better than any of them suspected. No bureaucracy moved fast, particularly one involved in law enforcement. No, law enforcement agencies moved painfully slow, dotting i’s, crossing t’s, and covering asses along the way. While a lone girl was dropped off in some surreal wilderness terrain, clutching her gallon of water, wearing her party clothes, and probably wondering what was gonna get her next.
“There’s more than a damn letter. The Eco-Killer has rules, Rules of the Game, we call them, and we’re seeing plenty of them in this murder. At least enough to convince me.” Mac ticked off his first finger, “One, he only strikes during a heat wave.”
“It’s July, we have plenty of heat waves,” Watson objected.
Mac ignored the FBI agent. “Two, the first girl is always found with clothing and purse intact. No sign of robbery, no sign of sexual assault. Body has one bruise in the thigh or buttocks, but cause of death is an overdose of the tranquilizer Ativan, injected into the upper left arm.”
Watson skewered Kimberly with a look. “Well, you really didn’t spare him any of the details, did you?”
“I went and looked for myself!” Mac spoke up sharply. “Dammit, I’ve been waiting for this moment for three long years. Of course I paid a visit to your crime scene. New agents aren’t the only people who can go skulking around in the woods—”
“You had no right—”
“I had every right! I know this man. I have studied him for five goddamn years. And I’m telling you, we don’t have time for this kind of bullshit. Don’t you get it yet? This girl isn’t the only victim. Rule number three: he always kidnaps in pairs, because the first girl is just a map. She’s a tool to help you find where the real game is going down.”
“What do you mean, ‘where the real game is going down’?” Rainie asked.
“I mean there’s another girl out there, right now. She was traveling with this girl, maybe her sister or roommate or best friend. But she was with the first victim when they were both ambushed, and now she’s been taken somewhere. He picked out the place ahead of time. It’s somewhere geographically unique, but also very, very treacherous. In our state he chose a granite gorge, a vast farming county, then the banks of the Savannah River, and finally marshlands around the coast. He likes places exposed, with natural predators such as rattlesnakes and bears and bobcats. He likes places isolated, so even if the girls roam for days they still won’t run into anyone who can offer them help. He likes places that are environmentally important, but no one thinks about anymore.
“Then he turns these girls loose, drugged, dazed, and confused, and waits to see what will happen next. In this kind of heat, some of them probably don’t make it more than hours. But some of them—the smart ones, the tough ones—they might make it days. Maybe even a week. Long, tortured days, without food, without water, waiting for someone to come and save them.”
Rainie was looking at him in rapt fascination. “How many times did he do this before?”
“Four. Eight girls kidnapped. Seven dead.”
“So you got one back alive.”
“Nora Ray Watts. The last girl. We found her in time.”
“How?” Quincy spoke up.
Mac took a deep breath. His muscles were bunching again. He grimly fought his impatience down. “The man leaves clues on the first body. Evidence that, if you interpret correctly, will narrow down the location of the second girl.”
“What kind of clues?”
“Flora and fauna, soil, sediment, rocks, insects, snails, hell, whatever he can dream up. We didn’t understand the significance in the beginning. We bagged and tagged according to SOP, merrily trotted evidence off to the labs, and found only dead bodies after that. But hey, even we can be taught. By the fourth pair of kidnappings, we had a team of experienced specialists in place. Botanists, biologists, forensic geologists, you name it. Nora Ray had been traveling with her sister. Mary Lynn’s body was found with a substance on her shirt, samples of vegetation on her shoes and a foreign object down her throat.”
“Down her throat?” Kaplan spoke up sharply. Mac nodded his head. For the first time, the NCIS agent seemed to have gained real interest.
“The sediment on her shirt proved to be salt. The vegetation on her shoes was identified as Spartina alterniflora. Cord grass. And the biologist identified the foreign object as a marsh periwinkle shell. All three elements were consistent with what you would find in a salt marsh. We focused the search-and-rescue teams on the coast, and fifty-six hours later, a Coast Guard chopper spotted Nora Ray, frantically waving her bright red shirt.”
“She couldn’t help you identify the killer?” Rainie asked.
Mac shook his head. “Her last memory is of her tire going flat. The next she knew, she woke up ravenously thirsty in the middl
e of a damn marsh.”
“Was she drugged?” Watson interjected.
“Bruise still fading on her left thigh.”
“He ambushes them?”
“Our best guess—he scopes out bars. He looks for what he wants—young girls, no specific coloring required, traveling in pairs. I think he follows them to their car. While they get in, he drops a tack or two behind their back tire. Then he simply has to follow. Sooner or later the tire goes flat, he pulls over as if offering to help, and boom, he has them.”
“Sneaks up on them with a needle?” Watson asked skeptically.
“No. He nails them with a dart gun. Like the kind a big game hunter might use.”
In the quiet room came the unmistakable sound of sharply indrawn breaths. Mac regarded them all stonily. “You think we haven’t done our homework? For five years, we’ve been hunting this man. I can tell you his profile. I can tell you how he hunts his victims. I can tell you he doesn’t always get his way—after the fact, we learned about two different pairs of girls who got flat tires and had a man pull over behind them. They refused to roll down their windows, however, and they got to live another day.
“I can tell you that Mary Lynn, whose body we found the earliest, tested positive for a second drug—ketamine, which is used by vets and animal control officers for its quickly subduing effect. I can tell you ketamine is a controlled substance, but also readily available on the streets; kids use it in rave parties, calling it Kit Kat or Special K. I can tell you Ativan is also controlled, and also used by vets. But pursuing all vets got us nowhere. As did investigating members of various hunting groups, the Appalachian Mountain Club, or the Audubon Society.
“I can tell you the man is growing angrier. He went from striking once a year, which takes a tremendous amount of control in a serial killer, to striking twice in twelve weeks. And I can tell you the man’s game only gets tougher. The first time, if we’d been paying attention, one of the clues was a rare herb found only in a five-mile radius in all of Georgia. Identify that herb, and we would’ve gotten the girl for sure. The last time, for Nora Ray Watts, the clues only led us to salt marshes. There are nearly four hundred thousand acres of salt marshes in Georgia. Quite frankly, Nora Ray was the proverbial needle in a haystack.”
“And yet you found her,” Kimberly said.
“She kept herself alive,” Mac replied tightly.
Quincy, however, was regarding him intently. “Four hundred thousand acres is not a feasible search area. A chopper could not pick out a lone girl when covering that kind of terrain. You knew something else.”
“I had a theory. Call it geographic profiling.”
“The victims were related somehow? Had areas of geography in common?”
“No. The bodies did. When you put them on the map and identified the direction in which they were facing—”
“He used them as compasses,” Quincy breathed.
“Maps. The guy sees the first girls as nothing but maps. So why not line up Mary Lynn’s body to point to her sister? She’s just a tool, after all. Anything for the sake of his game.”
“Jesus,” Rainie murmured. And all around the room, they were silent.
After a moment, Kaplan cleared his throat. “The victim this morning, she wasn’t aligned in any particular manner. In fact, her arms and legs were spread in four different directions.”
“I know.”
“It’s another inconsistency.”
“I know.”
“She did have a rock in her hand, though,” Kaplan was saying, his eyes appraising Mac. “And a snake in her mouth. Can’t say I’ve seen much of that.”
“She also had a leaf in her hair,” Mac said. “The ME pulled it out at the scene. I retrieved it later. I’ll fetch it when we’re done.”
“You’ve destroyed chain of custody,” Watson spoke up immediately.
“So paddle my behind. You want the leaf or not?”
“It just doesn’t make sense,” Kaplan was saying, still looking troubled. “On the one hand, the snake. Seems to indicate something off the business-as-usual map. On the other hand, all you really have in common is a letter to the editor written six months ago. Otherwise . . . it’s been three years between bodies and this is the wrong state for your man. Could be related. Or your caller could just be some asshole jerking your chain, and this body a matter of chance. You got an equal shot of going either way.”
Around the room, others slowly started to nod. Watson, Quincy, Rainie. Only Kimberly remained apart. Mac was proud of her for that.
“I have a theory,” he said abruptly. They looked at him, and he took that as an invitation.
“When this man started in ’ninety-eight, the first clues were obvious and easy. He ramped up pressure from there. Clues which were more difficult to find. Conditions which were harsher for the victims. A rapid escalation in time. He anticipated our own learning curve and to keep his game competitive, he remained one step ahead.
“Until the year two thousand. When we finally, seven bodies later, got it right. We saved the girl. And he quit. Because we’d finally won the game.”
Mac looked at Quincy. “Serial killers don’t quit,” the profiler said obediently.
“Yeah, but they don’t always know that, do they?”
Quincy nodded thoughtfully. “Sometimes they try. Bundy broke out of jail twice and both times he swore he’d stop attacking women. He’d quit, live a quiet life and get away scot-free. Except he couldn’t. He underestimated the physiological and emotional need he had to kill. In fact, the more he tried not to kill, the worse the compulsion became. Until he attacked five girls in a single night.”
“I think this guy tried to stop,” Mac said, watching as Rainie and Kaplan closed their eyes. “Except the compulsion, like you said, just grew and grew and grew. Until he had to start again . . .
“It’s not the old game,” Mac told them grimly. “We won the old game. So now it’s a new game. One where the victim’s limbs will no longer serve as compass points. One where the map contains a live, lethal rattlesnake. And one where the body is left outside the FBI Academy because what point is there to inventing a game if you can’t get the best to come out to play?
“In the year two thousand, this man killed three girls in twelve weeks. If this is the same man, if this is a new game, then whatever he’s doing now, I promise you, it’s going to be much, much worse. So sorry if I offend you ladies and gentlemen, but I can’t just stand around talking about this anymore. You don’t get to talk this case. You don’t get to write up detective activity reports or create timelines of events. From the second that first body is found, the clock starts ticking. Now, if you want to have any chance at finding the second victim alive, then believe you me, get off your butts and get to work. ’Cause there’s another girl out there, and I just hope to hell it’s not already too late.”
CHAPTER 14
Virginia
7:52 P.M.
Temperature: 92 degrees
HE WAS GETTING TIRED NOW. He’d been awake for close to forty-eight hours, and driving for a solid sixteen. The sun, bright and strong for most of the day, had helped keep him going. Daylight, however, was at long last beginning to fade. Behind him, the horizon was streaked with the vivid pinks and bright oranges of a dying sun. Ahead of him, in the thick wilderness into which he drove, the sun had already lost the war.
Darkness crowded under the thick canopy of trees. Shadows grew and lengthened, forming deep wells of black that swallowed up the world beyond sixty feet. Trees took on twisted, unnatural shapes, with leaves few and far between. Now, the landscape was interrupted only by double-wide trailers that squatted in the middle of fields, surrounded by the shells of burnt-out cars and old electrical appliances.
The man didn’t have to worry about anyone noticing his approach.
Kids didn’t play on these lawns. People didn’t sit out on these front porches. Here and there he saw lone bloodhounds, scrawny dogs with drooping faces and jut
ting hipbones, sitting dispirited on broken-down steps. Otherwise, only the steady line of road-killed possums marked his way.
Life still existed around here. Not everyone could afford to move. And some people simply got used to the smell that constantly permeated the air. A cross between rotten eggs and burning garbage. A heavy, acrid smell that made old folks gag while bringing tears to the eyes of strangers. A smell that made even the locals wonder if the high rate of cancer among their neighbors was really so random after all.
This place was still Virginia. But technically, most of the state would like to forget this place ever existed. Virginia was supposed to be beautiful, famous for its green mountain ranges and wonderful sandy beaches. Virginia is for lovers, the tourism board liked to declare. It wasn’t supposed to look like this.
The man took the right-hand fork in the road, leaving pavement behind and traveling on dirt. The van jostled and bounced noisily, the steering wheel jerking beneath his hands. He held it without much visible effort, though his muscles were tired and he still had several more rigorous hours to go. He would have some coffee after this. Take a minute to stretch out his arms and legs. Then there would be more work to do.
Life was about effort. Take your punishment like a man.
The thick canopy of trees gave way. His van suddenly burst into a clearing, where the dusky sky grew brighter and illuminated a scene straight out of a nightmare.
Yawning piles of sawdust stretched all the way up to the sky, still steaming from the compressed heat trapped in the middle and covered with a white film some people thought was dust, but was really a thin coating of fungus. To his left, ramshackle sheds with busted-out windows and teetering walls vainly attempted to shelter long conveyors lined with rusted belts and ending with giant saw blades. The teeth on the multiple blades appeared black in the fading light. Smeared with blood? Oil? It was anyone’s guess.
This place had finally been closed down a few years ago. Too late. Tucked away in this backwoods shithole, the mill had already spent twenty years polluting streams, killing off surface vegetation, and doing far greater damage beneath the earth.