Believe No One (18 page)

‘Believe it or not, we actually thought of that, Nick.' Kate again, waspish. ‘They're saying that they never received the autopsy pictures.'

‘The hospital records department promised to look for them, but their office is understaffed,' Dunlap had added. ‘It could take months.'

‘Did you try the pathologist?'

‘Nick.'
Simms again, putting all of her exasperation into that one word.

‘All right,' he'd said, before she could get any further. ‘You spoke to him. But did you specifically mention the missing pictures?'

‘Hardly. We spoke to him before we knew they
were
missing.'

‘People who deal with the dead can be a bit geeky about their craft,' Fennimore had said. ‘And speaking as a fellow geek, I would definitely have taken pictures for my personal archives.'

That was two days ago. The second Task Force meeting was arranged, and Fennimore was invited. The hotel where he was staying had been designated as the Incident Command Post, and Fennimore walked into its function suite to find it filled to capacity.

Detective Dunlap greeted him just inside the door. ‘Glad you could spare the time, Professor.'

Sheriff Launer came towards them, smiling through gritted teeth, looking like a pit bull with toothache. ‘What the hell?' he demanded.

‘He's here at St Louis PD's invitation, Sheriff.'

‘You're on my territory, now, Detective.' Launer kept his voice low and the smile plastered on his face, but there was no mistaking he was furious. ‘I
told
you I don't want this guy – we got all the lab rats we need on your team. And two of my deputies are certified CSIs.'

‘Did those certificates happen to come with a Ronald McDonald happy sticker on the scroll?' Fennimore said.

‘Professor.'
Dunlap's voice was a dark rumble.

Fennimore shut up.

‘The Professor is consultant to the
St Louis
Task Force. You won't hardly see him,' Dunlap said, telling the Sheriff that they might be on his territory but Fennimore was not under his jurisdiction.

They were head to head, the Sheriff's grey eyes dark and flat, but Dunlap held his gaze without rancour, his own brown eyes carrying a look of calm certitude. It couldn't go on for ever – one of them had to concede. In the event, it was Launer; he stalked off with his neck stiff and his hands in fists at his sides.

‘I don't think he likes me much,' Fennimore said.

Someone spoke at his shoulder. ‘Stop winding him up – you might get on better.'

Kate Simms. He turned to face her, his heart skittering a little. ‘
He
winds
me
up.'

Dunlap looked at Simms. ‘He always like this?'

‘It varies.'

‘Professor,' Dunlap said, ‘stay out of his way.'

Dunlap called the meeting to order. Tables had been set out conference-style, to accommodate forty people; some were already seated, the rest broke from clusters of three and four and moved to join them. Dunlap asked Detective Valance to start them off. The young St Louis detective stood and moved to a laptop that had been set up on the projector table, ready for him. He was fair-haired and boyish, and seemed nervous standing in front of such a large gathering. Fennimore saw Kate Simms give him an encouraging smile.

‘The hospital didn't find Rita Gaigan's autopsy pictures,' Valance said. ‘But the Professor was right: the pathologist took some of his own, as teaching aids.' He slotted a data stick into the USB port of the laptop.

Rita Gaigan's body was bloated, the flesh mottled brown and green. The fingers, lips, eyes and toes had been predated by turtles and fish, but a spell of severe weather had made the animals sluggish and reluctant to feed, so it was in better condition than might otherwise be expected.

‘The Sheriff's report said she was found by a guy ice-fishing,' Valance said. ‘This was thirty months ago. You remember that winter.'

He got a murmur of acknowledgement.

‘Broke records going back to 1923–4. Twenty-five inches of snowfall and thirty below.'

That would be Fahrenheit,
Fennimore thought. Around –35 °C. He remembered BBC news footage at the time: ice storms from New York to South Texas; trees filmed in glassy ice; power lines brought down with the sheer weight of frozen water.

‘Guy cut a hole and saw something dark, bumping just below the ice. He reached in, thinking to scoop out a striped bass, held Rita's face in his two hands instead.'

A collective shudder from the fishermen in the room, Fennimore included.

Valance clicked through the images on the laptop. They were sharply focused, good colour contrast. The bruising to her abdomen and chest was clear. And it was similar to the bruises they'd seen in Fallon Kestler and Kyra Pender's post-mortem pictures.

‘The pathologist didn't look at these pictures until we asked for them,' Valance explained. ‘Just took 'em and forgot 'em.' He clicked to a third image. A smaller, slug-shaped bruise showed on Rita's upper abdomen, towards the right side.

‘This bruise isn't in the autopsy report, because it wasn't
there.
' It happened on occasions: a lucky combination of camera angle and flash showed up something that could not be seen under ambient lighting. Fennimore added the interesting bruise to a mind map he was compiling. The next image showed the position of the duct tape residue in Rita's hair. Across her forehead, and at the temples.

Patterns,
he thought, adding this to his chart. He did like to see a pattern emerge.

‘He used rocks from the locality to weight the bodies,' Dunlap said.

Which was disappointing: brought from elsewhere, they would represent another distinctive feature – they might even take them to a particular location.

‘But we did get something on the cords from the institute in Maine.' He nodded to CSI Roper.

‘It's a high-strength, low-weight double-braid,' the CSI said, springing to his feet as if he'd suddenly broken free of bonds. ‘The same cord at all the dump sites, going all the way back to Fallon Kestler, three and a half years ago. It's designed for marine use – mostly for racing boat rigging. High-quality and specialized – we're checking suppliers now.'

St Louis PD had retrieved the postcard Trey Gaigan sent to his aunt. The St Louis lab was backlogged for weeks and Low-template/touch DNA analysis was delicate and labour-intensive. To speed things along, Team Adam had paid for a private lab to do the workup. They found a tiny quantity of epithelial cells from a fragment of fingerprint-ridge detail on the postage stamp.

‘Male DNA,' Dunlap said. ‘Not the boy's. Partial profile – only just complete enough for a search, but we do know it's not the boy's. It's running through CODIS now, but don't get too fired up – we could get dozens of hits off it.'

Lab tests and statistical analyses were aspects of any investigation that ran silently in the background. From time to time, they would throw out a useful result, a line of inquiry, even the name of a suspect; sometimes they disappointed – as with the analysis of the glue found on the skin of some of the victims. It was identified as an adhesive used in a duct tape available in every Home Depot and Walmart in the United States.

Deputy Hicks was next. The search for Billy Dawalt in CODIS had come back negative – which at least left some hope of finding him alive. Dawalt senior
was
in the system, however: he'd left blood at the scene of a burglary after he smashed a window to gain entry. The irony was, if he'd consented to the Family Reference Sample in the first place, Dawalt would still be a free man.

As good as his word, Launer had allowed Hicks to go out to Lincoln County, but he'd made it clear to her that he did not want Fennimore hitching a ride. In the event, it didn't matter: wherever Laney Dawalt had met the man she lived with, she had told no one.

‘Talking to those folks was like shouting down a well: all you get is darkness and your own voice coming back at you,' she said. Nobody saw Laney with a regular guy, and when she moved back to Adair, she told no one where she was going. The first anyone knew that she was gone was when the park manager knocked on Laney's door and found the place empty.

‘I spoke to the manager of the trailer park in Adair again,' Hicks said. ‘He remembered something about Laney's boyfriend. Said he was a lot older than her. And he talked funny.'

Detective Dunlap glanced up sharply. ‘A few people we interviewed said the same thing.'

‘A speech impediment?' Fennimore asked.

‘No, sir. Said he sounded like he was from back East.'

‘Yeah,' Valance said, his blue eyes lighting up with excitement. ‘One of them said he sounded like a “Harvard” type.' He pronounced the word with the elongated ‘a' vowels of a New Englander.

They would follow that up as they continued to interview trailer-park residents and former associates of the victims.

The ongoing interviews had discovered another new fact: the man living with the victims wore a maroon Oklahoma Sooners sweatshirt. Launer pointed out that this information was about as distinctive as Hicks's earlier description of the man with long hair and a beard, but the rest disagreed: football affiliations in the States were partisan and it suggested that their mystery man was from Oklahoma, rather than Missouri.

Dunlap's phone buzzed, jittering sideways on the tabletop. He checked the screen. ‘The postage stamp gave us three mainland United States hits on CODIS.' This was better than they'd hoped for. Three hits meant just three suspects to track down and eliminate from the inquiry. Dunlap scrolled down the screen. ‘One is dead, one in prison and … a Henry Connor – ex-con, living in the St Louis area.'

Valance was already checking Connor's details on the system. ‘Aggravated burglary, assault of a minor.'

A ripple of excitement ran through the room.

‘No current address,' Dunlap said, a hint of disappointment in his voice. ‘I'll ask St Louis PD to put a BOLO out on him.' He nodded to Kate Simms to take over while he slipped to the back of the room to make the call.

‘The Serious Crime Analysis Section in the UK agree that the killings seem to be on a six-month cycle,' Simms said. ‘But the eighteen-month gap between Rita Gaigan and Kyra Pender means there may be victims we haven't found yet. We'll know when we have more data.'

‘You want data?' Ellis, the sour-looking detective with a slab of a face and a crew cut, rested his hand on a stack of papers to his right. ‘Responders to Team Adam's little infomercial.'

Team Adam had sent out a message detailing the commonalities of the cases to every State Bureau of Investigation in the United States, as well as to County Sheriff's Departments in 473 counties across Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas and Kansas, the killer seeming to work in a north-east/south-west corridor.

Fennimore eyed the wad of papers. ‘How many?'

‘Fifty,' Ellis said. ‘That's what happens when you go looking for trouble: you find it. Most aren't even listed on ViCAP, because I'm told it's a pain in the ass filling out the forms.' He riffled the offence records with his thumb like they were a deck of cards. ‘Fifty murders, in forty states. It'd take months to input all that data.'

Dunlap returned to the table. ‘We just don't have the manpower,' he said.

‘Well, we can't tell them thanks for the information, but sorry, it's too much work,' Ellis said.

‘They could do it themselves,' Fennimore said.

Dr Detmeyer nodded agreement. ‘It's how the system is designed to work,' he said. ‘If they believe their deaths are connected with ours, it's up to them to find the personnel to get the job done.'

Dunlap said, ‘Mr Whitmore, could you help with this?'

‘Sure,' the Team Adam consultant said. ‘We'll work out a strategy to, uh … motivate local PDs to input their own data.'

Dunlap's phone began to buzz again. Heads came up, focused on Dunlap. The detective excused himself, but every pair of eyes remained on him.

‘Where?' he said. A pause then, ‘We can have someone out there by early evening. He closed the phone and looked at the assembly, a gleam of triumph in his eyes. ‘That was St Louis PD,' he said. ‘They have Henry Connor in custody.'

Lambert Woods Mobile Home Park,
near Hays, Williams County Oklahoma,
Friday evening

Red made his way slowly, the trail ahead seeming to bounce from side to side on account of he was weaving just a bit. It was Friday and the start of summer vacation. He had gone to school like Momma wanted, so he reckoned he had earned his quiet beer at the end of a hard day. The beer was stolen, of course – he didn't think the pervert would fall for the same trick twice, but it turned out he was as slow in the head as he was on his feet. The plan was to sit in his den a while, drink his beer, be home by six, like he was supposed to – Momma and the boyfriend had a treat planned, a trip to the Pizza Hut in Hays, on to a movie later. But he'd smoked the last of his weed and fell asleep. Now it was getting dark, so it had to be after eight; time to head home, face the music.

Unsteady on his feet, he tripped a couple times on tree roots and rocks sticking up out of the dirt. The cicadas had been screeching fit to break window glass all day, but as dusk came, they fell silent, one by one, and now he could hear the
peep-peep-peep
of the frogs in the ponds off the track and the softer chirrup of the grasshoppers and crickets. Deep in the woods he heard a birdcall that sounded something like the rattle of two spoons knocking together; close by, a scarlet tanager was whistling itself dizzy trying to claim its territory over the racket. As darkness fell, it gave up.

Red hoisted his backpack on his shoulder and jogged the last hundred yards home. He went around the trailer to the front door and stepped into the living room, blundering through to the kitchen, his head warm and buzzing from the stolen beer. He opened his mouth to call to his mom, but changed his mind: he had the munchies bad, and he would no doubt be sent to his room without his dinner 'cos he was late.