Signature Kill (13 page)

“You think you can get him in?” he asked. There was a strained pause in which Behr saw his shot at the crime scene vanishing before his eyes.

“Yeah, I guess. They’ll probably be able to take him …”

“Great, Suze, I’m sorry—” but she’d hung up, so he headed for the door.

Behr was at the scene within twenty minutes, and “fun house” was an apt description, if not an understatement, of what he found there. A line of police vehicles, ambulances, and coroner’s vans were parked along the winding two-lane drive that led to the campus of Donovan-Grant, a large pharmaceutical corporation that had gone out of business two years earlier on the west side of town. Uniformed officers kept a perimeter more than twice the normal distance, and a few arriving news vans were being held at bay. Behr showed his identification and waited while an officer radioed for clearance, which was quickly granted. He was shown where to park at the end of a string of cruisers, and then he walked toward the cluster of uniforms and windbreakers bunched around ground zero.

The smell of death and vomit hit him as he reached the edge of the crowd. A few less seasoned officers had lost their breakfasts. A couple of them had gone down to their knees and were being treated by EMTs and then walked away from the scene, probably for immediate counseling. Behr took a step closer and nudged his way inside a ring of vets and caught a whiff of menthol in the air, as the experienced cops smeared Vicks VapoRub under their noses and passed the tub along.

Behr cleared the row of onlookers and finally saw it. He felt his eyes zoom and spin trying to take in the unnatural sight before him at the edge of the parking lot. The body of a female victim, her skin alabaster against the black asphalt, had been cut apart and twisted and then reassembled, into a strange, squat pyramid. Her head was pointed in the opposite direction it was meant to. Facing away from him, it sat on top of the pile. The base of her skull, covered by lank blond hair with dark ginger streaks, rested directly on the shoulders of the torso, while the neck was missing altogether. Then after another instant Behr located it, a cylinder, removed from its points of attachment, the severed spinal column a white ring centered by pink marrow, like a round steak, tucked between a pair of crossed
and amputated feet. Behr saw that her breasts had been hacked off, and if they were on-site, he couldn’t see them.

He circled counterclockwise around the remains, passing between more officers who looked on in shocked silence, until he saw her face. Beyond lifeless, what remained of her eyes stared off into infinity. Her mouth hung open and was torn apart—as if small animals had gotten to it. Her hands were pressed to her colorless cheeks. Behr was no patron of the arts, but even he recognized the resemblance to the famous painting
The Scream
, by Edvard Munch. Except this version was real, and the subject’s hands were no longer connected to her arms.

Bobbing somewhere between horrified and mesmerized as he stared, Behr had to force himself to catalog his next impression, which was the lack of blood. There wasn’t as much as he expected. There was little, actually. What there was of it appeared to be seepage, as if the body had been vivisected and bled out elsewhere, before being placed.

Makes sense
. The blunt sentence came to Behr’s mind, as he tried to think rationally. It would be impossible to do this kind of butchery out in the open. But the coherent thought was pushed away by panicked impulses of mortality, of death foretold, and the inevitable end of all living creatures that flashed through the core of his being at what he saw.

Then Behr noticed the quiet. It was as near silent a crime scene as he’d ever stood on. There was a man-made pond in the near distance, with a fountain that had been dormant since the company shuttered its offices, so there was no sound from it. There were occasional footsteps, some radio crackle, and a muffled sob or two, but no loud instructions were being barked, nor were there any of the caustic jokes one could count on being tossed around a crime scene, no matter how gruesome, as a defense mechanism.

Then a smooth burst of concerted movement at the edge of the site and a series of clicks and flashes caught Behr’s attention. A lithe, medium-sized man with longish hair clad in an army field jacket crouched down on the ground with a big-bodied Nikon digital. Speed lights on low stands cut the flat, slate gray of the sky. The
man kneeled and kept on, lining up shot after shot, seemingly unaffected by his subject.

“Still life of death,” Breslau said, appearing at Behr’s elbow, chewing gum, a whiff of menthol about him, and a shine of Vicks above his upper lip.

“Huh?” Behr said.

“That’s what Quinn called it,” Breslau said, jutting his chin toward the photographer. “A still life of death.”

“Are those GSWs to the upper torso?” Behr asked of a pair of angry red holes on each side of the chest.

“No. First thought, based on the wounds, is that she was pierced and potentially suspended by rods or hooks through the skin.”

“Je-sus,” a cop next to them who’d overheard said.

“Has she been identified?” Behr asked.

“Nah. Is she yours?”

“Doesn’t look like it. Ninety-nine percent sure she’s not Kendra Gibbons.”

“That’s good, I guess.”

“Yeah. I’d like to do a DNA check though.”

“Sure.”

Behr’s eyes stayed on Quinn as the photographer moved in for a series of close-ups.

“You have anything?” Behr asked.

“We’re checking if security cams caught any footage, but it doesn’t look good. They seem to have been turned off and pulled out a while back when the company shut down the location.”

“Any security guards?” Behr knew that even defunct office buildings often employed night watchmen to keep trespassers out and reduce liability.

“Just doing twice-daily pass-bys. That’s who found this. He didn’t see anything, and he doesn’t know whether to shit or go blind right now. We’re talking to him anyway.”

Quinn was up from the ground now, dusting off his knees and drawing back several dozen yards, where he set the Nikon on a tripod.

“Lieutenant?” an officer said to Breslau.

“Yeah, Tommy?” Breslau drifted away to his conversation, and Behr headed for Quinn.

Behr waited a distance away while Quinn composed his shot, clicked the shutter, paused for a long beat, and clicked it again. He adjusted the aperture and took another few frames. The photographer reminded Behr of a hunter on a range sighting a rifle scope, such was his precision. Finally, he removed the camera from the tripod and began snapping what seemed to be final shots.

“Quinn?” Behr asked.

“Yeah,” the photographer said.

“Name’s Frank Behr. I’m an investigator here on a potentially related case.”

“Think I’ve heard of you. You used to be on the job?” Quinn said.

“Yep.”

“Call me Django.”

“Okay,” Behr said, wondering if it was his nickname or given one. “So, you ever see anything like this?”

“Well, they’re all a bit different, but I’ve seen plenty of shit.”

“You don’t mess with the Vicks?”

“Nah.”

“You’re used to it.”

“I save the crying and the puking for later,” he said, “but on the scene, I owe them …” Quinn waved his camera at the remains. “The least I can do for them is keep it together while I’m working.” The sentiment echoed Behr’s own feeling of duty at a murder scene and he nodded his agreement. “Ahh, the truth is: there’s not so much crying or puking. Not anymore. Fifteen years is a long time to be doing this shit.”

“Right,” Behr said. “I see you’ve got a real thorough approach to it.”

“I generally try to shoot from the same level the viewer would see the scene. No going up ladders or lying on my back, or other bullshit I’ve seen guys try.” Quinn lowered the camera, reached into
a pocket, and changed his camera’s memory chip. “Some shooters try to reinvent the wheel. I like to limit the scope, so the viewer’s eyes don’t have to move much. I frame so the viewer’s field of vision approximates my own while on the scene. That way they can experience being here. I hope. I just got it in my head this would be the most helpful to the detectives going over the photos later. I’ve been told it is.”

“I’ve noticed your work’s in a different league than the guys before you,” Behr said.

“Ah,” Quinn brushed it off, “they were good.” He held up his camera. “I’ve got this thing. Digital. I can outshoot my predecessors ten to one at no cost to get my shots. Imagine Tiger Woods with a wooden driver versus Ben Hogan with a Burner.”

“I see.”

“Anyway, you know Locard’s principle?” Quinn began, focusing for his next shot.

“Yeah,” Behr began. He’d read about the pioneering French criminologist from the early 1900s back in college. “Said anyone who enters a crime scene takes something of it with him and leaves something of himself behind. Especially the criminal.”

“Right,” Quinn said. Locard was referring to physical evidence—fingerprints, hair fibers, blood, soil—and beyond physical evidence, his theory included the methodology and psychological imprint of the killer. Behr believed the exchange went even further. Investigators on scenes like this one took horrible memories away with them, and left a small piece of their well-being behind each time too.

“That’s what I’m trying to do with my camera,” Quinn said, flashing a few frames. “I know I’m not actually going to capture a carpet fiber or DNA in my shots. But it’s metaphor, you know? If I do my job well enough, there’ll be something in the pics that helps solve it.”

“I appreciate the ambition,” Behr said.

Quinn finished, slung his camera, and began breaking down his other equipment, as the coroner’s crew who’d be handling the body parts, dressed in paper biohazard jumpsuits, hoods, and rubber gloves, moved in.

“That’s a hell of a shot there,” Behr remarked. The team looked like Roswell scientists huddled over alien remains.

Quinn gave it a glance. “Yeah. Can’t shoot it though. If I did, it could be subpoenaed in cases of alleged mishandling of evidence or whatever. Better not to even take it.”

“You photographed Northwestway?” Behr asked.

“I did indeed.”

“Related?”

“Look, that’s not my field …”

“But?”

“But I’d have to say so.”

“Because of the mutilation.”

“Yeah. I mean, you’ve got the low probability that there’s more than one of these animals out there dumping bodies in this condition. It’s not my area of expertise. I leave that to the detectives and number crunchers. But beyond that, there’s the visual impression. It hit me the exact same way there as it did here.”

“How would you describe it?”

“Like one of those fancy restaurants that serves everything stacked up in a tower on the plate. You’ve got to knock it all down before you can even eat that shit. They’re trying to create a big impression. That’s what this guy’s trying to do,” Quinn said. “But what the fuck do I know, right?” he added.

Maybe plenty
, Behr thought. Then he asked: “You mind if I get in touch? Maybe talk to you more about Northwestway, and some of your other scenes?”

“Yeah, thing is, I’m kind of busy,” Quinn said, covering his face with his camera.

Behr realized that despite the friendly chatter, he was just some donkey investigator bothering a guy at work.

“Got ya,” he said and turned toward the body, where Breslau now stood, his legs spread and planted, arms crossed at his chest, like some sentry of the dead. Breslau looked up and waved Behr and Quinn over.

When they got there they found a coroner’s assistant kneeling next to the body, holding the victim’s left leg in his gloved hands.

“Show ’em,” Breslau said. The assistant turned the leg and revealed a chunk of missing flesh the size of a quarter that was as deep as it was round.

“What do you think, trophy?” Breslau wondered aloud.

“Hmm,” Quinn said, as he focused and shot it. “Do a bite impression?”

“It’s not a bite,” the coroner’s assistant said.

Behr looked at the spot and tried to imagine the woman, alive, intact, and whole.

“You think?” Behr said. “I’d check Missing Persons for alerts on women with identifying marks.”

“Birthmarks, scars, tats.” Breslau nodded.

“Yeah, maybe he cut something off, to keep or to mask her identity. Give it a shot,” Behr said, and noticed Quinn’s eye come up from his camera’s screen and fix on him for a moment.

Soon the body parts were marked and bagged and loaded in a coroner’s vehicle, and then there was nothing left on the scene besides yellow “Do Not Cross” tape, and it was time for Behr to go after his suspect. He was just turning to leave when Quinn spoke.

“Bro,” he said, as his fingers went into his field jacket pocket and came out with a business card. “E-mail me if you want to talk, we’ll set it up.”

Murderer Jerold Allen Prilo drove up to his home in an old silver Toyota Camry. Prilo lived in half of a divided two-family house. He parked in a little cutout along a rusted chain-link fence and got out. Prilo was big and strapping, without excess flesh on his frame, and had thinning hair wrapped around his pale crown. He wore Carhartt work clothes and heavy Red Wing boots. He crossed to his house carrying a canvas tool bag in one hand. He wore canvas gloves as well, which Behr found interesting.