Stone Maidens (11 page)

“Karen’s given a good description to Mary.” McFaron stopped short of assuring Bob that he’d bring her home alive. “I won’t rest till she comes home or we find her. You know I won’t.”

“I want to join the search party.”

The sheriff gently rested his hand on the father’s broad shoulder. “As hard as it is, Bob, I’m asking you to stay home and take care of Karen and Maddy. They need you here with them.”

Heath shook his head; his lower lip pushed out. McFaron was thankful for having to deal only with Bob. Facing down Karen would have been harder with the blood evidence looming.

“I need to be going now. I’m on it full time, Bob. I’ll call as soon as I hear anything.”

McFaron got in his truck, waiting for Heath to go inside. Standing by a window next to the front door was the Heaths’ younger daughter, Maddy. Her face was plastered against the glass, staring at the sheriff. It was easy to see she’d been crying.

McFaron backed out of the drive. A mile farther down the road he veered onto the state highway, taking it north to Monroeville to the regional crime lab. He called his office on his cell. Mary was still there. McFaron told her he was headed straight for the lab, and then the briefing, and wouldn’t get to the Templetons’ till morning with the truck identification book. Mary said she’d notify Mr. Templeton and that she’d stay as late as he needed her to. Tonight he didn’t discourage her from the overtime.

The
STATE POLICE POST
sign appeared a quarter mile before the exit. McFaron took the turn and parked near the crime lab annex, which was a one-story gray building attached to the police barracks. The lab was well equipped for blood-typing, fingerprinting, and preparing samples to be sent to the main lab in Indianapolis for DNA testing, and McFaron had been there plenty of times before. Always with fingerprints though. Never with blood.

Missy Hooper, the girl who’d gone missing from Paragon Amusement Park, flashed through McFaron’s mind. Her decomposing body had just been found less than forty-five miles from here. It felt like a bad sign—and the blood sample riding on the seat beside him didn’t seem to promise anything good, either.

The ceiling lights in the narrow fuselage flickered as the Saab 340 turboprop commuter plane banked aloft, leaving behind the small Indiana airfield but not Prusik’s unsettled nerves. She checked her digital watch—7:30 p.m.—and adjusted the collar of the navy-blue polyester suit she preferred to wear to crime scenes and postmortems. She had spent a long day leaning over a decomposed body in a stuffy back room of a Blackie, Indiana, general medical practitioner’s office, blowflies constantly strafing her face mask in the makeshift morgue. Zippered in with the body as maggots, the pesky flies had emerged undaunted by an overnight stay in the cooler. The decaying flesh couldn’t disguise the ruthlessness of the young girl’s end.

Afterglow from the sunset came flooding through the porthole windows, coloring the cabin orange pink. In an hour a driver would pick her up at Chicago O’Hare and deliver her downtown to headquarters to face a barrage of questions from Brian Eisen and the rest of her team. Roger Thorne was impatient to see progress. Already stacked up on her new wireless PDA were three incoming messages from him since noon, wanting an update. Although she knew keeping him informed was part of her job heading up an investigation on a high-profile case, she was in no mood to talk to Thorne about Washington’s expectations. She needed clear air to think.

The fiery sky faded into a hazy charcoal gloom. The dead girl had a name: Missy Hooper. Dental records would confirm what the girl’s distraught parents already had. She’d been reported missing on July 4, close to a month ago, having last been seen by a friend, who’d dropped her at a local amusement park in Paragon, Indiana. From there, she’d placed a cell phone call to Glenna Posner, her best friend, a waitress who was supposed to meet her at the park but who’d canceled at the last minute. Posner’s feelings of guilt were so profound she had little to offer except one important piece of information: there was no boyfriend in Missy’s life, nor anyone Missy’d had a crush on, even from a distance. Whoever she’d left with, therefore, was most likely someone she’d just met. Interviews of park employees by Indiana state police officers had turned up nothing out of the ordinary. The Hooper family had recently moved from Weaversville, a city one hundred miles farther south, to Paragon, one town over from Blackie, where Mr. Hooper worked as a coal separator in a strip mine.

During the postmortem exam, Prusik had had to endure the plaintive wails of a distraught child in the doctor’s outer office. Between swatting flies and having to listen to the sobbing girl, whose mother kept calling her a crybaby for not cooperating, Prusik had nearly dropped the forceps more than once to rush out, dressed in mask and stained gown, and demand that the mother leave the office. But each time she had bitten her lip as she delicately lifted the dead girl’s fingers, carefully scraping and bagging the grit from under each grimy nail before taking a miserably gooey set of fingerprint impressions.

A sweltering heat wave had accelerated decomposition and jellified the flesh. Prusik had confirmed the estimated time of death: approximately twenty-four days ago. Larva hatchlings collected from the corpse were definitely second generation, meaning the body had been decomposing in humid heat since shortly after Missy Hooper’s visit to the amusement park. It disturbed
Prusik to see so many larvae squirming beneath the tissue, giving a weird life to the face.

What disturbed her more, though, was the startling discovery she’d made near the end of the exam. Her mind had started reeling with the bizarre connections the discovery forced her to make and then just as quickly discard. She had recovered her composure enough to complete the exam, but it had cost her. One Xanax, to be precise.

As Prusik had finished her job, the drama in the outer office had continued unabated. A nurse, now the mother’s coconspirator, kept repeating that the booster shot wouldn’t hurt a bit, promising the girl a cherry sucker when it was all over. Prusik shook her head in disgust. She hated it when people lied, and she especially hated it when they lied to children.

Too much had gone wrong before she got to Blackie. Police had crudely raked aside all the leaves at the crime scene, looking for a weapon, when it was perfectly obvious the girl’s neck had been broken. She wondered how long the site had remained unprotected and not taped off. How many onlookers had wandered down to see where it had happened? Prusik didn’t believe the local police’s assurances that no one had. How many unauthorized pictures had been snapped of the slain girl and sold already to the highest-bidding tabloid? The snafus were driving her crazy.

From her limited perusal of the crime scene, she doubted Howard’s field unit would have much success documenting which way the victim had fled through the woods, which might have led to the location of vital evidence. Howard had done the best job possible with a contaminated site, she had no doubt about that; he was nothing if not thorough. The business with the feather bothered her—why had he doled the information out so stingily when it was such a significant finding?—but she realized that she had to stop feeling threatened by him. Howard had his own fears and insecurities, no doubt. Alienating him now would do her no good;
she would only lose any insights he might be able to provide. The cases were spread over a wide geographic area. And if she wanted to succeed, she was going to need all the help she could get.

The plane bucked wildly, tossing Prusik’s briefcase onto the floor in the aisle. The seat belt light flashed on and the captain announced that they were in for a little turbulence. Her tongue was throbbing, and she tasted coppery blood. She’d accidentally bitten herself.

“Ma’am, are you OK?” A heavyset man in a business suit leaned across the aisle and handed her the briefcase.

“Fine,” she muttered in a funny voice, favoring her tongue.

It took hitting an air pocket to know she wasn’t fine at all. With her heart at a canter, the uncomfortable sinking feeling was taking hold again. She sucked for air, just as she had in the makeshift morgue with her arm buried up to the elbow in pulpy remains. When her hand had touched Missy Hooper’s torn windpipe, she had found something hard wedged tightly there. Pinching the object between a rubber-gloved finger and thumb had sent ten-year-old adrenaline shooting through Prusik’s veins.

Her eyes floated in and out of focus on the seat back in front of her. The past is never done with us, she thought. She had so successfully concealed it from everyone at the bureau all these years, but all it took was one little thing.
One little thing?
She interrupted herself.
One little thing? This was not a little thing.
She clenched her right fist, burying the pinkie nail into her heavily callused palm.

Furtively Prusik checked around the cabin. No passengers were looking. She flipped open the end clasps of her briefcase. Papers spilled from file folders onto her lap. A hard plastic vial rolled loose over the top, tumbling to her feet. Prusik quickly scooped it off the floor, ripping a jacket seam in the process.

She pressed her forehead against the small porthole glass. Blackness met her gaze. The vial in her hand had taken her straight back to the heat, the water, the terror.

Eleven years earlier, she’d been sitting cross-legged between the shelves in the graduate library stacks at the University of Chicago when she had come across a thin sleeve of hand-bound notes. They were research notes typed in the field by Marcel Beaumont, a graduate student in physical anthropology, her own department, in the early sixties.

Beaumont had done fieldwork two springs in a row in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. In May 1962, when he was scheduled to return home from Port Moresby, PNG’s capital, word had come back that the young researcher had vanished in the vast reaches of the Katori rain forest. One possible explanation for his disappearance Prusik had gleaned from the riveting final passages of his prior summer’s typed field notes. He had been in pursuit of an infamous highland clan known as the Ga-Bong Ga-Bong. Though forbidden by law, the Ga-Bong men continued the practice of cannibalism with depraved indifference. There appeared to be no social or kinship explanation for their behavior, nor could it be attributed to internecine fighting—the well-documented practice of ritual wars between tribal villages. Most ritual wars, as Prusik understood, were more a matter of economic shoring up, resetting the balance, a give-and-take between villages, not the wreaking of unholy violence as the Ga-Bongs did. Their attacks were haphazard, with no relationship to debts owed or reciprocal exchanges expected. No witnesses ever came forward, so feared were these nomadic kinsmen.

To Prusik it was too fantastic—a serial-killer family in the wilds of New Guinea. She read and reread the savage tale of Maleek Ga-Bong Ga-Bong, each time drawn to the tantalizing conclusion Beaumont himself had speculated upon—that the Ga-Bong men suffered from an inborn predilection to murder. Were the Ga-Bong Ga-Bongs proof that psychopaths existed among primitive peoples? Or that the drive to kill was not just cultural, but hereditary?

The Ga-Bongs always stuffed a charm or magic stone inside their victims’ remains, a ritual taken from an earlier age, usually out of respect for a deceased victim’s ancestors. But the Ga-Bongs could hardly consider inserting the sacred stones a virtuous act, Prusik thought.

Beaumont’s bizarre story struck a chord in Prusik. From his passages on the Ga-Bong clan, she devised her own thesis proposal: to study deviant behaviors among reformed highland villages in New Guinea where cannibalism was officially outlawed in modern times. She was dying to learn whether any Ga-Bong clansmen still roamed the Katori rain forest. Six months after her first avid reading of Beaumont’s field notes, Prusik stepped off a 747 into the blazing heat of the Turama River basin.

Prusik closed her eyes. Gooseflesh tightened the skin over both her forearms. With her right hand she felt along her left side, below the ribs, tracing her fingertips along the length of the ridged scar that ran nearly to her hip. Years later, during her short-lived affair with Roger Thorne, when he’d asked her about the scar, she’d lied to him, said it was from a freak accident at college, walking through a plate glass door.

She was certain the lie had affected their relationship. He’d never doubted her word, but she felt the gulf between them every time he touched the scar.

The pitch of the plane’s engines shifted, rattling the paneling overhead. The commuter plane began its descent, causing her ears to pop. She gazed out the porthole window. In the distance, the shimmering lights of Chicago’s tallest buildings jutted upward like a phosphorescent reef against the dark horizon. A patchwork of streetlights suddenly materialized beneath the wing, apparently as orderly as an integrated circuit board. Yet that was so far from the truth. Chaos reigned everywhere, it seemed. The
Tribune
and
Herald
only tapped the surface, reporting the latest homicide, drug deal, gang shoot-out, or abuse scandal. For Prusik, all of it
was wallpaper, a noisy backdrop to her own current part of the bedlam. And her unshakable past.

The pilot’s voice came over the intercom, announcing that they’d be landing at O’Hare shortly. Prusik clutched her briefcase. She closed her eyes, craving the quiet of the lap pool. She could almost smell the chlorine-soaked warm air of the dim-lit amphitheater of the downtown club where she swam, often well after midnight. The late-night sessions were her favorite, when she had the pool to herself, swimming lap after lap until she’d lose count. Losing count was best.

The United Express’s tires chirped down on tarmac, and air brakes squealed as it came to a halt. The pilot cut the engines. Prusik opened her eyes, tasting her fillings; she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Her mind suddenly flashed on the girl’s body—the sharp, deep cut running the length of her side. There had been no hesitation in the execution. She’d been gutted and left as empty as a stolen purse. Except for the carved stone deliberately placed by the killer in her windpipe. The carved stone that was now tucked away in a vial in Prusik’s briefcase.