The Butcher (5 page)

Sam had no idea who'd taken the one and only picture, but she knew it was snapped in front of the very first Starbucks, in Pike Place market, on a hot summer day. Her mother, dressed in a patterned halter top, cutoff denim shorts, and a pair of Converse Chucks, looked even
younger than seventeen. Two-year-old Sam was dressed identically, her chubby arms wrapped tight around her mom's slender waist. Both mother and daughter had thick dark hair, big brown eyes, and toothy, genuine smiles.

It was an Instagram photo before there was Instagram, perfectly square in shape, worn at the edges, and slightly yellowed from age. Sam had multiple copies of it on her laptop, home desktop computer, and iPhone. She didn't remember that day, but the image filled her with warmth nonetheless.

In contrast, the pictures spread out in front of her now on the coffee table were not nearly as pleasant. Unlike Instagram, crime scene photos had no filters to blur out the details, and every spatter, speck, and wound was clearly visible on the victims' bodies. There were fourteen dead women in total—all young, like Sam's mother had been—ranging in ages from fourteen to nineteen. Each one had been brutally raped vaginally and anally, sometimes with a blunt object, and then strangled to death. Each one had been missing a left hand that was thought to be chopped off with a cleaver just below the wrist bone (thus earning the Butcher his moniker). Each one had been burned with a cigar and found in a wooded area, buried in a shallow grave loosely covered with leaves. The bodies were found all over the Northwest, from as far south as Eugene, Oregon, right through Washington State, all the way up to Langley, British Columbia.

The Butcher's kill zone.

And Sam was determined—not obsessed, thank you very much—to prove that her mother was one of the Butcher's victims. There were several similarities. Sarah Marquez had also been raped vaginally and anally, both with and without a blunt object, and strangled to death. She'd been found in the woods a few minutes outside Olympia, Washington, buried in a shallow grave covered with leaves. In Sam's professional—yet
determined—opinion, this was more than enough to explore the Butcher as Sarah's murderer.

Unfortunately, Seattle PD disagreed with Sam, and for two good reasons. The first was that Sarah, unlike the other Butcher victims, still had both hands intact. And the second reason was even stronger: Rufus Wedge was shot and killed by Edward Shank's team in 1985. Sarah Marquez's murder didn't happen until 1987.

While Sarah's case was still technically unsolved, the last theory was that she had been killed by a homeless person, as she'd been seen interacting with a homeless man outside her workplace a few hours before she was murdered. However, the cops never made an arrest, citing lack of evidence. And since the Butcher case had been so sensational, anyone could have copied the Butcher's tactics.

The thing that had always bothered Sam, though, was
why
? Why copycat an MO from a
dead
serial killer? What was the point of that, when everybody would know it couldn't possibly be him? The fun of being a copycat killer was to capitalize on the publicity, to create further panic and mayhem in a city that was already scared. Or so Sam thought.

Unless, of course, it
was
really him. Sam didn't believe that Rufus Wedge was the Butcher, and this theory was the basis of her current book,
Butcherville
.

Her intention was not to criticize Seattle PD and their investigation. All she wanted was to open up the possibility that maybe someone else could have committed the murders. After all, the cases had never gone to trial. Rufus Wedge had never had the opportunity to defend himself. And nobody, not even the Chief, could deny that the charges against Wedge were based on strong circumstantial evidence only. There were no fingerprints, no DNA, and no trace evidence that definitively put Wedge at any of the crime scenes.

But neither was Sam intending to sanctify Rufus Wedge. The man was certainly no angel. He'd had a long criminal history that included sexual assault, larceny, drugs, and statutory rape long before he'd ever been accused of murder. Sam was fascinated by criminal profiling, and Wedge certainly fit the textbook definition of a serial murderer. He was a white male, loner, early forties, with a history of violence. He'd had no family and no friends, and so there'd been nobody to stand up for him after his death and insist that it
couldn't
have been him. It had been easy to accept Rufus Wedge as the Butcher.

Sam wanted
Butcherville
to document the mass hysteria that had taken over Seattle during the height of the investigation. From what she'd read and from what Edward had told her, women under the age of thirty were instructed not to go anywhere alone after dark, and many businesses were allowing their female employees to leave work early so they could be home by sundown. The city had been on the verge of imposing a curfew. Sam wanted to explore the extreme pressure on the Seattle Police Department to hunt the Butcher down. But she also wanted to point out that the main reason everybody believed Rufus Wedge to be the Beacon Hill Butcher was that the murders stopped after Wedge's death.

Or had they? Sam had theories on that, too. If the real Butcher had never been caught because some other guy had been nailed for his crimes, wouldn't it make sense to change his MO after Wedge was killed?

She had, of course, discussed all this with former police chief Edward Shank, who'd generously answered all of her questions. The Chief wasn't buying her theory, of course, but neither did he disapprove of Sam's current work in progress. In fact, her boyfriend's grandfather
seemed to be very interested in what she came up with, and often called to ask how the research was going. He'd even bought her a textbook for Christmas called
Practical Homicide Investigation: Tactics, Procedures, and Forensic Techniques,
which was the same textbook police officers used to study homicide before taking the detective's exam. It was complete with graphic color photos of actual crime scenes and the methods used to investigate. Sam had been ecstatic. Edward had also offered to write a foreword for her book, which she believed had ultimately been the reason she'd been able to sell the book to a publisher.

Matt, on the other hand, had thought the homicide textbook to be an extremely disturbing Christmas gift, but her boyfriend had resigned himself to her “strange hobby” a long time ago. Mind you, Sam wasn't crazy about the word
hobby,
either, but she vastly preferred it over the word
obsession
.

Sam picked up a picture of Rufus Wedge and stared at it for what seemed like the thousandth time. It was taken right after he'd been shot outside his apartment, and he was covered in bullet holes and blood. He certainly made for an interesting villain, as far as criminals went. So far, there hadn't been a definitive book about the man believed to be the Beacon Hill Butcher, and Sam could only assume this was because there was so little information about him other than his arrest record. From his birth to his death, Wedge had lived life mostly off the grid. He'd never had a driver's license (not in his real name, anyway), had never filed a tax return, and had never voted. He'd never had a bank account. He'd never had a steady job that lasted longer than three months. What Wedge did have was a conviction for third-degree sexual assault (for which he'd served three years), a series of arrests for petty drug possession and larceny (for which he'd cut deals), and a charge for the rape of a sixteen-year-old, which never went to trial because
the girl refused to testify. It was Sam's theory that had Wedge not been shot and killed, and had the case gone to trial as it should have, the prosecution may not have won a conviction. Yes, underwear and other personal items belonging to the victims had been found in Wedge's apartment. Yes, Wedge had been in every single city at the time one of the Butcher's victims was killed. But that was really all they had. Police hadn't even been able to find the cleaver that had been used to chop off the victims' hands.

Moving the photos aside, Sam traced a finger over the photocopy of the front page of the
Seattle Times
from April 26, 1985.
BUTCHER DEAD
! screamed out in thick, black letters, and underneath was a close-up of Rufus Wedge's face. It was his old mug shot from the sexual assault arrest, and of course he looked every bit like a serial killer should, with his greasy hair, doughy face, and dead eyes.

So easy to believe that he was the one.

And then, of course, the murders had stopped.

A ping from her laptop broke her thoughts, and Sam turned her attention to her computer. She was currently logged into a website called TheSerialKillerFiles.com, and okay, she could agree that the amount of time she spent on this particular site might potentially be considered a little obsessive. But where else could she chat with other site members about murder, serial killers, weapons, victims, and forensics? The website was originally owned by a teenager named Jeremiah Blake, who blogged about serial killers, and it was now owned and operated by someone else who'd purchased the domain name and turned it into an active forum for people who liked to discuss all things murder. And that was a lot of people.

The ping meant she had an instant message. When Sam clicked on it, she wasn't surprised to see it was from someone she'd been chatting
online with a lot recently, someone who went by the username “KillerRed.” She knew nothing personal about KillerRed, just as KillerRed knew nothing personal about Sam. You didn't ever want to give people you'd only ever chatted with online (about serial killers, no less) your personal information. All Sam had ever let on was that she was doing research for a book she was writing. No specifics.

However, Sam had been enjoying her conversations with KillerRed, someone who seemed a little more levelheaded than the other conspiracy theorists she'd run into on the site. They'd had several discussions about different Northwest serial killers, and of course they'd talked about the Butcher quite a bit. Sam had been delighted when KillerRed agreed with her theory that Rufus Wedge was the wrong man. Anonymous or not, it was finally nice to talk to someone who didn't think she was full of shit.

Sam blinked. Great, she wasn't expecting that. “IRL” was online speak for “in real life.” She frowned at her computer screen and contemplated how to respond. She'd been hit on a few times online—that was how it was with the Internet and social media. She sighed. So KillerRed was a guy, then. And coffee with a guy she'd never met before, who was a serial killer aficionado?
Hell, no
.

Yeah, right. Sure, you're not. And I'm not obsessed with the Butcher, either.

Sam snorted. She certainly hadn't been expecting
that
. Maybe KillerRed was a freak, after all.

That makes two of us,
Sam thought.

Rolling her eyes, Sam waited, though she couldn't deny that she was a little curious to see whatever it was KillerRed wanted to show her. She hoped it wasn't a picture of himself, or worse, his penis. That happened sometimes with guys online, too, and it was always gross and unwelcome.

After a moment, a square thumbnail—a mini picture—appeared in the chat exchange. Sam could make out two faces in the photo. Definitely not a nudie shot. More curious now, Sam clicked on it.