The Narrows (11 page)

ZZYZX ROAD
1 MILE

It was not the exact sign. I could tell by the horizon behind it. The photo had been taken from the other side, by someone heading to L.A. from Vegas. Nevertheless, I felt a deep tug of anticipation. Everything I had seen or read or heard since Graciela McCaleb had called me led to this place. I put on the blinker and took the exit off the freeway.

16

M
IDMORNING ON THE DAY after Rachel Walling’s arrival the agents assigned to what had been labeled the “Zzyzx Road case” gathered in person and by phone in the squad room on the third floor of the John Lawrence Bailey Building in Las Vegas. The room was windowless and poorly ventilated. A photograph of Bailey, an agent killed during a bank robbery twenty years earlier, looked upon the proceedings.

The agents in attendance sat at tables lined in rows, facing the front of the room. At the front was Randal Alpert and a two-way television that was connected by phone and camera to a squad room in Quantico, Virginia. On the screen was Agent Brasilia Doran, waiting to provide her report. Rachel was at the second row of tables, sitting off by herself. She knew her place here and outwardly tried to show it.

Alpert convened the meeting by graciously introducing those present. Rachel thought that this was a nicety allowed for her but soon realized that not everyone in attendance in person or by audiovisual hookup knew everyone else.

Alpert first identified Doran, also known as Brass, on the line from Quantico, where she was handling the collating of information and acting as liaison to the national lab. He then asked each person seated in the room to identify themselves and their specialty or position. First was Cherie Dei, who said she was the case agent. Next to her was her partner, Tom Zigo. Next was John Cates, a representative agent from the local FO and the only nonwhite person in attendance.

The next four people were from the science side and Rachel had seen and met two of them at the site the day before. They included a forensic anthropologist named Greta Coxe, who was in charge of the excavations, two medical examiners named Harvey Richards and Douglas Sundeen, and a crime scene specialist named Mary Pond. Ed Gunning, another agent from Behavioral Sciences in Quantico, brought the introductions around to Rachel, who was last.

“Agent Rachel Walling,” she said. “Rapid City field office. Formerly with Behavioral. I have some . . . familiarity with a case like this.”

“Okay, thanks, Rachel,” Alpert said quickly, as though he thought Rachel was going to mention Robert Backus by name.

This told Rachel that there were people in the room who had not been informed of the major fact of the case. She guessed that would be Cates, the token agent from the FO. She wondered if some of the science team, or all of it, was in the dark as well.

“Let’s start with the science side,” Alpert continued. “First of all, Brass? Anything from out there?”

“Not on science. I think your crime scene people have all of that. Hello, Rachel. Long time.”

“Hello, Brass,” Rachel said quietly. “Too long.”

She looked at the screen and their eyes met. Rachel realized that it had probably been eight years since she had actually seen Doran. She looked weary, her mouth and eyes drawn down, her hair short in a cut that suggested she didn’t spend much time with it. She was an empath, Rachel knew, and the years were taking their toll.

“You look good,” Doran said. “I guess all that fresh air and open country agrees with you.”

Alpert stepped in and saved Rachel from delivering a false compliment in return.

“Greta, Harvey, who wants to go first?” he asked, stepping all over the electronic reunion.

“I guess I will since everything starts with the dig,” Greta Coxe said. “As of seven p.m. yesterday we have fully excavated eight bodies and they are at Nellis. This afternoon when we get back there, we will begin with number nine. What we saw with the first excavations is holding true with the latter. The plastic bags in each incidence and the —”

“Greta, we have a tape going here,” Alpert interrupted. “Let’s be fully descriptive. As if speaking to an uninformed audience. Don’t hold back.”

Except when it comes to mentioning Robert Backus, Rachel thought.

“Okay, sure,” Coxe said. “Um, all eight bodies excavated and exhumed so far have been fully clothed. Decomposition is extensive. Hands and feet bound by tape. All have plastic bags over the head, which in turn have been taped around the neck. There is no variation on this methodology, even between victims one and two. Which is unusual.”

Late the day before Rachel had seen the photos. She had gone back into the command RV and looked at the wall of photos. It seemed clear to her that the men had all been suffocated. The plastic bags had not been clear plastic but even in their opaqueness she could see the features of the faces and the mouths wide open and searching for air that wasn’t going to come. They reminded her of photos of wartime atrocities, disinterred bodies from mass graves in Yugoslavia or Iraq.

“Why is that unusual?” Alpert asked.

“Because what we most often see is that the killing plan evolves. For lack of a better way of describing it, the killing gets better. The unsub learns from victim to victim how to do it better. That is usually seen in the data we have.”

Rachel noted that Coxe had used the word
unsub
. Short for unknown subject. It most likely meant she was out of the loop and didn’t know that the subject was very much known to the FBI.

“Okay, so the methodology was set from day one,” Alpert said. “Anything else, Greta?”

“Just that we will probably be finished with the excavations the day after tomorrow. Unless we get another hit with the probes.”

“Are we still probing?”

“Yes, when we have the time. But we’ve gone sixty feet past the last hit with the probes and haven’t gotten anything. We also got another flyover from Nellis last night. There was nothing new from thermal imaging. So we feel pretty comfortable at this time that we’ve got them all.”

“And thank God for that. Harvey? What have you got for us?”

Richards cleared his throat and leaned forward so that his voice would be heard by the electronic pickups, wherever they were.

“Greta’s right, we have all eight excavated so far in the morgue at Nellis. So far the veil of secrecy is holding up. I think people there think we’re bringing in aliens off a crashed saucer in the desert. This is how urban legends start, people.”

Only Alpert cracked a smile. Richards continued.

“We’ve conducted full autopsies on four so far and initial exams of the others. Similar to what Greta said, we’re not finding a hell of a lot of difference from body to body. This guy is a robot. No variation on theme. It’s almost like the killings themselves are of no import. Perhaps it is the hunt that juices this guy. Or perhaps the killings are just part of a larger plan we don’t know about yet.”

Rachel stared pointedly at Alpert. She hated that people working so closely on the case were still working in the dark. But she knew if she said anything she would quickly be on the outside looking in. She didn’t want that.

“You have a question, Rachel?”

He’d caught her off guard. She hesitated.

“Why are the bodies being taken to Nellis instead of here or L.A.?”

She knew the answer before asking the question but needed to say something to escape the moment.

“It’s easier to keep a lid on things this way. The military knows how to keep a secret.”

His tone suggested an unspoken final line:
Do you
? He swung his view back to Richards.

“Doctor, go on.”

Rachel picked up on the subtle difference. Alpert had called Richards Doctor, whereas he had simply addressed Greta Coxe by her first name. It was a character trait. Alpert either had trouble with women in positions of power and knowledge or he didn’t respect the science of anthropology. She guessed it was the former.

“Well, we’re looking at suffocation as the cause on these,” Richards said. “It’s pretty obvious from what we’ve got. There is not a lot left to work with on most of them but with what we’ve got we’re not seeing other injuries. The unsub overpowers in some way, tapes wrists and ankles and then puts the bag in place over the head. The taping around the neck we think is significant. That is indicative of a slow death. In other words the unsub was not holding the bag in place. He took his time, pulled it over the head, taped it and then could step back to watch.”

“Doctor?” Rachel asked. “Was the tape applied from the front or back?”

“The ends are at the back of the neck, indicating to me that the bag may have been pulled over from behind, possibly when the victim was in a sitting position, and then taped in place.”

“So he—the, uh, unsub—may have been ashamed or afraid to face his victims when he did this.”

“Quite possibly.”

“How are we doing on identification?” Alpert asked.

Richards looked at Sundeen and he took over.

“Still just the five that were included in the Las Vegas investigation. We assume the sixth from their group will be one of the final two excavations. The others we have nothing on so far. We’ve got no useable prints. We’ve forwarded the clothing—what’s left of it—to Quantico and perhaps Brass has an update on that. Meantime, we —”

“No, no update,” Doran said from the television screen.

“Okay,” Sundeen said. “We have the dental data just going into the computer today. So maybe we’ll get a hit there. Other than that we’re just waiting for something to happen.”

He nodded at the completion of his report. Alpert took back the lead.

“I want to go to Brass last, so let’s hear about the soil.”

Mary Pond took it from there.

“We’ve sifted all of the sites and it’s all come up clean except for one piece we got yesterday that is exciting. In excavation seven we found a wad of gum in a wrapper. Juicy Fruit, according to the wrapper. It was between twenty-four and thirty inches down in a three-foot grave. So we really feel it is related and could be a good break for us.”

“Dental?” Alpert asked.

“Yes, we have dental. I can’t tell you what yet but it looked like three good impressions. I boxed it and sent it to Brass.”

“Yes, it is here,” Doran said from the television. “Came in this morning. I put it in motion but I don’t have anything on it yet either. Maybe late today. I agree, though. From what I saw we’ll get at least three teeth out of it. Maybe even DNA.”

“Could be all we need,” Alpert added excitedly.

Even though she distinctly remembered that Bob Backus had a habit of chewing Juicy Fruit gum, Rachel was not excited. The gum in the grave was too good to be true. She thought there was no way that Backus would allow himself to leave such important evidence behind. He was too good as both a killer and agent for that. She could not properly express this doubt in the meeting, however, because of her agreement with Alpert not to bring up Backus in front of other agents.

“It’s got to be a plant,” she said.

Alpert looked at her a moment, weighing the risk of asking her why.

“A plant. Why do you say that, Rachel?”

“Because I can’t see why this guy who is burying a body in the middle of nowhere, probably in the middle of the night, would take the time to put his shovel down, take the gum out of his mouth, wrap it in its foil, which he had to take out of his pocket, and then drop it. I think if he’d been chewing gum he would have just spit it out. But I don’t think he was chewing gum. I think he picked that little wad up somewhere, brought it to the grave and dropped it in so we would spin our wheels with it when he decided to lead us to the bodies with his GPS trick.”

She glanced around the room. She had their eyes but she could tell she was more of a curiosity to them than a respected colleague. The silence was broken by the television.

“I think Rachel is probably right,” Doran said. “We have been manipulated from day one on this. Why not with the gum? It does seem like an incredible mistake for such a well-planned action.”

Rachel noticed Doran wink at her.

“One piece of gum, one mistake, in eight graves?” said Gunning, one of the agents from Quantico. “I don’t think that is such a long shot. We all know nobody’s ever committed the perfect crime. Yes, people get away but they all make mistakes.”

“Well,” Alpert said, “let’s wait and see what we get with this before we jump to any conclusions one way or the other. Mary, anything else?”

“Not at this time.”

“Then let’s go to Agent Cates to see how the locals are doing with the IDs.”

Cates opened a leather-bound folder on the table in front of him. It contained a legal pad with notes on it. That he had such a nice and expensive holder for a basic legal pad told Rachel that he was very proud of his work and what he did. Either that or the person who gave him the folder had those feelings. Either way, it made Rachel like him right away. It also made her feel like she was missing something. She no longer carried that kind of pride in the bureau or what she did.

“Okay, we started sniffing around Vegas Metro on their missing persons case. We’re handicapped by the need for secrecy. So we’re not going in there like gangbusters. We’ve just made contact and said we’re interested because of the state line thing—victims from multiple states and even one other country. That gives us an in but we don’t want to show our hand by blasting in there. So we’re supposed to have a sitdown with them later today. Once we reach the beach, so to speak, we’ll start back tracing these individuals and looking for the common denominator. Keep in mind these guys have been on this for several weeks and as far as we know don’t have shit.”

“Agent Cates,” Alpert said. “The tape.”

“Oh, excuse my language there. They don’t have anything is what I meant to say.”

“Very good, Agent Cates. Keep me informed.”

And only silence followed. Alpert continued to smile warmly at Cates until the local agent got the message.

“Oh, um, you want me to leave?”

“I want you out there working on those victims,” Alpert said. “No sense wasting time in here listening to us hash things around to no end.”

“Okay, then.”

Cates got up. If he had been a white man the embarrassment would have been more recognizable on his face.

“Thank you, Agent Cates,” Alpert said to his back as he went through the door.

Alpert then turned his attention back to the table.

“I think Mary, Greta, Harvey and Doug can all be excused as well. We need you guys back in the trenches, I’m afraid. No pun intended.”