The Narrows (6 page)

Dei didn’t answer.

“You ready for this?” she asked Rachel instead.

“Absolutely. I’ve been waiting four years for another shot at him. This is where it starts.”

She cracked the door and stepped out into the bright desert sun. She felt at home.

10

B
ACKUS FOLLOWED THEM down the exit ramp. He was a safe distance behind. He crossed over the freeway and put on his blinker to get back on in the opposite direction. If they were watching him in the mirror he would simply look like someone turning around to head back to Vegas.

Before turning back onto the freeway he watched the FBI car go off the paved road and head across the desert to the site. His site. A white cloud of dust kicked up behind the car. He could see the white tents in the distance. He felt an overwhelming sense of accomplishment. The crime scene was a city he had built. A city of bones. The agents were like ants between pieces of glass. They lived and worked in the world of his creation, unknowingly doing his bidding.

He wished he could get closer to that glass, to take it all in and see the horror he etched on their faces, but he knew the risk was too great.

And he had other things to do. He pushed his foot down hard on the accelerator and headed back toward the city of sin. He had to make sure everything was ready and things were set.

As he drove he felt a slight sense of melancholy slide in beneath his ribs. He guessed that this came with the letdown of leaving Rachel behind in the desert. He took a deep breath and tried to exorcize the feeling. He knew it would not be long before he was close to her again.

After a moment he smiled at the memory of seeing his name on the sign held by the woman who had met Rachel at the airport. An inside joke between agents. Backus recognized the greeter. Agent Cherie Dei. Rachel had mentored her just as he had mentored Rachel. That meant some of his special insights had been passed on through Rachel to this new generation. He liked that. He wondered what Cherie Dei’s reaction would have been if he had stepped up to her and her stupid sign at the bottom of the escalator and said, “Thanks for meeting me.”

He looked out through the car’s windows at the flat, barren plain of the desert floor. He believed it was truly beautiful, made even more so by the things he had planted in the sand and rock out there.

He thought about that and soon the pressure in his chest eased and he felt wonderful again. He checked the rearview for trailers and saw nothing that was suspicious. He checked himself then and admired the surgeon’s work once more. He smiled at himself.

11

A
S THEY GOT CLOSE TO THE TENTS Rachel Walling began to smell the scene. The unmistakable odor of decaying flesh was carried on the wind as it worked through the encampment, billowed the tents and moved out again. She switched her breathing to her mouth, haunted by knowledge she wished she didn’t have, that the sensation of smell occurred when tiny particles struck sensory receptors in the nasal passages. It meant if you smelled decaying flesh that was because you were breathing decaying flesh.

There were three small square tents in the approach to the site. These were not the kind for camping. They were field command tents with straight sides to eight feet. Behind these three was a larger rectangular tent. Rachel noticed that all of the tents had open vent flaps on top. She knew that there were body excavations taking place in each. The vents were to let some of the heat and stink escape.

Overlapping everything was the noise. There were at least two gasoline-powered generators providing electricity to the scene. There were also two full-size RVs parked to the left of the tents and their rooftop air handlers were rumbling.

“Let’s go in here first,” Cherie Dei said, pointing to one of the RVs. “Randal is usually in here.”

The RV looked like any supercamper Rachel had seen on the freeway. This one was called the “Open Road” and it had an Arizona plate on the back. Dei knocked on the door and then pulled it open without waiting for a response. They stepped up and in. The vehicle wasn’t set up on the inside for camping on the open road. Partitions and the comforts of home had been removed. It was one long room set up with four folding tables and many chairs. Along the rear wall was a counter with all the usual office machinery—computer, fax, copier and coffeemaker. Two of the tables were covered with paperwork. On the third, incongruous to the purpose and setting, was a large bowl of fruit. The lunch table, Rachel guessed. Even at a mass burial site you have to have lunch. At the fourth table was a man on a cell phone, an open laptop computer in front of him.

“Have a seat,” Dei said. “I’ll introduce you as soon as he is off.”

Rachel sat at the lunch table and took a precautionary sniff of the air. The RV’s air handler was on recycle. The odor from the excavation wasn’t noticeable. No wonder the man in charge stayed in here. She looked at the bowl of fruit and thought about taking a handful of grapes, just to keep her energy up, but decided not to.

“You want some fruit, go ahead,” Dei said.

“No, thanks, I’m fine.”

“Suit yourself.”

Dei reached over and picked off some grapes and Rachel felt foolish because she had painted herself into a corner with the fruit. The man on the cell, who she assumed was Agent Alpert, was talking too low to be heard—probably by the person he was talking to as well. Rachel noticed that the long wall along the left side of the RV was covered with photographs of the excavations. She looked away. She didn’t want to study the photographs until after she had been in the tents. She turned and looked out the window next to the table. This RV had the premiere view of the desert. She could see down into the basin and the entire ridgeline. She wondered for a moment if the view meant anything. If Backus had chosen the spot because of the view and if so, what was the significance of it.

When Dei turned her back Rachel grabbed some grapes and put three in her mouth at once. At the same moment, the man snapped his phone closed and got up from his table and approached her with his hand out.

“Randal Alpert, special agent in charge. We’re glad you are here.”

Rachel shook his hand but had to wait to get the grapes down before speaking.

“Nice to meet you. Not such nice circumstances.”

“Yeah, but look at that view. Sure beats the brick wall I’ve got back in Quantico. And at least we’re out here the end of April and not August. That would have been a killer.”

He was the new Bob Backus. Running the shop at Quantico, coming out on the big ones and of course this was a big one. Rachel decided she didn’t like him and that Cherie Dei was right about him being a morph.

Rachel had always found that agents in Behavioral were of two kinds. The first type she called “morphs.” These agents were much like the men and women they hunted. Able to keep it all from getting to them. They could move on like a serial killer from case to case without being dragged down by all the horror and guilt and knowledge of the true nature of evil. Rachel called them morphs because these agents could take that burden and somehow morph it into something else. The site of a multiple body excavation became a beautiful view better than anything at Quantico.

The second type Rachel called “empaths” because they took all the horror in and kept it in. It became the campfire they warmed themselves by. They used it to connect and motivate, to get the job done. To Rachel, these were the better agents because they would go to the limit and beyond to catch the bad guy and solve the case.

It was certainly healthier to be a morph. To be able to move on without any baggage. The halls of Behavioral were haunted by the ghosts of the empaths, the agents who couldn’t go the distance, for whom the burden became too much. Agents like Janet Newcomb, who put her gun in her mouth, and Jon Fenton, who drove into a bridge abutment, and Terry McCaleb, who literally gave his heart to the job. Rachel remembered them all and above all she remembered Bob Backus, the ultimate morph, the agent who was both hunter and prey.

“That was Brass Doran on the phone,” Alpert said. “She said to say hello.”

“She’s back at Quantico?”

“Yes, she’s agoraphobic about that place. Never wants to leave. She’s heading up things on that end for us. Now, Agent Walling, I know you know the score. We’ve got a delicate situation here. We’re glad you are here but you are here strictly as an observer and possibly a witness.”

She didn’t like him being so formal with her. It was a way of keeping her outside the circle.

“A witness?” she asked.

“You might be able to give us some ideas. You knew this guy. Most of us were on the street chasing bank robbers when the whole thing with Backus went down. I came into the unit right after your thing went down. After OPR went through the place. Cherie here is one of the few still around from then.”

“My thing?”

“You know what I mean. You and Backus going at it.”

“Can I go look at the excavation now? I’d like to see what you’ve got.”

“Well, Cherie will take you out in a second. We don’t have a lot to look at but today’s carcass.”

Spoken like a true morph, Rachel thought. She glanced at Dei and their eyes met in confirmation.

“But there is something I want to talk about first.”

Rachel knew what was coming but let Alpert have his say. He moved toward the front of the RV and pointed through the windshield out into the desert. Rachel followed his line but couldn’t see anything but the mountain ridge.

“Well, you can’t really see it from this angle,” Alpert said, “but out there lying on the ground we’ve got a great big sign. It says in big letters, FILMING — NO FLYOVERS, NO NOISE. That’s for anybody up there who might get curious about all these tents and vehicles. Pretty good idea, huh? They think it’s a movie set. Helps keep them away from us.”

“And your point?”

“My point? My point is we have thrown a real thick blanket over all of this. Nobody knows and we want to keep it that way.”

“And you are suggesting I am a media leak?”

“No, I am not suggesting that. I am giving you the same talk I give everybody that comes out here. I don’t want this in the media. I want to control it this time. Is that understood?”

More like bureau command or the Office of Professional Responsibility wants to control it this time, she thought. The Backus revelations almost decimated the ranks and reputation of the Behavioral Sciences unit last time, not to mention the colossal public relations fiasco it was for the bureau as a whole. Now with the failings of 9/11 and the bureau’s competition with Homeland Security for budget dollars as well as headlines, media focus on a mad killer agent was not what bureau command or the OPR had in mind. Especially when the general public had been led to believe that the mad killer agent was long since dead.

“I understand,” Rachel said coolly. “You won’t have to worry about me. Can I go out now?”

“One other thing.”

He hesitated for a moment. Whatever it was, it was delicate.

“Not everyone involved in this investigation is aware of the connection to Robert Backus. It’s ‘need to know’ and I want to keep it that way.”

“What do you mean? The people working out there don’t know it was Backus who did this? They should be —”

“Agent Walling, this is not your investigation. Don’t try to make it yours. You were brought here to observe and help, leave it at that. We don’t know for sure it was Backus and until we do —”

“Right. His fingerprints were only all over the GPS and his MO all over everything else.”

Alpert glanced at Dei, throwing her a look of annoyance.

“Cherie should not have told you about the prints and as far as the MO goes, there is nothing known about that for sure.”

“Just because she shouldn’t have told me doesn’t mean it isn’t true. You’re not going to be able to cover this up, Agent Alpert.”

Alpert laughed in frustration.

“Who said anything about a cover-up? Look, all we’re doing right now is controlling information. There is a right time for revealing data. That is all I am telling you. Your presence alone here will be revealing enough, okay? I just don’t want you deciding what to reveal and who to reveal it to. That’s my job. Understood?”

Rachel nodded without conviction. She glanced at Dei as she did so.

“Perfectly.”

“Good. Then, Cherie, take her away. Take her sightseeing.”

They left the RV and Dei led her toward the first small tent.

“You certainly ingratiated yourself with him,” she said to Rachel as they went.

“It’s funny. Some things just never change. I think it might be impossible for a bureaucracy to evolve, to learn anything from its mistakes. Anyway, never mind. What do we have here?”

“So far we have eight bags and gas on another two. We just haven’t gotten to them yet. Classic inverted pyramid.”

Rachel knew the shorthand. She had invented some of it. Dei was saying eight bodies had been recovered and readings from gas probes indicated there were another two bodies still interred and waiting for excavation. Tragic history created data from which models of similar behavior were formed. It had been seen before, a killer who returns with victims to the same burial spot follows a pattern, the newer burials radiating out from the original in an inverted pyramid or V pattern. So was the case here, with Backus either unintentionally or consciously following a pattern based on data he helped accumulate as an agent.

“Let me ask you one thing,” Rachel said. “He was talking to Brass Doran on the phone in there. She’s got to know about the Backus connection, right?”

“Yes, she knows. She found the prints on the package.”

Rachel nodded. At least she had one confederate she could trust and who was in the know.

They reached the tent and Dei pulled back the entry flap. Rachel went in first. Because the overhead venting flap was open it was not dark in the tent. It was only dim. Rachel’s eyes adjusted immediately and she saw a large rectangular hole in the center of the tent. There was no fill pile. She assumed the dirt and rock and sand removed from the grave had been shipped to Quantico or the field office lab for sifting and analysis.

“This first site is where the anomalies are,” Dei said. “The others are straight burials. Very clean.”

“What are the anomalies?”

“The reading on the GPS came back to this spot. Sitting here when they got here was a boat. It was —”

“A boat? Here in the desert?”

“You remember that preacher I told you started this place? He dug a canal for the spring water to fill. We figure the boat came from back then. It had been sitting here for decades. Anyway, we moved it, sank a probe and started digging. Anomaly number two is that the grave contained the first two victims. All the other graves are individual.”

“These first two, were they buried at the same time?”

“Yes. One on top of the other. But one was wrapped in plastic and he had been dead a lot longer than the other. Seven months longer, we think.”

“So he sat on one body for a while. Wrapped it for safekeeping. And when he had the second he realized he had to do something and so he came out to the desert to bury them. He used the boat as a marker. As a sort of gravestone and for himself because he knew he’d be back with more.”

“Maybe. But why’d he need the boat if he had the GPS?”

Rachel nodded and felt a little buzz of adrenaline start to tick in her blood. The brainstorming had always been the best part of the job.

“The GPS came later. Recently. That was just for us.”

“Us?”

“You. The bureau. Me.”

Rachel moved to the edge and looked down into the hole. It had not been deep, especially for two bodies. She stopped breathing through her mouth and took the fetid air in through her nose. She wanted to remember this.

“IDs yet?”

“Nothing official. No contact with kin yet. But we know who some of them were. Five of them at least. The first one was three years ago. The second seven months after that.”

“Have you built a cycle?”

“Yes, we have it. About an eight percent reduction. We think the last two will bring us up to November.”

Meaning that the intervals between the killings were decreasing by eight percent from the initial seven-month period between killings one and two. Again, it was familiar. The decreasing interval was common in case history, a symptom of the killer’s diminishing control of his urges at the same time his belief in his invincibility grows. You get away with the first one and the second comes easier and sooner. And so on.

“I guess that makes him overdue,” Rachel said.

“Supposedly.”

“Supposedly?”

“Come on, Rachel, it’s Backus. He knows what we know. He’s just playing with us. It’s like Amsterdam. He’s gone before we even recognize it is him. Same here. He’s moved on. I mean, why send us the GPS if he hasn’t? He’s split already. He’s not overdue and he’s not coming back here. He’s somewhere laughing at us, watching us follow our models and routines, knowing that we won’t get any closer to him than we did the last time.”