Playing With Us
I should have killed the prick at the clinic, Woody thought. Now he’s out there on the loose and I have to find him again. He massaged the muscles in his lower back. And this time he knows we’re on to him. Has he got Ken?
A small voice spoke up. “If this is Mrs. Stevens, shouldn’t we be blanketing the area with her husband’s picture? Along with that of Detective Dean, of course—”
Woody looked at the girl’s Forensic Assistant badge hanging around her neck on a special lanyard. “Thanks, Tana. We’ve got that covered.”
Brandi elbowed her coworker in the ribs and the girl had the grace to look at the ground. “Sorry, Detective. I get excited sometimes. I just admire you and Detective Dean so much—I mean I was there after she found the first set of remains. She was so awesome.”
Once again Woody noticed the word was. He let his gaze wander back to the remains they’d just uncovered. Blonde or gray? Was the corpse too petite, or was he simply being optimistic? No, Ken’s bones would definitely have more heft. She was tough—not a lightweight. Plus, there was that tweed fabric. Ken would never wear tweed.
He glanced back at the young assistant.
Her cheeks were polished red apples.
“No problem,” he said at last. “This isn’t Detective Dean. And by the way, I like to see enthusiasm in my coworkers. And Ms. Dagwan,” he looked directly at the senior assistant, “let me know if either of you come up with any more ideas we might not have thought of, all right?”
Brandi nodded. “Of course—”
Moment over, Woody knelt and laid a thin sheet of tracing paper on top of the victim’s exposed femur and began to rub it gently with the nub of a pencil.
The two assistants watched in silence.
The Medical Examiner crouched over the shallow grave opposite the big detective. She motioned for her girls to add more light to the scene, and they quickly obliged by redirecting one of the portables they had hauled up from the equipment van.
Woody rubbed the femur patiently. The tracing paper and pencil were things Kendra had always insisted they keep in their clipboards. They sometimes used them on the job to raise messages on “blank-appearing” paper notepads as well as old, worn serial numbers on weapons and other crime scene items.
As he worked on the bones, Woody let his mind wander in order to keep it from reminding him he was handling a woman’s thighbone.
He recalled doing gravestone rubbings even as a kid when his dad had taken the family to visit Tombstone, Arizona. They’d also visited Billy the Kid’s grave in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. The whole trip his mother had chided his father for teaching the kids to “worship outlaws.”
Thinking of their “outlaw” vacation reminded him of Stutter Creek’s historic Drugstore Café, a place where Billy the Kid and other outlaws had sometimes hidden from the law in a crawl space beneath the kitchen floorboards. The Café even boasted an official plaque on its old wooden sidewalk immortalizing that very fact.
Woody roused himself from his reverie and held the tracing paper up to the light. His eyes met those of the M.E., and her eyebrows went up, but he didn’t try to discuss the findings in front of the others. Another thing he had learned from Kendra was to keep things as quiet as possible for as long as possible. “Too many cooks spoil the broth,” she had often preached during his rookie days.
When they were out of earshot of the others, he handed the rubbing to Lois Campanelli. “More latitude and longitude lines?”
The woman shook her head. “I don’t think so. There are numbers, but they are different somehow.” She held the paper up and pointed to a letter.
Woody could make out what appeared to be 88 W 15 N 17 D. His eyebrows went up again. “If these are latitude and longitude coordinates like before, then he wrote them backward. 88 degrees west is the longitude, and 15 degrees north is latitude. They should be reversed. But then we have what appears to be 17 D? What the hell is D? That’s not a compass point no matter how it’s written. Or carved.”
The confusion in his voice made the woman laugh. “You’re reading between lines that we aren’t even sure are there yet.”
He frowned. He was itching to get out into the woods with the other search groups looking for Kendra, but he also knew the best way to find her was to find their perp. So he held onto his patience like a treasure. “Enlighten me, please.”
Keith trailed behind them.
The M.E. continued walking. “D isn’t any sort of direction. Not one that I know of, at least.” She shrugged. “I’ll plug the numbers into my GPS and see what pops up.”
The sheriff ambled along talking on his cell phone.
Woody stopped every few feet and looked back at the scene. It was lit up like a movie set with all the assistants hard at work to uncover the remains while preserving as much evidence as possible.
He took the paper back from the M.E. and studied it as they walked. The bright lights extended onto the trail from battery operated “snake lights” hanging from the lower branches of trees. “I don’t get it,” he said. “What could it be? Why is it different?”
“This one is very recent,” Sheriff Puckett said from behind them. “That means he’s had to change his M.O.”
Woody and the M.E. turned toward the sound of his voice. Even though the trail was lighted, the dark shapes of trees were close, the leafy smell of mold even closer. As he was thinking about their surroundings, and wondering where the hell Kendra was (he wouldn’t even let himself entertain the thought that she wasn’t simply lost) the snow began to make itself known again. The fine flakes quickly changed back to feathers, falling faster and thicker.
“This can’t be right,” the M.E. said. She touched the screen on her Garmin as if to recheck the data.
“Can’t find the location?” Woody was barely able to curtail his sarcasm.
“Oh, I found it all right. But it sure isn’t around here.”
“Let me guess,” Woody said. “It’s the middle of the ocean.”
She shrugged. “Not exactly. It appears to be Central America. Honduras, I think. If I plugged the numbers in correctly, that is.”
“What the hell?” Woody reached for her Garmin to see for himself.
“Playing with us,” the sheriff said. “Screwing with us just like he did with the Christmas present and the woman in clover. Letting us know we’re out of our element. That he is smarter than we are.”
“That’s right,” the M.E. replied. “The first two sets of remains were above ground, uncovered, and perfectly arranged. This one is completely different. And I don’t even know what to do with 17 D.”
“I’m sure he’ll let us know, somehow.” Sheriff Puckett removed his hat and shook snowflakes off the brim.
Woody recalled how the man had been drenched in sweat only a few moments earlier. He felt his own pulse rising. He longed to be in the car, going somewhere, doing something, rather than standing around speculating, doing nothing—but again, he reined in his emotions. Focus, he thought. Focus.
“I just realized there are no degree symbols,” the M.E. murmured. “All the other bones had degree symbols after the numerals. This time, there are no degree symbols, we simply assumed these were map coordinates like the others.” She swiped stray hair off her forehead. “Maybe it isn’t Honduras after all. But you know, when those two boys found the second set of remains, it was easy to go back and suss out the missing number on the femur of the remains Kendra had found—the one we call Clover Girl—and the coordinates matched up. Apparently the killer had carved the second girl’s grave coordinates on the femur of the first girl.”
“So is it possible the coordinates on the second set of remains somehow correspond with this set? Or could there be something else missing?”
Lois held her hands up in a you-got-me gesture. “We’ll soon find out. I’ve got a tech attempting to clean the femur without damaging the carving. Let’s see if he has come up with anything.” She pressed a number on her cell phone and spoke to someone in the lab. She then pulled up her GPS system and typed in the coordinates as he gave them to her. “Here goes.” She typed the numbers from the second set of remains—the Christmas gift—into the search bar and immediately got a hit on a topographical map. She held the phone up to the sheriff. “Does this location ring any bells with you?”
The sheriff took her phone and looked at the coordinates she had entered, and then he took out his phone and looked at the coordinates he had sent to the dispatcher. “Nope. It isn’t this one. He’s more than one step ahead of us.”
The M.E. sighed. “That’s what I was afraid of. So why change the numbers on this femur? Just to keep us on our toes?”
“Maybe,” Woody said. “But we also saw how hurried this one appeared to be—maybe that’s why the carving is so different—or maybe you’re right and he’s just playing with us.” He stopped walking. “Or what if there is another body? One in between the last one and this one? Or even more than one? I don’t think we were supposed to find this one right away. So far he’s been unburying the ones he wants us to find, and this one was obviously just buried.”
The others remained silent.
Finally, the sheriff spoke. “We need Chet Boone here. He knows these woods like the insides of his own eyelids. He might be able to figure out what 17 D represents.” He began to poke at the keypad on his phone. “I’ll ask him to come down to the station. John Stockton is supposed to meet us there to make his official statement.”
They started down the trail toward the roadside turnaround where most of the vehicles were parked. The sheriff said, “We can always put the numbers into the big screen back at the station—pull up a satellite map. See if that gives us any clues.”
Yeah, Woody thought grimly. Maybe the gravesites will all line up like a giant arrow pointing to the exact spot where we can find Kendra. He chided himself for being so negative, and then he realized Lois Campanelli was speaking again.
“Besides the strange un-coordinates carved into the femur this time, let’s think about the other differences in this body versus the first two.”
“There’s the condition of the body,” Woody said. “None of the others had been treated with chemicals—”
“That we know of,” Lois interjected. “So far the other remains were mostly skeletal. This one is much more recent.”
Woody tried to say something else, something about how strange it was that the perp seemed to plan out his burial sites, but his voice would no longer fit past the huge lump of fear sitting on the back of his tongue. Just knowing the guy was still out there, killing, was enough to make him doubt his convictions about the identity of the remains.
Lois must have heard the break in his voice. She patted his arm. “Actually we haven’t got all the postmortem results yet. Three corpses in six days is about two too many for our tiny department—but we’re doing the best we can. However, what I was going to say is that those other bodies may have been treated with chemicals at one time. Over the years, the stuff could have simply seeped into the ground.”
Woody nodded. He was doing his best to hold himself together, but the longer they discussed the bodies and the remains, the more he wanted to jump in the car and start searching. It wasn’t logical, it wasn’t the way he was trained, and Kendra certainly wouldn’t have approved—if she were here. But she isn’t. And that’s the whole problem.
Nevertheless, he couldn’t shake the feeling that she was somehow nearby. He knew her far too well to ever believe she would have gone down without a fight, without leaving a trail of destruction in her wake, but this body they’d just uncovered. It was definitely recent. And it was definitely wearing tweed. That plus the fact that the doc—who was supposedly the last person to see Kendra face to face—hadn’t been seen since the day he had interviewed him at the clinic added up to one very fat coincidence.
And we don’t believe in coincidences now, do we?
That little niggling voice sounded suspiciously like Kendra’s.
He rolled his shoulders and straightened his spine. Don’t worry, Ken. I will find you. Even if it’s the last thing I ever do.
Keith caught up to him and asked what the medical examiner had been talking about with the coordinates and femur carvings, so Woody gave him a thumbnail version of the case so far. “That’s really all we know at this moment except for the fact that the last place your mom was known to have visited was the doctor’s clinic—and then she was supposed to meet me in Pine River to review another case, and when she didn’t show, that’s when I discovered she was missing.”
“And she was the one who found the first set of remains six days ago, is that correct?” Keith stared into Woody’s face as if it were very important that he understand the timeline here.
Woody knew how he felt. Sometimes details were the only things one could cling to at times like this. “That’s exactly right, Keith.” He gripped the boy’s shoulder. “So now we’ve got to concentrate on putting all these little nitpicking puzzle pieces together so we can get an idea of exactly what this creep has done and where.”
Keith dropped his gaze to the ground, and Woody knew he was struggling to keep his emotions in check. “Thank you.” His voice was rough. “But there are lots of others out there searching, right?”
Woody assured him there were. Practically every able-bodied person in Stutter Creek and half the law enforcement officers from Pine River were out and about—doing as much as the moonlight would allow. The sheriff and Roger Brown, the Chief of Police, had both made it very clear that no civilians were to be wandering about the woods alone or even in pairs after the sun went down. “We can’t risk an accident on account of someone’s being overzealous. Detective Dean wouldn’t be on board with that. Not at all.”
Fortunately, with John Stockton and Chet Boone heading up the daylight civilian search teams, Woody felt confident that everything that could be done would be done. The only thorn in his side was the fact that with the discovery of each new victim, that many more officers were pulled away from the search in order to work the crime scenes.
But there was nothing he could do about that. It simply meant he would have to work that much harder to put the clues together.