Inside my closed hand, the chain and pendant pulsed faintly, like the heartbeat of a living thing. My whole body responded — tensing, pulling into itself. Behind my closed lids, my vision went bright, then images began to flicker.
Two people — a tall woman in cycling gear, her long black hair swept up into a tight ponytail, and a broad-shouldered man with brown hair graying at the temples. He holds out a blue velvet jewelry box to her, opens the lid so she can see inside.
She gasps in delight. “It’s lovely! Thank you, thank you,” she says, planting quick kisses all over the man’s face.
“Put it on,” he urges. “I want to see you wearing my gift.”
“I may never take it off. The charm brings good luck, you know.” She hands it to him and spins around, offering him the back of her neck.
He loops it across the front of her throat and fiddles with the clasp. Leaning in close to the nape of her neck, as if to see better, he inhales deeply. His expression is one of hunger and longing and grim satisfaction.
She dances over to a full-length mirror on the wall and studies herself from several angles. “It’s gorgeous, Carl! You really shouldn’t have.”
“I knew you wanted one.”
“Just a little silver one would have been fine. This must have cost a fortune. Did you get it specially made for me?”
“I wanted it to be unique, as exceptional as you are.” He smiles as he sighs. “I just wish you’d let me put a ring on your finger instead of a chain around your neck.”
Her face falls. “Oh, don’t start that again.”
“I want you to be my wife,” he says, meeting her gaze in the mirror.
She turns to face him. “You want me to belong to you,” she corrects him, lifting a pale hand to gently stroke the stubble on his jaw. “But I can’t. I can’t belong to anyone, you know that.”
He leans his face into her hand, but his expression is unhappy, angry even. “You’ve never tried!”
“I’ve never tried flying to the moon, either, but I still know it can’t happen.” She kisses him on the lips. “I’m going for a ride now. And if I get mugged for this beautiful bling, it will be entirely your fault for being so generous!”
With a giggle, she twirls out of the room and is gone.
The man, alone now, snaps the velvet box closed and hurls it at the mirror.
The scene faded. I realized I was panting and made myself take a deep breath as I doubled down, trying to see more. But all I got was a shimmering vista of trees — rows upon rows of them, with short, twisted trunks and thin, silvery leaves — bathed in golden sunshine. The image wavered and then disappeared.
I opened my eyes, suddenly aware that they were watering. My fingers were prickling with an electric tingle.
“Are you– are you crying?” Ryan asked.
I wiped my eyes. “No, just leaking.”
“Did you get anything?”
“Yes. A man, Carl — Laini’s boyfriend, I think? — gave her this. He wanted to marry her; she wasn’t interested. And she was a cyclist.”
Ryan drew back his head in surprise.
“And then that part ended, and I saw lots of trees.” I considered for a moment. “I think they were olive trees.”
“You saw olive trees?”
Registering his mystified expression, I said, “I’m not an expert, okay? I can’t direct this. I just get what comes to me.”
“Sure. Anything else?”
I slid the necklace back into its bag and returned it to the desk, shaking my head slowly. “Not really.”
But there had been. Along with the images I’d seen, I’d experienced sensations that weren’t easy to identify. A constricting heaviness in the first scene and a more open, light feeling when I’d seen the olive groves. I rubbed my hands together. The pins and needles had faded, but a faint awareness, a sensation like I had eyes in my fingertips, lingered.
Ryan and I sat in uneasy silence for a while. I didn’t know what to make of my visions, and he clearly didn’t know what to make of me.
Eventually, I cleared my throat. “So, what about the bone Lizzie found? Anything more on that?”
“It’s human.”
“I already knew that much from the news.”
“It’s old.”
I gave him the look that deserved. “Do you have an identity on the victim yet?”
“I guess I can tell you that much, because it’ll be released to the press. We found a medic-alert bracelet at the scene. It belonged to one Jacob Wertheimer, who went missing in 2009. So it’s likely that’s who our vic is, although we’ll only be sure when the ME’s office confirms the dental records.”
“There’s something you’re not telling me.” I didn’t need to be psychic to know that he was holding back; his face was a study in suspiciously careful blankness. “Oh, c’mon, Ryan, this is like pulling teeth. Tell me! Please. Pretty please? Pretty please with a — what was it, a Heineken? — on top,” I begged.
He looked pleasantly surprised that I’d remembered his favorite brand, but instead of answering me, he stood up, stepped over to the glass partition which looked out onto the hallway, and stood for a long minute with his back to me. Weighing his options? I kept quiet.
Turning to face me, Ryan asked, “When you touched that bone, did you see anything specific?”
“No. I just had an oppressive, dark feeling. Why?”
“Remember that old serial killer case I told you about?”
I did. Back in December, Ryan had told me about a serial killer who’d been operating in New England around the time of Colby’s death in 2007. Although they’d been murdered in a variety of different ways and dumped in different spots, all the victims had been young gay men.
“You’re not saying this is one of his victims?” I asked, amazed.
“Looks like it.”
“How do they know?” When he looked reluctant to answer, I said, “I won’t tell anyone, Ryan, I promise. I pinky-promise!”
I reached out and linked a baby finger with one of his as I spoke. Did he feel the same little zing of contact that I did?
“You literally have me wrapped around your little finger.” He gave my pinkie a squeeze and then released it. “According to the FBI, the killer left an item behind with every victim.”
“Don’t serial killers usually take something from their victims?”
Trophies, that’s what they were called. Many serial killers liked to keep reminders of each of their kills in macabre collections — a lock of the victim’s hair, something from their wallet, a piece cut from their body — to help them remember the victim and recapture the pleasure of the kill.
Ryan nodded. “This guy is different. He thinks he’s special. He wants us to know it’s him. Signing his work like it’s a piece of art or something,” he said, his voice thick with disgust. “Of course, he might have taken trophies, too, no way to know that. Anyway, the fact that he left something of his own behind at each body dump scene was kept from the media back then to prevent copycats, and so the FBI would know something that only the killer knew. That would help them definitively identify him if they ever caught him.”
“That’s how they knew Colby wasn’t one of his victims? They didn’t find the thing with his body?”
An image of Colby’s body — white and waxen, lying behind the yellow barrier of police tape at Plover Pond — flashed through my mind, a momentary memory of horror.
“Yeah,” Ryan said, dropping back into his chair.
“And this corpse up at the quarry — they found one of the things with it?”
“So they tell me.”
“What was it? Can I touch it?”
I felt a strong pull to find out more about that murder, even as my body recoiled at the thought of going anywhere near that oppressive sense of fear and evil again.
Ryan blew out an amused breath. “I don’t have it. I don’t even know what it is, yet. The FBI has jurisdiction on this.”
I tried to recall what I knew of the serial killer case. Something didn’t add up.
“You told me those murders stopped the year after Colby died, so in 2008. But if this guy, Jacob Whatshisname, only went missing in 2009, that means —”
“— that he went on killing after we thought he’d stopped, yeah. It means maybe he just got better at disposing of the corpses. It means we may still find more victims hidden out there,” Ryan said grimly.
“So, you think the killer picked up this young man somewhere nearby, then took, or forced, him to the quarry and killed him? Or maybe killed him somewhere else and just dumped his body there?”
“Could be. But the last time he was actually seen was on campus at UVM in Burlington, so for all we know that’s where he was taken. Maybe he was even killed there. Nine years on, there’s obviously no evidence of whether he walked up to that quarry or was dragged or carried.”
“Do you think the killer planned to drop the body in the pit but got tired and hid it in the brush?” I asked.
“Could be,” he said again.
“But you don’t think so.”
“I think it was a pretty specific place to dump a body, right beside that big boulder.”
“It would have made finding and accessing the body again easy?”
“That’s my theory. He wanted to visit it again. And maybe he did.”
Killers frequently did visit the corpses of their victims again. I knew this from a guest lecture on homicide in our recent psychopathology unit. The visiting expert had explained that killers enjoy a special intimacy with their victims. They often prefer the non-threatening, non-judging compliance of the dead — posing and sometimes mutilating the bodies, or playing with them like a child would with a rag doll. A small percentage of such perpetrators return to have sex with the corpse — necrophilia being the ultimate in control and degradation of the victim — or to masturbate to fantasies of what they did while reliving the high of the kill.
The expert had told us that Ted Bundy, who often returned to his victims to dress their bodies and sometimes even paint their nails before photographing and having sex with them, had once explained to an interviewer, "When you work hard to do something right, you don't want to forget it.”
“Then again,” Ryan continued, “the perp may just have dumped it there in a shallow grave because it was a good spot well off the path, so it wouldn’t be discovered immediately. That would give him time to be well away from the Pitchford area by the time it was found, if it ever was. And in the meantime, the elements, insects and animals preying on the corpse would destroy most of the forensic evidence. If he’d dumped it in the quarry, it would have been found sooner by kids going there to the swimming hole.”
Fall leaves, their vivid scarlet and amber hues fading to brown, drift down. A breeze blows them up against the base of the boulder.
“He did it in fall. Around the end of fall,” I said, speaking slowly. “Am I right?”
Ryan looked startled. “He went missing in November. Did you– did you just get a vision?”
Had I? I couldn’t be sure.
I shrugged. It was difficult trying to distinguish glimpses of something that had once happened and that I was tuning into in some psychic way, from intuitive hunches, or from even just picturing the scene and having my imagination fill in details. I’d always done that.
Didn’t everybody?