Riddles. Those are my specialty. That is, when I am not studying patterns. Or decoding enigmas. Some might say that solving puzzles is all I’m good for. That leaving my desk in the Jacksonville office of the FBI to interact with real people is not the best use of my time or talent. And I would agree with them.
I stood beside my rented Toyota Avalon and stared at the yellow one-story ranch home.
“Hella impossible,” a voice came from over my shoulder.
I glanced at my partner.
Cassie Pardo is a petite five foot three but has the propulsive energy of a thousand suns. She also uses the slang of a nineteen-year-old.
“Nothing’s impossible,” I said.
Cassie closed the manila folder that her head had been buried in since we left DFW Airport. As we drove here, she had been handicapping the odds on what we were about to see. One in a million … one in two million.
A deputy walked over. He was fortyish with a comb-over the color of wheat and an Adam’s apple that protruded fourteen millimeters from his larynx.
“Ryan Hollings.” He reached out his hand.
I stared at it. Over two hundred bacteria thrive on each square inch of our palms. “Gardner Camden,” I said, shaking. I’m not OCD. I just know things like this.
I pointed at the yellow house. “Your victim,” I said. “How exactly was he found?”
“An employee from Ashland Gas was checking the meter,” Hollings said. “Glanced through the slider and saw blood. Called us.”
Cassie popped a piece of chewing gum in her mouth. She was twenty-nine and wore a tailored black jacket over gray slacks. “And you ran the man’s prints,” she said. “Saw Agent Camden’s name?”
Hollings nodded, and we followed him across the lawn. “I googled you two as I waited,” he said. “Saw you were the ones who found that six-year-old in those caves down in Sonora. That was big news here in Texas.”
The case he referred to had been solved thirteen months ago, with Cassie and me at the helm.
“Not sure if you remember how crazy that was,” Hollings kept up. “Folks were setting up phone banks and doing grid searches. You two came along and bam—”
“There were traces of an anhydrous carbonate on his father’s shoe,” I said.
Hollings scrunched up his face.
“The kid rescued from those caves,” Cassie clarified.
“There are only nine places in the U.S. where that mineral has been mined,” I said. “Only one in Texas.”
“Well God damn, man.” Hollings shook his head. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
The deputy had a deep voice, and I pictured a book. A Study of Laryngeal Prominence. Page 52. Right side. An illustration of an Adam’s apple, along with a statistic about baritones.
We got to the front door, and Cassie took out two sets of purple nitrile gloves. She snapped a pair over her olive skin and retied her brown hair into a tight ponytail.
“No one’s been inside?” she asked, handing me the other set of gloves.
“Just me and medical,” Hollings said.
He pushed the screen door open with the steel toe of his boot, and I studied him. Two inches shorter than me and stocky. I have more of an athletic build. Six foot one with curly brown hair and blue eyes.
Cassie pointed at the open door, her lips forming a smile. “Age before beauty.”
I evaluated the statement. Then walked exactly five feet inside and stopped.
The place had an open floor plan with an island situated in the center of a combined kitchen and living room. A pool of blood spilled out from behind it.
A man was crouched there, a disposable crime scene coverall wrapped around his wide frame. “You two must be the federals,” he said. He weighed roughly two hundred and eighty pounds, and his hands went first to his knees and then his hips as he stood.
“Terry Ward.”
“Dr. Ward?” Cassie asked, confirming we were speaking to the medical examiner.
“That’s what they call me.”
The doctor had blinked when Cassie asked the question, and my eyes moved to his medical kit on the kitchen counter. It looked like a cleaned-up tackle box, once used for fishing. Shoved into it was a pair of forceps, bent at an angle, with only one loop, on the grip side.
I took in the wrinkled skin around Ward’s knuckles. He was sixty-five or seventy.
“Ashland doesn’t have a full-time ME?” I asked.
Ward narrowed his eyes, and Cassie glanced at me.
“Cervical biopsy forceps,” I said, motioning at his kit. “I assume you were an obstetrician.”
“That’s very perceptive,” Ward said. “I’m retired. Came here as a favor.”
“And we’re glad you did,” Cassie said. “We always appreciate local cooperation, don’t we, Agent Camden?”
I made eye contact with Cassie. “Yes,” I said to Ward. “Yes, we do.”
I crouched a foot from the dead man, who lay face down on the tile. Without touching the body, I could tell it had achieved rigor by late last evening and was now coming down the other side, the muscles softening in what’s called secondary flaccidity.
But Cassie was staring at something else.
The victim’s shirt was bunched around his sides, as if unbuttoned in the front. Cassie lifted the edge of it. There were blood drops on his left sleeve that moved up instead of down, defying gravity.
“Did you flip the body?” she asked.
“I had to,” Ward replied. “I had to confirm he was dead.”
The blood under the man’s legs formed a meandering oval that ran under the refrigerator. I studied the dark liquid. The average adult body holds five quarts of blood, and there were at least four on the floor.
“I put him back, though,” Ward said. “Exactly as I found him.”
“Yes. Thank you,” Cassie replied. Her brown eyes connected with mine, and her lips turned up.
I smiled back. Ward had turned the body to inspect the man and then laid him back down, redunking him in his own blood.
I placed one hand on the victim’s shoulder and the other on his waist. Pushed him until I had his body up on its side, like a book on a shelf. Stared at a face I knew all too well.
Ross Tignon.
A man I had hunted years ago. I had only stopped hunting him because he turned up dead … years ago.
The screen door clicked, and Hollings took two steps inside. “So you knew the guy?” he asked. “The dead fella’s got a history with y’all?”
Statistics filled my head. The three women Ross Tignon had murdered back in March of 2013. The precise depth in centimeters his knife had plunged into their skin.
“’Cause the computer spit out his name when we took his prints,” Hollings went on. “Then we saw the confusion with him being listed as dead already.”
Confusion was the wrong word.
“Seven years ago,” Cassie said, “Ross Tignon was the primary suspect in three murders in Florida. Then a fire broke out in his home.”
An image formed in my head. Ross Tignon’s wife, Beverly, being pulled from the blaze, her face soot-covered and her curly blond hair singed a charcoal color. But her husband did not appear to have such good luck. I remember examining the stretcher that ferried Ross Tignon’s burned body out to the coroner’s van.
“I’m not following,” Dr. Ward said. “Your suspect—he was in that fire?”
I pictured the stretcher, Tignon’s body atop it. “There is a pose the human body takes when it has been scorched,” I said to Ward. “The muscles constrict, hands drawn close like a boxer about to throw a punch. ‘Pugilistic’ is the word coroners use. But that expression is unnecessarily dramatic. The posture is simply based on the constriction of muscles as the body is burned at temperatures over two hundred degrees.”
As I spoke, creases formed along Ward’s forehead. First confusion. Then disgust.
“You thought your man Tignon was dead?” the doctor said.
Which brought an immediate question to mind. If Ross Tignon had been killed yesterday here in Texas, whose body had we found seven years ago in the Florida fire?
Cassie took out her iPad. “You interview the neighbors?” she asked Hollings.
“A real estate agent owns the place over there,” he said, pointing in the direction of the cul-de-sac. “He said the victim moved in two years ago. Didn’t call himself Ross Tignon at all. He was Bob Breckinridge to the neighbors.”
Tignon had set up a false identity. Bought property with it. Lived here in hiding.
A second question arose. Why kill a man who was already presumed dead?
“Any sign of a blond woman?” I asked. “Late sixties? Tignon’s wife?”
Hollings shook his head. “No, this guy lived alone.”
I glanced down. The victim’s dress shirt was unbuttoned and spread open, revealing the source of the blood. A cavity had been carved between his xiphoid process and his waist.
My eyes moved up to Tignon’s chest.
Something was marked there. Carved into his skin six inches above the area where he was cut open. But when Dr. Ward had flipped the body, blood had smeared across Tignon’s torso.
“The deputy took pictures,” Ward said, following my gaze. “From before I laid him back down. We figured that’s why you’re here.”
We were here because Cassie had received a text from our boss, Frank Roberts, at 5:03 a.m.
I’ve got you and Gardner on the 7:30 from Jacksonville to Dallas.
But Frank had only received word about Tignon’s fingerprints popping up on a body in Texas. Nothing more. This is why Cassie had been handicapping those odds on the drive here. She was estimating the chance of two different men with the same prints.
But this wasn’t that. This was the same man. My suspect from 2013.
I walked toward the door. Deputy Hollings had moved only two feet inside, as if keeping his distance from that oval of blood would ward off something evil.
Death has a smell, I thought.
It is more than the acrid odor of rotten eggs. Or the stink of blood and urine as they leave areas in the body designed to hold blood and urine in place. This smell is something invisible, something that comes from those who look on. From coroners, lawyers, and cops. From the imaginations of men and women who see bodies like this and entertain thoughts like, “If it could happen to him, it could happen to any of us.”
I don’t get these thoughts. When I was younger, my mother told me that my mind “just worked differently than others’.” That my affect was simply “a bit lower than normal.” And that this could be a good thing. It would offer me clarity when others became reactive, scared, or angry.
But there were other effects, too.
Things my mother had not described. Things you had to live through.
Last week in the office, I had been inside a restroom stall when two agents came in to wash their hands. “When he’s on a case,” the first man said, “it’s a wow. I mean, a real wow. But in social situations … well, I think we’re not supposed to say the r word anymore, right?”
“No, we’re not,” the second man said. “You mean retard, right?” He laughed. “Whoops, I said it.”
When I emerged from the stall and saw the agents’ faces, I knew they were speaking of me.
I approached Deputy Hollings. Ten minutes ago, he had been giddy to see us. “Fan-boyish,” Cassie would say. But now his face looked green.
I remembered a piece of advice that my mother taught me years ago. To add bits of information at the starts of conversations. To be perceived as more likable. Emotional.
“I’m sorry this is happening here,” I said. “Ashland seems like a beautiful town.”
Hollings nodded in appreciation. “Thank you for saying that.”
“You have pictures from before Dr. Ward flipped the body?” I asked.
The deputy retrieved a phone from his back pocket. He showed me a wide shot of the kitchen. Then a close-up of Ross Tignon, lying on his back.
“I need a sponge,” I said, turning to the doctor.
Ward fished through his kit. Handed me what appeared to be a brand-new construction sponge. Yellow and rectangular. Three inches thick. Three dollars and eighty-nine cents at the nearest Home Depot.
After wetting it at the sink, I leaned over the body. Used the corner of it to slowly clean Tignon’s upper chest.
The numbers 5 and 0 were carved into his skin, two inches high and an inch apart, right between his nipples.
“The number fifty mean something to you?” Ward asked.
In my head I combed through every detail from the three murders Ross Tignon had been accused of in 2013. His victims’ ages were twenty-six, twenty-nine, and thirty-two, and each had been knocked unconscious, the depth of their stab wounds 4.2, 5.3, and 6.1 centimeters past the chest wall.
My mind cycled through a half dozen other variables.
The number fifty … meant nothing.