“Hello? Tyler?”
“Hey, Dr. B. Sorry to interrupt you. But you asked me to let you know if I found anything significant when I cleaned the bones.”
I felt my senses go on high alert. “What is it?”
“I was just looking at the left humerus. It was cut about midway between the shoulder and the elbow?”
“I remember. Go on.”
“Well, I looked at it in the dark, the way you showed us, with a flashlight beam skimming it at a really low angle.”
The wait was killing me. “For Pete’s sake, Tyler, just spit it out. What’d you see? Saw marks? Knife marks? An image of the Virgin Mary?”
“Well, cut marks, for sure,” he went on, with maddening indirection, “but not saw marks or knife marks, best I can tell. I compared ’em to all the examples we’ve got in the reference file. I finally found one photograph that matched the pattern.”
“So what was the tool?” I looked down and found myself drumming my fingers on the desktop, unconsciously aping Brubaker’s gesture of impatience.
“It was labeled ‘Unknown.’ From a case you worked in Alaska two years ago.”
“SEXUAL SERIAL KILLERS DON’T do that,” Brubaker said, with an assurance born of a quarter century of experience studying violent, twisted murderers.
“But why else would he cut her up that way,” I persisted, “with a tool that I would recognize—that only I would recognize—if he’s not trying to taunt me, or threaten me?”
“You said it yourself,” he went on. “Even you don’t know what the cutting tool was—not in this case; not in that Alaska case.” He was pummeling not just my hypothesis but my confidence, too. “And you said the Alaska killer hung himself in prison, so we know he didn’t kill this stripper. Not unless you missed the time-since-death estimate here by a lot more than ten days.” That felt like a low blow, and it stung. When did the conference table turn into a boxing ring—and how had my forensic colleagues been transformed into spectators, watching me take a drubbing? “How the hell would some truck driver in Tennessee know about this cutting tool that’s so mysterious even you can’t figure out what it was?” I had no answer to that.
“Serial killers don’t go after cops,” he went on, “and they damned sure don’t go after anthropologists. They go after their dream victims. Bundy? He went after brown-haired women who looked like the girlfriend that dumped him. Gacy? Boys and young men. The Green River Killer, up near Seattle? Forty young women so far, nearly all in their teens and twenties.” I nodded, grudgingly.
“Look,” he added in a more conciliatory tone, “there are only so many ways to kill somebody. Put a hundred million killers at a hundred million crime scenes for a hundred million years, and sooner or later two of them will pick up the same cutting tool.” I liked the reference—a riff on the old saying about monkeys and typewriters and the works of Shakespeare, which was really a saying about how random genetic variation eventually, inevitably, turned primordial slime into human beings—but I disliked the swiftness and certainty with which he’d rejected my idea: my suggestion that the Stinking Creek killer was somehow—somewhy—echoing one of my prior cases.
“You’re the expert,” I said, hoping my voice didn’t convey the sullenness I was feeling.
“These guys go after victims that feed their sexual fantasies,” he repeated. “Don’t take this the wrong way; I mean, I do find you a very attractive man, Doctor”—he said it with a sly grin and a wink, to let everyone know it was a good-natured olive branch of a joke, as well as a signal that the discussion was over—“but I doubt that this guy’s fantasies extend to you.”
I prayed to God he was right. I hoped like hell he wasn’t wrong.
CHAPTER 12
Desirée
SHE WAS LEANING AGAINST a streetlight—one foot propped on the post, the knee raised and her back arched, accentuating her curves—when the blue Mustang sidled to the curb and stopped. She waited until the passenger-side window came down, then pushed off from the post and sauntered to the curb. Music spilled from the car window—Elton John pleading “Don’t let the sun go down on me”—then the volume ramped down, and she heard the guy inside call out, “Hey, good-lookin’. What’s your name?”