The vines had been pulled away from the old vault entrance and the heavy brass and lichen-covered door had been fully opened. Rigging had been set up for lights to flood the interior of the vault.
When Aidan arrived, crime scene workers were still taking out whatever small specks or fibers could prove to be evidence.
Van Camp and Voorhaven stood in front of the tomb, watching the proceedings.
Voorhaven greeted Aidan with a friendly handshake. “Hey, glad you’re here. I sketched a diagram of what the vault looked like before they took out the hatchet and the knife, scraped off the blood and collected any hair and fiber they could find. Naturally, Van Camp and I went through first in booties to try to reconstruct what happened. I’ve also included the outside environs. Can I show you what I’ve done?”
“Of course.” As he spoke, the head of the forensics unit, introduced to Aidan as Gina Mason, stopped by to tell him and the detectives that her people had finished.
“They’ll send someone to clean up the blood. Not that anyone should be in this old place, anyway, but we don’t want to create a possible health hazard,” she told them. “But, Detectives, Agent, you’re free to try out more theories.”
“Did you get anything promising? A cigarette butt, a thread, a hair?” Aidan asked her.
“Hair. Plenty of it on the altar. Where the heads were hacked off. I believe, however, that we’ll discover that the murderer was aware of what we’d be looking for, since he wore gloves. Maybe even a snood to protect his own hair—or, hell, maybe he shaved himself bald. Not a button, a cigarette butt or even old beer cans. College kids didn’t get in here for frat night or anything—so there’s no unrelated evidence. That should make it a little easier for us. The killer left the hatchet and the knife. That’s it. I’ll report on them as soon as I can.”
Aidan nodded. “Thank you.”
“I hope we can help!” she said. “I really hope we can help.”
She waved goodbye and walked to her truck.
Van Camp turned to Aidan. “I think the kid here has done a good job with that sketch,” he said.
Voorhaven looked at Van Camp and then at Aidan. “The kid? Lee just has to refer to me as ‘the kid’? Old man, I’m thirty-three,” he said. The “old man” was said teasingly. Aidan could see that the two partners cared about each other and despite Jimmy Voorhaven’s initial hostility to the FBI’s moving in, he wanted to be a good cop.
“Hey.” Aidan grinned at Van Camp. “It’s okay. I wouldn’t mind being a kid again. And when a job’s done right, doesn’t matter how old someone is.”
Van Camp shook his head wearily. “Let’s just do this,” he said.
“All right,” Jimmy said, holding out his sketch and pointing at two parallel lines he’d drawn. “Here’s the way in. We might have gotten tire tracks if we’d found this place early enough. Not many people use this road, since it’s almost more of a trail and it goes through a line of forgotten vaults in a hill. Access is through one of the cemetery roads. But our killer knows this. He has his victims in a car—I’m thinking a van or SUV. He stops. Moves the vines and cracks open the door.”
He indicated the opening to the vault on his sketch. “We had to use crowbars to get it all the way open, the way I’ve got it here. Okay, so then he has to bring his victims in one by one, but that’s not hard if they’re knocked out. I think they might all have been alive when they got here, but maybe he didn’t want the kind of blood spatter he’d have on him if he chopped off their heads when they were alive. Okay, so—”
Voorhaven paused. “Say I’m the killer. I have one victim hoisted over my shoulder. I slip in. I probably have a light in here because I go straight to the deep end—way beneath the earth.” He stared down at his drawing. “I’m guessing these murders were personal because it takes a lot of strength to strangle an adult man or woman—a lot of adrenaline, a lot of passion. Or desperation, if you’re in a fight, but I don’t think there was any fight. So, he drops off one victim, then goes back for the next. Of course, the kid’s a different matter. Now, if our killer had balls, he did all this with the van parked out there. If he was worried, he moved it and came back.”
“Or he or she had an accomplice,” Aidan said. “We’ve been leaning that way.”
“Right,” Voorhaven agreed. “So, he slips through with one victim over his shoulder and then walks back to his van.” The young detective thrust his crumpled sketch in his jacket pocket and mimed the action he described; Aidan and Van Camp followed.