Johnson frowned and shifted her feet. “Yeah. So she said she went about making her breakfast and getting showered and dressed and happened to glance back outside at around 11:35. New guy was there, so she figured they changed shifts. An hour later, he wasn’t in the car, so she thought he was walking around, checking the property. After lunch, about 1:00 PM, she looked again and again he wasn’t in the car.
“Ms. Marcks started to call Detective Curtis when she heard something outside. She hung up and went to the window, saw her neighbor running down the street. The woman was shrieking. Jasmine went out and discovered the officer’s body, saw he’d been murdered. She found his body in a well-concealed planter between two shrubs. Jasmine grabbed her purse and tore out of here.”
“The officer?”
Johnson pulled out her spiral notepad and thumbed to a couple of pages. “Arrived at eight, relieved the night watch officer. Gregory Greeling. Thirty-one years old, wife and son.” She shook her head. “Anyway, he’s got some strange markings on his body. ME’s still here, with the body. You wanna see for yourself?”
“Hell yes,” Vail said, and she and Curtis followed Johnson down the street.
Hurdle intercepted them midway and gave them a halfhearted salute. “I’m off.”
“Off?” Curtis said. “We’re going to look at the body.”
“Already done. Weird shit, not sure what it means. But it’s not important. Whoever did that’s got some problems.”
That might be the understatement of the year.
Hurdle backed away. “What matters is we got a bad dude out there on the run with a nice head start. On my way back to the command center. Gotta catch us a fugitive and every goddamn minute is precious. You find the daughter, let me know. I wanna make sure she knows to call us if she hears from her father. That’s about all I gotta do here. Be back at the motor home at five, ready to roll up your sleeves.”
“He’s kind of abrupt,” Curtis said as he watched Hurdle move off. He nodded at Vail. “Reminds me of you.”
Johnson chuckled.
“Hey,” Vail said, giving Johnson’s shoulder a shove. “Don’t encourage him. Besides, I’m nothing like Hurdle. I mean, he’s a deputy. I’m a special agent. He’s Marshals Service, I’m FBI. He’s a man. I’m a woman. See what I mean? We’re totally different.”
“Okay. Whatever you say.”
Vail continued walking toward the medical examiner. “I respect the guy. No nonsense. Knows what he needs to do and does it. Helps to have someone like that in charge.”
They stopped a few feet from the body and Vail took in the scene. The ME turned and watched them approach.
“First homicide, your second day on the job.” Curtis glanced at Johnson. “Welcome to Fairfax, partner.”
“Definitely not my first homicide,” Johnson said. “I worked in New York, remember?”
“Karen Vail, FBI,” she said to the ME, holding up her badge. “This is Erik—”
“I’m Lindy Dyson. I already know Detective Curtis. And Detective Johnson and I have met. Guess you want to hear about our victim. Time and cause of death?”
“That’d be a good place to start,” Vail said.
“TOD looks to be within the last four hours, consistent with what Jasmine Marcks said relative to when she last saw Officer Greeling. Cause boils down to a laceration of the carotid. Massive hemorrhage. Clean margins, so your killer used a very sharp knife.” She swung a hand around, gesturing off to her left. “As you can see from the amount of blood in the planter and the arterial spurt on the surrounding foliage, he was killed right here. And then there’s this.” Dyson moved the white canvas down to the officer’s waist.
Vail swallowed. She had seen it before—but always in photos. The abdomen featured deep parallel slice marks carved into the skin, down to the muscle layer. “Not deadly, and done postmortem. Right?”
Dyson nodded slowly. “Correct.”
“And I assume his penis and—” Vail cleared her throat. “The male genitalia have been excised?”
She drew back the sheet farther. “Right again.” Dyson rose from her crouch. “You’ve seen this before?”
“Not in the flesh.” She winced. “Sorry. Didn’t mean that. Only in photos. But yeah, I’m familiar with the mutilation pattern.”
Curtis licked his lips and turned away. “Okay, let’s cover that baby up. Please.”
Johnson was squinting, the back of her right hand covering her mouth. “That’s pretty goddamn disgusting,” she said, her palm rising and falling as her lips moved.
“Welcome to my world.” Vail gestured to Dyson to recover the body. “We’ve got a marshals task force set up.”
“Hurdle,” Dyson said. “Just met him.”
Vail gestured at Dyson. “You’ll make sure we get all the reports ASAP?”
“Soon as I can, yeah.”
“You think of anything, let us know. The guy who did this just escaped from Potter Correctional. Any detail could be crucial. You know the drill.”
“Unfortunately, I do.”
“LOOK,” JOHNSON SAID as they walked back down the street. “I just want you to know it wasn’t anything bad. The thing with the NYPD. You don’t have to worry about me not having your back. It wasn’t anything like that, nothing bad.”