“Or maybe they fell off in the struggle.” Behind them was Leslie Johnson. “Got here as soon as I could.”
“We had a theory on MO,” Curtis said. “He entraps them when they’re driving, uses a ruse to get them out of the car, then gets close enough to easily and quietly disable them. Maybe he makes believe his car is having problems. They stop and come over to help him, and that’s when he anesthetizes them. He takes them somewhere and tortures them, brings them to a secluded area, usually a park or a wooded area, and dumps the body.”
“Well, that seems to fit,” Hurdle said.
“Doesn’t pose them,” Vail said, “at least not overtly. He leaves them face-up, probably so we see the bloody lines. Abdomen’s laid bare. As we discussed, those lines mean something to him. He wants us to see them.”
“Well, he succeeded,” Hurdle said. “We see ’em.”
Curtis licked a few flakes of snow off his lips. “And the excised genitalia. Don’t know about you, but that’s just friggin’ gross.”
Vail turned to him. “Did you think we’d find that anything but gross?”
“How long’s she been out here?” Johnson asked.
Dyson checked her watch. “I did a liver poke. I’d say about four hours. Lucked out that a hiker found her before some animal realized he hadn’t gotten enough to eat today.”
“Cause of death?”
“Severed carotid,” Dyson said.
Curtis looked up into the falling flurries. “Like the others.”
Like the others. Vail considered that. Except that this was not exactly like the other murders.
“Problem?” Curtis asked.
“Nah, just giving it some thought. It’s like the other MOs, and yet it’s different. He usually spent time with the body before dumping it. But he didn’t do that here. He’s not been out long enough to ‘enjoy’ his time with the victim. Why would he spend so much less time with this woman?”
Hurdle crouched to get a better look at the body. “What you said earlier. Maybe he was so excited to be free, to be able to kill again, that he couldn’t contain himself. He was so eager to kill that he had to do it. He couldn’t wait. Kind of like premature ejaculation.”
“Not a bad analogy. I guess that’s possible. But for him, it’s not just the kill that he’s after. It’s the whole process, the interplay with the victim, the power he exhibits over her while he tortures her. He skips parts of his ritual, it won’t be nearly as enjoyable for him.”
“Makes sense to me,” Curtis said. “But that still leaves us with the question of why he rushed through it.”
“Could be something as simple as he had no place to bring the body,” Vail said, “where he could take his time. He’s been in prison and he’s on the run.”
“And he doesn’t know how long he’ll be out,” Johnson said, “how long he’ll be free, so he’s doing his best to get in as much ‘fun’ as he can. Yeah, he takes less time with the body, enjoys it a little less, but he’ll make it up in volume.”
Vail filled her lungs with frigid, moist air. She exhaled and sent a robust cloud of vapor into the forest. “Hope you’re wrong, Leslie. Because that would really suck.”
HURDLE LEFT SHORTLY THEREAFTER, but Vail, Curtis, and Johnson remained at the crime scene another ninety minutes, passing theories back and forth. They decided that until they knew more about Tammy Hartwell—who she was, where she frequented, and what could have brought her into the crosshairs of Roscoe Lee Marcks—they were playing with a deck of cards missing all the suits: you didn’t get very far and the game was not much fun.
Hurdle had excused Vail and Curtis from returning to the command post until the morning. Given their past experience with, and knowledge of, Marcks, their time was better spent working the new homicide—for the moment. When he got the call about the Hartwell murder, he had directed Tarkoff to hand out assignments to the task force members. They could deal with the “fugitive 101” items that they had discussed before they broke for dinner. And if there were things they needed help with, he could pull more men and women from the Marshals Service as well as the county police force.
When Vail walked into her house at midnight, she found Richard Prati sharing a glass of port with Robby in the family room. Jonathan had driven Ryan home, then gone on to his dorm because he had an 8:00 AM class.
“You two still at it?”
Robby sat up and drained his glass. “We were swapping stories about growing up in Los Angeles.”
Vail wondered if he had disclosed some of the most significant ones, those he had told Vail a few years ago. His face was impassive and she could not read it—a rarity.
“We had some similar experiences,” Prati said. “Why we got into law enforcement.”