By now Mike had gotten the X-ray unit into place. “Which brings me,” he declared as he worked, “to my central point.” Having set the imager, he returned to his kit, inside of which sat the small control console, and flipped a few switches. Then he returned to me and took the imaging plate, attempting to somehow get it set on the side of Shelby’s neck opposite the imager, between her shoulder and the rack on which her arm was bound: an awkward process undertaken so that I wouldn’t have to hold the thing myself. And, while I appreciated the effort, I had to laugh a little.
“Really, Mike?” I said. “With all the radiation the doctors are shooting into me these days, you think one X-ray exposure is going to make a difference?”
Mike pondered that, then nodded. “Point taken. Okay, then—you hold it. Steady as you can, L.T., I’ve only got one plate. Didn’t figure on those fuckers overlooking this…”
With that we changed places again, and in a few seconds Mike had gotten his image. “It’s more than just the knot,” he said, picking up the conversation right where we’d left off and starting to pack the X-ray gear away.
“Yes,” I said, beginning to get it as I focused my eyes more intently on the area around the deadly ligature. “Her neck has been snapped back, suddenly and violently. I don’t think this was strangulation at all, Mike—this girl looks like she was hanged.”
“Yeah, sure, steal my idea now, motherfucker, when it’s obvious what I’m driving at,” he replied, a little annoyed, yet a little pleased, too. “But,” he continued, “there’s one more possibility: the killer originally had the knot in the traditional spot—on the back of her neck—and was able to jerk it with such force that he snapped the spine clean.”
“Come on, Mike.” I was still studying the apparently fatal break in Shelby’s neck. “What are the odds of that? Achieving a hanging-like force with one pull of your arms? You’d have to be pretty monstrously strong.”
His cheeks fattened with another smile. “Well, maybe that’s a clue for your profile, genius. Anyway, the X-ray is the only thing that will tell us for sure.”
“Either way…” I stepped back from Shelby’s body again, and glanced around at the pictures on the shadowy walls of the room once again. “One thing is clear: somebody has staged all this—I think our method gets us to that point safely. Yes, somebody very badly wants us to believe that Shelby was murdered here, in this place, by a violent sex offender. And it would make some sense—one might, under other circumstances, even call it clever. Burgoyne County has always been a safe place to relocate sex offenders. People mostly mind their own business; plus, it’s mostly rural, so there are plenty of spots where they can hide the modern-day lepers away.”
“Very true,” Mike said, going back to tracking down any other items of notice around the body that he could find.
“But what does that leave us with? We’ve dealt with all elements of the ME’s and Curtis’ theory—what are we going to tell Pete and Steve to replace it with?”
“Okay,” Mike replied, standing. “If drugs are out…and we think sexual assault is out…and the case for the murder-rape is at least weak—what does that leave us with?”
“You forget one more thing we’ve eliminated,” I said. “The notion that she somehow killed herself from that strung-up position.”
“Right,” Mike agreed. “But what, then? There’s a lot of possibilities: could have been a sexual encounter that went bad—she didn’t want to go through with it, the guy got so pissed off he killed her, and then, like you say, staged all this to confuse investigators.”
“But that just leads back in a circle,” I replied quickly. “Because anyone with that kind of strength could have gotten physical control over her and completed the rape, as we said. And remember, that’s a strangler knot—it’s not like he just grabbed her by the throat, there’s no evidence to back up manual strangulation. And the strangler takes time to prepare.”
“He could have had it ready.”
“So murder was the main motive, and not rape? Why? What the hell did this poor kid have to make her a target, if not herself?”
“I don’t know, Trajan,” Mike said in frustration. “Maybe she was dealing, and held out on her supplier. Or maybe she was turning tricks, and did the same to her pimp.”
“Mike,” I droned skeptically. “You’re applying big-city rules, now. Do you know the incidence of white rural prostitution nationwide, much less in this county? Not to mention drug dealing—Steve might not have known if she’d been using, but I can guarantee you, if she’d been hooking and dealing, there would have been rumors. No—whatever happened here…” I glanced around the room again. “It’s something we haven’t seen before. And I say that with a full appreciation of the fact that we’ve seen just about everything.”
“Yes, we have,” Mike answered, starting to put the remainder of his equipment back in his kit. “So—what do we have that we can say we’re even half-assedly sure of?”
“All right: we believe she was hanged. And yet, if she was hanged, she apparently experienced none of the other bodily functions generally associated with the act.”
“Yeah, but she may just have had nothing to eat or drink in the hours before she died,” Mike commented. “In fact, in the case of a girl like this, I think we can pretty much assume that much.”
“Fine—but even if that’s true, you’re going to have to find me a spot in this trailer where she could have been hanged that would have allowed a sufficient drop to achieve the kind of break in her neck that we both believe the X-ray will reveal.”
Mike took a quick glance down the hallway. “I can’t do that. Unless it was a tree outside.”
“Which would have risked the killer’s being seen. No, either her neck was snapped by someone hugely strong, who would have overpowered her and raped her, or the hanging was an effort to cover a different crime by someone who knew where she lived. And if it was done to cover something else, what’s the crime that hanging is most often an attempt to disguise?”
“Suicide,” Mike said immediately. “Which, we’ve already said, doesn’t seem to make sense. Even if she did it, what did she care about covering it? It’s not like she had life insurance.”
“Right.” I paused, mulling it all over. “None of it makes sense, Mike…” Taking one or two steps away from the closet, and pacing on Kolmback’s plastic sheeting, I pondered the apparent conclusion: “Suicide makes no sense, rape seems not to have occurred, murder without rape, too, seems to make no sense, and we can’t ascertain anything that makes us believe that drugs were even involved. So we know Weaver and Kolmback are wrong, but—”
Suddenly I stood very still, having caught sight of something on the floor that had been hidden in the shadows behind the beam of one of Curtis’ work lights. It was such a poignant, yet, in its way, terrible sight that I only half-heard Mike when, as he finished repacking his kit, he mused, “I know this is going to sound crazy, L.T., but—it almost seems like somebody is trying to tell us something, and we’re just not—”
I could no longer stifle a soft oath, however: “Good Christ, Mike…” Shaking myself, I waved to him. “Come here, and tell me what you think of this.” Even as I said it, voices became audible outside the trailer: Curtis Kolmback returning. “Fast.”
Mike moved to stand by me, also having heard the voices that were coming our way. But then he, too, froze, less with dread than with shock; because what was on the floor before us suddenly and rather resoundingly confirmed the theory that my partner had only begun to voice.
{iv.}
In a very ordered pile, one that was in no way suggestive of a fifteen-year-old girl with a supposedly entrenched meth habit, lay a half-dozen articles of clothing, each folded carefully, one would almost have had to say lovingly. They proceeded in order from the floor: jeans, shorts, a delicate shirt and two similar tank tops, then a bra and two pairs of panties that seemed as fashionable as those she had on, and finally shoes. A pair of black leather hig
h-top sneakers studded to look like biker boots, along with (less predictably) an obviously costly brace of gladiator sandals, had been placed on either side of the pile. The supposedly telltale meth paraphernalia was nearby, along with a goodly supply of the drug in a small, clear bag; but these items, too, were arranged, not strewn about in anything like a desperate manner that might have indicated their use.
“Well, fuck me,” Mike breathed, quickly reopening his kit and grabbing for a few more strips of tape and his camera. “That’s really something I’ve never seen…” He speedily took photos of, together with samples from, each article of clothing in the pile, being careful not to disturb the collection in any noticeable way. “This,” he mused, as his hands expertly went about their work, “is goddamned bizarre…”
“It’s worse than that,” I answered. “It’s one more thing that makes no damned sense.”
“Doesn’t seem to,” Mike replied.
“First, there is the body,” I continued, saying what we both were thinking. “And the obvious attempt to make us think the girl had been abused and violated; yet then there is this attempt to be so considerate of her effects? It’s a blatant contradiction, one I doubt that she was responsible for. I mean, does it look like the work of a rebellious fifteen-year-old?”
“Nope,” Mike judged certainly, finishing up his work. “That, it does not.”
“Right; so whoever it was,” I continued, utterly mystified, “had a very seriously fractured approach to whatever he—or she—was doing. Almost as if…”
“Almost as if there were two people doing it,” Mike said, completing my thought as he returned his samples and his camera to his kit and closed it back up.
“Two people would be easier for us,” I said. “Because if it’s one, we are dealing with a far more deeply troubled and troubling profile. And yet—I’m afraid the second possibility is exactly what we face.” Feeling the chill of certainty run up my back, I looked at my partner; and I hesitate to admit that there was likely a certain gleam in my eye, the gleam of facing some horribly new yet bracing challenge. “I think that we’re being drawn into that rarest sort of murder case, Mike,” I whispered, less out of fear of being overheard (even though Kolmback had entered the trailer) than in awe of our discovery: “A case in which a perverse dialogue has begun to take shape. Someone is talking to us with all this, just as you said, and hoping we will read it well enough to respond in some way.”
Mike’s face grew a bit puzzled. “But why us? How could whoever it was have known that we’d get pulled in on this thing, that it would go unrecognized by those saps outside?”
“If he knows the county, he knows how inept Weaver and the FIC are,” I said quickly. “And it hasn’t been any enormous secret that we’ve helped Pete and Steve before. Plus, you heard the pair of them before we came in here: both spoke of ‘another,’ and ‘this one.’ I think this killer has been at work before, Mike, and we haven’t yet been told about it. Yet. But we’re going to be, I am going to make good and goddamned sure—”
My statement was cut off when Kolmback finally reached the end of the trailer. Steve was now bellowing at us to finish up, and the tech was moving our way at a fast pace. Mike lifted his kit by its handle as he took a quick step away from the clothing, creating the impression that he had not yet performed any significant examination of those items or much of the rest of the scene. I took several steps back, myself, looking around the room but trying not to allow the fascination engendered by the detail that Mike and I had just discovered to register in my gaze.
“Hey, guys,” Kolmback said as he came through the doorway, wearing a surgical mask of his own. “Sorry about the raccoon,” he went on, a bit sheepishly. “We never saw him.”
“Her,” I murmured.
“Hunh?”
“There are a litter of kits in the oven—they’ll be rabid, too. You might want to leave that job for Steve.”
“Yeah,” Curtis breathed, looking back toward the kitchen in apprehension. “I might just, at that. So—” He tried to become more self-assured. “You guys have anything to add?” His tone was confident, yet bespoke a willingness to hear either simple agreement or informed dissent; as yet, however, I was inclined to keep our cards very close.
“Doesn’t look like it, Curtis,” I said. “Did Weaver name a t.o.d.?”
“Eight to fourteen hours ago,” Kolmback replied.
“His usual precision,” I said with a nod. “Well, there’s no apparent sign that she was spending any time here.”
“No,” Curtis answered, pleased to agree with our conclusion. “Just a small flashlight that we bagged. No evidence of any kind of food, though, not even a candy wrapper. And nothing to sleep in, or on, except that mice-ridden mattress in the other room.”
“All of which,” I sighed with a nod, “naturally makes our ME even more confident that someone dragged her home to kill her…”
“All that,” Curtis answered, “along with a couple of other things that rule out suicide. But I’m assuming you’ve examined those.”
“Yeah, we’ve examined them, Curtis,” Mike said. “The big question is, why does a guy who’s strong enough to strangle her on the floor, or somewhere else, go to the trouble of trussing her up like this to try to make it even seem like suicide?”
Curtis’ face suddenly grew very puzzled; and I knew we had our first crack in the official presentation. “What do you mean?” he asked. “She wasn’t killed before she was put up there—it was after.” To Mike’s and my own apparently dumbfounded looks, Curtis continued, rather proudly, “Well, maybe you guys missed it for some reason, or maybe you just didn’t want to get too close, but—she died up on those bars, all right. Come on, I’ll show you.”
As we followed Curtis back to Shelby, I looked at Mike, who, like me, seemed to be trying to determine what in the world Kolmback could have been driving at, and if we’d really missed something crucial. Then, after just a few seconds, my partner realized what he believed that thing must be, and he turned to me, mouthing, Holy fuck, and rolling his eyes as if to say, Just wait until you hear this one…
Curtis took up a position within the closet and beside the dead girl, as best he could manage. “Now,” he began, getting an enormous kick out of playing instructor to us. “You’ve already ruled out the idea that she hanged herself in here, or that she could exert enough pressure on the ligature to produce what looks like the break in her neck.”
“We have,” Mike said. “But that was good work on your part, Curtis, spotting the angle of the cervical spine.”
“Thank you, Mike,” Curtis said, genuinely grateful for the compliment. “But I’m afraid you’ve fallen into the killer’s trap of trying to make you think he must have inflicted that break somewhere else. But there is a way it could have happened inside the closet, if you’ll just bear with me for a second…” Curtis moved his latex-gloved hand up to take the pulling end of the nylon cord from Shelby’s supposed grasp. “Okay, now,” he went on, holding the yellow strand over his head. “You’re a strong man. You’ve raped the girl, then taped her up like this. But you still need to finish her. So what do you do?”
As Curtis fumbled to get himself wedged tighter in the closet and then shimmy up its walls to reach what would have had to have been, according to his theory, the killer’s height, I moved closer to Mike and whispered, “What the hell is he doing?”
“Don’t sweat it,” Mike said. “Not that I think you’re sweating it. But I know where he’s going, and the mistake he’s made—fucking hell, it is painful…”
“All right,” Curtis continued, having been able to move himself up a good couple of feet off the floor. “So we’ll assume our killer was not only strong, but tall—say, six foot three, at least. Does that line up with your preliminary thoughts, Dr. Jones?”
“Hmm?” I said, by now simply stunned at the image of Curtis, his legs straightened now so that his neck was being pushed downward by the ceiling. “Oh, yes, I’d say that?
??s about right.”
“But you still don’t know how he achieved the force, even with his height and strength, to bring about such a violent snap in the girl’s neck, am I correct?”
“You are correct, Curtis,” Mike answered. “But hurry the hell up, man, we don’t want to see you fall and break your goddamned neck.”
“Not a problem,” Curtis answered, though it clearly was. “Anyway, from this position, the answer is simple: he took his foot, which was backed up by a leg many times more powerful than his arms, pressed it against the small of her back, here—” With great difficulty, the poor tech removed one of his feet from the closet wall and tried to demonstrate his theory. “Then, still holding the rope, he slammed the foot down—”
And at that point the presentation became too much: Curtis came tumbling back to the closet floor, bumping rather clumsily into Shelby’s body, and would have ended up flat on his ass had it not been for Mike, who moved quickly to rescue him from so undignified a fate. “I warned you about that,” my partner said, trying not to smile but unable to quite complete the effort. “You all right, Curtis?”