Not long thereafter, Caractacus Jones rode into Surrender, where he and his men were presented with the sight of the two youths hanging from the pulley arm that extended out from under the eve of the barnlike building that housed the town’s post office and general store. They were not quite dead, when the Colonel arrived; but by the time his men raced up and cut them down, they were. Yet when a note from the now-vanished townspeople that had been pinned to one of the young men’s chests was brought to Jones, explaining that the “good people of Surrender” hoped this offering would satisfy him, it had a singularly peculiar effect on the Colonel. His eyes once more filled with tears, he crumpled the paper in his hand, and then, looking around at the buildings along the crossroads, he murmured:
“You cannot escape it, in this country…”
Colonel Jones then turned his horse around and headed back up Death’s Head Hollow. He would sire three sons and two daughters in the fifteen years of life remaining to him; but he would never again leave the confines of Shiloh. Nor would he ever explain those enigmatic words spoken so quietly in the square of Surrender—indeed, he would never even hint at what the inescapable “it” he had referred to was. His statement became the town’s supreme mystery, as well as a kind of curse. The people of Surrender did not speak of what had happened for a period of time that, given their gossiping nature, was a very long one; and when they finally did dare to ponder the meaning of the words, it was in whispers concerning which families among them had been most actively responsible for the pair of murderous schemes, the one that had failed and, even worse, the one that had succeeded, thus prompting the Colonel’s unexplained indictment.
This debate was a shrouded but no less heated one: families spread rumors about the involvement of other families, and inevitably violent encounters erupted, first with fists and knives, then with guns, though injury rather than death was the usual result of these contests. Blood feuds were born, in which stealing and vandalism were the preferred tactics: although they would never have admitted it, most citizens of the town had had their fill of murder. As Surrender staggered on through the end of the nineteenth century, and then the beginning and middle of the twentieth, new residents moved to the village, driven by the ebb and flow of economic fortunes in surrounding towns and cities and, later, as ships and automobiles destroyed the meaning of distance, far-off states and, finally, other parts of the world. The largely German-American valley of the Taconics now became a destination for families from eastern and southern Europe, particularly Italy; but the new arrivals who settled in or near Surrender were eventually drawn into the old feuds by obscure causes, coincidental slights, or simple boredom, choosing sides in a battle of whose real origin they were wholly ignorant. Indeed, so ignorant of it were they that when the descendants of the few families that had once worked for Colonel Jones (descendants who themselves worked for the Colonel’s heirs) actually proposed erecting a monument to their benefactor in the modest town square—a bronze statue of the man, resplendent in full-dress Federal uniform, with his slain dog proudly standing at his side—the motion was passed by the town’s leaders, and the funds appropriated without argument.
Time and still more generations passed. News of war came several times to Surrender, and some of her sons even served, with varying degrees of valor. The mobile home was invented, creating the greatest environmental and scenic impact on Burgoyne County since the inventions of the axe and the saw; yet in a more fundamental way—that way peculiar to towns that lie at the very frontier of our civilization and law—change continued to avoid the village of Surrender in any form more significant than the laying of vinyl over wooden clapboards and the paving of once-dusty earthen roads (although Death’s Head Hollow itself, which remained the property of the Jones family, was never to know asphalt). The instruments with which families warred against each other evolved, and there were occasional and tumultuous shifts in clan alliances; and all the while, the battle to expunge something that few of them could even identify went on. There was universal talk of respect denied, of swindles and lies, and of the extent to which enemies were asking, even begging, for a reckoning; but the crimes committed in Surrender (to say nothing of similar acts perpetrated in Burgoyne County more generally), for all the grandiose, drunken talk of most of their perpetrators, generally remained as petty as were the minds behind them.
Yet, though petty, some of those minds and those crimes could on occasion be cruel enough to rise above mere mischief and achieve genuine outrage; indeed, we had just witnessed one such offense, which now formed the first piece of the mortal puzzle into which Pete Steinbrecher and Steve Spinetti were drawing Mike and myself with such evident urgency.
And in the days to come, we would meet another victim of another kind of local outrage. That same unusual character would bring with him up Death’s Head Hollow further confirmation of the theories Mike and I were already forming about Shelby Capamagio’s death; but he would bring a great deal more. For we were on a collision course to meet one of Surrender’s few sons who had managed to defy both his community’s past and his own parents’ abusive deviousness to become a young man of exceptional character—although he himself would have been loath to admit it.
{i.}
The most apparent points of interest and alarm concerning the account that Pete Steinbrecher gave us during the drive back to Shiloh concerning cases similar to Shelby Capamagio’s were not the numbers involved (two additional children of about Shelby’s age, a boy and a girl, found dead in Burgoyne County during the past several weeks), nor even the eerily similar fact that both had also been apparent murders in remote locations. No, eerier still was the fact that Mike and I felt sure, after hearing the details from Pete, that both death scenes had been staged. Still more important than all this, we agreed with the pathology reports from the first two cases, which overruled the FIC tech involved in each and declared that the children had probably not been killed where they were found, thus explaining Steve’s elation on hearing our theory that the same held true for Shelby. (Rather ominously, the tech in both cases had once again been Curtis Kolmback, a repetition that defied departmental rules, and, further, suggested that political forces were at work about which we knew next to nothing.) But the two most important and disturbing aspects of the three plainly linked cases, we became increasingly convinced from spending the following two long days and nights studying the case files concerning all three killings (the texts of which Pete very decently and discreetly scanned and e-mailed to us himself), were, first, the sex, or more precisely the sexes, of the victims, and second, the fact that a hoped-for similarity—that all three had been “throwaway children,” kids abandoned by their families—had been contradicted by a report that the first victim had apparently been a simple runaway. Both of these were fundamental inconsistencies: and true inconsistency in the behavior of murderers is never a welcome feature—although it is nearly always a critically revealing one.
During all those hectic hours of focus in the fuselage of the old Junkers JU-52, however—hours interrupted only by the need to deliver lectures to and referee discussions among our students at SUNY-Albany, as well as by the need to grab what few snatches of sleep and food we could—Mike and I came no closer to understanding just what explanation of the crimes these two inconsistencies regarding the sexes of the victims and the circumstances of their separations from their families might indicate. There was one obvious and inviting candidate concerning the first factor, of course, and we had no doubt that the Bureau of Criminal Investigation’s officers were currently dashing about the county investigating it: the possibility that a registered sex offender with a known taste for pubescent boys as well as girls was back at work. It was by no means an outlandish suggestion: hebephiles—adults who are sexually attracted to pubescent children—are often and even usually interested in age, rather than sex; and the list of registered offenders with such tastes who were either longtime residents of Burgoyne County or had been relocated to i
ts more sparsely populated regions was long indeed. But the possibility that one such character had not only resumed his behavior, but become murderous, as well, was statistically remote, although Mike and I did not discount it on that basis: for it was part of our method never to include or preclude suspects or scenarios on the basis of the numbers game, given that we were firm believers in the maxim of the nineteenth-century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, who had declared that there were three grades of falsehood: “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Rather, we based our resistance on certain behavioral considerations that we had been able to glean from the case files we had been sent, as well as from the preliminary results of the tests that Mike had run on the body of Shelby Capamagio:
“It just doesn’t work, Trajan,” my partner declared, on the afternoon of the third day of our wrestling with the known facts before us. “I can’t find any greater evidence of sexual assault, or even sexual activity, in the reports on the first two kids than I’ve been able to determine regarding Shelby. At least so far. I mean, sure, the girl was no virgin, the pathology report demonstrates that, but that’s no big fucking shock. Besides, neither was the second victim, Kelsey Kozersky, and she lived an entirely different lifestyle, on a horse farm. So that’s a dead end. And as for anything else, anything violently telltale…Well, it just isn’t there.”
I nodded as I stood up, my lower body unsteady after too many hours of work and too few of sleep. Taking out a cigarette and sticking it in my mouth without lighting it, I picked up a heavy, retractable dog’s leash and said, “Which means that we are almost certainly not dealing with any known sex offender; perhaps not with a sex offender at all.” I chuckled once, more out of a desire to find something amusing than because anything was genuinely humorous. “And wouldn’t the folks from the BCI just love to be sure of that. They could stop racing around back roads with their hair on fire, rousting unsuspecting schmucks who’ve already been put through the mill by anyone who’s found out about their pasts. A shame nobody in Albany would ever listen to us…”
“Yep,” Mike agreed glumly.
“As for the thread of throwaways,” I went on, “it speaks for itself. If it’s not there, it’s not there, and if Kelsey ran away, then her being brought home after being killed is simply not consistent in any way that is of fundamental use. Simple diversion. Which this killer—or group of killers—has an increasingly apparent taste for…”
“Yep and yep,” Mike murmured, already knowing this fact to be plain.
Checking the pocket watch in my vest, I realized with some little concern just how late in the afternoon it was: we had been burning through both possibilities and hours, the former dead ends and the latter seemingly wasted. “Almost four-thirty,” I said, taking up my light cotton suit jacket and my cane. “You’re up.”
“Already?” Mike said, lifting his forehead from one hand and speaking with no little dread. “Oh, Jesus, man—where’s the Visine? My eyes must be shot to shit.”
“Might be,” I answered, getting my jacket on and then shoving a small black book I’d been studying into its pocket. “But I don’t know why you’re worried about it—nobody can see your damned eyeballs, anyway. Besides, a nice, exhausted squint just makes you look even more inscrutable.”
“Fuck off, you ethnically insensitive pig. Where’s the fucking Visine?”
“In the top drawer of your desk, where you left it last night.”
As Mike found the small plastic bottle and began to drip the liquid into his bloodshot eyes, he made his own rather strained effort to inject at least a little humor into the frustrating moment: “You know, Trajan, we could put these students to work for us on this—without giving them specifics, of course. Just the basic, anonymous facts. And who knows, one of them might turn out to be the—ah, you know, that thing about how you put a thousand monkeys in a room with a thousand typewriters and eventually one of them will write War and Peace? Well, one might be our monkey, and end up giving us the key to the whole thing by accident.”
Mike was, of course, only expressing frustration at being pulled away from a potential triple homicide to perform our academic obligations; but his idea was one that, in the days ahead, would come back to haunt us. For the moment, however, feeling as irritated as my old friend that our difficult role as informal advisors on the case was not yet supplying us with enough information to indicate a path forward, yet still believing that the solution of the murders might somehow depend on our work, I felt the rather desperate need to get out of the plane and the hangar. I wouldn’t be able to get any sleep, of course, for it would be my turn before the students in just a couple of hours; but I might at least clear my head. So I began to walk down the aisle between the few remaining leather passenger seats of the JU-52 and toward the forward hatch of the fuselage, replying to my partner’s suggestion by saying, “Just try to get through your lecture in something resembling a coherent fashion, Michael.”
Eyes cleared, Mike took his copies of the case files we’d gotten from Pete off his desk and slammed them on the floor, in an effort to find the text for his next course. Once he’d located the blue volume, he began the work of preparing both the rear portion of the fuselage and himself for the work ahead: he switched on the bank of flat-screen video monitors that sat in a shallow semicircle in front of the doorway to what had once been the plane’s lavatory, then began moving into place a black felt backdrop that we employed to hide the actual nature of our headquarters from our students.
“Ah,” I said, as he tugged at the felt with the book under his arm. “The National Academies report. So today you go after the big fish.”
“Damn straight,” he replied, stepping onto my side of the backdrop once the thing was in place. “Although I’d rather keep going after the local species. But they don’t seem to be biting…” The book Mike was holding was the Research Council of the National Academies’ report on Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States, which, despite its title, was as much a scathing indictment of what had gone wrong with forensic science generally (and especially the many forensic laboratories in the country, particularly the famed national lab of the FBI at Quantico, Virginia) as it was a prescription for improvement. Mike’s evident focus on it that afternoon, I knew, meant that he intended to work off some of his present frustration concerning our case by showing his students just how the patterns for corruption and incompetence that were so rife at the local levels of laboratory work had also grown entrenched in the hallowed federal evidentiary analysis center. The FBI lab had been one of those places—through its imagined appearance and activities in books-turned-movies dating back to Silence of the Lambs—that had doubtless inspired many of our young scholars to pursue a career in forensic investigation in the first place; yet somehow, at that moment, with just our two exhausted selves in the plane, the report seemed as much a reminder of what we were up against, in trying to challenge our effective professional exile and provide answers to three murders from our completely unofficial position and our most unlikely headquarters, as it did any embodiment of defiance.
I let out a long sigh as my partner looked at his reflection in one of the darkened, low windows of the fuselage and buttoned up his short-sleeve white shirt, which was somewhat the worse for wear after two straight days of use. “It isn’t the old days, is it, Mike?” I said, bitterly wistful. “Steaks and scotch at Luger’s, when we beat the city lab on some headline case…”
“No, it sure as shit ain’t that,” Mike said, his voice admirably free of remorse. “But that’s not why we got into this business, L.T., and you know it.” Picking up a clip-on tie and fixing it to his collar, he went on: “And we’re not done on this one yet—once I get through this class, I’m gonna finish those last tests on Shelby. The trace on her clothes—there’s something about that…And if I find anything worthwhile, I’ll buy you a twelve-pack of Genesee to celebrate. Besides, you just need to get the fuck out of here and spend some time with you-know-who. Once
we get a break on this thing, you won’t be moaning about steaks in Brooklyn.”
“Yeah. Well, get this damned class over with, so you can test whatever you need to test and find whatever you need to find.” With that, I finally headed out the hatch of the plane and onto the set of steel steps just outside it. “Always remembering, of course, that we continue to give these kids their money’s worth, insofar as we’re able. It’s them, not the citizens of Burgoyne County, that are keeping us alive, just now.”
“Them and Miss Clarissa Jones, of course,” Mike answered, straightening his ridiculous but convenient neckwear and pulling on a sports jacket of matching functionality. Then he nodded at the leash in my hand. “Go on and have your quality time—maybe you’ll think of something we haven’t yet, and start pulling your weight on this case.”
“Unh-hunh,” I noised. “And you quit flirting with that Chinese exchange student. Some of the others have started to notice, and they’re cracking wise on the subject.”