Near Death (4 page)

The stepping-stones snaked across fast-moving light beams. They looked slippery but he was certain he could make it and wanted nothing more than to be enveloped in his father’s waiting arms. He gingerly and eagerly placed his left foot onto the first stone.

His father looked so happy at that moment, as though Liverpool had come back to pull off a 2–1 victory. And he felt happy too, overwhelmed by a feeling of pure bliss more powerful than anything he’d experienced in all his young life.

He was about to transfer his weight and push his right foot off the bank but he couldn’t.

He was being pulled backward, away from the river.

“Hey!”

Everything reversed with stunning speed. He was back in the tunnel, zooming in the opposite direction, back to the motorway, back to the crash, back to the burning car and when he got there, he was aware of being dragged out the passenger side rear door by the shoulders, feeling
violent pain all over and being racked by wicked paroxysms of coughing.

Men were shouting.

He was looking into the face of a bearded stranger. “Can you hear me, boy?”

The coughing stopped long enough for him to sputter, “Please let me go back.” He didn’t want to be here. He desperately wanted to be
there
.

The stranger looked confused. “The only place you’re going is to hospital. The ambulance’ll be here soon enough. Lie still. Put your head on my jacket.”

He coughed some more and rasped, “I want to go to back to my Dad.”

The man looked at the gaggle of Samaritans standing over his father’s broken corpse, shaking their heads. Others were kneeling over his mother arguing about mouth-to-mouth technique. Nearby, at a safe enough distance, the car was fully engaged by fire. There were shouts as someone discovered his brother crawling through the woods.

“I’m sorry, son,” the man said tremulously. “You’re safe now. You’ll be okay.”

He defiantly tried to sit up. “I want to go back!”

“You’re not going anywhere! Just lie still and wait for the ambulance to come.”

At that, the boy lay back down on the ground, turned his head away and began to sob. “I want to go back.”

Five

Cyrus held the crime scene photo in his hand and studied it before setting it down on a growing pile. Avakian kept them coming: dozens of shots of a fully clothed Caucasian girl in a roadside ditch, attractive as corpses go, discovered by a highway crew, her flesh nicely preserved by the chilled autumn air. In some angles, she looked like she could have been woken with a good prodding. If the family had wanted an open casket it was definitely doable.

He sat at the little round conference table shoehorned into Avakian’s office, a meager symbol of the older man’s seniority. His own office was even more of a nutshell; his ex-wife’s walk-in closet was larger. He looked away from the photos for a moment and glanced out the window onto the moonscape of Government Center, an ugly expanse of municipal concrete made grayer by the steady rain. He sighed, unavoidably breathing in the other man’s cologne, that sickly spicy smell, day after day, month after month, year after year. Avakian was a creature of repetition: same striped ties, same bagged lunch every day, same deprecating
stories about the wife and kids. He was shiny-bald and powerful, the physical embodiment of a bullet with a flat pugnacious boxer’s nose and a black Vandyck neatly trimmed and smattered with gray.

The two shared over a decade of history. The office didn’t have a formal partner system but as the Counterterrorism and Counterintelligence Divisions had expanded post–9/11, Major Thefts and Violent Crimes had shrunk. Cyrus had always been able to avoid a transfer to another squad. The FBI had a boatload of specialists among their ranks: accountants, lawyers, computer jocks, internationalists. He was more of a glorified cop and so was Avakian. With a dwindling supply of special agents to do battle against ordinary villains, Cyrus found himself working with Avakian most of the time. Not that he minded it. Avakian was many things to him, most of them agreeable.

“The last set is from her autopsy.”

In the best of times, Cyrus wasn’t wild about seeing snaps of a young woman cut open on a slab and these weren’t the best of times. He hardened his jaw and reluctantly stuck out his hand. The first photo showed her head on its side. She had a nice profile, a pleasing upturn to her nose, a good chin. A neat rectangle of bleached hair had been shaved from her right temple by the coroner’s
assistant and a steel metric rule was laid out on her scalp. In the pale-flesh center of the shaved patch was a small, perfectly round, perfectly black hole. The next photo was an extreme close-up that made the black hole look unanatomical, infinitely deep, and unspeakably evil.

He tried to detach himself from the image by asking a pedestrian question. “What is that, three-sixteenths? Eighth of an inch?”

Avakian had the report. “It’s the same as the others. Eighth-of-an-inch drill bit. Nothing distinctive about it. Same as you can get in any hardware store.”

Minot slipped in behind them and watched them work for a moment. The fabric of his clothes was permeated with aromatic pipe tobacco and both men turned at the sensory cue. He asked them how it was going.

Avakian deadpanned they’d have it wrapped up by lunch.

There was an air of academia about Minot; it was difficult to imagine he’d ever qualified on the pistol range or the obstacle course at Quantico. He was borderline emaciated, blessed or cursed by a rapid metabolism that gave him the lipid profile of a youngster but left him so perpetually cold that he always wore a sweater vest under his suit jacket, even in summer. His thinning but carefully combed hair drained of color and his pink-tinged plastic
bifocals that framed lachrymal eyes suggested an aging Boston banker, not someone with a holster in his desk and a badge in his pocket.

He touched Cyrus’s arm the same way the priest had done earlier and asked, “How’s your daughter?”

“She’s home. Everything’s status quo.”

Minot gestured at the files. “I wish I didn’t have to give this to you.”

Cyrus shrugged to signal he understood.

“It’s a weird case, isn’t it?” Minot mused.

Avakian handed him the photo of the punctured skull, then followed suit with other autopsy photos of two young black women with the same wound.

“This is a sick guy,” he clucked. “Didn’t Jeffrey Dahmer drill his victims?”

Cyrus knew the details; he remembered these kinds of things. “He injected their frontal lobes with acid. He wanted to turn them into sex zombies but he wasn’t a great scientist. All of them died.”

“Anything similar going on here?”

“No one thinks foreign substances were introduced,” Avakian said.

“What then?”

He rubbed his bald head, fingers splayed like a man who still had tousled hair. “To be determined, Stanley.”

After lunch they took a drive. They had to start somewhere so they decided to begin with the latest victim, Carla Louise Goslinga, a twenty-one-year-old prostitute from Boston whose body was found the previous Friday up in Hooksett, New Hampshire. Her probable interstate transport put the crime on the federal map. The case was shaping up to be a jurisdictional hash anyway: the first victim was found on state-owned land on the banks of the Charles in Newton, so the Massachusetts State Police had it; the second victim was discovered in a vacant lot in Columbia Point not far from the JFK Library, so that case was owned by Boston Homicide. Now that the third case triggered the FBI’s involvement, everyone was rushing to dump off their databases and let the feds have the headache and expense of a serial killing investigation.

It was a straight shot out of Boston, north on I-93. Avakian drove one of the pool cars, his attention moronically glued to a sports radio station while Cyrus wearily rested his hands on his knees and stared through the beating wiper blades at the dull highway scenery. Despite that peak foliage was only a week or so past, the wet afternoon and gloomy light muted the palette of the
woodlands. Avakian was babbling to the radio, calling one of the talk-show guys an idiot, but Cyrus was able to tune out, only distantly aware of a stream of logorrhea.

When they crossed the state line, Cyrus pulled out the report from the New Hampshire State Police with the precise location of Goslinga’s body. They had to drive right past the spot, so a quick tramp through the crime scene was on the agenda even if it meant soaking trousers.

When they passed the Route 3A exit, Cyrus reached over and turned off the radio, prompting Avakian to swear at him. “Three miles,” he said in response. “There’s a large pond. Let’s not overshoot it.”

“I can drive and listen to the radio, it’s not that advanced,” Avakian grumbled.

“This crap makes you crazy,” he replied, referring to football.

“Our running game sucks. We need more balance.”

“No,
you
need more balance.”

“Yeah, right,” Avakian countered. “My egghead partner’s telling me
I
need balance. I like red-blooded American sports, you like libraries. Tell me which one of us is normal and which one needs professional help.”

He guided Avakian off the road onto the shoulder as soon as he glimpsed the edge of Pinnacle Pond through the misty trees.

Finding the location where her body had been discovered was a piece of cake because a knot of yellow police tape remained on a nearby tree. Cyrus had a wide-angle photo showing the body in a roadside depression: he and Avakian thus were able to stand over the precise spot, close to the grassy verge, down a natural slope in a shallow piece of ground puddled with runoff.

Cyrus pointed to the highway. “All he had to do was pull off the shoulder, park there, pull her body out of the car, drag it three feet and push it down the slope. He’s in and out in under a minute.”

“They couldn’t get any tire tracks,” Avakian said. “The grass is too thick and it was dry last week.”

“No witnesses either,” Cyrus added. “He was probably here late at night when the traffic’s thin.” They were getting drenched.

“Okay, we’ve seen it,” Avakian said, making a move back to the car. Cyrus wasn’t following. He was trying to decide whether to jump down into the wet ditch. “They went over the place,” Avakian implored. “You think you’re going
to find the perp’s wallet down there? Let’s go, for Christ’s sake.”

Back in the car while Avakian dried his scalp with his pocket handkerchief, Cyrus offered up his assessment. “He picked her up in Boston off her usual beat, probably
didn’t
have sex with her, strangled her, drilled her head for whatever reason, drove her up here, pulled off the highway at a random place when there weren’t any headlights in his rearview mirror, dumped her just far enough off the road so she wouldn’t be spotted immediately, took the next exit and turned tail back to Massachusetts.”

“Why no sex?”

“Because he made no attempt to conceal the body by burying it, covering it up, dragging it another twenty yards and throwing it into the pond. That tells me he’s confident we wouldn’t find his DNA on her body. Just like the other two.” He seemed to second-guess himself for being so opinionated and he abruptly adopted a less certain tone. “I could be wrong. He could’ve used a condom.”

Avakian grunted and turned the radio back on. “You keep thinking, I’ll keep driving.” He turned the volume up. “No ego problems here.”

The rain was coming down too hard for Avakian to deign to use the parking lot. He pulled up to the covered
entrance of the Holiday Inn in Concord, got out and showed his badge to the attendant. The young man didn’t give him any lip and ran off excitedly to tell his buddies that a couple of FBI agents were on the premises.

The assistant deputy medical examiner who’d conducted the girl’s autopsy over the weekend was attending a conference, and he agreed to meet with the FBI agents on short notice only if he could see them at the hotel. All the medical examiners in southern New Hampshire, along with their support staffs, were holed up for the day at an off-site meeting to get in-serviced on new database software that was supposed to make their lives easier. Dr. Ivan Himmel nevertheless had grumbled over the phone in a stream-of-consciousness way that there was nothing wrong with the software they already had and that the state of New Hampshire never got anything right.

The doctor seemed beyond grateful when someone from the conference staff pulled him out of the hotel ballroom. He approached Cyrus and Avakian like a puppy then happily led them over to a table near the afternoon coffee setup. “First dibs on the baked goods,” he exulted. “Load up. On me.”

Himmel was one of those older men who never seemed to grow out of adolescence, and even though he was a portly
sixty-five decked out like a period piece in a red bow tie and suspenders and short-sleeved white shirt, he had juvenile mannerisms, dunking his chocolate chip cookies into his coffee and wiping the crumbs off his puffy lips with the back of liver-spotted hands.

He slurped his coffee and apologized again for the venue before launching into a tirade on the inefficiencies of state government. Cyrus grounded him at the first polite moment. “The cause of death was strangulation, right?”

“Yeah. Her larynx was crushed. It was manual, from the front. The bruises were consistent with a pair of thumbs. It’s not so easy to kill someone like that unless they were drugged or passed-out drunk.”

“You don’t have the tox back yet, right?” Avakian asked.

“Hello? This is New Hampshire. Have you seen our budget? The idiot bureaucrats are spending money on software we don’t need instead of nuts and bolts.”

Cyrus jumped in, heading off a tangent. “Which came first, the strangulation or the head wound?”

“Look, if she was conscious at the time of the assault, I’d say a hundred percent she was strangled then drilled.” He turned his hand into a power drill, pointed a finger against his skull and made a long drawn-out
brrrrrrrr
sound with his throat, causing the two agents to blink in disbelief at his antics. “You can’t sink a drill bit into someone’s skull without them putting up a little bitty fight and there aren’t any signs of bondage. If she was drugged first, then all bets are off on the sequence. If she still had a beating heart the drilling would have produced a real gusher. There wasn’t any blood at the crime scene but she was certainly killed somewhere else. There also wasn’t a lot of blood on her hair and scalp so she was probably dead or fibrillating when she got trephined. We’ll know more when the labs come back, but like I said, it’ll take a while.”