Stone Maidens (19 page)

“The same color as the girl’s skirt,” the sheriff said.

“It sure looks like it to me,” Henegar agreed.

“By the way,” the sheriff added, “the victim’s from the same school as Joey Templeton, who observed at the approximate time
of the girl’s disappearance a strange man, possibly the killer, stuffing something in the back of his truck.”

Prusik imagined the panicked girl thrashing to escape, ripping her skirt. “I want to interview the boy who saw that stranger right away, Sheriff.”

“I can set it up,” McFaron said, pushing back the brim of his trooper hat. “He’s the only eyewitness we have. I’m disappointed our police sketch hasn’t yielded a suspect yet.”

Prusik stooped; something else had caught her eye. Dangling from the underside of the same bough was a thicker strand, possibly canvas. She picked up her field case and handed one end to McFaron.

“Would you mind?” she asked.

“No, that’d be fine.” He held the ends of the case while she fished around inside.

McFaron’s awkwardness always bloomed around attractive women. It was an awkwardness that had turned the few dates he’d had in recent years into complete disasters. Worse was hearing the reverberations of each failed encounter throughout the town afterward, which kept his forays into companionship to a minimum. And yet he wasn’t always awkward. Sometimes, he thought, he could be downright charming. Or so he hoped.

Prusik capped the vial containing the second thread and withdrew a tape measure from her zippered pouch. “Could you hold one end, Dr. Henegar?” She stretched out the tape.

“I’d be glad to.”

The doctor held the end of the yellow metal tape, which was marked in both inches and centimeters, as Prusik proceeded to measure the length and width of the disturbed grave site.

She let the tape measure snap back into its holder. Her empty stomach tightened, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten since wolfing down a measly croissant at the Chicago O’Hare food court before catching her flight. She had an urge to invite the sheriff to dinner, but hesitated.

A trickling sound drew Prusik’s attention. Without a word, she left the crime scene, wandering down the wooded slope. All the victims’ bodies had been found near running water. She followed along a track of disordered leaves that led down to some exposed flat rocks beside a small stream. Immediately her eyes locked on what appeared to be dried blood on one smooth stone.

Rifle fire sounded in the distance.

The sheriff stepped up behind her. “Could be from a deer carcass,” McFaron said, noticing what had caught Prusik’s attention. “Hunters are crawling all over these woods.”

She pulled on another pair of forensic gloves. With forceps she flicked some of the blood into a vial and capped it.

“My field technicians will comb this area and inside the perimeter sometime tomorrow,” Prusik said. “I’ll plan on spending the night. Have any good recommendations for a place to stay?”

“There’s only one really,” McFaron said. “The motel by the interstate gas station. It has an all-night restaurant.”

As Christine was nodding, a nearer blast of rifle fire caught her off guard. “Let’s go see that eyewitness of yours before we all get shot.”

A whistle blared shrilly. “OK, Sarah,” Coach said. “You’re in.”

Sarah North’s eyes brightened as she hustled to the right forward position, waving Olive Johnson, an eighth grader, off the field. The scrimmage resumed and the center quickly passed off to Sarah, who dribbled downfield.

“Good wheels, good wheels!” Coach’s voice boomed. “Pass the ball, Sarah, out to the wing!”

Sarah instantly responded. Her pass to the girl at wing landed perfectly—two steps in front.

“That’s it! Nicely done!” Coach barked through cupped hands.

The girl on wing beat the defender and centered the ball, dropping it midway between Sarah and the goalie. Sarah had to stretch, but she beat the goalie and kicked a low grounder inside the corner post. Nothing but net!

“Nice move, Sarah!” Coach said, marching out to midfield. “You just earned yourself a starting position in this Saturday’s game, young lady.”

Sarah had started the season second string on the Parker, Indiana, middle-school soccer team because she was a seventh grader. Sixth through eighth graders all played on the same squad, but seniority tipped the scales in favor of the older girls starting first string. Now she would be starting!

After practice, she headed home, kicking at the pinecones scattered along the roadside, replaying the goal she’d made. The team was beginning to click after practicing most of August, and Coach was openly boasting that they had a good chance to beat Carver, a school twice their size. Both schools were located in satellite communities of Crosshaven, the county seat, which was twenty-five miles away.

Sarah adjusted her pace for the two-mile jog home. She was just about to enter the shadows of a hemlock grove when a loud engine revved up behind her. She turned and was blinded by sunlight. A dilapidated truck was rolling straight at her, cutting her off. Sarah wedged her thumbs under her pack straps and sprinted over the curb. The driver ground the gears; one of the truck’s tires had gotten hung up on a rock off the pavement.

She looked back from a few yards away. Why had the man driven off the road like that? Was he drunk? Suffering a heart attack? The driver was pounding the steering wheel. She thought she heard moaning through the closed window, making her more uneasy. She glanced in the direction of school. No one else was coming. When she looked back at him, the man’s face was pressed hard against the driver’s window, his face twisted in agony. She didn’t recognize him from school or anywhere else. His cheeks
were glistening. He was crying. It didn’t make sense. It didn’t look right, either.

The skin on Sarah’s forearms tightened. A funny thought skittered through her mind—the missing Crosshaven girl she’d heard about. She started running, keeping to the center of the road, pumping her arms. Without slowing, she checked over her shoulder as she would on the practice field to receive a pass, only this time it felt like it was for keeps. The truck was still stuck, but she could hear the engine revving madly.

As she ran into the shadows of the hemlocks, cooler air flushed across her hot cheeks. She thought of dashing into the woods to a cave she knew, squeezing through its tight crevice entrance, a place the weirdo man couldn’t get into. She looked behind her again. The truck was gone. It had disappeared.

She stopped, bent over and out of breath, not realizing how fast she’d been running. Perspiration trickled down her forehead. Sweat soaked through her clean shirt. The truck was nowhere in sight. She repositioned her backpack and ran on, and she didn’t stop until she reached her own driveway.

Sheriff McFaron dropped Christine off at the Interstate Motel following the interview with Joey Templeton. Before they’d left the crime scene, she’d briefed him and the doctor on all the relevant details of the case—the museum theft, the charm stones in the second and third victims’ throats, the profile she was creating of the killer. She’d declined the sheriff’s offer of dinner, saying she had to hit the phone pretty hard. The digital clock radio on the small bed table read 6:55 p.m. Time to check in with Brian Eisen.

Prusik punched the
AUTO DIAL
button on her cell. “Let’s hear what you got, Brian,” she started right in, kneading her forehead with the butt of her hand.

Ten minutes later she grew restless listening to him rehash things. There was nothing new to report—Thorne’s favorite refrain. She told Eisen she wouldn’t be flying back tonight and ended the call, laid down her cell phone, and pulled off her jacket and pants, flinging them over the chair back.

Christine felt queasy, not having eaten a proper dinner. She should have accepted McFaron’s offer. It was good business practice, and she knew it. Besides, he had a nice manner, he was considerate—not to mention his good looks. That she had good feelings toward him was undeniable, all of which made her cautious, fearful of screwing it up, whatever “it” meant. Men and feelings were hell on her nerves. Whatever else, she didn’t need to add that complication into the mix right now. Prusik arched back her neck,
longing for the lap pool, which was more effective than a drug and healthier for her, too.

Five months into the investigation and all the classic symptoms of her PTSD were surfacing at once. The tension had been close to intolerable today: Finding the charm stone in Julie Heath’s trachea had almost sent her into a tailspin, putting her on edge for the rest of the day and making her overly argumentative with both the doctor and Sheriff McFaron. In the makeshift morgue, she’d had to grapple with panicky thoughts and do it without revealing that something more than the murders was bothering her; murders, after all, were something she routinely dealt with as part of her job. Prusik feared that Howard and Thorne would find her out and label her an incompetent, as her mother had been before being involuntarily hospitalized for intractable depression. Like mother like daughter—wasn’t it that simple? Well, she wouldn’t give in to her panic. She wouldn’t.

She clicked open her attaché case and removed the rubber glove that was still bunched around the broken figurine. She freed the two stone pieces that fit together into a sterile collecting jar and screwed the lid tight. The carving was exquisite handwork; it had to be one of the stolen museum artifacts. The shortwave UV light Nona MacGowan had demonstrated would likely turn up the identifying micro etch.

She stripped and ducked into the small shower stall. “Don’t sweat the small stuff, Christine,” she mumbled to herself under the forceful spray. But there was nothing small about it. The gruesome murders were upsetting enough on their own, but once their uncanny resemblance to the ritualistic cannibalism of the Papua New Guinea highlanders became clear, the murders were beyond freaky.

“There’s a perfectly logical explanation,” she said, talking to herself loudly now, not considering whether this made her crazy like her mother. She turned the water down. “You’ve got a PhD in forensic anthropology, and you’re working the lead on a serial
murder case for the FBI. You’ve got plenty of backup. You’re in America’s heartland, for chrissakes. Not on some godforsaken island in the Pacific. You’re in charge, Christine. In charge!”

She stepped out of the shower and toweled off. She liked motel rooms. Being able to rant about everything that had gone wrong in the day, carry out a diatribe while looking into a mirror, was especially gratifying in a neutral, impersonal space. She wasn’t beyond throwing pillows at the bed, the floor, the walls. Prusik had learned tantrums young watching her mother’s wild ones. At the end of a hard day back in Chicago, she often fantasized about finding a motel room nearby and giving it a piece of her mind. Now, she picked up a pillow with half a mind to hurl it at something. As she raised it above her head, however, the idea somehow lost its appeal, and instead she found herself sliding between the welcoming sheets.

A few hours later, Christine was awakened by the racing of her heart. There was little she could do to stop the uncomfortable metabolic sensation, a manifestation of her chronic anxiety. She slapped the bed table in the dark searching for her pills and swallowed two Xanax. She pulled off her nightshirt soaked in sweat. Trembling in the cold, dark room, she wrapped a blanket tightly around her shoulders, knelt between the twin beds, and rocked back and forth to steady her nerves. She checked her pulse—rapid—and scrubbed clammy fingers through her hair. She crept toward the bathroom in the dark, knocking over the chair piled with her clothes. She sat on the toilet seat, forcing herself to take deep breaths to slow her redlining heart.

Christine had a crazy thought to call Sheriff McFaron but knew that wouldn’t be right. What would she say to him? Would you please come and hold my hand while I wait for my drugs to kick in? She located her phone under the clothes heap
and dialed 411. A few minutes later the call went through to a twenty-four-hour hotline. A pleasant young woman’s voice said her name was Amy. “Mine’s Christine...I can’t sleep...my heart’s racing...I’m shivering...nearly passed out in the bathroom a moment ago. Look, I just need someone to talk to. Will you stay on the phone with me awhile?” She stood up and made her way to the outside door in search of fresh air, then slipped off the security chain and opened it.