Stone Maidens (2 page)

Missy grew quiet and gazed out her side window, not exactly sure how to respond. The truck passed familiar landscape. She could see a friend’s farmhouse on a ridgeline opposite the road. She was about to ask him to stop the truck and say that she just remembered she was supposed to drop by her friend’s house this afternoon when the man extended an open palm near her lap.

“See?” he said. “I finished this one yesterday. Hand carved from chert, a variety of jasper.” He smiled at her. “Like my name.”

Missy stared at the reddish stone still wet from being in the man’s mouth. It was about the size of a chess piece. At one end, a distinct head and face were carved. Grooves along the small stone outlined arms and legs.

“I bet that takes you a long time.”

“Yup.” The man closed his palm and pocketed the charm.

“So where do you work, Jasper?” Missy asked, changing the subject. “I bet it’s outdoors, on account of your tan.”

“Well, aren’t you a smart young lady,” he said, nodding slowly. “I sign paint different places, business establishments. Some people think hand-painted signs are old-fashioned. I guess I’m what you call a throwback.” He grinned and flicked the tips of his fingers gently against her bare shoulder.

She started at the casually intimate touch.

“A regular artist I am. Do my best work when I’m left alone, know what I mean?”

She glanced down at his spattered jeans. “Yeah. But it kind of looks like you work for the fairground people, painting clowns.”

He chuckled, shaking his head. “That’s a funny one. Truth is, the damn Sweet Lick Resort can’t buy near enough of me. I get worn out working so much.”

“You mean that fancy golf course place?” she asked. “My friend’s uncle is a groundskeeper there. His name is Lonnie Wallace. Ever hear of him?”

“No, I don’t think I’ve ever met the man. But then...” He arched his brow and hesitated as if pondering her question. “I’m not apt to talk to anyone when I’m on the job. Better to concentrate.” He fidgeted his hands over the top of the steering wheel, twisting his grip. “Like throwing that baseball, winning you this prize.” He tugged one of the stuffed animal’s ears. “It truly was worth all the tea in China meeting you like this, Missy.”

The truck jounced over a bump. Missy rocked forward and pushed back her hair away from her face. He winked both his eyes at her, and Missy laughed right on cue. He told her how earlier in the year he’d been put in charge of a painting crew renovating a Chicago museum—a hundred men working under his watchful eye repainted primitive exhibits, ones that displayed spear-wielding cannibals in their native jungle habitats.

“Really? That must have been amazing.”

“I fib you not.” She felt his eyes brush over her and smiled self-consciously. “I’m only the greatest damn sign painter on the whole darn planet, you know? No splash-and-dash operation, no ma’am.”

“Well, yeah. Sure.” It puzzled her—his saying first how he worked solo most of the time and then right afterward saying a hundred men had worked under him in a museum renovation. She chalked it up to male insecurity—his needing to boast so much. Besides, he was funny and sweet in his own way. And she’d finally figured out why he looked so familiar.

He slowed the truck and pulled off under a high canopy of evergreens. The air was a full ten degrees cooler than the fairgrounds and smelled piney sweet.

She leaned an elbow over the stuffed bulldog, rubbing one of its ears between her fingers. “Know why I really came along with you?” A coy smile broke across her face.

“I suspect you wanted to see Clear Creek.”

“You don’t remember me, do you?” she said, dipping her chin shyly. “Science class junior year?” She looked straight into his eyes. “Weaversville High?”

He hesitated. “If you say so.”

“Come on. Really, don’t you remember? You were the only one too afraid to cut open that cow’s eye.” Nodding, feeling more certain of herself, she said, “You walked out of class too grossed out to even touch it.”

He scratched hard behind one ear. “You sure got a memory for things, I’ll say that.” He opened the truck door and hopped out.

Missy followed him around to the hood, hands tucked in her back jeans pockets. “You were so shy back then. What happened?”

“I guess”—he covered his face, peeking out between his fingers—“because I started playing hide-and-seek so damn much! Better run and hide before I count to ten,” he yelled.

Like a lit firecracker, Missy took off. She plunged down the wooded bank like a kid half her age would, sparked by Jasper’s boyish charm and his clear interest in her. There was nothing but the petticoat rustle of leaves and the nutty smells of the forest telling her that this was one of those rare occasions in life when wishes might just come true. When finally, finally you met someone meant just for you. Like magic, it was happening exactly the way it was supposed to, the way her mother had met Missy’s father and had known in that instant he was the man for her.

The grade slanted steeply. Missy took choppier steps and had to grab hold of slender saplings to keep from falling. Far below, she caught glimpses of water sparkling between the trees.

She deftly slalomed in and out of a mixed grove of beeches and oaks, then dropped onto the sandy bottom of a partially dry creek bed. Beyond were standing pools of water. She crouched behind a massive overturned sycamore, giddy with expectation. Peering up the wooded ravine she’d just descended, she listened intently for his footfalls over her rapid heartbeats but could hear nothing.

She registered a dull thud behind her, across the creek. How could he be there already? Missy bolted away from the sound across the deep, damp basin, each step slowed by the sucking sand. Something wasn’t right.

From behind, she heard him splashing through a deep pool. “You sure are...fast on your feet,” he panted. His voice sounded taunting somehow, not charming at all, and a sharp bolt of fear ripped through her chest.

Scattered sunlight glinted on the water. Instinctively, Missy’s eyes scanned what lay ahead, searching for an exit. Her eyes picked out a line of escape: a patch of harder ground that veered back up along the edge of the woods. She swung her arms for added speed, unnerved that she hadn’t heard him coming through the forest. She hadn’t heard a damn thing until he had dropped down from the opposite bank.

She ran while looking behind her and plowed straight into a fallen tree, sending her sprawling to the ground. Frantically, she clawed at the bark, tumbled back down the sandy bank, and tore her shirt in the process. Tendrils of panic worked their way into her brain, nearly sending her headfirst into a deep pool. The collision with the tree had left a nasty gash on her left kneecap, and blood was trickling down her shin.

The sound of a semi downshifting nearby brought her struggle to a standstill. She could just make out the moving hulk’s flickering shadow in breaks between the trees that rimmed the steep ravine high above her. A coal carrier chugged by with a full load from the Lincoln Mines in Blackie, where her father worked. Her dad’s kind, weathered face flashed through her brain. The slowmoving truck was only a football field’s distance away as the crow flies, but deadfall formed a near-insurmountable barrier.

Missy suddenly realized it wasn’t her own breathing growing louder, but her chaser’s, from directly above her on the bank. She looked up, blinked.

“Thought I’d lost you for a minute.”

Confusion spun the contents of Missy’s mind as she tried to make sense of what she was seeing. The man was reclining, arms crossed and utterly relaxed, on the fallen tree that had sent her flying to the ground. His face was covered by an elaborate feathered mask.

He tucked the mask back over the top of his head and gazed at her sympathetically. “Got a little hung up, didn’t you?” His hand flopped over the side of the trunk, pointing out her torn shirt. A stone of some kind dangled from his neck.

She crossed her arms over her ripped shirtfront and stepped backward into the cool water, warily maintaining eye contact with him. She’d lost her sneaker during her mad dash, and her one bare foot slipped on creek stones coated with algae. She had been badly mistaken. Jasper wasn’t the name of the student from science class, and the face gazing down at her wasn’t anything like that of the shy boy she’d known in high school.

A knock came at the door. A slim woman with gray hair pulled primly back poked her head in. “Christine, they’re waiting.”

“Just a sec, Margaret,” said Christine Prusik, chief forensic anthropologist of the FBI’s Midwest Forensic Sciences Laboratory. Its jurisdictional responsibilities took in most of the central corridor from the Great Lakes to the borders of the Gulf Coast states, which were handled by New Orleans forensics teams.

Prusik tucked her short chestnut hair behind her ears, revealing two gold studs—the only piece of female hardware on the special agent—and continued to scan her field notes with practiced eyes. Of medium height and well proportioned from years of swimming the backstroke—she’d been a county champion when she was in her early teens—she was adept at rebuffing the advances of men who hadn’t correctly read what she tried to make eminently clear through her body language: Hands Off.

Her mammoth desk—a fortress of piles, with no surface free on which to jot even a note—was still insufficient a space to display all the materials she needed to ponder a case and its possible permutations. On the floor wreathing around her desk were open field notebooks, forensic-ruled photographs, and postmortem summaries underscored and starred with Magic Marker blues and pinks. Prusik’s dynamic intelligence at once focused in on the most diminutive detail and nuance of trace evidence and panned out to the wide screen, factoring in the significance of geographic
location, crime scene patterns, and any similarities and differences with other potentially linked cases.

To Prusik, working a case meant all information had to be at hand, to be positioned or repositioned on the floor as she stood hunched over, scanning downward like some bird of prey on patrol, intently searching for a telltale sign, something—anything—odd or out of place or deliberately wrong.

Wind buffeted the building. Slanted streaks of rain raced across the large-paned windows of her sixteenth-floor office overlooking downtown Chicago. Prusik leaned back in her chair, holding a color slide up to the light. Hurriedly she skimmed the stack sent by overnight courier, looking for one in particular, the angle shot of the neck. She preferred holding actual slides to toggling through an array of digital images on a flat screen. To her, a photographic positive was crisper on close-ups than on the digital counterparts from the new Canons most field agents preferred.

She propped a brown, crepe-soled oxford shoe on the edge of her desk. Her free hand tugged a tuft of her hair, snagging loose a few strands in the process, as she mulled one particular close-up of a gaping purple wound—a vicious cut—that perversely mimicked the contours of an open mouth along the abdominal cavity. Just then an itchy panic took hold of her, and the photographic slide slipped from her fingers onto the floor.

Prusik fumbled open the desk drawer and grabbed the small pewter pillbox she kept there. Many years ago it had belonged to her grandmother, and Christine had wondered what pills her mother’s mother would have kept in it. Swallowing one Xanax tablet dry, she lofted the Bose headset over her ears and flipped the lever of the CD player on the credenza. She closed her eyes in the hunt for calm, waiting for the near-trance-inducing chords of Bach’s Partita for Keyboard no. 1 to return things to order. She tightened her right fist, squeezing her pinkie against her palm. Pills couldn’t erase the fact things were getting worse.

Within a few minutes, the combination effect had worked—the modern miracle of neurochemistry acting in consort with Bach’s genius. Her breathing had slowed; her heart rate no longer frightened her.

The office phone rang, destroying her peace and startling her forward in the chair. It was Margaret, her secretary, nudging her again. But she wasn’t ready yet. She refocused on the short stack of slides in front of her and hunted for any forensic anomaly that might cast light on the killer. The pictures had been taken the preceding day, July 27. Three whole months had gone by since the first corpse had turned up—nearly three whole months without delivering a positive ID of the killer or even one iota of incriminating evidence. The body of the first victim, a teenage runaway named Betsy Ryan, was found in water, near Lake Michigan and protected shore lands. Very private, with no residences nearby housing someone who might have heard her cries for help had she made any.

This latest victim, a Jane Doe, had been found two hundred and fifty miles south of Chicago in Blackie, Indiana, a coal-mining district southwest of Indianapolis, a region dominated by dense forests and steep-sided ravines. The victim’s body had been discovered partially exposed under some leaves near a creek bank; she wasn’t a floater or submerged like Betsy Ryan had been. Ryan’s body had surfaced in the third week of April, snagged on the anchor line of an outgoing skiff on the Little Calumet in Gary, Indiana—practically Prusik’s doorstep. The Ryan girl had been washed clean; nipping minnows and crustaceans had made sure that no foreign DNA had been left behind. But one thing remained that no amount of washing could erase, and it tied the first crime irrefutably to the second—a vicious ventral slit running the length of the left side of the victim’s abdomen. All the internal organs had been removed, leaving the bodies literally eviscerated. And both killings had occurred near water.

The office door cracked open again.

Without looking up, Prusik said to her secretary, “Yes, Margaret, I know.” Christine’s boss’s plane to Washington would be leaving in one hour, his car to the airport in fifteen minutes.

“No, you don’t know,” Margaret scolded in a stern whisper. Margaret eased herself all the way into the office. “It’s Thorne. He’s calling again.” She paused for emphasis, though none was needed. “He’s got a plane to catch.”

“Tell him to keep his shirt on for chrissakes.” In her ten years with the bureau, Prusik had acquired a reputation for gruff impatience, which she exhibited at inopportune times with superiors and subordinates alike. Driven by high expectations of herself, she had little room for work or effort that was, in her opinion, second rate.