Strike Dog (9 page)

He used a tag alder to pull himself up the grassy rise. Even from a distance of several feet he immediately saw dark spots on some blades of grass. He found a stick and probed the ground. The end came out dark. Flies rose and buzzed.

“You got something?” she said.

“Looks like,” was all he said.

He saw signs of something heavy dragged west. He followed, and in an opening just behind the tag alders, among crushed yellow birch saplings and grass, he found the ground saturated with more blood and flies.

From there a drag trail led back to the water about twenty paces upstream of where Ficorelli had come ashore. He slid back into the river near Special Agent Monica. “How far from here to where the body was found?” he asked her.

“About three-quarters of a mile, maybe a mile,” she said. “Why?”

“Did your people search down this far?”

“Not yet,” she said, in a tone that suggested they had not planned to come this far.

The distance was about what he had guesstimated. He turned to face her. “I think this is your kill site. He got out for some reason and was killed up there. The body was then dragged up the river to where it was found. Dragging it through water dispersed evidence, helped drain the blood. The killer probably gambled you would be more likely to concentrate upstream because it would be easier to move the body down the river.”

“Which means?”

“Our perp is strong to be able to move a body so far upstream.”

“Not easy to drag dead weight against this current,” she said.

“Exactly. It's not easy, but it's easier than you might think in the shallows, where the current isn't as persistent. Whoever did this is probably in pretty good shape.” Ficorelli had not been a large man, but dead weight was dead weight.

“Did you find evidence of the body being dragged near where it was found?”

“Nothing; but as you saw, the site looked like it had been swept and cleaned.”

“Makes sense. Ask your people to meet us at the dump site and we'll direct them down here. I think they can come in from landside.” If the site had been sanitized, why had the perp left the rod, reel, and fly box here? And where were Wayno's vest and wading boots?

Service took one of the men downstream and told the others to parallel them inland. When they reached the new site, he showed the items in the water to the technician who had accompanied him, and talked the others down to the blood spots.

“Luminol?” Tatie Monica called out to one of the techs.

“Needs to be darker for good results,” a female technician said.

“It's plenty dark under the trees,” Service pointed out. Luminol was a chemical that glowed greenish-blue when it came in contact with blood, and it didn't take much to get a reading. He had seen it used a couple of times.

The crime scene techs and agents worked methodically while he remained in the river with Monica, watching them spray the two sites he had found.

“Luminol can react with some plant matter,” she said while they waited. “But our people are trained to sort out and interpret what they find.”

Asinine comment,
Service thought. Was she trying to impress him, or the others? If so, it wasn't working for him.

Service saw a camera flash illuminate the woods under the trees. The flashes went off every few minutes, and he found himself flinching, not sure why.

“Drops indicate the body was dragged up to here, over to there, and back down to the river,” a tech above said, pointing.

Service asked. “Footprints? There are no drag marks where I followed him up from the river, which means he crawled out under his own power. What about human blood?”

“What other kind of blood would be here?” the tech asked.

“There's old bear scat on the far bank and there are wolves in Wisconsin. The blood could be a fawn kill, or an adult deer.”

“Scat? You mean bear shit?” Tatie Monica asked.

“It was between Ficorelli's truck and the river,” he said.

“You didn't say anything.”

“Didn't matter.”

“I'd bet this is human,” the tech said after conferring with colleagues. “There's a lot of it.”

Tatie Monica announced, “Ficorelli was killed here, butchered, and dragged up to the other site by the old bridge.”

No shit.
“Somebody wanted to make sure the body was found,” Service said. “Right by the four-wheeler track and all. Have all of them been left in open places?”

“I'd call them more obvious than open—if we discount the fact that they've all been off the grid, more or less. Let's go back and grab some more coffee and breakfast,” she added. “The techs will call us if they need us.”

“More Mickey D's?”

“We tried to get Emeril, but he charges too much for backwoods culinary camp calls.”

This was a long cry from the backwoods. He called out to a technician, “Look for a vest, boots, shorts, maybe waders. He wasn't fishing in the buff.”

They were within fifty yards of the command post when somebody yelled, “Crapoleon on the squawk box!”

Tatie Monica rubbed her eyes and walked over to the coffee urn. “Ninety seconds,” she told the other agent. She rolled her eyes when Service gave her an inquisitive look. The next thing he knew they were standing under the tarp in the birch grove and a disembodied voice was saying, “Tatie?”

“Present—or accounted for,” Special Agent Monica said sleepily into a black speaker phone.

“Get your team to Missouri,” the voice said. “We have another prize.”

“Where?” the FBI agent asked, pen and notebook in hand. She looked at Service and mouthed
Body
.

“South central part of the state in the Irish Wilderness Area, on the Eleven Point River. A bureau bird will pick you up in Iron Mountain and take you to the old Blytheville Air Force Base in Arkansas. There's more clutter and less visibility there. You could be dropped in Springfield, but you'll have better cover at the old base. It's all general aviation now, and also a major depot for picking up and delivering Guard and Reserve troops. You won't be noticed. I suggest you move with the utmost dispatch, Special Agent. We've got another golden window.”

“On our way,” Tatie Monica said, punching a button to break the telephone connection. She looked at the other FBI personnel. “You heard the man, people. Let's shake and bake.”

“What about this site?” Agent Bobbi Temple asked.

“I'll talk to Thorkaldsson and his people can keep it secure. You're now the site commander.”

“Is it possible that this guy has struck twice so soon?” Service asked.

“It doesn't fit the pattern for our guy, or for most serials. Usually there's a resting period between kills,” Monica said. “But none of these blood eagle things match the earlier group of killings, so who knows?” The other agents stood blinking until Agent Monica clapped her hands and said, “We're burning daylight, people.” This sent them scrambling, and she immediately turned to Service. “First we call Thorkaldsson. We'll grab breakfast on the way to Iron Mountain. You got fresh clothes?”

“For how long?” he asked.

“Never mind,” she said dismissively. “You can draw from our stuff if you need it.” She turned to walk away, and Service caught her by the arm. “Whoa,” he said. “This train's moving a little fast for me. Care to fill me in?”

“That was Cranbrook P. Bonaparte on the speaker. He's the BAU—Behavioral Analysis Unit—acting ay-dick who was supposed to come here. We apparently have another body—in Missouri—and we're going down there now. You're coming along, and I'll explain more en route.”

“Ay-dick?”

“Acting assistant director. I'll explain later.”

Later?
It seemed to Service that explanations from the FBI agent were always in abeyance, and when and if they came, tended to be pretty thin. But he also noticed that when she gave an order the others jumped into action.

“He said, ‘you,'” Service said. “Not me.”

“This is my decision.” She put the back of her fist on his chest. “Have you got a problem with it?”

He shrugged. “I've got some fresh stuff in my truck.”

“Larry and I will ride with you,” she said. “Bobbi, you keep our vehicle.”

The female agent nodded and trotted away.

Service got into his Tahoe, Gasparino got into the backseat, and Special Agent Monica jumped up into the passenger seat, buckled her seat belt, triggered her handheld radio, and told the Florence County sheriff to meet her at the interpretive center.

Sheriff Thorkaldsson was a bearded six-foot-nine giant with lavender-tinted wraparound sunglasses and a field of red moles on his forehead shaped like gumdrops. “Arnie,” she said as they met between the vehicles, “this is Grady Service.”

Thorkaldsson nodded. “Wayno told me about you,” the sheriff said.

“We're leaving, Arnie,” she said. “Agent Temple is in charge of the site; Bobbi has people to cover the gate and the roads. I have no idea when we'll get back. Soon, I hope. Meanwhile, I want to continue the embargo on the announcement of Ficorelli's death.”

“People around here are already yammering,” Thorkaldsson said. “The county rumor mill is churning. We're getting media calls.”

“Just tell them there's no fucking story here!” she snapped, and quickly softened her voice. “Just keep the lid on it, and if things go funny, you have my cell phone number. Work with Bobbi.”

“Yes, ma'am,” the towering sheriff said.

Service asked, “How come Wayno parked on the other side of the river?”

“Always did,” Thorkaldsson said. “Superstitious, maybe. We always did pretty good in that part of the river.”

“You find his rod with the body?”

“No.”

“What's he use?”

“Four-weight Winnie with a Hardy reel.”

“We have it,” Service said.

“And a probable kill site,” Special Agent Monica added. “It's downstream about three-quarters of a mile from where you found him. The tech team is there now. They'll stay, but we'll have to widen the perimeter. That's why we need the Wispies.” Members of the Wisconsin State Patrol were called Wispies.

The sheriff said, “Rather have people I know than strangers in on this. I've got an auxiliary.”

She said, “It's Bobbi's call, but whatever she decides, keep it quiet.”

Service thought the sheriff seemed a little possessive, which was not an uncommon reaction to the FBI's swooping in.

“Was Wayno's body wet when you found it?” Service asked.

“Yeah.”

Service and the agents ate sticky cinnamon bear claws from a gas station on their way south. Tatie Monica inhaled three of them while Service was still working on his first one. “This is what you call breakfast?” he asked.

“You prefer the golden arches?” she countered.

“Crapoleon?”

She grinned. “FBI humor. His name is Cranbrook P. Bonaparte. Bona-parte equals Napoleon. Cranbrook P. gives us Crapoleon.” She looked over at him. “Don't worry, it's an affectionate name. Cranbrook is about the most charming sonuvabitch you'll ever meet, a truly nice man, and very sincere.”

Her words and tone didn't quite match. “Your boss?”

“No, he's
acting
head ay-dick of the Behavioral Analysis Unit in NCVAC, which for him is a temporary gig. He's been there forever. My boss is the special agent in charge of the Milwaukee field office, but I'm the lead investigator for the case. The analyst who put all this together called me to talk about what he'd found. I went to my boss, and he grabbed onto the case and got the Bureau to give me the lead.”

“A career moment,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Up or down. If I don't bring this one home, it'll be a big belly flop into Bumfuck.” Her voice was matter-of-fact, resigned.

“Isn't that in Wisconsin?” Service asked with a straight face.

“Shove it,” she said, grinning. “The Bureau is merciless about failure these days,” she added.

“I keep wondering if it's possible that there could be two killings so close together.”

“Certainly it's not what our boy's done in the past, but if Cranbrook says we have another, we have another.”

She was respectful of the BAU man, Service thought, but he sensed an undercurrent of something else, a certain edge when she talked about him.

“Bonaparte's an expert on profiling?” Service asked as he drove.

“One of the pioneers,” she said, looking over at him, “which puts him in a cast of dozens. Since profiling became popular with fiction writers and Hollywood, dozens of agents have stepped forward to claim they invented the concept.”

“Him too?”

“No. Bonaparte's too nice and too smart to blatantly self-promote. His style is to quietly insinuate himself into those places and with those people he thinks can help him. He's got some theories that don't quite fit profiling coda.”

“Is he good at what he does?”

“That's a loaded question. The naked fact is that no profiler has ever provided work product that allowed a field agent to capture a serial murderer. We think there are about one hundred of these killers active around the country at any given time, and the only way we ever get any of them is through a back door, or their fuckup—usually the latter. In practice, profiling helps us verify what we've got
after
we have a suspect or somebody in custody, and usually for reasons that don't relate to our primary interest. Historically, profiling hasn't enabled us to intervene.”

“If Bonaparte's so good at the job and a pioneer, how come he's not director or permanent assistant director for BAU?”

“Fair question,” she said. “When Louis Freeh left, there was an interim director before Mueller was named, and he quickly named his own people. Cranbrook didn't have time to suck up to Mueller, so he got passed over. Right now there's an opening, so he's filling in until the current powers can find their own man.”