The Absence of Mercy (18 page)

“I agree.” Heads turned toward Natalie Rhodes, who was sitting cross-legged in the dirt. “A lot of us walked home alone that night.” She looked up at Bret Graham, who was leaning against the hood of a Volkswagen Beetle that had clearly seen better days. “Your house is, what, four miles from Devon's? Mine's
at least
that far. We both got home safely.” She frowned, her eyes returning to the ground in front of her. “This isn't something any of us could've predicted.”

“Except it had already happened once before,” Devon replied. He shook his head. “I never should've let people walk home that night. I should've
insisted
on cabs for everyone.”

“There aren't that many cabs in the entire town,” Thomas pointed out. “People would've been waiting at your place for hours.”

“
Good
. They could've helped me clean up,” Devon replied, and a slight snicker ran through the group. Rocco stood up and disappeared into the junk maze, resuming his patrol.

“That dog's senile, Ernie,” Russell Long commented.

Ernie Samper smiled. “Ugly, too. But at least he's got personality, which is more than I can say for the majority of you losers.”

“He patrols a scrap heap,” Russell advised him. “I just wanna draw your attention to that, Ernie—in case you didn't notice. The dog guards trash.”

“He's hardworking, dedicated, and professional,” Samper replied. “Ya oughta try it sometime.”

“Well, right now he's urinating on a lime-green refrigerator,” Marty Spears noted, adjusting his glasses as he squinted into the sun. They all looked, and indeed Rocco was, the dog's left rear leg cocked skyward in an unbecoming pose.

“That's gonna hurt the resale value,” someone quipped, and they all laughed at this, their guilt and pain momentarily forgotten. The remains of the automobiles within the Yard seemed to study them silently, hunkering their tired, broken frames ever closer to the earth. Somewhere to the east on Route 22 the impatient thrum of newer vehicles could be heard passing along the highway, and the distance from there to here suddenly seemed both very far and very close at the same time.

“Let's get outta here,” Paul Dalouka suggested. “I'm sick of this place.”

Natalie Rhodes stood up and stretched, her right knee popping softly. “You stay here long enough, you become part of the heap,” she said, and this was met with some general consensus.

They filed out through the front gate, engaging one another in scattered conversation. Ernie was the last to leave, looping the rusty chain through the gate and locking the padlock behind him. He followed the loose procession up the steep hill of Sycamore Street, and when he reached the crest he glanced back at his father's unlikely establishment, which appeared to fade slightly into the afternoon haze, the dog staring back at him through the metallic skin of the chain-link world in which he lived.

The days and weeks following the attempted murder of Monica Dressler passed as time often does in the wake of such an event: slowly at first, for those most intimately affected by the tragedy. Shock and disbelief gave way to sporadic fits of incapacitating emotion, the rage and anguish bleeding forth from their bodies like fresh-cut wounds, leaving them raw and vacant and still without answers. They sat alone in the private chambers of their grief, and the passage of time was measured not by the clock on the wall but by the changing faces of the people around them.

The girl's surgeon, Dr. Elliot, had turned optimistic, advising Paul and Vera Dressler that their daughter was recovering faster than expected. The large plastic tubes protruding like extra appendages from between Monica's ribs were removed, and the lungs remained inflated—a very good sign, the surgeon informed them. The second exploratory laparotomy had been performed, and after they found that there were no additional injuries and that the bleeding from the liver had completely subsided, they surgically closed the abdominal wall and brought the skin together with sutures. The three abdominal drains were removed, one on each successive day following the second exploratory. The fractured bones of the left ankle had been straightened and secured with titanium plates, and the swelling had diminished significantly. The plastic surgeon had come by to discuss plans for reconstructive surgery of the right breast and the partially amputated right ear. He had every reason to expect, he advised the parents, that the cosmetic results would be excellent. As for the two amputated fingers on the left hand, prosthetics could be utilized, and even the functionality of that hand would remain good, since the thumb, index, and middle fingers remained intact.

And yet . . . the girl would not wake.

The sedative agents that had dripped steadily into her veins since her arrival at the hospital had been stopped three days ago. Dr. Elliot had advised the parents that it often took time for the body to metabolize the remaining drugs in the system, even once the infusions were discontinued. It wasn't unheard-of, she'd told them, for the effects to last many hours or even days. But by now three days had gone by, and still nothing.

Like many in the town, Ben and Thomas had made the trip to Pittsburgh several times now to check on Monica's progress and to visit with her parents. After her first visit, Susan had elected to stay home with Joel during subsequent trips. “It's upsetting for me to see her like that,” she'd told her husband one afternoon in the kitchen, “and I don't think it's good for Joel either to keep going back.”

“Paul and Vera appreciate the support, Susan,” Ben had responded, surprised by his wife's unusual skittishness. “You might want to reconsider.”

“I can't,” she replied. “But you and Thomas should go. I think he needs to see this side of things.”

Ben nodded. The day Monica was discovered along the roadside, Susan had confronted Thomas about sneaking out to the party the night before. Her intuition had been right, and after a brief denial their son had admitted to leaving the house against their bidding.

“It was reckless of him to sneak out like that,” Ben agreed. “I just keep thinking that something like this could've happened to him.”

Susan dragged the dish towel across the counter, shepherding crumbs over the edge and into her upturned hand. She opened a cabinet door and deposited them into the trash can. “It's hard to know how to deal with children as they get older,” she mused. “We can't control the choices they make, the people they become.”

“We just have to do the best we can,” Ben said, trying to reassure her.

His wife looked out the window, and as Ben followed her gaze it occurred to him that the world out there suddenly seemed too big, too capricious, too hard and full of sharp edges.

“I just don't want to lose him,” Susan said to herself, her voice wavering near the end.

Ben walked up behind her, cupping her shoulders with his hands. “Don't worry,” he told her, placing a soft kiss on the back of her neck. “We won't.”

She turned her head sideways in order to smile back at him, touching the knuckles of his right hand with her fingers. “I know,” she said, but her eyes were sad and lost in a place Ben didn't quite know how to reach.

Carl Schroeder sat in the small, crowded conference room with the other men and waited for the phone to connect. Sam Garston sat across from him, Detective Hunt to his left. His junior partner twirled his pen nervously. Carl wished he would stop. It was getting on his nerves. He would have told him just that, too, if the three other men—FBI field agents, newly assigned to the case and now in charge of the investigation—hadn't been there to witness it. Instead, he sat there in silence waiting for his brother, Mike—a computer analyst with the bureau—to pick up the damn receiver on the other end of the line as the speakerphone rang and rang over the quiet hum of the air conditioner.

So far their best lead had been the bite wounds sustained by the victims. Saliva specimens from the wounds had failed to yield a match through CODIS, but there
had
been one important match, which explained the presence of the three FBI agents in the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office today. DNA specimens obtained from the bite wounds sustained by the second victim had matched those from the first. Hence the assailant had been the same person, which meant that in all likelihood they were dealing with a serial killer. The second victim hadn't died, so the perpetrator still had another two murders to go before he truly fit the definition.

The detectives did not intend to wait for those to happen.

The psychiatric patient who'd escaped from the emergency department had been their only real suspect, although Carl still didn't know what to make of him. There was something disturbing in the absolute certainty with which he'd confessed, in the unflappable conviction in his voice, and in the picture he'd drawn of himself standing over the victim, a silent scream plastered on his lips. The FBI had employed the skills of a forensic profiler to assist them in the case, and she'd pointed out that psychiatric patients with fixed delusions can often be quite convincing. Whether those delusions were somehow tied to reality was difficult to say. The problem was, they hadn't been able to locate him. The name he had given—Harold Matthews—had apparently been fictitious, and he certainly wasn't a local. If he was a drifter, Carl thought, perhaps he had drifted on to some other part of the country by now. They might never see or hear from him again. Then again, it was all too possible that they might—and
that
was what worried him.

The injuries from the two victims had been photographed extensively, and color photos of the wounds were now scattered on the table in front of them, coalescing into a grotesque collage of macerated flesh. Silicon castings had been constructed from the wounds by the forensic odontologist in Pittsburgh, and one of the more superficial wounds had left a reliable enough dental imprint for the odontologist to identify an abnormal widening—a
diastasis,
he'd called it—between the upper left canine and the first premolar. It wasn't much of a lead, but at least it gave them
something
to go on. But where did they go from here?

Then an idea had occurred to Carl two days ago while brushing his teeth. He'd returned his toothbrush to its plastic holder and had smiled into the mirror, inspecting his handiwork.
Is there any easily accessible resource,
he'd wondered,
that might be utilized to yield information about an individual's dental pattern
? A general subpoena for the dental records of the entire town was not a feasible option, but what about simple photography? How much information could one get from a close-up picture of a person's smile, for example? He didn't know. Maybe not much, except for obvious anomalies such as missing teeth or a severe overbite. He would have to check with the dental specialist. The other question was how to obtain such pictures, and he thought he had an answer to that. It had presented itself on the computer screen in front of him every time he'd made a routine traffic stop as a patrolman in his earlier days on the force: driver's licenses. There was a face smiling back on nearly every one. Okay, it was true that
some
people didn't smile when they had their picture taken, but
most
people did. At least 70 percent, he'd guess. He'd looked at enough driver's licenses to know. And the pictures of every licensed driver were on file with the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles. So the question was, how much detail regarding dental anatomy could actually be gathered from those pictures? You'd have to use a software imaging program to zoom in on the smile and adjust the resolution accordingly. You'd have to take measurements and compare them with those obtained by the forensic odontologist. Was it plausible? He'd contacted Mike to find out. The answer was typical for all things technical: It depended on the data.

The software programs to magnify and analyze photographic images were certainly available, and their capabilities were constantly improving. The FBI had been using them for more than two decades for a variety of applications. Photographs for driver's license identification were now taken digitally in every state, which would make them easier to manipulate. Most people partially revealed the upper central and lateral incisors, canines, and first premolars when they smiled. Big grinners might reveal the second premolars, and some people revealed the bottom central and lateral incisors and canines, but that was less common. Of course, some people didn't smile at all for the license shot, and some states were now instructing them not to. Presently, Ohio wasn't one of them. So what they'd really be focusing on, Mike had told him, was four to eight teeth along the upper dentition in those individuals who'd smiled for their pictures. In a two-dimensional photograph, the most reliable measurements would be the length of the cutting surface of each tooth and the space between them. How useful that information would be depended in large part on how much of the dental anatomy the forensic odontologist had been able to reconstruct from the photographs and silicon castings of the bite wounds. Hence the plausibility of gleaning useful information depended on the data, but more from the forensic dental analysis than from the numbers crunched by the software programs from the BMV snapshots. The computer work would actually be the more reliable of the two. Computers were predictable. Real life was always the wild card.

With the FBI now formally involved, Mike had been given the go-ahead to review the BMV photos and see what he could find. They'd begun with licensed drivers from Jefferson County. If that didn't yield any positive results, they could expand outward to adjacent counties. It was still a long shot, and Carl knew it. All of this was assuming that their suspect even
had
a driver's license. But at least it had given them a place to start. Now the six of them sat and stood in various positions around the rectangular table and listened to the phone ringing on the other end as they waited for Mike to answer at his lab in Sacramento, California.