The Botanist (32 page)

Chapter 50

Two weeks later, Cody stood outside an interrogation room, looking in at Landes through two-way glass. The doctors had allowed Landes to be brought to the station to speak with the police, but they weren’t releasing him. After several rounds of psychiatric evaluation, it was clear that Landes would spend some time in an institution. He needed real care.

Being the lead detective, Cody had the privilege of conducting the first comprehensive interview since bringing Landes out of the caves. They’d tried to speak to him in the hospital a handful of times, but he was too erratic to say much.

The DNA test results had come back from the lab only the day before. Although DNA tests are never one hundred percent, Alex had enough alleles in common with Landes to give a paternal probability of 99.998% +. She was his daughter.

Stieger had shown up not long after Alex’s rescue, towing an elderly woman named Colleen. Her recollection of seeing Landes in Mt. Dessicate after Alastair’s death was interesting, but not definitive. It seemed to support Landes’ story that he’d been here all along—more than twenty years. Anything else Landes himself would have to corroborate.

“You ready for this, Oliver?”

The question came from John Tandy, the FBI criminologist who’d been called in to assist on the case. He’d been prepping Cody for the interview; it was his belief Landes would be more open with Cody than with a man he’d never met before.

“I think so, sir.” In truth, Cody didn’t think he’d ever be ready to interview Landes. He didn’t think he—or anyone else—truly wanted to hear the story Landes had to tell. It was sure to be macabre, and Cody was too close to this case, too close to Alex.

“Above all, remember to keep your face serene. That’s going to be harder than you think, but if you show too much emotion, you’ll spook Landes, and he’ll clam up.”

Cody nodded, but Tandy continued.

“I’m serious, Oliver. This story has an insidiousness to it; we’ve all felt it, but Landes has a wealth of information not generally available to criminologists locked away in his head; the history of a serial killer from a man who witnessed it firsthand. You
must
keep him talking.”

“I understand, sir.”

Tandy studied Cody for a few moments. Finally he nodded.

The outer door opened and Frank, Court, and the captain entered. The captain had said they’d be having a quick pow-wow before the official interrogation began. No one spoke. The last few weeks had been too trying for small talk.

“Agent Tandy,” the captain said, “why don’t we start with you? What has the journal told you?”

“As I was telling Detective Oliver, here, it’s a gold mine of information. I’m sure I’ve only scratched the surface in what time I’ve had. The Botanist went by the name Charlie, but he doesn’t mention a surname in the journal, so it’s hard to tell much more than that. He talks about his life on the Landes ranch, but not about anything before he went to work for Alastair, so I still have no idea where he came from or what kind of upbringing he had.”

“So what do we know?” Court asked.

Tandy sighed, looking weary. “This Charlie was obsessed with Shakespeare’s heroines. He believed they ought to be worshipped and immortalized.”

“That by itself isn’t
so
uncommon, right?” Frank asked. “Actors believe that sort of thing.”

“But the Botanist believed it literally. He believed they ought to be preserved and revered in their dead and tragic state. With his victims, he was creating shrines to these dead women of literature. He believed them to be an homage and a work of art.”

The silence stretched while they all frowned at the ground.

“What’s the significance of the number twelve?”

“There is none that I can find. Shakespeare wrote more than twelve tragedies, and that’s aside from the histories which happened to have a lot of tragedy in them. From what I can tell, that is simply the number that struck his fancy, the one he obsessed about. I’m sure the ones he connected with have something to do with his particular psychopathy, but it will take me months, maybe years to figure it out.”

“So”—the captain rubbed the bridge of his nose—“we’re saying this man was educated? That he read a lot of English literature?”

“He definitely knew the stories.” Tandy nodded. “The way he talks about some of them, it almost seems that he’d grown up with them, like someone had read them to him at some point. Any chance Alastair Landes is responsible for that?”

“I doubt that,” Cody put in. “Landes wasn’t a man much given to the arts. He would have seen it as less than masculine.”

“How about Jonathin? Did he and Charlie know each other long before Jonathin left town?”

“I’m not sure about that,” Cody said. “If they did, it wasn’t for long—a few months at most.”

“Well,” Tandy said, “however he learned them, he used them as frames of reference for how he killed his victims. You said your coroner couldn’t pinpoint one particular cause of death in the victims? That’s because he did different things, depending on which heroine he believed that particular victim to be. He drowned the ones he imagined were Ophelia, strangled those playing the role of Desdemona, you get the idea.”

Court rubbed the back of his neck. His face had turned the color of fresh cream. Cody knew how he felt.

“Why isn’t ‘Shakespeare’s Girls’ written on the other grave sites?” Frank asked.

It was a good question. Two more sites had been located so far. Resputa’s theory about them being arranged like spokes on a wheel was proving accurate. They were using the wheel pattern to triangulate where other sites might be. If Resputa’s other theory—that the Botanist’s pattern was incomplete—also proved to be true, then those sites might not hold bodies. Then again, if they were full, or even near to full, the Botanist would become one of the most prolific serial killers on record.

“Well,” Tandy went on, “I don’t think he stuck solely with Shakespearean literature. Near the end of the journal, he starts using other names I couldn’t find Shakespearean references for. It took some digging, but I realized they were names out of classic literature of other eras and countries. Simply put, he branched out, looked for other tragedies to model his victims on.”

“But”—Court threw up an index finger—“how was he finding these stories? It was one thing when he was living with Landes, but since then, from what we can tell, he’s been living out in the desert. No internet, no books of any kind. He’s been out there for twenty years. Where is he getting his information?”

It was then that the light bulb went on in Cody’s head. “From the library.”

They all turned to look at him, Frank and Court with eyes that said he’d finally lost it.

“Tom’s maggot case, remember? The librarian said various books would disappear, then reappear in odd places. She thought the place was haunted.”

“But how would he have gotten in there?” the captain asked.

“They’re still exploring the extent of those tunnels, Cap,” Frank said. “Some of them come right up to the edge of town. He could have walked right into town without bothering with the highway or the intervening land—not topside anyway—and we haven’t followed even half of the passageways to their exit. Maybe one of them lets out in the basement of the library. It’s an old building. Has a bomb shelter and everything.”

“The librarian told Tom over and over that she felt an icy cold presence,” Cody said, thinking back to what Tom had told him about the case. “She thought it was a ghost.”

“We thought it was early-onset dementia . . . ” Frank put in with a grin.

“But really . . .” Cody trailed off.

Court let out a frustrated spiral of breath, running his hands through his hair. “Creepy.”

Cody thought back to what Stieger had unearthed. “Actually, they said he just wandered into town one day, looking for work. No one had ever seen him before or knew where he came from. Who’s to say he wasn’t out there even before he worked for Alastair?”

There were several loud swallows as that sank in. “Detectives.” Tandy removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Of course we’ll scour every inch of those underground passages, and I’ll personally read every line of this journal—and between them—dozens of times, but you must accept the fact that there are certain things about this man which we may never know.”

Cody nodded, though he was the only one.

“Just one more thing, though not about the journal,” Tandy continued. “Do any of you know who a lady named Janie Turner is?”

“Yes,” Cody said at the same time Court said, “You mean Crazy Janie?”

“Who?” the captain asked, and Frank’s expression mirrored the question.

It was Cody that answered. “Janie is an older woman that lost her daughter twenty-five years ago. The little girl drowned the year the river was insanely high. How do you know her, Court?”

“She’s my mother’s third cousin, twice removed. How do
you
know her Cody?”

Cody smirked. “My buddy Blaine owns a bar she frequents. We went to high school together, still get together for a drink every so often, and he’s told me about her.”

“I take it Mrs. Turner never believed her daughter’s death was an accident?” Tandy asked.

Cody’s eyes narrowed. “No, but the way she raves . . . it’s not kind, but people call her Crazy Janie for a reason, Agent Tandy.”

“Mrs. Turner came in with dozens of others, volunteering her DNA and demanding to know if her daughter was amongst the dead.”

“And was she?” Frank asked.

“She wasn’t in the mass grave, no.”

“But?”

“The bones you found in the shed on the Landes property, Detective?”

It took Cody a moment to grasp what Tandy was saying. When he did he gasped. “That was Janie’s
daughter?”

The others mirrored his reaction. “But.” Court took two giant steps backward, as though to distance himself and get a clearer picture, but it didn’t seem to help. He looked just as confused as before. “Wait,
what?”

“Yeah,” Cody said. “What?”

Tandy held up his hands. “The smaller mounds in the field on the Landes property have all been excavated. They are all full of animal bones. My theory is that they are evidence of this killer’s progression. I don’t think the Botanist had done murder to a human being before the little girl’s death. Even while he lived with Landes, though, his homicidal tendencies were already present. His MO was developing; his . . . ceremony was evolving. He buried the animals in flowered mounds, much as he would the women later on, but he hadn’t come fully into his own psychosis yet.

“I checked the records; the report was filed on Janie’s daughter only months before Alastair’s death. I believe Janie’s daughter was his first human kill. He snatched her from the river bank at an opportune moment. Her friends heard her cry out, but she was there and gone so fast, the only explanation was the river. It was the perfect cover for our killer because other children had already gone into the river that year. Part of the evidence the river theory was based on was that articles of Julie’s clothing were found miles downstream—too far for a child her age to get on foot. Mother Nature’s fury was the only explanation anyone considered, and perhaps rightly so. But a full-grown man, carrying the child and taking articles of clothing off her to throw into the river as a decoy . . . it’s just not a scenario that anyone imagined.”

“But how is this possible?” Frank pounded the table with his fist. “How could no one have known? Traces of this man have been around for decades but no one noticed! He snatched a child from the riverbank; he may have murdered Alastair Landes for all we know; he held a man captive for twenty years—a man who had a toddler that wandered out onto the highway—and no one connected the dots?”

Frank’s voice rose in pitch as his tirade went on. Cody suspected that it was the story of the little girl on the river bank—Frank’s daughter was about the same age Janie’s daughter had been when she disappeared—that was unhinging him. Suddenly Mt. Dessicate didn’t seem like the safe, family-friendly place they’d always believed it to be.

Tandy spread his hands. “Please try to understand, Detective”—he directed his remarks to Frank—“it’s not that shocking when you look at the whole picture. The assumption that the little girl went into river was a good one. Why wouldn’t they assume it? Alastair was an old man when he died. It’s highly likely that he died of natural causes. As for Jonathin, I think there was a history in that house—an unhappiness, the full truth of which may have died with Alastair. Jonathin is certainly in no mental condition to disclose it, and the Botanist is dead.

“We must also keep in mind that most of this went down more than twenty years ago. Detective work, DNA, fingerprints, everything was so different back then. I’m not sure anyone
could
have connected all the pieces; no one had them all. Mostly, though, understand that our killer was insanely intelligent.”

“Insane being the operative word,” Frank muttered.

“Exactly,” Tandy said quietly, and Frank looked up in surprise. “He was educated, resourceful, and probably a master manipulator. If he was coming into town to borrow books and put them back again without being seen, he was probably present in other ways as well. He’s a chameleon. He’s perfected the act of hiding in the light. He hasn’t been caught before because, well, he didn’t want to be.”

“But he did now?” Court asked.

Tandy leaned back in his chair, lacing his fingers behind his head. “I’m not sure I’d go that far. All I mean is that he’s smart, and because of that he managed to keep from being found for so long. It’s not anyone’s fault but his. I will say that I think his being brought to justice has everything to do with this young lady I keep reading about, uh, Alexandra Thompson?”

“How so?” Cody asked.

“Intuitive young woman. Strange, isn’t it,” Tandy asked, “that a young woman who probably experienced something terrible as a child, and never even found out what it was, who could have lived a full and happy life otherwise, was somehow drawn back to the very spot it all happened? That she was randomly pulled over on the highway by the very man who had her biological father captive? I don’t think that’s a coincidence. She said she had a strange experience; she reported it. Most people wouldn’t have done so much. Granted, it took four years for all this to come out, and she had to return yet again, but still . . .”