Vanished (31 page)

“You might change your mind when you see the bodies,” Tanner muttered.

Evelyn held back her rebuttal. It didn’t matter what state the bodies were in, the drop site told its own story. And this one was already telling her they had a killer who liked his privacy, who was careful and even-tempered. Someone who’d be hard to track down

“There it is,” Tanner finally said, pointing.

Up ahead, crime scene tape had been strung around trees, and cops were working inside it. Two men in black coats with the words
Medical Examiner’s Office
stenciled on the pockets were carrying a gurney.

Evelyn picked up her pace, her heels sinking into ground that was still damp from last week’s rain, still littered with decaying leaves even as the first day of spring beckoned. She wanted to see the crime scene intact.

But the closer she got, the more she realized that would be impossible. The cops were trampling the scene. Reminding herself that these particular cops didn’t get many murders didn’t help.

Frustration bubbled to the surface. “Your officers are stepping on potential evidence.”

“We’re not incompetent.” Tanner caught up to her. “We took pictures before I sent my officers in to dig them out.”

The case file had mentioned partial burial of the victims, as well as knife marks so specific they suggested a killer’s signature. Evelyn had hoped to see at least one victim the way she’d been left by the killer. “Have both bodies been pulled out yet?”

Tanner gestured to the crime scene. “See for yourself.”

And when two cops moved aside, she did. “Shit,” she breathed.

There was a skull sticking out of the ground. Nothing but a skull, the long brown hair still partially attached. The killer had dug a vertical hole some five feet deep and put his victim in it, then shoveled dirt back over her until her chin rested on the ground. Animals and the elements had violated her after the killer had.

They’d pulled the second victim out, which was one reason Evelyn knew there was a body underneath the head. The victim was laid out on the bag she’d be zipped inside to transport her to autopsy.

And being buried up to their heads wasn’t the only indignity these women had suffered. The one who’d been dug up had been tightly wrapped in plastic sheeting, but the medical examiner had peeled it back. The woman was nude, her skin discolored and slipping from the bones. She was covered in circular bruises that had never healed because she’d been murdered before they could. In the center of her chest, slicing over both breasts, the killer had carved a circle into her now-rotting flesh.

The fact that Evelyn’s immediate reaction wasn’t to bring up her breakfast, but to step closer and study the details for what they said about the killer, suggested that she’d seen too many crime scenes in the past year. Still, like every other case, it put a familiar twinge in her heart, made her remember what it had felt like when she’d lost someone she loved.

But at least these bodies had been found. At least these families had closure. It was something she and Cassie’s family might never get.

Tanner came up beside her and gulped, trying not to gag. “What does it mean?”

She didn’t know. But Dan was right. This case was weird. Why display the victims if the killer wasn’t showing off? The heads above the ground were shocking, the sort of action she’d expect from a killer who called the press and bragged about what he’d accomplished.

But this killer had done it for himself. Which meant he was nearby. And that he came back to visit.

“Who’s the medical examiner?” she asked Tanner instead of replying.

He pointed to a heavyset man wearing rubber boots and a scowl.

“How long have they been dead?” she called, making several cops with green-tinged faces look her way. Their curious gazes lingered, skipping over her from the top of her bun to her mud-caked heels.

“The one here, probably a month. The one in the ground, likely a week or two. Hard to be exact, given the unusually warm weather we’ve had in the past month, which would speed up decomp. I’ll know more when I get them back to my lab.”

“Have they been in the ground that long or were they moved here recently?”

He nodded at the victim still in the ground. “My guess is they’ve been here since they were killed.”

She turned back to Tanner. “Any evidence they were killed here?”

“None that we’ve found.”

“So just a drop site.” She edged a little closer to the body on the bag. This one wasn’t smeared with dried blood from the circle carved in her chest. There was only dirt around her neck, where the plastic hadn’t quite covered her. “And he cleaned them before he brought them here.”

“But do you know why?”

“Why he’s killing? To create an accurate profile, I need victim information, too. But I can tell you that this—” she gestured to the skull resting on the packed dirt “—is really unusual.”

She squinted at the skull, considering the killer’s intended symbolism. Studying serial killers for a living had shown her depravity she’d never dreamed existed, but there was something singularly creepy about this.

An ominous feeling rushed over her, sending ice up her spine. She tried to shake it off, put confidence in her voice. “Typically, you’d see this sort of thing if the body was left in a public place. Since it’s not, we aren’t looking at showmanship. He’s not trying to shock or disgust anyone. This display is personal. It has some meaning for him.”

“What?” Tanner pressed.

“I don’t know.” She’d never seen anything like this before. “But once I figure it out, it’ll tell me how he thinks.”

She stepped closer to the body still packed in the dirt, knelt down next to it and felt her nose pinch at the stench of decay wafting up from the ground. Anger at the callousness of the murder knotted in her chest. She already knew the killer had gotten off on holding this woman’s life in his hands, liked hearing her beg even though nothing she said would change the fact that she was about to die.

Behind her, she heard Tanner mutter under his breath, “How he
thinks?
He’s a fucking head case who likes to hide in the woods and carve up women.”

Studying the brunette, Evelyn replied, “If you’re assuming he’s insane, he’s not. These crime scenes are neat, not disorganized the way they would be if the perpetrator was clinically insane. He does have an antisocial personality disorder, though.”

Tanner let out an ugly snort. “Yeah, I figured anyone who could do
this
wouldn’t have tons of friends.”

“He can probably make friends,” she corrected. “He has no empathy for others, but he can fake it. He’s smart. I don’t need the autopsy results to tell you this is a sexually motivated serial killer. He’s intelligent, adaptable and extremely methodical. He enjoys outwitting the police and his victims.”

Goose bumps prickled her skin as she stared at what was left of the victim in front of her, knowing if she didn’t move fast there’d be another one. “He won’t be easy to catch.”

“Isn’t that your job? To make him easier to catch?”

Evelyn stayed perched next to the victim in the ground, but looked up at him. “It is. And to do it, I need to get inside his head, see the world through his eyes. So, tell me about the victims. Have you identified them?”

Tanner’s whole face hardened and a cold, determined sheen fell over his eyes. “Yes. The one in the ground is probably Barbara Jensen. The blonde victim on the autopsy bag is definitely Mary Ann Pollak—we identified a tattoo on her ankle. They both disappeared in the past month. They’ve lived in Bakersville for years. Mary Ann got married a few months ago.”

“What do they have in common?”

Tanner’s massive shoulders rolled. “Nothing as far as I can tell. They had totally different jobs and different interests. Friends and families said they didn’t know each other, except maybe in passing. The only thing I can see they had in common was getting grabbed by a psycho.”

“Did they look alike?”

“Well, they were about the same age. They were both white.”

The same age and race from one victim to another was normal, but a serial killer would be seeking a more specific quality. He’d have a type. “What about eye color or stature? Or anything else?”

Tanner frowned, shook his head.

Evelyn frowned, too. If this killer wasn’t searching for a physical attribute, there was something else. Something she couldn’t see.

“They were taken pretty close to when the M.E. says they were probably killed,” Tanner added.

Evelyn looked back at the brunette in the ground. So, the killer didn’t hold on to them for long. And that told her displaying the bodies was as important to him as the kill, perhaps more so.

But she didn’t know what to make of the display. Tension weighed down on her shoulders as she said, “Tell me about the abductions.”

“Like I mentioned, we’re pretty sure the one still buried in the ground is Barbara. She was last seen at a supermarket. A few hours later, her husband called to say she was missing. We found her car at the supermarket with a flat tire, but no sign of her. Mary Ann was last seen leaving a friend’s house around eleven at night. We found her car around the corner.”

She glanced at him. “Flat tire?”

“No.”

“What else can you tell me?”

“We couldn’t find any enemies. No one with a reason to hurt Mary Ann or Barbara.”

Of course not. Because these murders weren’t based on any typical motive, like revenge. If they had been, solving them would be a simple matter of solid police work. Looking at who had a reason to hurt the women and digging into that person until he broke. If the motive was typical, a profile would be a waste of time.

Serial murders were a whole different crime. Normal motivations didn’t apply and normal investigative methods didn’t work. That was why she had a job. Profilers saw crime scenes differently.

“You’re not going to find the killer by investigating people in the victims’ lives who held grudges,” Evelyn told him. “They didn’t know him, at least not more than superficially.”

“So I was wasting manpower?” Tanner’s face broadcasted anger, but beneath it, she saw the regret.

“When they went missing, it was the right thing to do. Now that we’re convinced we’ve got a serial killer, we go a different route.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, so low she barely heard him.

She wasn’t sure if he was talking to her or Barbara, but she answered, “It’s not your fault.” He was a cop, not a profiler, so there was no reason for him to know how serial killers thought. Sometimes, late at night when she couldn’t get a case out of her head, she wished she didn’t know, either.

But she’d picked this job when she was twelve years old, when the world had been falling apart around her. And now, it was the one thing she excelled at, the one place where she could make a difference.

She dusted off her hands and stood, letting the cops with shovels move past her to dig Barbara out. She’d wait and see for herself, but she already expected Barbara to be covered in strange bruises, with a circle carved into her chest.

“I don’t suppose we know cause of death yet?”

“The M.E. suspects blunt force trauma to the head on Mary Ann, but there’s no evidence of that with Barbara. He won’t be sure until he does the autopsies.”

“What about the bruising? Any idea what caused it?”

“No.” The medical examiner fixed his penetrating gaze on her. “But it wasn’t fists. And it was multiple objects, because the bruises aren’t the same size or shape.”

Evelyn took a closer look at Mary Ann. The bruising on her body was mostly circular, but the M.E. was right. The circles weren’t consistent. They suggested the killer was inflicting pain for his own pleasure, that he was a sadist. But something about that felt wrong.

As the cops started working, Evelyn moved farther back, taking in the sheer vastness of the woods, the isolation. Thinking about the two victims who’d been left here. “Two weeks apart,” she mused.

“What?” Tanner asked.

“Mary Ann and Barbara went missing two weeks apart. Assuming, of course, that this is Barbara. And now it’s been another two weeks.”

Tanner’s face had gone ghost-white and he rocked back on his heels. “Serial killers stick to that kind of pattern?”

“Usually. But two weeks between murders is short.” Evelyn scanned the scene around her, the killer’s playground. “Not a lot of time to find a potential victim, then stalk and kill her.”

Red flooded Tanner’s cheeks, creeping up his ears to his hairline. “Another woman went missing two days ago.”

“What?”

He shuffled his feet. “We don’t think she’s connected. She’s not from Bakersville, either. She’s from Kensington. Her husband told Kensington police she took off after an argument.”

Evelyn tried to keep the frustration out of her voice. “And you think she isn’t connected, why? Because you didn’t find her buried here, too?”

“No, because apparently this is a repeat performance for her. The husband didn’t even report it until twenty-four hours later.”

“What do you mean ‘repeat performance’?”

“Apparently, after she argues with her husband, she leaves town with a friend. That friend is off on vacation and not answering her cell phone, but her husband says chances are this woman is with her.”

With a serial killer on the loose, Evelyn didn’t like to take chances. “You should coordinate with the Kensington cops. Make sure they follow up.”

Tanner looked ready to snap at what had probably sounded like an order, so she asked quickly, “How far did we walk to get here from the car?”

He seemed surprised by the change of topic, but replied, “About a quarter mile.”

“And there’s no other way to get in?”

Tanner shrugged, letting out a heavy breath. “If there is, even Harris doesn’t know it. And he’s lived here his whole life, right on this property. It belonged to his parents before him.”

“A quarter of a mile is a long way to transport two bodies. Did you see any ruts from wheels in this mud?”

“No. Definitely nothing like that.”

“That rules out a wheelbarrow to transport the bodies.”