The Unwilling(31)

The boy held out a small hand, and they shook. He looked like Gibby at the same age: the thin shoulders, the same solemn eyes. “Do your parents know where you are?” The boy shook his head. “Will you tell me their names?”

“It’s just my mother.”

“Your mother, then.”

“Kate.”

“Kate. Good. Thank you, Samuel. Will you tell me why you came here this morning?”

“Some older boys said I might find arrowheads.”

“Did you find any?”

He shook his head, eyes filling. “I found…”

“It’s okay, Samuel.”

“I found … I found…”

“You’re okay, son. Breathe.” French squeezed the narrow shoulders. “In and out. That’s a boy.”



* * *



When the kid stopped crying, he told a simple story. He’d wanted one thing and found another. When he finished talking, French put him in a car with a female officer who had kids of her own. It was a good fit. He saw it in the boy’s eyes.

After that, they cut the body down.

It took bolt cutters and three men with strong stomachs. When she was bagged and in the van, French called the medical examiner into a shady place by a different stairwell. Malcolm Frye was a small man with coffee skin and salt in his hair. He was good at his job. The two of them went back at least a decade. “What can you tell me?” French asked.

Frye pulled off latex gloves, his eyes as doleful as the kid’s. “Where should I start?”

“Cause of death?”

He shook his head, and used a handkerchief to polish wire-rimmed glasses. “I doubt any single cut killed her. Preliminarily, I’d say shock, cumulative trauma, massive blood loss.”

“Was she alive for all of it?”

“Probably.”

“Jesus.”

“It was precision work designed to keep her breathing and conscious. No damaged organs or nicked arteries. Whoever did this to her had training.”

“Surgical?”

“Not to that degree, but training. Paramedic, maybe. A corpsman. A med school dropout.”

“How long, do you think?”

“Once they subdued her and strung her up?” He lifted his shoulders, weary. “Long enough to chew through her own tongue.”

The ME settled the glasses back on his face, and French studied him more closely. “You okay, Doc?”

“I’m a black man in the South, Detective. What’s not to like about a good lynching?” The bitterness came out; he couldn’t help it.

“Listen, I’m sorry this one landed on you. If you want, we can get a different examiner.”

“No, no.” He waved off the suggestion. “Forget I said that.”

“Forgotten.”

“What else can I do for you?”

“Can you be more specific on timing? When it happened? How long she lived? This early in the case, even a guess would be helpful.”

“I can’t speak to her abduction, but she suffered for a long time, make no mistake. Inflicting that kind of damage would have taken hours. Methodical work. Careful work. Then there’s the underlying psychopathy.”

“Meaning?”

“That he probably enjoyed it. I doubt he rushed.”

French closed his eyes, but could not unsee the flayed skin, the exposed organs. Were there a theme to the crime, it would be that people, in their expressions of cruelty, could be endlessly inventive. “Anything else you can tell me?”

“Not before the autopsy. Speaking of which…” He gestured at the van, the body inside.

“Hang on one second, Doc.”

Burklow was moving in their direction. When he arrived, he nodded at the ME, but spoke to French. “We’ve been working from the inside out. No sign of her clothes or personal belongings. No usable footprints or tire tracks, but the chain out front is cut. Looks like they came right up the main drive.”

“Pretty brazen.”

“Dark of night. Light traffic. We did find this.” He brandished a clear, plastic evidence bag.

“Is that what I think it is?”

Burklow handed over the bag. It contained a crumpled package made of foil and white paper. “We found two more empty packages like this one.”

“Looks fresh.”

“I’d say it’s brand-new.”

“Oh, the sick bastard…”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

French walked away, and studied the sky as if it were the last clean thing in the world. The ME looked a question, so Burklow explained. “Polaroid film,” he said. “The son of a bitch took pictures.”



* * *



It was still early when French left the crime scene. He tried to stay, but couldn’t focus, couldn’t lead.

“What do you mean you’re leaving? Where are you going?”

“I can’t talk about it, Ken.”

“We still have work to do. Uniforms are canvassing. We haven’t identified the body. The hell’s wrong with you?”

French shook his head; kept walking. He’d buried thoughts of his son, but Jason was out there. So was an explanation.