Into the Night(28)

If Bowen wanted him, he’d have to work harder.

Harder and smarter.

*

MACEY STARED DOWN at the remains. What little was left, anyway.

“Bad, isn’t it?” a male voice behind her said, sympathy heavy in his tone. “But not the worst I’ve seen, unfortunately.”

Macey glanced over her shoulder at the ME. Dr. Shamus McKinley’s wire-framed glasses were perched on his nose. His skin was a warm brown, his eyes were a deep gold that glinted with intelligence and the silver at his temples was the only hint at his age. He’d struck her as being a no-nonsense ME. Straight to business, but still sympathetic to his victims.

“Not a whole lot to go by,” he added as he rounded the table and pointed to the remains with a gloved finger. “The body was severely burned.”

Burned until nearly nothing was left. “Were the nails recovered?”

Shamus looked up at her. “Yes.” His jaw locked. “That was something new.”

“Because of the damage, will you be able to tell if they were delivered postmortem?” She suspected the answer based on her own medical training.

He shook his head.

But I’d hoped to be wrong.

“I will say, the victim’s lower extremities were burned far more severely than his torso and his head.”

She nodded and forced herself to look away from the remains. The smell... Macey swallowed. “When Special Agent Murphy and I arrived on scene, the victim’s upper body hadn’t been ignited. There were obvious signs that his lower body had been burned, though.”

Shamus exhaled. “He was tortured before death.”

“Yes. The burns on his upper body... I can confirm those happened postmortem.” She turned away from the body and saw the evidence bag with the nails. She picked up the bag, studying them carefully. They looked to be the same size as the nails retrieved from Daniel’s body, but she measured them, just in case. Measured the head of the nail. The length...

The same.

“We’ll be sending these to the FBI’s lab.” Not that she meant any disrespect to the local authorities. “Our lab can get a faster turnaround for us, and they’ve already got the materials from the crime scene in North Carolina.”

Behind her, he was silent.

Then he let out a long sigh. “There’s this...museum in town...” Shamus’s voice was low, hesitant. “You know Gatlinburg, we’ve got all kinds of things to bring in the tourists. This place—it’s full of strange things. Oddities and stuff.”

She turned back toward him but found that his gaze was on the remains.

She kept her stare on him.

“I took my grandson there over the summer.” For a moment, his lips thinned. “He’s a little thing, just turned six, and he got scared by one of the exhibits.”

She waited, knowing this story would go somewhere.

His gaze finally lifted to hers. “They had this skull in there, supposedly from some old tribe in Africa that practiced voodoo magic. The skull scared him so much, not because he thought it was real, but because the skull had nails driven into it.”

Macey sucked in a quick breath. What he was saying—her own research had uncovered a link between nails in the body and voodoo rituals.

“Not typical voodoo,” he continued. “This was to hurt someone. According to the chart there, every time you wanted something bad to happen to a person, you drove a nail into the skull.” Once more, his gaze slid back to the body. “Guess someone really wanted something bad to happen to that guy.”

“I’m going to want the name of that museum.”

He nodded. “Thought you might.”

“I’ve been researching cultures that use nails. In the Congo region, there’s a tribe that has a religious idol.” She licked her lips. “Nkondi. But...what they do to the statues, it’s nothing like this.” She gestured to the body. “This is personal. This is an attack. This is...hate.”

Shamus took a step back. “That’s what they were called at the museum. Hate nails.”

Her phone rang then, vibrating in her pocket. She pulled it out quickly and stared at the text from Bowen.

Need to see you ASAP. Got a hit on NamUS.

NamUS—the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.

Her phone vibrated again.

Actually got more than one hit...too many.

A shiver slid over her.

*

BOWEN HAD TAKEN over the conference room in the police station. As soon as Macey entered the room, he dropped his news. “Ten.”

She froze, her unusual eyes flaring wide. “Excuse me?”

He rose and stalked toward the map he’d pinned to the wall—and he pointed to the bright circles he’d made on the map. “I found a pattern.”

She shut the door behind her and hurried forward. “What kind of pattern?”

“Over the last two years, there are ten hikers that fit a profile—young males, all in their early twenties. They left hiking alone, and then they vanished. Most of them weren’t even reported missing for several weeks because they didn’t have close ties to their families.”

“You’re telling me ten people have gone missing here in the last two years?”

His brows climbed. “Actually, almost twenty have gone missing in the area.”