Criss Cross (Alex Cross #27)(37)

“This is where they happened?” I asked. “The first two? The parents?”

Peaks nodded. “Dale and Lucy King. They ran a one-stop shop for cattlemen clear to the panhandle. Slaughterhouse and meatpacking. Real successful in its day.”

By then I had been working on the Meat Man case for more than ten months. My involvement had begun when a decapitated naked male was found in a panel van abandoned in an empty lot in Southwest DC.

A headless corpse I’d seen before, but not one with segmented black lines drawn with a felt-tip pen all over its torso, arms, and legs.

Two weeks after that, a second body was found in a car trunk. Female this time, she too was covered in similar segmented black lines, which we finally deciphered as the kind of cutting guide a novice butcher might use to take apart a cow and turn it into steaks and chops.

We ran a crime bulletin on the decapitations and the diagrams and quickly got hits from seven different states, including Texas, as well as three foreign countries.

It turned out that eleven decapitated bodies scored with similar diagrams had been found during the prior seven years, and two had been found nearly thirteen years before.

“Nothing bombproof to tie Tanner Oates to it?” I asked.

Peaks shook his head, then pinched some tobacco and stuck it between his cheek and gum. “Oates was the Kings’ foster kid for a while, but that was years before. And he had a solid alibi. Until she conveniently died in a wreck a couple of years later.”

“But you think Oates is the Meat Man?”

“I do,” Peaks said, and he spit. “Whatever he’s calling himself these days. You want to see where it happened?”

“Came all this way to get a better handle on him.”

We climbed the second gate and crossed through weeds as the winds whistled.

“How are we gonna know if there’s a tornado coming?” I asked.

“Hopefully, we’ll see it first,” Peaks said, spitting tobacco again as we came to a chained and padlocked door. “If we hear it before we see it, we’re out of luck.”

“You’re full of good news.”

“Just factual.”

On the door was a notice stating that the property was condemned and a sign warning against trespassing. The Ranger ignored both, grabbed the lock, and spun the combination he’d gotten from the bank in Lubbock that had foreclosed on the property.

Peaks pushed the door open. As we flipped on our flashlights and went inside, the wind began to gust, no longer whistling but moaning and howling through the eaves of the old slaughterhouse.





CHAPTER 46





THE ABANDONED PROCESSING PLANT HAD been mostly stripped for salvage by then and was awaiting demolition.

“Oates work here as a child?” I asked.

“Where he learned the trade. From nine to fifteen, I think.”

“It’s close enough,” I said, following him as he jumped over a channel cut in the floor that Peaks said had been used to sluice out blood and animal offal.

You’d think a place like that would still stink. But it didn’t. It was just dusty and dirty, and it made me feel more than a little claustrophobic.

We reached an old metal staircase, and the winds outside seemed to ebb. As we climbed, I caught the sound of something humming that I attributed to a change in wind direction because it was quickly smothered by new gusts that shook the walls.

I imagined the place as a teeming operation and I tried to see Oates in it based on what I’d read in the disturbing files Peaks had shown me.

As soon as Tanner Oates was born, he’d been abandoned in an alley in Galveston.

It would be a gross understatement to say the Texas foster-care system let Oates down. When his speech did not develop past grunting and whining, his first foster father, sick of the noises, began to beat him.

In turn, the boy began to lash out like a raging wild animal, which only provoked more abuse.

It wasn’t until he was nearly nine that he was finally diagnosed as profoundly hard of hearing. He wore bilateral hearing aids from that point forward and was eventually transferred to the care of the King family, who taught him to speak and read. His IQ, it turned out, was near genius level.

“This is it,” Peaks said now.

We’d reached the landing, and he pushed open the door to a large empty office. He gestured toward the corner.

“Mr. King’s body was there in a pool of blood. His wife’s corpse was laid perpendicular to him. Both headless. The heads are still missing.”

“Like all the rest of them,” I said. “They’re his trophies.”

“Skulls by now,” Peaks said.

“You said we could look at the Kings’ old house.”

“I said I’d ask.”

The Ranger pulled out his cell phone, looked at it. “No bars. Let me try outside.”

“Where the tornado’s coming,” I said, following him out.

“True enough,” he said, and he dropped down the stairs.

I paused to take it all in, tried to imagine what Oates could have experienced there that caused him to saw off the heads of the only people who’d ever been good and kind to him. I failed.

By the time I reached the bottom of the staircase, Peaks was stepping outside. I half expected to see the door torn away by the gusts, but then, as before, the wind died down.