CHAPTER FOUR

Guy Dafoe didn’t particularly like getting up so early in the morning. But at least these days he was working hard to take care of his own cattle rather than the herds he’d handled for other owners. Early morning chores seemed well worth the effort now.

The sun was rising, and he knew it was going to be a beautiful day. He loved the smell of the fields and the sounds of the cattle.

He’d spent years working bigger ranches and bigger herds. But this was his own land, his own animals. And he was feeding these animals right, not raising them artificially on grain and hormones. That was a waste of resources, and production-line cattle lived miserable lives. He felt good about what he was doing.

He’d plunged all his savings into buying this farm and a few cattle to start out with. He knew it was a big risk, but he had faith that there was a real future in sales of grass-fed beef. It was a growing market.

The yearling calves were clustered up around the barn, where he’d penned them up last night in order to check on their health and development. They watched him and mooed softly, as if waiting for him.

He was proud of his small herd of Black Angus, and sometimes he had to resist the temptation to become fond of them, as if they were pets. These were food animals, after all. It would be a bad idea to get very attached to any of them individually.

Today he wanted to turn the yearling calves into the roadside pasture. The field they were in now was eaten down short, and the good legume and grass pasture down by the road was ready for grazing.

Just as he swung wide gate open, he noticed something odd on the far side of the pasture. It looked like some kind of tangle or bundle over near the road.

He grumbled aloud …

“Whatever it is, it probably isn’t good.”

He slipped through the opening and pushed the gate shut again, leaving the yearlings where they were. He didn’t want to turn his stock into this field until he found out what that strange object was.

As he strode across the field, he grew more puzzled. It looked like a huge wad of barbed wire hanging from a fence post. Had a roll of the stuff bounced off of someone’s truck and wound up there somehow?

But as he walked closer to it, he saw that it wasn’t a new roll. It was a tangle of old wire, wrapped in all directions.

It didn’t make any sense.

When he reached the bundle and stared into it, he realized that something was inside.

He leaned toward it, peered closely, and felt a sudden cold chill of terror.

“Holy hell!” he yelled, jumping backward.

But maybe he was only imagining things. He forced himself to look again.

There it was—a woman’s face, pale and wounded, contorted in agony.

He grabbed the wire to pull it off her, but quickly stopped himself.

It’s no use, he realized. She’s dead.

He staggered over to next fencepost, leaned on it, and retched violently.

Pull yourself together, he told himself.

He had to call the police—right now.

He staggered away and broke into a run toward his house.

CHAPTER FIVE

Special Agent Jake Crivaro sat bolt upright when his office phone rang.

Things had been too quiet at Quantico since he got back yesterday.

Now his gut told him instantly …

It’s a new case.

Sure enough, as soon as he picked up the phone, he heard the sonorous voice of Special Agent in Charge Erik Lehl …

“Crivaro, I need you in my office right now.”

“Right away, sir,” Crivaro said.

He hung up the phone and grabbed his go bag, which he always kept at the ready. Agent Lehl was being even more laconic than usual, which surely meant urgent business. Crivaro was sure that he would be traveling somewhere soon—probably within the hour.

He felt his heart pumping just a little faster as he hurried down the hall. It was a good feeling. After a 10-week stint serving as a mentor for the FBI’s Honors Internship Program, this was a welcome return to normality.

During the first few days of the summer program he’d been pulled away by a murder case—the notorious “Clown Killer.” After that he’d settled in to the more mundane work of mentoring just one of the interns—a talented but exasperating kid named Riley Sweeney, who had shown startling brilliance helping him on the case.

Even so, the program had passed too slowly for his taste. He wasn’t used to spending such a long period out of the field.

When Jake walked into Lehl’s office, the lanky man rose up from his chair to greet him. Erik Lehl was so tall that he barely seemed to fit into any space he occupied. Other agents said that he looked like he was wearing stilts. He looked more to Jake as though he were made out of stilts—an awkwardly assembled assortment of lengths of lumber that somehow never seemed to be perfectly coordinated in their movements. But the man had been a crack agent and had earned his position at the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit.

“Don’t make yourself comfortable, Crivaro,” Lehl said. “You’re leaving right away.”

Jake obediently stayed on his feet.

Lehl looked at a manila folder that he was holding and heaved a grim sigh. Jake had long since observed Lehl’s tendency to take every case extremely seriously—even personally, as if he felt directly insulted by any sort of monstrous criminality.

Not surprisingly, Jake couldn’t remember ever finding Lehl in a cheerful mood.

After all …

Monsters are our business.

And Jake knew that Lehl wouldn’t be assigning him to this particular case if it weren’t unusually heinous. Jake was something of a specialist in cases that defied human imagination.

Lehl handed the manila folder to Jake and said, “We’ve got a really ugly situation in West Virginia. Have a look.”

Jake opened the folder and saw a black-and-white photo of a weird bundle held together by duct tape and barbed wire. The bundle was dangling against a fence post. It took a moment for Jake to realize that the bundle had a face and hands—that it was in fact a human being and obviously dead.

Jake inhaled sharply.

Even for him, this was a uniquely grisly sight.

Lehl explained, “The photo was taken about a month ago. The body of a beauty parlor worker named Alice Gibson was found bound up with barbed wire and hanging from a fence post on a rural road near Hyland, West Virginia.”

“Pretty nasty stuff,” Jake said. “How are the local cops handling it?”

“They have a suspect in custody,” Lehl said.

Jake’s eyes widened with surprise.

He asked, “So what makes this an FBI case?”

Lehl said, “We just got a call from the chief of police in Dighton, a town near Hyland. Another bundled-up body like this was found just this morning, hanging from a fence post on a road outside of town.”

Jake was starting to understand. Being in a jail cell at the time of the second murder gave the suspect a pretty good alibi. And now things looked like a serial killer was just getting started.

Lehl continued, “I’ve given orders that the current crime scene not be disturbed. So you need to get there ASAP. It would be a four-hour drive across the mountains, so I’ve got a helicopter waiting for you on the airstrip.”

Jake was just turning to leave the office when Lehl added …

“Do you want me to assign you a partner?”

Jake turned and looked at Lehl. Somehow, he hadn’t expected the question.

“I don’t need a partner,” Jake said. “But I’ll need a forensics team. The cops in rural West Virginia aren’t going to know how to get a good reading on the scene.”

Lehl nodded and said, “I’ll get the team together right now. They’ll fly out with you.”

Just as Jake was stepping out the door, Lehl said …

“Agent Crivaro, sooner or later you’re going to need another regular partner.”

Jake shrugged awkwardly and said, “If you say so, sir.”

With a hint of a growl in his voice, Lehl said. “I do say so. It’s about time for you to learn to play nice with others.”

Jake stared at him with surprise. It was rare for the taciturn Erik Lehl to say anything the least bit snide.

I guess he really means it, Jake realized.

Without another word, Jake left the office and headed through the building. As he walked briskly along, he thought about what Lehl had said about him getting a new partner. Jake was well-known for being tough to work with in the field. But he really didn’t think he gave anybody a hard time unless they deserved it.

His last regular partner, Gus Bollinger, had certainly deserved it. He’d gotten fired for smearing the fingerprints on a piece of vital evidence in the so-called “Matchbook Killer” case. As a consequence, the case had gone cold—and there was little that Jake hated more than cold cases.

On the Clown Killer case, Jake had worked with a DC agent named Mark McCune. McCune hadn’t been as bad as Bollinger, but he’d made stupid mistakes and thought too highly of himself for Jake’s taste. Jake was glad that their partnership had been only for that one case and that McCune remained in DC.

As he stepped onto the tarmac where the helicopter waited, he thought about someone else he’d worked with recently …

Riley Sweeney.

He’d been impressed with her ever since she’d been a psych student who had helped him solve a serial case at Lanton University. When she’d graduated, he’d pulled strings and stirred up the ire of some his colleagues to get her into the Honors Internship Program. Perhaps against his own better judgment, he’d enlisted her help on the Clown Killer case.

She’d done some really brilliant work. She’d also made some really outrageous mistakes. And she was a long way from learning how to obey orders, but he’d only known a handful of even seasoned agents with such powerful intuitions.

One of those was himself.

As Jake stooped below the spinning propeller blades and climbed up into the helicopter, he saw the four-man forensic team trotting across the tarmac. Then the forensics guys climbed into the chopper, which took to the air.

It seemed silly to be thinking of Riley Sweeney right now. Quantico was a huge base, and even though she was at the FBI Academy, their paths weren’t likely to cross again.

Jake opened the folder to read over the police report.

*

After the helicopter cleared the Appalachian mountain ranges, it passed over rolling meadows dotted with Black Angus cattle. As the chopper descended, Jake could see where police vehicles had blocked off a stretch of gravel road to keep onlookers away from the crime scene.

The helicopter set down in grassy pasture. Jake and the forensics team climbed out of the vehicle and headed over toward a small group of uniformed people and several official vehicles.

The cops and the medical examiner’s team were standing on both sides of a barbed wire fence that ran along the road at the edge of the pasture. Jake could see what looked like a snarled bundle of wire hanging from a fencepost.

A short, sturdy-looking man of about Jake’s height and build stepped forward to greet him.

“I’m Graham Messenger, the chief of police here in Dighton,” he said, shaking hands with Jake. “We’ve had ourselves a couple of pretty awful incidents, at least for these parts. Let me show you.”

The chief led the way to a fence post and, sure enough, a weird bundle was hanging from the post, all held together with duct tape and barbed wire. Again Jake was able spot a face and hands indicating that the bundle was actually a human being.

Messenger said, “I guess you already know about Alice Gibson, the earlier victim over near Hyland. This looks like the same damn thing all over again. The victim this time is Hope Nelson.”

Crivaro said, “Was she reported missing before the body was found?”

“Yeah, I’m afraid so,” Messenger said, pointing pointed toward a stunned-looking middle-aged man standing near one of the vehicles. “Hope was married to Mason Nelson over there—the town mayor. She was working in their local farm supply store last night, but she didn’t come home when Mason expected. He called me in the middle of the night about it, sounding pretty alarmed.”

The police chief shrugged guiltily.

“Well, I’m kind of used to folks going missing for a spell, then turning up again. I told Mason I’d look into in today if she didn’t turn up. I had no idea …”

Messenger’s voice trailed off. Then he sighed and shook his head and added …

“The Nelsons own a lot of property in Dighton. They’ve always been good, respectable folks. Poor Hope didn’t deserve this. But then, I don’t reckon anybody does.”

Another man stepped toward them. He had a long, aged face, white hair, and a bushy old-fashioned mustache. Chief Messenger introduced him as Hamish Cross, the county’s chief medical examiner. Chewing on a weed, Cross seemed relaxed and mildly curious about what was going on.

He asked Jake, “Ever seen anything like this before?”

Jake didn’t reply. The answer, of course, was no.

Jake stooped down beside the bundle and examined it closely.

He said to Cross, “I assume you worked on the earlier murder.”

Cross nodded and stooped down beside Jake and twirled the weed in his mouth.

“That I did,” Cross said. “And this one’s pretty near identical. She didn’t die here, that much is certain. She was abducted, bound up first with duct tape and then with barbed wire, and bled slowly to death. Either that or she suffocated first. Bound up tight like that, she’d hardly have been able to breathe at all. All that happened somewhere else—there’s no sign of bleeding here.”

Jake could see that the face and hands were almost as white as paper, and they glistened in the late morning sunlight like pieces of china. The woman simply didn’t look real to Jake, but more like some kind of sick, grotesque sculpture.

A few flies had gathered around the body. They kept landing, roaming around, then flying away again. They looked like they didn’t know what to do with this mysterious object.

Jake rose to his feet and asked Chief Messenger, “Who found the body?”

As if in reply, Jake heard a man’s voice calling out …

“What the hell’s going on here? How much longer is this going to take?”

Jake turned and saw a longhaired man with a scraggly beard coming toward them. He looked wild-eyed with anger, and his voice was shaking and shrill.

He yelled, “When the hell are you taking this—this thing away? This is a huge inconvenience. I’ve had to keep my cattle in an overgrazed pasture because of all this. I’ve got lots of work to do today. How much longer is this going to take?”

Jake turned to Hamish Cross and said quietly …

“You can take the body away any time now.”

Cross nodded and gave orders to his team. Then he led the angry man away and spoke to him quietly, apparently calming him down.

Chief Messenger explained to Jake …

“That’s Guy Dafoe, who owns this property. He’s an organic farmer—our local hippie, I guess you might say. He hasn’t been around for very long. It turns out this area is good for raising grass-fed organic beef. Organic farming’s been a real boost to the local economy.”

The chief’s cellphone rang and he took the call. He listened for a moment, then said to Jake …

“This is Dave Tallhamer, the sheriff over in Hyland. You may have heard there’s a suspect in custody for the first murder—Philip Cardin. He’s the victim’s ex-husband, and a bad sort who didn’t have an alibi at the time. Tallhamer thought he had him dead to rights. But I guess this new murder changes things, doesn’t it? Dave wants to know if he should let the guy go.”

Jake thought for a moment, then said …

“Not until I’ve had a chance to talk to him.”

Chief Messenger squinted curiously and said, “Uh, doesn’t being locked in a jail cell when this woman was killed pretty much let him off the hook?”

Jake suppressed a sigh of impatience.

He repeated simply, “I’ll want to talk to him.”

Messenger nodded and got back on the phone with the sheriff.

Jake didn’t want to go into any kind of explanation right now. The truth was, he knew nothing at all about the suspect currently in custody, or even why he was a suspect. For all Jake knew, Philip Cardin might have a partner who committed this new murder, or else …

God knows what might be going on.

At this point in an investigation, there were always thousands of questions and no answers. Jake hoped that would change before too long.

While Messenger kept talking on the phone, Jake walked over to the victim’s husband, who was leaning against a police car staring off into space.

Jake said, “Mr. Nelson, I’m very sorry for your loss. I’m Special Agent Jake Crivaro, and I’m here to help bring your wife’s killer to justice.”

Nelson nodded only slightly, as if he were barely aware that he’d been spoken to.

Jake said in a firm voice, “Mr. Nelson, do you have any idea who might have done this? Or why?”

Nelson looked at him with a dazed expression.

“What?” he said. Then he repeated, “No, no, no.”

Jake knew that there was no point in asking the man any more questions, at least not right now. He was clearly in a deep state of shock. That was hardly surprising. Not only was his wife dead, but the way she had died was especially grotesque.

Jake headed back over toward the crime scene, where his forensics team was already hard at work.

He looked all around, noting how isolated the place seemed to be. At least there wasn’t a crowd of gawkers hanging around …

And so far no sign of the media.

But right then he heard the sound of another helicopter. He looked around and saw that a TV news helicopter was descending toward the meadow.

Jake sighed deeply and thought …

This case is going to be tough.