CHAPTER FIVE

For a long moment, Riley stood staring at the body on the tracks. She’d seen corpses mangled in all kinds of horrifying ways. Even so, this victim presented a uniquely shocking spectacle. The woman had been beheaded cleanly by the wheels of the train, almost as if by a guillotine’s blade.

Riley was surprised that the woman’s headless body seemed unscathed by the train that had passed over it. The victim was bound tightly with duct tape, her hands and arms taped to her sides, and her ankles taped together. Clothed in what had been an attractive outfit, the body was twisted in a desperate, writhing position. Where her neck was severed, blood was spattered on the crushed stones, the wooden ties, and the rail. The head had been thrown some six or seven feet down the embankment along the tracks. The woman’s eyes and mouth gaped up at the sky in an expression of frozen horror.

Riley saw several people standing around the body, some of them wearing uniforms, some not. Riley figured they were a mix of local police and railroad cops. A man in a uniform came toward Riley and her colleagues.

He said, “You’re the FBI folks, I take it. I’m Jude Cullen, Deputy Chief of Railroad Police for the Chicago region – ‘Bull’ Cullen, folks call me.”

He sounded proud of the nickname. Riley knew from her research that “Bull” was general slang for a police officer on the railroad. Actually, in the railroad police organization they held the titles of Agent and Special Agent, much like the FBI. This one apparently preferred the sound of the more generic term.

“It was my idea to get you guys here,” Cullen continued. “I hope the trip proves to be worth it. The sooner we can get the body away from here, the better.”

As Riley and her colleagues introduced themselves, she looked Cullen over. He seemed remarkably young and had an exceptionally muscular physique, his arms bulging below the uniform’s short sleeves and the shirt stretched tight across his chest.

The nickname “Bull” suited him pretty well, she thought. But Riley always found herself put off rather than attracted by men who obviously spent many hours in a gym to look this way.

She wondered how a muscle-bound guy like Bull Cullen actually found time for much of anything else. Then she noticed that he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. She figured that his life must be about his job and working out, and not much else.

He appeared to be good-natured and not especially shocked by the unusually grisly nature of the crime scene. Of course, he’d been here for a few hours now – long enough to get somewhat numbed to it. Even so, the man immediately struck Riley as rather vain and shallow.

She asked him, “Have you identified the victim?”

Bull Cullen nodded.

“Yeah, her name was Reese Fisher, thirty-five years old. She lived right near here in Barnwell, where she worked as the local librarian. She was married to a chiropractor.”

Riley looked up and down the tracks. This stretch was curved so that she couldn’t see very far in either direction.

“Where is the train that ran over her?” she asked Cullen.

Cullen pointed and said, “About a half mile down there, exactly where it stopped.”

Riley noticed an obese, black-uniformed man who was crouching next to the body.

“Is that the medical examiner?” she asked Cullen.

“Yeah, let me introduce you to him. This is the Barnwell coroner, Corey Hammond.”

Riley crouched down beside the man. She sensed that, in contrast to Cullen, Hammond was still struggling to contain his shock. His breathing was coming in gasps – partly due to his weight, but also, she suspected, from revulsion and horror. He’d surely never seen anything like this in his jurisdiction.

“What can you tell us so far?” Riley asked the coroner.

“No sign of sexual assault that I can see,” Hammond said. “That’s consistent with the other coroner’s autopsy of the victim four days ago, over near Allardt.”

Hammond pointed to mangled pieces of wide silvery tape around the woman’s neck and shoulders.

“The killer bound her hand and foot, then taped her neck onto the rail and immobilized her shoulders. She must have struggled like mad trying to get loose. But she didn’t stand a chance.”

Riley turned toward Cullen and asked, “Her mouth wasn’t gagged. Would anybody have heard her screaming?”

“We don’t think so,” Cullen said, pointing toward some trees. “There are some houses through those woods, but they’re out of earshot. A couple of my guys went from door to door asking if anybody had heard anything or had any idea what had been happening at the time of the murder. No one did. They found out all about it on TV or on the Internet. They’ve been instructed to stay away from here. So far, we haven’t had any trouble with gawkers.”

Bill asked, “Did it look like anything was stolen from her?”

Cullen shrugged.

“We don’t think so. We found her purse right here beside her, and she still had identification and money and credit cards. Oh, and a cell phone.”

Riley studied the body, trying to imagine how the killer had managed to get the victim into this position. Sometimes she could get a powerful, even uncanny, feeling of the killer just by tuning in to her surroundings at a crime scene. Sometimes it almost seemed that she could get into his thoughts, know what was on his mind as he committed the murder.

But not right now.

Things were too jangled here, with all these people milling about.

She said, “He must have subdued her somehow before he bound her up like this. What about the other corpse, the victim that was killed earlier? Did the local coroner find any drugs in her system?”

“There was flunitrazepam in her bloodstream,” Coroner Hammond said.

Riley glanced at her colleagues. She knew what flunitrazepam was, and she knew that Jenn and Bill did as well. Its trade name was Rohypnol, and it was commonly known as the date rape drug or as “roofies.” It was illegal, but all too easy to buy on the streets.

And it certainly would have subdued the victim, rendering her helpless although possibly not fully unconscious. Riley knew that flunitrazepam had an amnesiac effect once it wore off. She shuddered to realize …

It might well have worn off right here – just before she died.

If so, the poor woman would have had no idea how or why such a terrible thing had happened to her.

Bill scratched his chin as he looked down at the body.

He said, “So maybe this started off date-rape style, with the killer slipping the drug into her drink at a bar or a party or something.”

The coroner shook his head.

“Apparently not,” he said. “There wasn’t a trace of the drug in the other victim’s stomach. It must have been given to her as an injection.”

Jenn said, “That’s odd.”

Deputy Chief Bull Cullen looked at Jenn with interest.

“Why so?” he asked.

Jenn shrugged slightly.

She said, “It’s a little hard to imagine, that’s all. Flunitrazepam doesn’t take effect right away, no matter how it’s delivered. In a date-rape situation, that typically doesn’t matter. The unsuspecting victim maybe has drinks with her soon-to-be assailant for a little while, starts feeling woozy without knowing quite why, and pretty soon she becomes helpless. But if our killer stabbed her with a needle, she’d immediately know she was in trouble, and she’d have had a few minutes to resist before the drug took effect. It just doesn’t sound … very efficient.”

Cullen smiled at Jenn – a little flirtatiously, Riley thought.

“It makes sense to me,” he said. “Let me show you.”

He walked behind Jenn, who was markedly shorter than he was. He started reaching around her neck from behind her. Jenn stepped away.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Jenn said.

“Just demonstrating. Don’t worry, I’m not really going to hurt you.”

Jenn scoffed and kept her distance from him.

“Damn right, you’re not,” she said. “And I’m pretty sure I know what you’ve got in mind. You’re thinking the killer used some kind of choke hold.”

“That’s right,” Cullen said, still smiling. “Specifically, a so-called blood choke.”

He twisted his arm to illustrate his point.

“The killer approached her unexpectedly from behind, then crooked his arm like this around the front of her neck. The victim could still breathe, but her carotid arteries were shut off completely, cutting off the blood flow to the brain. The victim lost consciousness within seconds. Then it was easy for the killer to administer an injection that rendered her helpless for a longer period.”

Riley easily sensed the friction between Cullen and Jenn. Cullen was obviously a classic “mansplainer” whose attitude toward Jenn was condescending as well as flirtatious.

Jenn clearly didn’t like him one bit, and Riley felt the same. The man was shallow, all right, with a poor sense of appropriate behavior when it came to dealing with a female colleague – and an even worse sense of how to behave at a murder scene.

Still, Riley had to admit that Cullen’s theory was sound.

He might be obnoxious, but he wasn’t stupid.

In fact, he might be genuinely helpful to work with.

That is, if we can stand to be around him, Riley thought.

Cullen stepped off the tracks and down the slope and pointed at a space where the ground had been taped off.

He said, “We’ve got some tire tracks, from where he drove down here after turning off the main road back at the railroad crossing. They’re big tracks – obviously some kind of off-road vehicle. Here are some footprints too.”

Riley said, “Have your people take pictures of these. We’ll send them to Quantico and have our technicians run them through our database.”

Cullen stood with his arms akimbo for a moment, taking in the scene with what seemed to Riley almost like a sense of satisfaction.

He said, “I’ve got to say, this is a new experience for me and my guys. We’re used to investigating cargo theft, vandalism, collisions, and the like. Murders are few and far between. And something like this – well, we’ve never seen anything like it before. Of course, I guess it’s nothing really special for you FBI folks. You’re used to it.”

Cullen got no reply and he fell silent for a moment. Then he looked at Riley and her colleagues and said, “Well, I don’t want to take too much of your precious time. Just give us a profile, and my team will take it from here. You can fly back home today, unless you really want to spend the night.”

Riley, Bill, and Jenn looked at each other with surprise.

Did he seriously think they could wrap up their work here that quickly?

“I’m not sure what you mean,” Riley said.

Cullen shrugged and said, “I’m sure you’ve figured out something in the way of a profile by now. That’s what you’re here for, after all. What can you tell me?”

Riley hesitated for a moment.

Then she said, “We can give you a few generalizations. Statistically, most murderers who leave the body at the scene have a prior criminal record. Over half of them are between the ages of fifteen and thirty-seven – and over half are African-American, employed at least part time, and have at least a high school education. Some such killers have had prior psychiatric problems, and some have been in the military. But …”

Riley hesitated.

“But what?” Cullen asked.

“Try to understand – none of this is really useful information, at least not at this point. There are always outliers. And our killer is starting to look like one already. For example, the kind of killer we’re talking about usually has some kind of sexual motivation. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here. My guess is that he’s not typical in a lot of ways. Maybe he’s not typical at all. We’ve still got a lot of work cut out for us.”

For the first time since she’d arrived, Cullen’s expression darkened a little.

Riley added, “And I want her cell phone rushed to Quantico. And the other victim’s cell phone as well. Our technicians need to see if they can get any information out of them.”

Before Cullen could reply, his own cell phone buzzed and he scowled.

He said, “I already know who that is. It’s the railroad administrator, wanting to know if he can get the trains moving again. The line has got three freight trains piled up and a passenger train running late. There’s a fresh crew ready to drive away the train that’s still sitting on the tracks. Can we move the body yet?”

Riley nodded and said to the coroner, “Go ahead, get her into your van.”

Cullen turned away and took the call, while the coroner called his people together and got to work with the body.

When Cullen got off the phone, he seemed to be in a genuinely sour mood.

He said to Riley and her colleagues, “So I guess you folks are going to make yourselves at home for a while.”

Riley thought she was starting to understand what was bothering him. Cullen was positively looking forward to solving a sensational case, and he hadn’t expected the FBI to rob him of his thunder.

Riley said, “Look, we’re here at your request. But I think you’ll be needing us – for a while longer anyway.”

Cullen shook his head and shuffled his feet.

Then he said, “Well, we’d all better head on into the Barnwell police station. We’ve got something pretty unpleasant to deal with there.”

Without another word, he turned and headed away.

Riley glanced at the body, which was now being loaded onto a gurney.

She wondered …

More unpleasant than this?

Her mind boggled as she and her colleagues followed Cullen back the way they’d come.