Angel Fire (22 page)

She had first visited the Santa Fe and Angel Fire areas nearly three years ago when she had come to Albuquerque for a book signing. As soon as she first stepped foot off the plane, she felt like she had come home. It was something about the way the air smelled, about the sky and the stars that seemed to wrap around her like a blanket. It was something about the buildings—how they were small and warm, how there was a coziness, a womblike comfort to their interiors. And then there was the terrain, the gorgeous mountains, the hot springs, the trees in the highlands, the desert. It just felt like heaven to her and after she had left, she’d kept longing to return, so much so that she’d bought property here.

The book signing had been held at a Barnes and Noble in Albuquerque. She tried to remember now if there had been anyone there who’d imprinted on her memory as especially odd, but there had been so many book signings between now and then in so many Barnes and Nobles across the country. And there were always one or two freaks that had to be escorted from the signing table. She just didn’t pay attention anymore.

She thought about all the various people she had encountered during the purchase of her home: real-estate brokers, mortgage brokers, maid service, lawn maintenance people, locksmiths. She could think of nothing that had made her uneasy, no one who had seemed off to her.

“What do you want from me? And why did you want me to come here?” she said softly. She thought about the pen he had left for her and the note:
Vengeance is mine
. Did he want to wreak vengeance on her? Did he perceive her as having wronged him in some way? Had she written about him and offended him?

She walked the edge of the clearing, peering down a slight slope that led to a heavily forested area. She could see the windows of the neighboring house through the pine glinting in the sunlight. She sidled down into the trees, holding on to branches to keep her balance, her lizard-skin boots not finding much of a hold in the dirt. Once she reached level ground, she walked away from the clearing, her eyes on the forest floor, scanning for anything left by humans … a matchbook, a cigarette butt, a soda can, anything. She heard a soft rustle of leaves to her left and turned, expecting to see the doe again but there was nothing there. The sun moved behind a patch of cloud and it became more difficult to see the ground. Then about fifty feet in front of her she saw, mingled in with the green, red, and brown of nature’s palette, a square inch of pure white.

She continued to move toward the white patch, when she was startled by her cell phone. “Hello?”

“Where are you? The desk sergeant said you took off out of here like you were being chased by a ghost.”

“Hold on a second.”

“Lydia … Lydia …”

His voice was distant as she bent down and started brushing aside the leaves and dirt. Sticking out of the ground was a soft corner of plastic. She moved away from it, not wanting to touch anything and contaminate the scene any more than she already had.

“Jeff,” she said into the phone, as she looked around her into the darkness of the trees.

“Lydia, where the fuck are you?”

“I’m at 124 Black Canyon Road, there’s no marker, but it’s the only drive without one on the street. You better come with Morrow. We’re going to need the ME and all the usual suspects.”

“What have you found?”

“I think someone’s been buried here.”

J
effrey’s voice was soft, but authoritative enough to hold rapt the room of men and women gathered to discuss what was now the first serial-murder case the jurisdiction had ever seen. In the room dimmed by pulled shades, Lydia, Chief Morrow, Henry Wizner, and several local police officers sat around the conference table taking notes. The shifting tray of slides in the projector that Morrow operated punctuated Jeffrey’s comments. Images of gore and decay reflected on the screen.

“We’ve asked Private Investigator Jeffrey Mark and Lydia Strong to be involved in what we now consider to be a serial-offender situation, because of their vast experience in this area,” Chief Morrow had said by way of introduction between them and his department. “Having them here allows us to conduct this investigation without calling in the FBI, which no one wants. So I will ask that you give them the same amount of respect that you give me, and take their orders as you take mine, and by the time the feds hear about this, we’ll all be heroes instead of local yokels that couldn’t handle the situation ourselves.”

“The bodies of Christine and Harold Wallace were found today,” Jeffrey began. “So now we have three corpses missing their hearts. We don’t know where the killer is removing them or why. We do know that the locations where he’s dumped the bodies are not the locations of the kill. As far as evidence goes, we have turned up nothing except a partial footprint at the Lopez dump site.

“Due to some very unglamorous but very important
legwork—no pun intended—on the part of Homicide Detective Raymond Barnes,” Jeffrey continued, motioning to a heavyset man with a military bearing and haircut, “we have determined this boot to be a Timberland Toledo with a rubber lug sole. This doesn’t help much because it’s a popular boot sold in virtually every men’s retail shoestore in the area.

“The bodies of Christine and Harold Wallace were in bad shape. But we are trying to determine at this point whether he removed their hearts after he killed them or before.”

“Why is that significant?” asked one officer.

The image of Christine and Harold’s gutted bodies flashed on the screen behind Jeffrey. “Because it tells us exactly how sick a fuck we’re dealing with.”

A ripple of uncomfortable laughter moved through the room.

“Because,” Jeffrey continued, more seriously, “the more we know about what he does, the closer we are to why he does it. The more we understand about his motivations, the more we understand him, and the better profile we have.

“So this is what we know about him: His MO is to overpower his victims, either incapacitate or kill them, take them alive or dead to another location, and then to dump their bodies in a third location. The killer’s signature behavior is that he removes their hearts. For those of you that missed last week’s episode of
Profiler
, a ‘signature behavior’ or ‘aspect’ is something that an offender does above and beyond what he needs to do to commit the offense. It’s something he does to satisfy his emotional needs. Removing the heart is one part of it. I believe that what he does with the heart is another part of it. We’re in the dark as to what the underlying motivation is at this point.

“But we know enough to draw a decent profile. We know that he is an ‘inadequate’ type by the way he blitz-attacked Maria
Lopez; he used as much force as he had to subdue her. He forced his way into her apartment and put chloroform to her face. When that didn’t work, he killed her there. We know he is highly organized, in that it was necessary for him to burglarize the supply warehouse and set up an operating room somewhere, stalk his victims, perform his sick ‘surgery,’ and dump the bodies—all without getting caught. He is likely to be white and in his mid- to late thirties, on the older side of the traditional serial-killer profile, because it takes maturity, organization, and skill to do what he is doing. We are probably looking for a person with some medical background but probably not an actual doctor or surgeon. More like a buff, someone that would have liked to have been a doctor but failed in some way. He holds down a job somewhere. He probably lives alone or he has a place separate from his home where he’s doing his crime.

“The other notable element is that this killer seems to have an agenda other than the pleasure of the kill. He wants something else. He has a plan—either real or imagined. Ms. Strong seems to be a part of that agenda.” A picture of the items the killer had left on Lydia’s doorstep appeared on the screen.

“The message he left for her indicates he wants some kind of ‘vengeance.’ Whether he wanted revenge on his victims, whether he wants it from Ms. Strong, we can’t be sure.”

A collage of photos of the victims’ faces loomed on the screen behind him. “So far, the victims are all different physically, crossing age, gender, and racial lines. But they all attended the same church with varying degrees of regularity. They were all leading somewhat lonely lives with checkered pasts. Christine and Harold had extensive records of drug abuse and domestic violence. Shawna was a chronic runaway and a discipline problem. Maria allegedly accepted money for sex. We can see by the way he disposes of the
bodies that he is remorseless. These people are less than trash to him. He did not have intimate connections to them in life.”

The image of Maria Lopez’s trashed apartment was next on the screen. “We were hopeful that Maria Lopez’s apartment would contain some physical evidence. But the only hair we found we matched to Maria Lopez and Michael Urquia, who has been eliminated as a suspect. Same deal with the fingerprints. We found some fibers at the scene, but it takes a while to sort through that, and State is working on it. We found blood and skin underneath Lopez’s fingernails that has been sent to the lab for DNA testing … we all know that takes forever. Same with the bodies of Christine and Harold—checking for blood or DNA that doesn’t match theirs. Again, it’s going to take a few days. And then it will only help us if our killer has been entered into the system somewhere for some other offense.

“We don’t know for certain if anything was missing from the victims’ personal belongings. Shawna Fox, whose body we have not recovered and who may or may not be one of the victims—though we believe she is—took nothing with her when she left her foster parents’ home. Neither her foster parents nor her boyfriend Greg noticed anything missing from her belongings. In other words, we’re not sure if he’s collecting trophies.”

Lydia, sitting in a darkened corner in the back of the room, had been listening intently to the facts though she was more than familiar with them at this point, hoping that there was something that she missed. But when Jeffrey mentioned trophies, the image of her mother’s garnet earring occupied Lydia’s mind again for a moment. She remembered it glittering in the palm of Jeffrey’s hand as he’d returned it to her, and she shivered.

“Chief Morrow,” said Jeffrey, “this is the plan of attack I suggest. First, you need several stakeouts. One at each site where we
found bodies because killers often return to the scene to relive their kill. And one at the Church of the Holy Name because all the victims were parishioners there. And one at the home of Lydia Strong. He has likely developed an obsession with her, and we can expect to see him there again.

“All officers are advised to be on the lookout for someone fitting the profile driving a green or other dark-colored minivan. You can always find a good excuse to pull someone over if you look hard enough.

“Rental-car companies have been advised to alert us if someone using the name Vince A. Gemiennes tries to rent a car. This was the name, obviously a fake, someone used yesterday to rent a 2000 Jeep Grand Cherokee, which has since been impounded. The address that was left led Lydia to Christine and Harold Wallace’s bodies today. This could have been a huge break for us but apparently it was a very busy day at Avis yesterday and none of the three women working the counter remember this person enough to give a description. We have them here at the station now, looking over airport security tapes, hoping they will see someone that jogs their memory. Unfortunately, there is no camera directly on the Avis rental desk.”

“How did he rent a car? He had a fake credit card and driver’s license?” asked one uniformed officer.

“Well, we’re not a hundred percent positive. In the file, there is neither the imprint of the card or a copy of the license as there should be. All the girls insist that no one could have rented a car without those things. But the records have disappeared.”

“But it’s possible that he could be walking around making purchases with a fake credit card.”

“Yes, and area merchants are being notified via fax and e-mail to be on the lookout for someone using that name.”

Lydia wrote down the name again in her notebook, Jeffrey’s voice fading to background noise. It was an odd name, clearly fake since there was no record of it at any of the government offices. She traced the letters. Had she heard it before? Did she somehow know this person? She had the sense she was missing something.

Jeffrey paused and looked down at his notes. “Also, someone should start going through records of local arrests over the last two years. We are looking for sex crimes, domestic violence, pedophilia, animal mutilation. Keep the profile in mind, though. And remember also that we are looking for someone with a medical background.

“One of your people should get online with VICAP and plug in the elements of this case, see if anyone turns up. Though it’s highly unlikely, we could have a traveler. Remember Johansen?”

“Yeah,” Lydia replied, shaking her head and speaking up for the first time. “The traveling salesman who liked to pick up women in bars. He was an attractive guy. When a woman checked him out, he took her back to her apartment, strangled her, gouged her eyes out, and cut off her breasts. Seven victims, all found in different poses across the country. We finally figured out that he was positioning the bodies in the shape of letters. By the end, he’d spelled out ‘FUCK YOU.’ ”

“That’s the one,” Jeffrey said, and the local officers groaned.

“Someone else,” Jeffrey continued, “needs to start going over the crime-scene notes and photographs. Go back to the locations and poke around, get the feel of them, make sure nothing was missed. Then start going to places like the bar, the restaurant where Maria worked, the church. Observe, ask questions, start making people uncomfortable.

“Does anybody have any questions?”

When no one spoke, Morrow stood up. “Okay. Let’s get to
work,” he said, as he starting handing out assignments to different officers at the table. In pairs the officers filed out, each with their tasks before them, looking a little overwhelmed, Lydia thought.