In the Belly of Jonah (11 page)

“Cut it,” I said.

Joe disappeared next door to the plant maintenance shop and returned with bolt cutters. One hardy snip and we were in. Jill had left her hard hat and her coveralls hanging on the hooks. The coveralls were dusty but had no rips or tears in them yet. Her hard hat was adorned with three stickers:one that said “Safety First,” one that had our company logo, and one that said “Go Rams!” On the floor of the locker, Jill had placed her steel-toed boots side by side with the laces neatly tucked inside each boot. On the top shelf of the locker cabinet, we found a blue bandana, a paperback edition of
Crime and Punishment
, and a silver chain necklace from which some heart-shaped charms hung. I placed the boots in the box first. After carefully folding Jill’s coveralls, I laid them atop the boots, scooped the contents from the shelf onto the coveralls, and placed the hard hat in the box last.

The whole process was more emotionally challenging than I had imagined it would be, and Joe must have experienced the same weightiness I had felt, if his sigh was any indication.

“She turned in her time card Saturday night,” he said.

“Let me guess,” I added. “On time and completed without a single error?”

“Yep.”

“The Jill Brannigans of the world are hard to find.”

“And even harder to lose.”

I placed the lid on the box and hefted it from the ground. Joe closed the locker door and ceremoniously peeled the sticker bearing Jill Brannigan’s name off the front. We both bowed our heads for a minute and quietly left the change room.

He stayed beside me as I walked to my Explorer with the box. “She didn’t mean a thing by that kiss, Joe, other than to thank you and tell you how much she appreciated your kindness.”

I had told him before, but I sensed he needed reminding.

“Thanks,” he said, opening the door to my backseat.

I set the box down and closed the door. “Anytime. Want to make a round through the plant with me?”

He nodded. “Kyle’s taking this the hardest.”

“Think he had a crush on Jill?”

“I think the entire team had a crush on Jill. What’s not to like about the girl?”

We took the catwalks along the conveyor and the steps up to the highest reaches of the plant, listening and looking at every piece of equipment as we passed. We pulled some samples along the way and shook them through sieves to check for quality. When we got to the top of the silos, we looked down below at the scale and the trucks waiting to be loaded, over to the quarry, and beyond the pit to the Rocky Mountains.

“Where are all the guys?”

We hadn’t seen any of the other four plant team members for this shift. Normally we would have at least seen the material handler loading trucks or the assistant charging the hopper for the dryer with feedstone, but we hadn’t seen a single soul for the past thirty minutes.

Joe said, “Maybe after sleeping on it, they’re struggling more today over the news than they were yesterday.”

“Think we should bring Cindy back?”

“Let’s find Allan and ask what’s up.”

We finally found Allan, Greg, and Oliver in the control room. Looking a bit sheepish, they started to scatter when Joe and I came through the door.

“Hey, guys,” I said, stopping their retreat. “Sorry about Jill and not being able to come see you about it yesterday.”

They made rumblings, but nothing coherent.

“Did it help to have Cindy here?”

Allan nodded. The other two kicked at invisible rocks on the control room floor. Not the boisterous, opinionated guys I had grown accustomed to. I hadn’t seen them this mulish since the Christmas party following the summer when I had hired a stripper as a material handler because she said she wanted to turn her life around. Night-shift workers’ spouses were not real thrilled with me that year. Not one of my finer moments. Tough on the guys as well.

“I’m thinking about seeing if she could come back again today,” I suggested. I wanted to send out the trial balloon to gauge their reaction. I got some subtle head bobbing but nothing definitive until I added, “For me, of course, since I didn’t get to talk with her.”

Cindy would be coming. They still needed her. Or something.

“Where’s Kyle?” I asked.

“Over with Terry,” Oliver said. “They’re talking with some of the drivers.”

“About Jill?”

More nods.

“What are you guys hearing? Besides a bunch of bullshit rumors,” I asked.

That brought them around a little bit. Fleeting smiles, at least.

Greg looked at the imaginary rock and kept kicking and swaying. “Heard she was cut to bits, boss. Heard she was hurt bad.”

He never looked up. I scanned the other faces. None of the men would look me in the eye. I was no psychologist, but I couldn’t help but wonder if this was about me being a woman and them having heard something about

Jill being raped. So I asked, “Are there rumors that Jill was raped?”

Allan nodded and elbowed Greg. “Go on.”

“Well, we heard she was raped,”Greg began, “and that she was cut bad all over her body. And her face. And that’s why they aren’t showing nothing on the news except those basketball pictures of her.”

“Well, none of that’s true. At least the part about her being cut all over her body and face,”I said. “And as far as rape goes, they haven’t even received the lab results yet, so whatever you’re hearing are unfounded rumors.”

“Ask her,” Oliver whispered to Greg.

Allan jabbed Greg again with his elbow.

“Well, you always told us that you hate rumors and that if we heard something that bothered us, we should just ask you and you’d tell us the truth. Straight from the horse’s mouth, you said.”

“And I meant that,” I said.

I braced for what might come. I chose not to lie to my employees, and I encouraged directness to combat rumors. But in this situation, I was obligated to Lisa to keep quiet about what I knew and was walking a fine line between not lying and not divulging too much about what I knew of the case.

“We heard you saw Jill yesterday,” Greg finally blurted.

I hadn’t noticed I’d been holding my breath. Relief allowed me to blow it all out before answering. “I did. Officer Jan McDouglas from the Fort Collins Police Department stopped by yesterday morning to escort me to Denver to identify Jill’s body. Her younger sister is also a student at CSU and was still torn up by all the news. The authorities wanted to start the autopsy as soon as possible, but Jill’s parents were in transit from Wisconsin. So they asked if Joe or I would identify the body.”

“How’d she look?” Greg asked.

The control room was as quiet and still as I’d ever heard it. All four men were rigid, awaiting my answer. My mind went to that lifeless face, so unlike Jill’s, which was always full of life. I wasn’t about to describe her deathly pallor, so I grasped whatever I could from the truth of what I saw.

“It was Jill, no doubt. She looked like ...like Jill. There were no cuts or bruises that I could see on her face, neck, or shoulders, so I can tell you for sure, some of those rumors you’re hearing are not true.”

Their eyebrows were still highlighting the concern in their eyes. They collectively held their breath. What did they want from me? I didn’t have the power to take away their concern that Jill suffered. She was dead. What suffering is worse than losing a life? Their faces told me the answer:what’s worse might be the survivors’ suffering over a lost life. I knew if I saw Jill’s sister or parents’ faces, I’d know for sure their suffering would be the worst of all.

“Look. I’m no doctor or psychologist. But I was struck by the sense that Jill died quietly, despite the hole. Something in her face. It wasn’t terror or pain. I can’t describe it,” I answered, as honestly as I knew how.

At some point while I was speaking, Kyle had walked into the control room behind me. The others’ eyes landed on him, and I turned to see what they were seeing. Kyle’s eyes were wide and bloodshot.

“Kyle? Are you all right?” I asked.

Kyle’s voice was unsteady, incongruous with his sturdy six-foot-three, two-hundred-fifty-pound frame. “It’s all over the news. The drivers. They told me and Terry.”

“What did they tell you?” Joe asked.

I couldn’t imagine what would have made the news by this early in the day. Maybe it was leaked to the press that the Fort Collins Police Department no longer had jurisdiction over the case and that the FBI was taking over. Maybe the coroner had released some of the early findings. It would be too soon for Lisa to make any conclusions on the behavioral profile or for Agent Pierce to be making any statements or release anything to the press. Maybe it was about Detective Brandt turning in his resignation because Chief Richardson was a pompous, egocentric ass. But it turned out to be none of my various speculations.

“It’s de Milo, the serial killer. The Venus de Milo murderer killed Jill.”

AS HE SIPPED HIS
water with the twist of lime, he read the captions as fast as they flashed on the muted TV above the bar. The anchorwoman was describing the breaking news that Jill Brannigan, the popular CSU student who was murdered west of Fort Collins, was indeed the third victim of the Venus de Milo murderer.

How he hated that stupid moniker.

And how completely asinine the FBI had been for choosing it. They weren’t even close. The least those idiots at the Bureau could have done was to name him the “
Aphrodite
murderer,” a more accurate and poetic name than the more popular name—Venus de Milo—for the same statue.

Upon further reflection, though, the parallels between who he was and what they were calling him began to come sharply into focus. Yes, the Venus de Milo was missing her arms. So were many of his models.

The ancient statue of Aphrodite had limbs originally, just as his models had. Only he intentionally removed the limbs from his models, something Alexandros never intended to do with Venus, arms breaking accidentally while being loaded on a ship. He was proud of his superiority in that his art was intentional, not accidental.

And the sculptor, Alexandros of Antioch, was a copyist, creating bizarre and striking images of life, just as he did. The brilliance of Alexandros’s ability to add original twists to his work was similar to his own. Although, he mocked life with far superior ability than Alexandros dared to do.

And finally, he would be revered in centuries to come, just as Alexandros, both men living in decadent periods of history.

He studied the images of the stony-faced man with a white butch haircut and the lovely girl with long black hair leaving the Fort Collins police station with Detective Doug Brandt. He followed the captions to find out who the people accompanying the detective were. But his instincts already told him. Those two were FBI, the idiots who were calling him the Venus de Milo murderer. Simply because of the way he had staged, more like molded . . . no,
carved
his models.

He grinned at the thought of his Great Masturbator. That poor, unsuspecting couple lying along the riverbank outside of Platteville had been quite perfect for his purpose. He had spent the entire evening enjoying his models and molding them into the surrealism of his own sexual neurosis. Not that he, too, suffered from nightmares that
his mother
might one day devour his penis but, rather, that such a horror could exist in the brilliance of his sculpture. Fascinating.

The work gave him a sense of validation and comfort. After all, he did suffer from a fear of being brutally chomped by one of his sexual partners, yet neither being able nor wanting to deny himself the pleasure of sexual intimacy. Resisting but always yielding to erotic release, like he had experienced the day before with Tina from Martini’s. Not to challenge his hero’s brilliance, but the Great Masturbator should have been more aptly titled “Succubus” or “Incubus.”

And why had they seen his models as the Venus de Milo? Because of the pretty girl’s face, perhaps? A likeness to the Greek goddess of love and beauty? Or maybe it was because she no longer had arms. Or legs. But didn’t they find the locust? The tongue? And his male model was quite Apollo-like, particularly in his tighty whities. But mostly, he suspected, the FBI bestowed the name upon him because of his genius, his carving. Yet they hadn’t truly seen it. They hadn’t grasped what he was attempting with his five masterpieces to date.