body's stomach contents with the meal Bondurant and her father had that night, but I doubt it. She'd have had to have been killed almost right away. That's not how this sicko operates.
“The press conference is at five—not that the press is waiting for it,” he went on. “They've been all over the air with the story. They've already given this scumbag a nickname. They're calling him the Cremator. Catchy, huh?”
“I'm told they're drawing correlations to some murders from a couple of years ago. Is there any connection?”
“The Wirth Park murders. No connection, but a couple of similarities. Those victims were black women—and one Asian transvestite he got by mistake. Prostitutes or supposed prostitutes—and this guy's first two vics were prostitutes. But there's always someone killing prostitutes. They're easy targets. Those vics were mostly black and these are white. That right there points to a different killer—right?”
“Sexual serial killers generally stay within their own ethnic group, yes.”
“Anyway, they got a conviction on one of those Wirth Park murders and closed the books on the others. They got their killer, there just wasn't enough physical evidence to go to trial on all the cases. Besides, how many life sentences can a guy serve?
“I talked to one of the homicide dicks this morning,” Walsh said, crushing out the stub of his cigarette in the filthy ashtray. “He says there's no doubt about it, this is definitely a different scumbag. But to tell you the truth, I don't know much more about these murders than you. Until this morning all they had were two dead hookers. I read about them in the paper just like everyone else. I sure as hell know the other guy never cut anybody's head off. That's a new twist for this neck of the woods.”
The dark play on words struck him belatedly, and he made a little huffing sound and shook his head at the bad joke.
Quinn looked out the window at the gray and the rain, the winter-dead trees as black and bleak as if they'd been charred, and observed a moment of sympathy for the nameless, faceless victims not important enough to warrant anything but a label. In their lives they had known joy and sorrow. On the way to their deaths they had likely known terror and pain. They had families and friends who would mourn them and miss them. But the press and society at large whittled their lives and their deaths down to the lowest, lowliest common denominator: two dead hookers. Quinn had seen a hundred . . . and he remembered every one.
Sighing, he rubbed at the dull headache that had taken up semipermanent residence in his frontal lobes. He was too tired for the kind of diplomacy needed at the start of a case. This was the kind of tired that went to the marrow of his bones and weighed him down like lead. There had been too many bodies in the last few years. Their names scrolled through his mind at night when he tried to sleep. Counting corpses, he called it. Not the kind of thing that inspired sweet dreams.
“You want to go to your hotel first or to the office?” Walsh asked.
As if what he wanted had anything to do with it. What he wanted in life had gone out of sight for him long ago.
“I have to go to the crime scene,” he said, the unopened folder of photographs as heavy as a steel plate on his lap. “I need to see where he left her.”
THE PARK LOOKED like a campsite the day after a Cub Scout jamboree. The charred ground where the fire had been, the yellow tape strung from tree to tree like bunting to fence off the area; the dead grass trampled down, leaves pressed into the ground like wet paper cutouts. Crumpled paper coffee cups had blown out of the trash can that sat just off the blacktop trail on the hillside and skittered across the ground.
Walsh parked the car and they got out and stood on the blacktop, Quinn scanning the entire area from north to south. The crime scene was slightly below them in a shallow bowl of ground that had afforded excellent cover. The park was studded with trees, both deciduous and evergreen. By dead of night this would be a small world all its own. The nearest residences—neat middle-class single-family homes—were well away from the crime scene, the skyscrapers of downtown Minneapolis several miles to the north. Even the small service lot where they were parked was obscured from view by trees and what was likely a beautiful row of lilacs in the spring—camouflage to hide a small locked utility shed and the park maintenance vehicles that came and went as needed.
Their UNSUB (unknown subject) had likely parked here and carried the body down the hill for his little ceremony. Quinn looked up at the sodium vapor security light that topped a dark pole near the utility shed. The glass had been shattered, but there were no visible fragments of it on the ground.
“We know how long that light's been out?”
Walsh looked up, blinking and grimacing as the rain hit him in the face. “You'll have to ask the cops.”
A couple of days, Quinn bet. Not long enough that the park service would have gotten around to fixing it. If the damage was the work of their man in preparation for his midnight call . . . If he had come here in advance, knocked out the light, cleaned up the glass to help avoid detection of the vandalism and thereby improve his odds that the security light would not be replaced quickly . . . if all of that was true, they were dealing with a strong degree of planning and premeditation. And experience. MO was learned behavior. A criminal learned by trial and error what to do and what not to do in the commission of his crimes. He improved his methods with time and repetition.
Ignoring the rain that pelted down on his bare head, Quinn hunched his shoulders inside his trench coat and started down the hill, conscious that the killer would have taken this route with a body in his arms. It was a fair distance—fifty or sixty yards. The crime scene unit would have the exact measurements. It took strength to carry a dead weight that far. The time of death would have determined how he had carried her. Over the shoulder would have been easiest—if rigor had not yet set in, or if it had come and gone already. If he had been able to carry her over his shoulder, then his size could vary more; a smaller man could accomplish the task. If he had to carry her in his arms, he would had to have been larger. Quinn hoped they would know more after the autopsy.
“What did the crime scene unit cover?” he asked, the words coming out of his mouth on a cloud of steam.
Walsh hustled along three paces behind him, coughing. “Everything. This whole section of park, including the parking area and the utility shed. The homicide guys called in their own Bureau of Investigation crime scene people and the mobile lab from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension as well. They were very thorough.”
“When did this rain start?”
“This morning.”
“Shit,” Quinn grumbled. “Last night—would the ground have been hard or soft?”
“Like a rock. They didn't get any shoe prints. They picked up some garbage—scraps of paper, cigarette butts, like that. But hell, it's a public park. The stuff could have come from anyone.”
“Anything distinguishing left at the first two scenes?”
“The victims' driver's licenses. Other than that, nothing to my knowledge.”
“Who's doing the lab work?”
“BCA. Their facilities are excellent.”
“I've heard that.”
“They're aware they can contact the FBI lab if they need help or clarification on anything.”
Quinn pulled up just short of the charred ground where the body had been left, a thick, dark sense of oppression closing tight around his chest as it always did at a crime scene. He had never tried to discern whether the feeling was anything as mystical or romantic as the notion of a malingering sense of evil or something as psychologically profound as displaced guilt. The feeling was just a part of him. He supposed he should have welcomed it as some proof of his humanity. After all the bodies he'd seen, he had yet to become totally hardened.
Then again, he might have been better off if he had.
For the first time, he opened the folder Walsh had given him and looked at the photographs someone had had the foresight to slip into plastic protectors. The tableau presented might have made the average person recoil. Portable halogen lights had been set up near the body to illuminate both the night and the corpse, giving the photo a weirdly artistic quality. As did the charring of the flesh, and the melted fabric of the woman's clothing. Color against the absence of color; the fanciful vibrance of a triangle of undamaged red skirt against the grim reality of its wearer's violent death.
“Were the others wearing clothes?”
“I don't know.”
