The detective nodded, chewing her lip.
“You said she was reported missing by a coworker?”
“Yes.”
“Not her boss.”
“No.”
“The boss — a man, right?” She nodded. “Middle-aged? Married, I’m guessing?”
Her brow furrowed as she thought, and I could picture her trying to remember the boss’s left hand. She looked up at Brubaker, surprised. “Yeah, now that you mention it, he was wearing a ring.”
“Be interesting to know if the boss’s wife was away when this happened,” Brubaker said. “Also be interesting to check his kitchen for blood.” Her eyes narrowed, and as they did, I could see wheels begin turning behind them.
We ended with the new case Meffert and I were working in Campbell County. Meffert started with an overview of the case, and with the update of the ID. “The victim was a twenty-six-year-old white female from Covington, Kentucky. Melissa Mahan; went by Crystal.” He flashed a picture — a mug shot — showing a pretty but world-weary young woman. “She had a couple of arrests for soliciting. She worked part-time as an exotic dancer here”—he showed a slide of Adult World, the seedy establishment at the I-75 exit, a few miles from where we’d recovered her body. Next he showed the nearby truck stop. “She could have been picked up at either Adult World or the truck stop. Lotta truckers visit the porn palace; lotta hookers work the truck stop. She was a familiar face at the truck stop, I’m told.”
“When was she reported missing?” asked Brubaker.
Meffert frowned. “She wasn’t. Her last day of work at Adult World was September seventh. Over two weeks ago. But she wasn’t scheduled to work again until September fourteenth, because her boss had suspended her for a week. So we don’t actually know when she got picked up.”
“You got anything that links her to a trucker?”
“Nothing definitive,” said Meffert. “We found a fleck of red paint on the railing of the bridge she was dumped from. High on the rail — probably too high to have come from a car door. We’ve got the crime-lab guys analyzing it now, seeing if they can match it to a brand of paint or a brand of truck.”
Brubaker turned to me. “Dr. Brockton, what can you tell us about how long she’d been dead?”
“Not enough,” I said truthfully. “Obviously she was killed sometime after September seventh. And she was pretty badly decomposed by September twenty-third. I’m guessing she’d been there for a week, maybe close to two, before we found her. But whether she’d been dead for six days or sixteen days, I can’t say for sure. There’s just not much scientific basis for estimating time since death — not after the first few days, anyhow.”
He drummed his fingers three times. Was he just thinking, or was he impatient; frustrated? Maybe all of those. “How many trucks a day pass by the strip joint or the truck stop?”
Meffert shrugged. “Lots. A hundred? Two hundred?”
“So if it was a trucker, and the time-since-death estimate has a ten-day range, your suspect pool could be as high as two thousand truckers.” He shook his head. “That’s a hell of a lot of truckers.” He looked at me sharply. “Ten days? You really can’t pin it down any tighter than that?”
I felt my face redden, and I wished I’d thought to begin studying maggot growth and development earlier than I had. I glanced at Meffert, remembering how he’d teased me about misjudging Colonel Shy’s death by more than a century. Meffert was looking down at his notes — studying them with extreme attentiveness, it seemed to me.
Brubaker shifted gears. “What about the dismemberment? What was used to cut her up? Power saw? Hand saw? Hunting knife?”
“Don’t know yet,” I said, but I felt better about this line of questioning. “We put the bones in to simmer yesterday morning. I expect my assistant’s cleaning them just about now. Ask me tomorrow, after I’ve had a chance to take a close look at the cut marks.”
After another ten minutes of discussion — most of it focusing on the Stinking Creek woman, though with some follow-up Q&A about the Memphis and Chattanooga cases — Brubaker summarized his conclusions. The three murders were unrelated, he said. All three victims were women, true, and all three bodies had been found near interstate exits, but the similarities ended there.
“Well, thank God we’re not looking for a serial killer,” said Wallace, the TBI honcho, putting words to the relief that I imagined all of us around the table were feeling.
That relief was short-lived. “Oh, but you are,” said Brubaker. “I guarantee it.” All heads turned in the direction of the FBI profiler.
“I don’t understand,” countered Wallace. “I thought you just agreed that these killings are unrelated.”
“I did. They are.” We stared at him. If he was hoping to get our attention, he’d succeeded. “These three are unrelated. But one of them’s the work of a serial killer.” I knew which one he meant even before he said it; in fact, at some level, I’d known since I’d first seen her bloody body. “The hooker who was cut up and dumped in the creek — she was almost certainly not that guy’s first victim. You don’t start with something like that. And she sure as hell won’t be his last victim. Not unless he’s caught very quickly.”
Meffert raised his hand. “We’ve got another dead female in East Tennessee. Unidentified. Unknown cause of death.”
Brubaker turned to him. “Killed when?”
“Don’t know,” said Meffert. “Doc, you want to jump in here?”
“An adolescent,” I said. “Fourteen, fifteen. Dead at least two or three years, maybe lots more. Maybe as long as twenty years. Bare bones, bleached by the sun.”
Brubaker’s gaze swiveled between me and Meffert. “Was she dumped near an interstate?” Meffert shook his head. “Some other easily accessible spot?”
“No, sir,” said the TBI agent. “Way the hell off the beaten track. At an abandoned strip mine up in the mountains. ’Bout as hard to access as it gets.”
Brubaker shrugged. “Hard to say, if we don’t know how or when she was killed. But unless something turns up that links the scenes, I’d guess it’s unrelated.”
Just then the door opened halfway. A woman caught Wallace’s eye and beckoned to him; he pushed back from the table and stepped into the hallway. A moment later, he returned and tapped me on the shoulder. “Doc, you’ve got a phone call. Your assistant — Tyler somebody? He says he’s found something you need to know ASAP.”
Startled, I excused myself and followed the woman to a nearby office. On the desk was a phone with a blinking light indicating a call on hold. She pressed the button and handed me the receiver.
“Hello? Tyler?”
“Hey, Dr. B. Sorry to interrupt you. But you asked me to let you know if I found anything significant when I cleaned the bones.”
I felt my senses go on high alert. “What is it?”
“I was just looking at the left humerus. It was cut about midway between the shoulder and the elbow?”
“I remember. Go on.”
“Well, I looked at it in the dark, the way you showed us, with a flashlight beam skimming it at a really low angle.”
The wait was killing me. “For Pete’s sake, Tyler, just spit it out. What’d you see? Saw marks? Knife marks? An image of the Virgin Mary?”