Dark Web (18 page)
Swift stroked Kady’s fur and stared into the fire burning in his woodstove. It was almost one o’clock in the morning. He’d been up for nearly twenty-four hours. It was time to get some rest, otherwise things would start to go to shit, become messier than they already were. The young bucks out there would find McAfferty. The old geezers needed to rest their eyes and their addled brains. No matter what was going on — aliens landing or complete economic collapse, a serial killer tearing through town or a mass murderer at large — people still needed to eat, pee, sleep. Soldiers passed out on watch. Prison guards caught secret naps in the broom closet. Even the President of the United States occasionally rested his bones on one of the Oval Office couches.
Only human. Only flesh and blood.
Still, he had one more call to make.
Sheriff Dunleavy sounded older on the phone, more tired than Swift had ever known him.
“I appreciate it, John,” Dunleavy said after listening to Swift’s few well-chosen words. “But it was my call. I was the one who asked for you to keep Cohen around. We’re both big boys, we can handle it. The only person who is at fault here is the son of a bitch who did this.”
Swift felt a pain in his heart, but also the release of his culpability for Cohen’s death. He hated that he felt this relief, yet there was no denying it was there. Why else had he called the Sheriff this late?
“And we’re going to catch him,” said Dunleavy, with a little enthusiasm coming back into his voice — as if prompted by vengeance. “Your whole State Police force and my Department are all out looking for him right now. We’ll catch him.”
“That’s right,” said Swift. There didn’t seem to be much more to say. They had already gone over all of the details and each had exhausted their stores of useful information. There was certainly a connection between the Braxton Simpkins murder and the man, Tori McAfferty, who had struck a match to his meth operation — biology for one — but the anything else was an outside guess. And both Dunleavy and Swift were too long in the tooth to waste much time on wild guesses.
“If this cold and snow keep going on like this, I’m going to break into the sacramental wine,” Swift said.
Dunleavy laughed, but it was thin. They lapsed into silence again.
“Alright,” said Swift.
“Alright,” Dunleavy echoed.
Swift hung up his phone and dropped it on the couch beside him. Kady’s ears perked up, she looked at the phone, licked her chops, and then set her head down on his knee. Swift stroked her behind the ears. His eyelids were growing heavy, but his mind still buzzed. It was tough to shut it all out. Hard to put the images away in a box somewhere, but he’d gotten better at it over the years. The religious said you gave it over to God; you lay your burdens at His feet. Swift didn’t know about God, not in a world like this, not in a place where teenage boys dropped dead in the middle of the night and their bodies turned to lumps in the snow. And as he drifted off to sleep, he couldn’t help but think about the victim’s family, and what a thing it was to have children, something he’d never had. That boy had wandered off into the night, the dark trees surrounding him, the snowflakes melting on his warm body, and he had drifted into the road, somehow, yet there had been no footsteps, and he felt sure that when they tossed it they’d find no evidence that the boy had ever been inside that car with the three others.
It was like he just manifested there, in the road. Swift could still see him, a shape in the falling snow.
Swift began to descend into sleep, and as he did, he saw the boy turn, and Swift found himself right there, out in the road, just a dozen yards away from the teenaged Braxton Simpkins.
And the boy looked at him through the white flakes, and raised his arms out to either side, and there was a sound in Swift’s ears, something like a chiming, a ringing in the background, a kind of radiation, and the taste of metal on his tongue, not unpleasant, but somehow clean, like blood.
They stood like that in the snow, and then the boy’s mouth opened, and he spoke to Swift as he dreamed, and showed him things.
He showed him everything.
Kady was a mild-mannered dog; she seldom barked. Swift sat up and rubbed at his face and blinked and looked to where Kady usually lay sleeping on the floor beside his bed, but she wasn’t there. He groaned and got up, swinging his legs out and groping the floor with his feet for his slippers, not finding them, not bothering to look further. He stood, the bed springs squeaking, relieved of his weight.
“Kady!” he snapped, more irritably than he wanted to. Then, in a more friendly tone, “Kady? Huh, girl?”
He grabbed the long black Maglite from his bedside table along with his sidearm, still in the holster. With these items in hand he walked out of the bedroom and into the kitchen.
Kady continued to bark. She was standing by the back door, her nose raised towards the knob, her tail down between her hind legs, her golden hair iridescent in the gloom.
“Kade. Kady-girl.”
She briefly jerked her neck around to look at him and her tongue came out for a moment, pant-pant. She turned her head back to the door and started yapping again.
“Okay, okay,” Swift said. He approached her, bent low, his hand out, and as he reached her, smoothed his hand alongside of her and patted her soft stomach. She reacted with a jump, gave him a quick kiss with her moist tongue, and licked her chops. “Shh, shh,” he told her. “Still.” Now that he was beside her, her tail started to wag, whacking against the back of his legs. He was wearing pajama pants, no shirt. The woodstove in the living room was still cranking and the house was warm. The digital clock above the stove read that it was just after four a.m. He’d been asleep for barely three hours. He stood at the back door and unfurled to his full height, feeling the joints of his spine clicking in protest, and leaned toward the window to look out.
The rear door of the kitchen looked onto the back of the property. There was one lamp post about ten yards from the house that stayed on all night, glowing a Halloween orange. The night was still, showing no snow, only the crystal glints of the powder that had fallen that day, unbroken in drifts and ridges.
Kady barked again. “Shh. Shh. What?” He saw nothing but the snow and the sky, a smudge of jagged treeline in the distance, the humps of the foaling shed, the dilapidated barn, and beyond these, the edge of the outbuilding.
He set the flashlight down on the shelf next to the kitchen door and used both hands to remove his pistol from his holster. He set the holster on the shelf and took the flashlight. He clicked on the light, shone the beam towards the glass, which only succeeded in reflecting a bright supernova of light back at him. He set the gun on the shelf, unlatched the door, took the gun and put his hands together; one holding the light, the other aiming the gun where the light shone.
The door swung inward with a gust of wind and banged against the radiator behind it. Kady barked again and took several steps backward. Swift stepped through the kitchen door.
The kitchen was up a few rickety steps from the ground; in the spring the concrete blocks beneath the subfloor were visible until the perennials his grandmother had planted years before bloomed into life. The steps were now covered in snow. Swift was in his bare feet, the bitter cold knifing into him, clamping around his legs and ankles and arms. He did a sweep from right to left, the light beam playing over the buildings, the old post-rail fence greyed by the sun and listing with age. Behind him, Kady was silent. Right to left he swept, then back the other way.
“Kady,” he said softly. “What is it?”
When he turned to look back at his dog, she wasn’t there. Instead, she was a few feet away on the other side of the kitchen floor, drinking from her water bowl.
Swift lowered the flashlight and the gun and stepped back inside. He set the light and the weapon down on the shelf and closed the door. A few moments outside and the cold had gone right through him. He looked across the parquet floor at his golden retriever. “Hello? You with us, there, watchdog?”
Kady’s head came up, water dripping from her black gums, and then she ducked back to the bowl and resumed lapping up the water for another few seconds before trotting into the living room where she lay down in front of the woodstove.
Swift watched her affectionately, and then, taking his cue from the pooch, went to warm himself by the woodstove beside her.
“He was dragged.”
“He was dragged?”
Swift sat across from Janine Poehler. He had invited Brittney Silas to join them, and she had her evidence folder with her and a laptop. They were meeting at Poehler’s office. It was going on noon, approximately thirty-three hours since the estimated time of Braxton Simpkins’s death.
Janine Poehler nodded and took a sip of her black coffee. There were croissants and bagels on the table, but no one was eating. This could have been partly due to the photographs Poehler was displaying on her desktop computer.
She pressed play on her digital voice recorder.
“. . . Following removal of the shirt, various scars were observed along the left forearm that suggest potential cutting and at least one mark from ligature. It’s as if the victim’s wrists were bound together at one point. A second ligature mark, which will be known throughout this report as Ligature B, was observed on the decedent’s neck. The mark is a dark red ligature and encircles the neck, crossing the anterior midline of the neck just below the laryngeal prominence.”
She clicked it off. Brittney Silas was looking through her own photographic log of the crime scene, clicking through a slide show of photos and squinting at the screen. Now she looked up at Poehler.
Swift was looking over Brittney’s shoulder at pictures of route 9N. “You think he was tied up and dragged? By the car?”
“My report shows that the victim died from ligature strangulation. That is an asphyxia caused by closure of the blood vessels — hence the petechial spotting — and closing of the air passages by external pressure on the neck. My conclusion is dragging. The mark is sloping, indicating that the ligature was pulled upward from behind, and the position is high up at the level of the hyoid bone. I see evidence of violent compression and constriction of the neck. This was obtained from the presence of bruising and ecchymosis about the marks on the neck, hemorrhages in the strap muscles, under the skin, in the sides of the tissues around the trachea and larynx, in the larynx and in the laryngeal structures themselves. The ligature mark alone is not diagnostic, it’s more indistinct, suggesting a soft material used.”
Brittney spoke up. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. Something tensile enough to create the compression without snapping.”
“A garrote,” Swift said.
Poehler raised her eyebrows, perhaps appraisingly. “Precisely.”
Brittney frowned. “What’s a garrote?”
“It was first used in Spain,” Swift said. “It’s where convicts were tied to a wooden stake and a rope was looped around the neck. A wooden stick was slipped down the back of the neck between the cord and the skin and twisted.”
“Jesus,” said Brittney. She grimaced. Janine Poehler sipped her coffee and watched Swift, who went on.
“So then other countries got into it. Garrotes have been used as a stealthy way to eliminate sentries and enemy personnel. They also teach it to special forces now, how to improvise garrotes and make special ones suited to particular tasks.” Swift finished speaking and rubbed his jaw absently, looking off.
“But not a rope,” Janine said. “There were no fibers of any kind and the ligature marks for both A and B are more consistent with a softer material.”
“Well, we’re not looking for a woman’s silk scarf,” Brittney countered.
“I would say no, not exactly. I think you’re looking for a cord. Something higher end, not any cheap extension cord, which could leave traces of rubber embedded in the skin. Something strong, but elastic.”
Swift continued to rub and itch his jawline.
Poehler looked at him. “Growing a beard?”
Swift’s eyes seem to find focus again and he looked at her. “Too lazy to shave.”
Brittney looked back and forth between the two of them. Swift knew she was tough and as a CSI had seen her share of horrors no doubt, but death by strangulation was hard to take. And they now had to reconcile the possibility that the body had been dragged, with a crime scene which had been scraped over by a highway department plow just ten minutes before Braxton’s time of death, according to the timeline, and then covered in snow which had accumulated that night at a variable rate of around four inches per hour. There had been no evidence to show a body had been dragged behind a car. No way to obtain casts of tire tracks either. But, Swift remembered, and it concurred with Brittney’s observation that night — she had found no footprints left by the victim.
“This kind of thing — the garrote — has even made its way into the mainstream by way of movies,” Swift said. “Ever see James Bond in
The World Is Not Enough
?”
Ever since meeting with Darring he’d found himself referencing movies.
Poehler shook her head, and then fixed Swift with her green eyes.
“It’s in
The Godfather
, too,” she said.
“That’s right. That’s exactly right.” He drifted away again after that, putting something together in his mind.
Brittney interjected. “So what are we talking about here? In layman’s terms.”
Poehler nodded and pushed back the swivel chair, rotating to face the two of them more directly. She demonstrated with gestures as she spoke.
“The victim was tied at the left wrist and around the neck by a sash cord of some kind that left no fibers behind. This cord was then likely attached to the back of something powerful, probably a car. And he was dragged. There are minor abrasions consistent with a dragging. At first I thought they were cutting marks. Which is, sad to say, because I’ve seen a lot of that in my pediatric work. It was a gut reaction. Now I see those marks as drag marks. So, I think he was towed like this, dragged like this behind the car. The hemorrhaging isn’t severe. There was very little putrefaction — I was able to see that, aside from the petechial markings, the bursting of the capillaries in the eyes was moderate. It’s possible to conclude that, yes, asphyxia, or even hypoxia, is the official cause of death, but there is also the massive dose of cortisol, adrenaline . . .”
“Fear,” said Swift.
“Yes. Fear, the cold, the exposure. All of these things contributed.”
No one spoke for a few moments. Then Brittney finally broke the silence.
“There was no cord found in the car, or at the scene. What do we do, Swift, do we go back and sweep the woods again?”
“Absolutely. I take full responsibility for pulling us out of there.”
“What about the car?”
“Now that we’ve got it, officially, we can take a close look at the rear bumper. There’s no hitch — it’s a Hyundai, for chrissakes — so there’s got to be somewhere they tied that cord on. We need that cord.”
Poehler asked, “Where are they now?”
“Two are gone. Let go this morning. One is processed and sitting in county jail. It’s his vehicle, so it stays with us. Mathis laid charges on thick, but they won’t stick without the cord, or some weapon.”
“He didn’t lawyer up?”
Swift pursed his lips and shook his head. “No. He didn’t. He’s going with a public defender.”
“Huh,” Poehler said.
“Yeah.”
Now they needed to go and find something which their first search had shown just didn’t exist. The crime scene had been as bare as an empty cave.
Swift considered one other place he ought to look.