Fireproof (31 page)

She nodded and started walking. Tully followed.

“Depending on what time of day or night they stopped here there may have been no one else.”

“He could have easily taken her into the woods,” Tully said. “Maybe convinced her to go stretch her legs with him.”

“I have to tell you I’ve looked over the file Racine has on Lester and he sounds squeaky clean. He doesn’t sound like a killer.”

“How many times have we heard that? It’s always the ones nobody suspects,” Tully said. “That quiet neighbor. The helpful janitor. Remember what people said about Ted Bundy. Such a nice guy. How about the BTK killer? Wasn’t he on the church council or something?”

“I’ve also read all the information on Gloria Dobson and she certainly doesn’t sound like the type of woman who would walk into the woods with someone suspicious. And she would have fought for her life. She has three kids. She’s a recent breast cancer survivor.”

Maggie continued to walk all the way up to where the trucks were parked. It was high enough to see over some of the trees that surrounded the lower half of the rest area. She studied the parked trucks.

“Ganza told me there’s a whole subculture to truck stops and rest areas. A whole world no one sees unless they know where to look. Prostitutes come knocking on the doors of the big rigs while they sleep. Drug dealers, too. Where do they go in between tricks and deals? Do they have their own vehicles? Why doesn’t anyone else see them?”

Tully was quiet for a moment, looking around. “Maybe no one else notices them because they blend in.”

She turned to examine the paths below and take another look at the travelers going in and out of the restrooms. That’s when the birds caught her eye.

She hadn’t noticed them before. The angle of the setting sun transformed their circle above the trees into a halo, the tips of their black wings highlighted by brilliant yellows and oranges. She
heard Tully’s intake of breath and she knew Tully saw them, too. And he was thinking exactly what she was.

Without a word or a glance they started down across the parking lot, across the brown lawn, not even using the sidewalks. There were dirt paths going into the woods. They took the closest one. It narrowed immediately but Maggie kept going, ducking tree limbs and ignoring the dried brush that scraped her arms.

Several hundred yards into the trees she could smell it. Rotting meat. Several days old. Not the pungent coppery smell of a fresh kill. Whatever had captured the birds’ attention had been dead for a few days.

She looked up to the birds for direction. She slowed her pace so she wouldn’t lose her footing. Inside the canopy of trees the shadows of dusk threw off her depth perception. She looked for the birds, but what she saw stopped her dead in her tracks. Tully bumped into her.

“What is it?”

She pointed up into the branches of a huge maple that stood about seventy-five feet in front of them.

This time she could hear Tully gasp, “Dear God.”

Though they were dried now, Maggie could still recognize the streamers that decorated the lower branches. She wondered if she would have recognized them as easily without seeing the gutted body that lay at the base of the trunk.

“What sick bastard have we found?”

Immediately Maggie saw that the body didn’t include a head.

“I think we may have found Zach Lester,” she said.

Mutilations always caught Tully off guard. It didn’t matter how many he saw. He stood back and tried to make his lungs inhale despite the stink that already permeated the lining of his nostrils. He knew there was an initial shock, as if his eyes had to convince his brain that, yes, indeed, there were no limits to evil.

Maggie moved forward already examining, analyzing, shifting smoothly into gear. She swatted blowflies, swarms so slow and unwilling to leave their treasure that she could knock them to the ground with a simple wave of her hand.

Tully didn’t see any of the hesitation in her, none of the fear he had witnessed the other night at the warehouse fires. He kidded her once about becoming a specialist in dismembered bodies. The parts seemed to appear on cases she was assigned, whether in take-out containers, Mason jars, or fishing coolers.

“Should we call the State Patrol guys to come back?”

She squatted down about three feet away from the corpse, careful not to touch and even more careful where she stepped. She seemed so intent he didn’t think she had heard him. He looked down at the pine needles and soggy maple leaves, some embedded
in the mud. He moved closer, keeping to the same path Maggie had used.

“He crossed state lines,” she finally said. “And the interstate is federal property. Are the rest areas?”

Tully had no idea.

“Technically it’s our jurisdiction,” she said.

He closed his eyes and let out a breath. Too many times law enforcement agencies fought over jurisdiction. He never understood it. Opening his eyes and following the trail of what was once Zach Lester’s intestines, Tully found himself wishing they could hand this off to someone, anyone, else.

“The state of Virginia’s crime lab is top-notch,” he said, giving it another try.

“One of the best,” Maggie agreed.

He saw her glance at her watch as he pulled his cell phone from his jacket pocket.

“Ganza should be able to get a unit out here in forty, forty-five minutes,” she said.

Ganza
. Tully bit back a response, not surprised that she’d choose to hand it over to their FBI crime lab. And it was probably a smart choice, even the correct choice. But it meant they’d be out here, stranded, until almost every last piece of evidence had been collected.

Still, Tully made the phone call without question or comment.

The whole time he talked to Ganza he watched Maggie. She had started taking pictures with her smartphone. A good move, considering there would be little sunlight by the time Ganza and his team made it to the scene.

He slipped his phone back into his pocket, his fingers lingering.
He wanted to call Gwen, the urge something fierce. Even though and maybe because she wasn’t expecting a call.

Maggie stopped and Tully watched her slowly turn, taking in the surroundings as if for the first time really seeing them.

“Do you think he killed Gloria Dobson here, too?”

Tully listened now that his breathing had returned to normal and his heartbeat had settled. He couldn’t hear the interstate traffic. He couldn’t hear any traffic or car doors being slammed or voices calling to each other back at the parking lots. A breeze rustled branches overhead. The birds cawed and squawked at each other. If the killer had timed it right and no one had been at the rest area, these woods would have absorbed the victims’ screams.

“Ganza should be able to figure that out,” Tully said.

But as he looked around he wondered how difficult a job it would be. Outdoor crime scenes were always challenging and this one was days old, contaminated by the birds and other predators. Pools of blood that seeped into the ground would need to be dug up. Leaves and debris would have matted on top. The wind may have blown away fabric and hair.

Tully remembered Gloria Dobson’s face—or rather what was left of it—in that dark alley. If pieces of her had been splattered and left here on the tree bark or stuck to blades of grass, Keith Ganza and his technicians would find it.

“I don’t think he killed her here,” Maggie said. “It’d be too far to drag her body back. He had to take her someplace where he could bring a vehicle close.”

“Maybe she didn’t make it this far into the woods.”

He tried to imagine a pursuit and found himself looking for broken branches, skid marks in the mud, a drag line. He remembered
it had rained the other night, not hard but enough to disrupt evidence. Did it rain here, too?

He glanced at Maggie and saw she was thinking along the same lines. She was scanning the path they had taken.

“Why would he take on two? And how was he able to do it? Did he plan it or was it an impulse that got terribly out of hand?”

“Either way, we’re dealing with one sick bastard.”

Maggie stared up at the streamers of intestines. Ripped and ravished by the birds, they still looked to Tully too much like human guts. The large intestine retained its dark red color, the small a grayish purple.

“The average small intestine is twenty feet long,” Maggie said, and he knew she wasn’t spouting off trivia. Then she added exactly what Tully was thinking. “He’s done this before.”

Tully took three steps for a closer look. He agreed. The streamers were intertwined on the low branches of the maple tree like someone would hang a strand of lights on a Christmas tree. It took some time and effort and expertise. This wasn’t the chaotic frenzy of a madman, ripping and tossing.

Maggie’s phone started ringing. She glanced at the caller ID and answered, saying, “You’re not going to believe what we found.”

But the person interrupted her and Maggie went quiet, listening, her eyes darting around before settling on Tully.

After a few seconds she whispered, “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Cornell had talked them into holding him another night in jail. He insisted he had some valuable information for Agent Tully. Only problem was that Agent Tully, he was told, was out of town and couldn’t talk to him until Monday morning.

What a shame. What a lucky shame
.

The wafer-thin cot was softer than the pavement and a blanket—hell, he didn’t even need a blanket it was so much warmer in the holding cell. He tried his best to not let them know that this inconvenience was like a vacation. Although not quite a vacation. He missed not having a shot or two of whiskey. And the headache was not a picnic, but the food was lukewarm and he even got a couple rec hours in the TV room.

It had been so long since he’d watched TV he didn’t recognize any of the celebrities or pundits. Though Cornell had never been much interested. Reality shows—what a bore.

Tonight a thin, washed-out druggie had control of the remote and Cornell knew not to challenge the man. Glassy-eyed and leather-skinned, this guy looked like he had climbed out of a Zombies-R-Us ad. And for some reason the guy appeared fascinated
by cable news. No channel surfing, no checking sports scores or weather.

The next show was supposed to have a feature on the fires and that caught Cornell’s attention. So he sat patiently. What else did he have to do? Oh, that was another thing—the drug zombie kept the volume to a whisper, so Cornell spent most of his time reading the crap at the bottom of the screen.

He pulled up the chair closer to the TV just as an interview started. Two men were identified at the bottom of the screen as Jeffery Cole, journalist, and Wes Harper, private firefighter for Braxton Protection Agency. Cornell was so busy reading, it took him a minute to look at the two guys and when he did he couldn’t believe it. Without a doubt he recognized the guy from the alley. The guy who had poured the gasoline.

Maggie had turned down Tully’s offer to drive her to the hospital. Someone needed to wait and secure the crime scene until Ganza’s crew got there. Besides, it wasn’t the first time her mother had attempted suicide. In fact, Maggie had lost track of how many times Kathleen O’Dell had tried to kill herself.