Kill Switch (25 page)

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Authors: Neal Baer

BOOK: Kill Switch
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“Yes,” Doug answered. “Why?”
“Do you know if he worked at their main office?” Claire asked.
“You mean, over by Cobbs Hill? Yeah, I think so,” Doug said. “I remember Mom dropping me off there that summer, after camp was over. Dad and I would go up by the reservoir and fly this ... ,” he said, pointing to the kite as his voice trailed off.
Nick put his hand on her shoulder. “What is it, Claire? What do you remember?”
“My father took me up there too,” she said, looking only at the kite. “That's where I saw this. That's where I saw
him
.”
“Lewis?”
She turned to Doug. “Did he take you up there a lot?” she asked, almost afraid to hear the answer. “To the top of the hill?”
“Not just there,” answered Doug, “but all over the park. We'd go for picnics next to Lake Riley, hike through Washington Grove to the old water towers. He loved that place... .”
He stopped, as if he realized what he was saying. What it
meant
.
Claire clamped her hand onto a nearby box, steadying herself.
“I think I know where he buried Amy.”
 
Just west of the Monroe County Water Authority's headquarters in Cobbs Hill Park, accessible only through the Authority's parking lot and a dirt road behind the main building, is a large clearing surrounded on three sides by trees. In late August, when the foliage is at its thickest, the clearing is invisible from anywhere but that dirt road leading in.
It was here, the following morning, that Claire sat beside Doug Lewis in the backseat of Al Hart's unmarked Crown Victoria, watching dozens of police cars, trucks, and buses loaded with cops pour in one by one. The sun was just coming up, but they'd arrived hours earlier, at three in the morning, before the city—and especially the media—woke up to witness one of the area's busiest parks being overrun by a small army of police.
“You think they can pull it off?” Doug asked Claire.
Claire shrugged, though she was awed by what was unfolding before her, mostly because it was her doing. As soon as daylight broke, dozens of cops, some from as far west as Buffalo and as far east as Syracuse, would begin a grid search of the entire park—all hundred and ten acres of it—to find the remains of her friend Amy Danforth. For the next several hours, Claire sat in the sedan, staring out into the darkness, remembering fragments of time spent with Amy. Jumping rope. Hugging each other and laughing wildly at some joke she could no longer remember. Coloring together. Amy's face as Lewis's car pulled away ...
She stirred. The sun was just peeking over the horizon.
I must've dozed off,
she thought as she sat up, just in time to see Hart and Nick crossing over to the car. Hart opened Claire's door. “It's time,” he said.
As she and Doug exited the sedan, a flurry of activity was under way. Platoons of cops were forming as Captain Killian and his boss, the commander of Rochester detectives, assigned each platoon to comb a section of the park.
“We're searching the wooded areas only,” Hart told them, turning to Doug. “Your father may have known this place inside and out, but I'm guessing he wasn't so arrogant that he'd bury a body in the open areas around the reservoir or on one of the softball fields.”
His statement made Claire and Nick think of another killer—Todd Quimby—who
had
been arrogant enough to drop a body on a softball field.
That was only weeks ago,
Claire mused,
but it seems like years.
“Are they checking around the water tanks?” Claire asked.
Hart chuckled. “Believe it or not, they've become a big attraction.”
“But they were abandoned years ago,” she remembered.
“Not by the graffiti artists,” Hart explained, “and the photographers who shoot their work. C'mon, I'll show you.”
He led them south through the woods. Claire enjoyed the walk. The air was still cool, before the sun would claim the day. The smell of the dewy grass took her back to those wonderful days as a child hiking with her parents. As they emerged from the trees, the two sky-blue water tanks loomed ahead, and she saw Hart had been serious. They were covered in graffiti.
“People come up here to see this?” Claire asked Hart.
“And to add to the mess,” Hart answered, shaking his head. “The graffiti artists gather up here admiring one anothers' work. And nobody stops them. State-sponsored vandalism, I call it.”
“Nothing a couple hundred gallons of paint won't cure,” Nick observed, joining them.
“Which'll be paid for by your tax dollars and mine,” Hart added. Claire had walked away from the men by then, circling the larger of the two tanks. Most of the graffiti was of the usual unimaginative variety, what looked like gang tags and messages.
I'm surprised the police don't crack down on that,
she thought.
But then she came around to a side closer to the tree line, where she saw some work that surprised her. Bart Simpson on a skateboard. A more colorful work in red and orange hues that looked like a spider that had morphed into a symbol of some kind. An Eye of Providence in a pyramid, resembling the one on the back of the dollar bill. Beside it, a badly drawn Eye of Horus, which Claire knew was the Egyptian symbol of protection.
And then she stopped short. She backtracked several steps to the Eye of Providence, thinking she'd seen something that bothered her. Sure enough, she was right. Something about it was amiss.
It was bloodshot.
Just like the eye on the kite in Doug's house. The one Lewis had flown so many years ago.
Claire took a closer look. The Eye of Providence, along with the Eye of Horus, were more faded than the other drawings on the tank, as if they had been painted years before the other graffiti.
Was it possible? Was he that arrogant?
Excited and terrified, Claire looked at the ground in front of the tank. The grass was green, the earth flat. Even if she'd found the spot where Lewis had buried Amy's body more than two decades ago, any evidence of a hole would have long since been erased by the elements.
And then her eyes caught the tree line a few yards away. Walking in a straight line from the all-seeing pyramid, she approached the grove, walked a few feet in, and looked back.
The eye was staring directly at her.
The snap of a twig made her wheel around. Nick pushed a tree branch out of his way and was crossing toward her.
“You've got to stop disappearing like that,” he said as he approached. “What are you doing now?”
“Take a look,” she said as Nick joined her. She pointed to the Eye of Providence.
Nick stared. Then he stared at her, getting it.
“It can't be that easy,” he said.
Just then, Doug and Hart came into view, rounding the larger tower. “Where are you guys?” Hart shouted.
“Over here,” Nick yelled back, emerging from the trees. “Think we may have something.” He crossed toward them. “Take a look at the art,” he said, gesturing to the graffiti-covered tower. “Anything up there look familiar?”
“Sure,” he said. “That eye.”
“I knew it,” Claire said, pointing to the Eye of Providence. “It's just like the eye on your father's kite.”
“I wasn't talking about that one,” Doug said, pointing up at the other eye. “That one's on an album cover from the eighties.”
“An album cover?” Hart scoffed.
“Yeah. My father used to sing me to sleep with one of the songs. That drawing's been up there since I was a kid.”
“What was the song about?” Claire asked.
“A guy who was lost and had a dream and didn't know where to go, even though the answers were right there,” Doug answered, staring at the eye.
Claire gave Nick and Hart a sharp look. This was too much to ignore. “I think your dad is telling us something,” Claire said.
“I'll get a tech up here,” Hart replied, and he headed off.
 
“Over here!” yelled the technician. The search had gone on for two hours with no results except for the discovery of some small animal bones. Until now.
Hart and Nick ran over to where the tech was stopped with his ground-penetrating radar unit, about ten feet in from the tree line—directly in view of the graffiti eyes.
“What is it?” Nick said as they reached the tech, who pointed to the monitor on his unit.
“Call me crazy, but that sure looks like bones to me,” he said.
They looked at the screen. The outlines of a human skull and several long bones were unmistakable.
“How far down?” asked Nick.
“About four feet,” replied the tech.
Hart looked around, quickly found what he was looking for. He picked up a long stick and rammed it into the ground, marking the spot.
“Get the crime scene guys up here,” he shouted to anyone who would listen. “And tell them to bring shovels.”
 
Claire and Doug had gone back to the staging area, where a portable canteen truck was set up to feed the cops helping with the search. They were about to sit down with sandwiches at one of a dozen hastily set up folding tables when a dark blue van whizzed by them, turning up the small dirt road in the direction of the water tanks.
“What the hell's going on?” Doug asked, trying not to breathe in the cloud of dust raised by the vehicle.
Claire looked up from her food just long enough to catch the lettering on the back of the van.
“That's the medical examiner,” she said, moving away from the table. “They wouldn't have been called unless—”
She didn't finish her thought. She began running, Doug keeping pace with her as they disappeared into the thicket.
 
It took only a few minutes before Claire and Doug, breathless, their clothes soaked through with sweat from the summer humidity, reached the water tanks. Claire made sure to look at the time on her phone. It was just before ten in the morning.
“There,” said Doug, pointing.
Through the trees, Claire could see the area was already cordoned off by yellow police tape. Inside the perimeter, three crime scene techs with shovels carefully dug at the spot marked earlier by Hart, who stood aside, waiting for what he was sure he'd see.
“Here we go,” said one of the crime scene techs. “We're ready for the camera.”
A tech with a Nikon strapped around his neck began snapping photos.
“Okay, folks,” the first tech said to the group. “We clear the dirt from here by hand.”
“Why didn't you call me?” Claire asked Nick as she and Doug reached the taped perimeter.
“I wasn't sure you'd want to see this,” he said.
He's looking out for me,
Claire thought, her anger evaporating.
“Thanks,” she said. “But I'm okay.”
“They found remnants of what looks like a plastic trash can liner,” Nick informed them. “One of those big, thick leaf bags.”
“Bones!” shouted the lead crime scene tech. “We've got bones.”
Hart turned to a nearby uniformed Rochester cop. “Let's get the medical examiner in here.”
He caught Claire's eye before turning back to the task at hand.
“How long before we'll know?” asked Claire.
“Homeland Security's helping out on this,” Nick replied. “They have some new technique where they can get preliminary DNA results in about an hour. It's still in the testing phase, but one of the biotech labs here in town has it and got permission to use it on this case. The DNA from the bones will also be processed the traditional way. But it has to be her, Claire. It has to be Amy.”
The reality of it was too much for Doug. He turned and walked away. Claire looked at Nick, then went after her new friend.
“What is it?” she asked him when she caught up.
When he turned to face her, there were tears in his eyes.
“I'm sorry. I'm so sorry—”
He turned away, not wanting her to see him crying.
“We wouldn't be here now if it wasn't for you,” she said. “You have nothing to be ashamed of. And nobody has to know he's your father.”
Doug tried to hold back his tears. Out of nowhere, Nick appeared, putting his arm around him. “C'mon, pal,” he said, meaning it. “I'll get you out of here if you want. Before the news vans show up.”
The son of the serial killer shook his head.

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