RATTLEMAN: Praise for 18 Seconds 'Excellent! Stephen King Page 5

  She felt him pressing against her from behind and she bit her lip, eyes filling with tears as they rose to the level of the tree limbs. Her husband was already dead. No matter what happened now this night would define her existence. This night would never go away. She sighed and lowered her head in anticipation.

  His hand reached between her legs, fingers brushing against her underbelly, reaching toward her dangling breasts.

  “Mecabellub-deendalnahi-dulenbenay-kensolee.”

  Searing pain shot through her chest. She could feel the hair on the back of his arm as it slid across her stomach, retreating between her legs. She dropped her head in time to see her intestines slip to the ground.

  Chapter 4

  Memphis Tennessee

  One Month Later

  The smell of brewing coffee lingered over the Memphis Marriott conference room. It was nearly one o’clock and five and a half hours since the group ate breakfast. The hotel banquet manager stood in the corridor outside, ear to the door, looking impatiently at his watch. His staff waited behind him ready to clear the room for lunch.

  A plaque on a tripod next to them identified the group as the Southeast Chief of Police Conference, and in bold letters –

  NO ADMITTANCE

  Inside the room, full of high-ranking police executives, the image of a young blonde woman filled a floor to ceiling projection screen. She was wearing a park ranger’s khaki colored uniform adorned with the gold Georgia State Seal. For a minute the room had gone silent. She wasn’t a cop in the truest sense of the word, but she was definitely part of their world. Jane Cameron had been a Vogel State Park Ranger for thirteen years and was the recipient of the 2007 Governor’s Public Safety award for saving the life of two State Police helicopter pilots who had crash-landed in Lake Trahlyta. She was also a renowned search and rescue instructor, training law enforcement officers for as long as some of them had been on the job.

  The Conference had been assembled at the request of an Assistant Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. An agent was leading them through a Power Point presentation that had been impersonal until now; pie chart statistics and volleys of crime scene photos depicting bones and scattered bits of clothing. Like doctors looking at x-rays, no one knew the victims personally, no one had shared a coffee or a beer with them, no one even knew their names. But the picture of Jane Cameron startled them. She wasn’t supposed to be there. She wasn’t supposed to be among them.

  The agenda was in no respect unknown. The Bureau wanted to talk about the cave on Blood Mountain and a fifteen year old statistic that had for as long been the subject of debate. Crime analysts up and down the east coast mountain states knew that a growing number of women had been reported missing along a thousand-mile region bordering the Appalachian Trail. A particularly vexing statistic in an era with hand-held GPS technology and the proliferation of cellphone towers across the summits. But many were quick to point out the ever-increasing number of women turned outdoor enthusiasts; there were indeed more women kayakers, rock climbers and hikers than ever before. Perhaps the rise in the number of women gone missing might be reflective of nothing else.

  And then there was always the inherent danger of the mountains. People falling down ridges and breaking their backs or neck. Some had heart attacks and others fell in sinkholes or drowned crossing rivers and streams. They were struck by lightning and crushed by rockslides and more than a few became disoriented and lost. No small number of hikers and hunters had died of starvation or hypothermia within shouting distance of a road.

  But without evidence of a crime, the anomaly was just that. Less than five percent of the reported missing had ever been found, and the few that were discovered were in such a state of decomposition that it was impossible to determine a cause of death.

  Nevertheless it was debated and often compared to the case of Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, who confessed to seventy-one murders committed over a period of twenty years. If it could happen in the Cascades, some said, it could happen in the Appalachians and the numbers could be as large or even worse. Those literal skeletons in everyone’s closet might just one day come back to haunt them.

  Now the Assistant Director of the FBI wanted to have a meeting and everyone had heard the rumors. The skeletons were banging on the door.

  The agent concluded his film presentation, leaving the image of Jane Cameron on the screen. When he left the stage he handed the projector’s remote to a tall weary looking man who climbed the steps and approached the podium.

  The man spoke into the microphone. “For those who don’t know me, my name is Agent Fielding. I lead the operational arm of VICAP, the agency’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program out of Washington DC.”

  The microphone howled then slowly faded away. A feeling of general discomfort hung over the room.

  He looked around at the many faces, conscious of the emotion sparked by the ranger’s image. The shock of the discovery on Blood Mountain was still fresh on everyone’s mind: images of the bodies being removed by slings from hovering helicopters looping endlessly on the evening news, and pictures of the victims on the covers of every magazine and major newspaper in the country. Every detail was covered. From the search party that found Ranger Cameron’s backpack to the last photograph found on her digital camera, to the cave on the bluff and the screen of woven reeds that had been used to camouflage the opening. ‘Chamber of Horrors’, TIME Magazine dubbed it, over a photograph of animal bones and old garbage, taken in broad daylight last January from a camper parked at Winfield Scott Lake – a blurred image with shadows that everyone now knew were the eviscerated bodies of the Girl Scout and Ranger Cameron, and the skeletal remains of a missing thirty-year-old schoolteacher from Savannah. Until now the FBI had wanted no part in the state’s missing persons statistical debate. Police chiefs across the country were paid to suppress crime and their effectiveness in doing so was measured by an index. Low crime index numbers assured the public that the police were doing their job. High crime index numbers lowered public confidence and raised tension between police chiefs and the politicians who had appointed them. If even a small number of missing persons were suddenly reclassified as crimes, the index would spike and a political fracas would ensue over what other kinds of crimes the police chiefs or commissioners had been hiding from the public.

  But all that had changed and Agent Fielding was here to give them the bad news.

  “It has been four weeks and a day,” he said softly, noting the many eyes that remained on the wall-sized screen. “You all know what we found in the cave on Blood Mountain, Georgia. We hardly need to cover that in this room. You also know that the State Bureau of Investigation was called to the scene of a double homicide in the town of Tellico Plains, Tennessee, just an hour’s drive from the Georgia state line. Most or perhaps all of you are familiar with the details. A commuter pilot out of Atlanta saw a fire and reported it on the morning of April eleventh, less than seventy-two hours after Ranger Cameron went missing. Firemen arrived, put out what was still burning and found the bodies, one in the fire and one in the nearby trees. The man’s body was all but destroyed, but it was evident he had been killed with an axe. The woman had been eviscerated and her organs piled between her legs. We didn’t know then about the cave on Blood Mountain. It was another week before it was discovered and we connected the crimes. When we did, it seemed apparent there was only one major difference. One was conducted in an attempt at great secrecy. The other was blatantly out in the open.”

  He rested his hands on either side of the lectern.

  “The bodies in Georgia were autopsied by the chief medical examiner in Atlanta. The Tennessee victims were sent to the Center for Forensic Medicine in Nashville. All the women’s abdomens had been slit open with a knife and their insides put between their legs. From the available evidence there was no sexual assault. But the remains of the Tennessee female had another unusual feature. Her jaw was forcibly unhinged and two lower molars, numbers six
teen and thirty-one, were chiseled from their sockets.”

  He picked up a bottle of water from the lectern and began unscrewing the cap. “The FBI was asked to review the cases due to the interstate issue. VICAP – my office – requested the bodies be transported to our lab in Washington DC.”

  He scanned the faces in the room and took a drink from the bottle, screwing the cap back on. “Some of you have already heard the rumors.”

  A few heads nodded.

  Fielding put the water down and picked up the remote.

  “For those of you who haven’t, a woman’s head was found last February in an out of the way mountain lake in north central West Virginia. It was later determined to have belonged to a jogger reported missing last Thanksgiving. Since there was no body, we don’t know the cause of death, but we did determine that the head was mutilated post mortem. Someone had removed the woman’s earrings and pried silver fillings from her teeth.”

  There were whispers throughout the room.

  “The head was preserved by the temperatures and then the ice, the tissue all intact. Lacerations were observed on the lips and inside the mouth, the deepest of which penetrated the bone of the lower mandible. Suddenly we had two skulls bearing evidence of post mortem mutilation, one in West Virginia and one in Tennessee. Our lab put the jawbones under a comparison microscope and digital imagery found something both rare and extraordinary.”

  He flicked the remote and a magnified image of the two heads flashed onto the screen. The victim’s jaws were clamped open. One woman was clearly decapitated.

  “Four cuts circled in red on the roofs of victims’ mouths were inflicted concomitant to the gouges or striations you see on the jawbone. What that means is that the instrument with a blade that penetrated the bone had a pronounced hook near the tip and it simultaneously tore into the flesh above it.” He pointed at the red circles. “Here, here, here and here. We believe it was a gut hook knife – a tool used by hunters and game skinners. You literally shove the tip of the knife into the flesh and pull away and the sharpened hook opens the flesh like a zipper.” He pointed at the jawbones. “These striations bear identical variations in width and imperfections. They are a match of incontrovertible certainty.” He held up two fingers. “Two victims, seven-months and two hundred miles between.” He looked around the room and lowered the second finger. “One knife, one killer.”

  Whispers erupted into open conversation.

  “But we didn’t stop there.” He raised his voice, holding up a hand to silence them. “We looked at the partial remains of five females found in the Appalachians over a fifteen-year period. They weren’t all complete and two remain unidentified. One that had been found in a limestone cave near the town of Eolia, Kentucky bears the same unique striations as those on the victims’ jawbones in Tennessee and West Virginia. In this instance we don’t have the derivative wound of the hook to look at, but our scientists tell us the blade is a match and that those particular remains have been in the cave no less than ten years.”

  “God,” someone whispered. A few chair legs scraped on the floor as people began turning in their seats.

  “Which brings us to your missing women statistic.” Agent Fielding left the podium and walked to the middle of the platform. “From a ten-year sampling of nearly sixty women reported missing along the Appalachian Trail, we decided to choose twenty-one that we classified as high probable abductions. I won’t go into the details of how they went missing, but five of these cases were between the years 2000 and 2005, another five from 2005 to 2010 and a whopping eleven between 2010 and 2012. If even half of these missing women were victims of a serial killer, he is stepping up the pace. His cooling-off periods are growing shorter. He has gone from years to months to weeks and now days. We know that this man was in Tellico Plains, Tennessee.” He pointed at the skulls on the screen. “It is evident from the eviscerations that he was responsible for the three attacks on Blood Mountain, Georgia. We also know that he was in West Virginia and Eolia, Kentucky.”

  He looked around the room.

  “Everyone knows the cycle of the serial killer. They fantasize, they kill and they feed off the memory. That is their cooling down period and it may last for many months or even years. When the memory no longer stimulates, they kill again. That’s the simplified version.” He put a hand in his pocket. “Emergency workers develop a tolerance to death, addicts a tolerance to narcotics, serial killers a tolerance to the euphoria provoked by memory. It doesn’t matter why they kill. It can be sexual, symbolic, rage turned inward or outward. What matters is that they can no longer sustain high cortical levels of arousal and they must kill again to get it. In time they become frenetic for that gratification and when this happens we see the first chinks in their armor. They have difficulty keeping up their normal appearance. Their families and coworkers might notice a change. They might start skipping work or stop going altogether. They’re coming apart, like a shooting star burning up in the night sky.”

  He removed his hand from his pocket and pointed at the screen. “We may be seeing one of these now. This man who so cautiously hid victims in remote caves and mountain lakes has suddenly snatched a child from a crowded state park. Then he sets a house on fire at the edge of a town only forty miles from the epicenter of the single largest manhunt ever to take place in the state of Georgia. If he has indeed become frenetic, he cares less about evasion. Some serial killers even look forward to their end. Which makes them utterly lethal if approached.”

  Fielding returned to the podium and picked up a sheet of paper and raised it over his head.

  “Within forty-eight hours of the murders, the Tennessee State Bureau of Investigation put out alerts for usage of the victims’ bank accounts and credit cards. To date they remain inactive. What no one knew until a bill arrived in the victim’s mail two days ago, an hour before we called this emergency session of your Conference, was that a Visa card had been issued to the victims in the name of a limited liability corporation called Tellico River Trading Company. That card was used only once, for the purchase of gasoline at a filling station in Tellico Plains, and we got a break.” He picked up the remote and the screen changed to a black and white image of a man pumping gas.

  “A surveillance camera captured this image seconds after the Visa card was swiped. He is Latino and in his thirties or early forties. His head is turned away from the camera, but there is a religious tattoo on his right arm. The gray truck behind him is a Ford, an older model F-150. Note the old World War II Jerry Can in the bed with a yellow X on it. Same kind of can was found in the fire. Note also the chrome F-150 on the front quarter panel is broken and reads F-15.”

  Fielding put the remote down.

  “Georgia State Police are revisiting the hundred hours of surveillance footage collected the week the Girl Scout and Ranger Cameron went missing. We are looking for a Latino male or a gray truck near the base of Blood Mountain or in the surrounding areas of Vogel State Park. Obviously we’re also focusing on the evidence found in the cave. So far there are fingerprints and DNA, but no matches to our database. How our killer came to discover and then frequent the cave is the sixty-four thousand dollar question and not just because it happened in Georgia, but because he has killed as far north as West Virginia. He is comfortable in the mountains – maybe a park worker or a climber or a caver. On the off chance he is part of some recreational organization, we’ve petitioned some of the better known clubs for their registers, including the National Speleological Society. But you all know the privacy issues and it’s a long shot at best. Vogel State Park didn’t even know this cave existed. Meanwhile, we’re issuing a national BOLO for the man and vehicle this morning. Your agencies will have received it by now. As you can see, the photo is poor quality and people are going to see gray trucks around every corner. Maybe he’ll do something suspicious and get pulled over and we’ll find a gut hook knife under his seat. Or maybe he’ll use the credit card again. That’s the best we can hope for right n
ow.”

  He nodded toward a young black woman sitting in the front row. “Agent Ross will provide you with a packet including the surveillance pictures and descriptions. Your people will need it in about five hours when our press office releases details to the media. Someone knows him. Maybe he has a home and family in one of your jurisdictions.

  A woman raised her hand in the back. “Is anyone setting up a hotline?”

  He shook his head. “Not yet. VICAP will of course be using the FBI tip line and website. If you’ve got the manpower and want to dedicate a line, we encourage it. Either way, tell your people to expect phones to ring. You know what’s going to happen when news of a decade old serial killer hits the press.”

  Chapter 5

  Leesburg, Virginia

  A windowless cargo van sat along a narrow dirt road near Leesburg, Virginia, hood propped open and white rag tied to the outside mirror. Alongside the road was a steel fence enclosing a dozen small airplane hangars, a limp orange windsock and half-a-mile of blistering runway.

  In the back of the van two technicians faced an array of intricate equipment. Speaking softly they watched a video monitor and a burgundy Mercedes approaching fast from behind. The car passed the van and continued to the gate of the airstrip where the driver put down the window and punched a code into a keypad. The gate swung open and the Mercedes progressed to hangar number four. A man got out and opened the trunk, removed a duffel bag and walked to a side door.

  “Kingfish, this is Bright Red Zero. Subject one is driving Virginia Whiskey Robert Tango Three Three Five on a new Mercedes, copy? Trunk is open and he took out a duffel bag. Opened and is entering a side door.”

  The camera in the van rooftop vent continued to feed video as the man and the bag disappeared. Twenty minutes later the door opened and the man emerged, but now he was empty-handed. He returned to the vehicle, got behind the wheel and made a U-turn, exiting the airstrip as the double doors of the hangar swung open. In the shadows of the building the propeller of a single engine plane began to rotate. Simultaneously an engine coughed to life. Then an orange and white Cessna taxied onto the sun-drenched tarmac. The pilot aimed his remote at the hangar doors and continued to taxi toward the runway.