Waking Hours (7 page)

“Dani Harris,” Irene said, “this is Detective Phillip Casey. He’ll be my lead investigator on the case. Detective Casey, Dani Harris.”

Phillip Casey gave her a smile so weak it would have been taken for a frown in any country outside of Scandinavia, accompanied by a grunt that may have been the detective clearing his throat but seemed more like an expression of disgust.

“The detective was just telling us that in his years of experience with Providence law enforcement, forensic psychiatrists did nothing but let bad guys off the hook by saying they were crazy,” Stuart said. “We told him you and Sam and John have been invaluable to us.”

Dani appreciated Stuart trying to break the ice on her behalf.

“How old are you?” the detective asked her.

Dani tried not to bristle outright. She’d had an instructor in medical school, a man who was ex-military by-the-book and a bit of a bully, but he’d liked Dani because she stood up to him. Dani guessed Casey might be of a similar ilk.

“Twenty-nine,” she said. “What do you weigh?”

Stuart smiled, then wiped the smile from his face before Casey noticed. The senior detective was of medium height but had clearly spent more time at the pasta bowl than the salad bar. He had a gray brush cut that reminded Dani of pictures she’d seen of mystery writer Mickey Spillane. He was clean-shaven, pushing sixty, and wore a plaid sport coat that made him look like a sportscaster at a local affiliate in rural Canada.

“I can’t resist my wife’s risotto,” he told her flatly. “You look twenty.”

“Thanks,” Dani said, though she wasn’t sure he’d meant it as a compliment. She decided she liked him, and she suspected he liked her too, though it would probably take both of them awhile to admit it. “Can somebody tell me what happened last night?”

Stuart dimmed the lights. There was a 50-inch flat-screen monitor mounted on the wall to the right of the district attorney’s desk. Detective Casey stared a few moments at the screen, then at the computer used to generate the PowerPoint presentation. Dani watched the cursor move tentatively from field to field as he manipulated the mouse, unsure how to operate the program.

“Allow me,” Stuart offered, taking a seat at the laptop.

Casey turned his attention to the picture on the screen, an image of a wooded uphill path. “This is Bull’s Rock Hill,” he said. His delivery was dry and matter-of-fact. “I gather you people know where this is.”

“It’s about four miles from my house,” Dani said.

“Is it?” Casey said. “I actually wasn’t wondering where you live. The body was found this morning by a yoga instructor, a little before sunrise, which was . . .”

“7:01,” Stuart said, adding, “AM.”

“Thank you,” Casey said. “AM? You’re sure? So she gets about forty feet away when she sees this . . .”

Dani had seen plenty of crime scene photographs before, twenty-megapixel images that could be enlarged to show the smallest details, but she’d never seen anything as brutal as this. Casey let the picture speak for itself before gesturing to Stuart to click through a series of similar photos taken from different angles.

“Your ME is working on the details, but we think the victim is a girl between fourteen and twenty. Blond or light brown hair. No way to tell eye color, obviously.”

Stuart zoomed in on the victim’s eyes, now just blackened sockets, burn holes in a ghoulish Halloween mask.

“We don’t know what the killer used for fire. Preliminary indications suggest possibly a blowtorch. We had a guy in Providence once, friend of mine’s informant, who got caught ratting out the boys on Federal Hill—we found him in a pizza oven. Apparently they put him in it alive and then turned on the flames. I used to think nothing could top that, but now I ain’t so sure.”

Stuart zoomed out again, clicking to a slightly more distant view of the next slide, then zoomed back in. Dani noted the position of the body, the victim’s head and neck. Her training in anatomy gave her the names of the exposed tissues, ligaments, and bones, but she was more interested in the mind of the killer than the body of the victim. Considerable trauma had been done to the body, but for some reason Dani didn’t think she was looking at mindless violent actions. Rather, this seemed to be the work of a killer who was brutal, deliberate, and methodical. The things they’d said about Jack the Ripper.

“No clothing at the scene, but no preliminary indications of sexual assault either,” Casey continued. “The ME can tell us more.”

“Signs of struggle?” Irene asked.

“Nothing so far,” Casey said. “Nothing under the fingernails, but again, we’ll know more after we get the labs. The body appears to have been repositioned postmortem.”

“Moved?” Irene said. “Hard to imagine somebody carrying a body up that hill.”

“We don’t know.”

Dani tried to put herself in the mind of the victim. The absence of resistance, John Foley had told her once, indicated that either the victim was unconscious when she was killed, was surprised by a stranger, or was killed suddenly by someone she knew and trusted. The blood of violent crime victims often showed elevated stress hormones secreted to produce a fight/flight response. Banerjee could test for that.

What would it feel like, she wondered, to know you were about to die? More specifically, what did the girl on Bull’s Rock Hill experience? Had she gone willingly, or was she forced? Tricked?

Casey turned to Stuart Metz. “What do we have next?”

Stuart clicked to a picture of the victim’s toes, the nails painted a bright red, then to a picture of the victim’s hands, the nails done in the same color. She wore a red-and-black braided friendship bracelet around her right ankle.

“If that’s a pedicure, it’s not a very good one,” Irene said.

“Uneven application on the right hand,” Detective Casey said. “I’m thinking she’s right-handed and did it herself. What’s a pedicure go for around here?”

Dani blurted out, “Thirty-five dollars,” at the same time that Irene Scotto said, “Seventy-five.” It was no surprise that they didn’t go to the same salon.

“Harris, is it safe to say that up where you live there are plenty of girls who wouldn’t think twice about paying seventy-five dollars for a pedicure?” Casey asked.

“Safe to say, yes,” Dani agreed.

“So this girl does it herself. To save money?”

“Maybe she did it to cheer herself up?” Irene said.

“Maybe she was going to a party?” Dani said. “Or on a date?”

“Ah,” Casey said, pointing his finger at Dani. “I’m with Harris on this one.”

Stuart clicked to the next photograph, a picture of the victim’s upper body. There was a burned-out cavity in the center of the chest, but it was hard to tell from the photo how deep the burn had gone.

More intriguing to Dani was a marking on the victim’s stomach, and she asked Stuart to zoom in. It appeared to be a symbol, something like the letter G, and then its mirrored image, abutting at the vertical ascenders:

The four of them stared at it a moment.

“Anybody?” Casey said. “We found this on the girl’s stomach, written in blood. How long will it take serology to turn this around?”

“Depends on the backlog,” Irene said. “The FBI office is in Federal Plaza, Manhattan. If they can’t do it, we send it to Quantico.”

“So how long?” he asked again.

“A week,” Irene said. “Maybe less.”

“How many people do we think were involved?” Stuart asked.

“The crime scene guys tell me between four and ten,” Casey said. “Based on multiple partial footprints in the dirt where the grass was worn away. Whoever it was cleaned up after themselves. No cigarette butts or beer bottles or swords with the killer’s fingerprints and DNA on the handle. We should be so lucky.”

“Swords don’t have handles,” Stuart said. “They have grips, quillons, counterguards, or ricassos. I fenced in college.”

“What are your thoughts, Dani?” Irene asked. “How would between four and ten people do something like this?”

Dani paused. John Foley would normally be the one to provide analysis, but Foley wasn’t here. How she answered the question could determine the course her career would take. No pressure.

“Well,” she said, “I’d like to think there aren’t ten people in the entire country who could do something like this. And if there are, I doubt they’d ever be in one place at the same time.”

“Four to ten,” Casey reminded her.

“Even four. I wouldn’t look for four psychopaths, or ten. I’d look for one leader and nine followers. One person with some kind of power over the others. Whether that’s charisma or fear or mind control is hard to say, but I think the kind of person who could actually do something like this is fairly rare.”

“No offense, Harris,” Casey said, “but when you’ve had as many years in this job as I have, you see everything. Including guys who’ve been baked in a pizza oven.”

Now Dani felt the hairs rising on the back of her neck. She saw Stuart and Irene exchange a glance.

“Detective Casey,” she said, keeping her tone measured and in control, “during my internship in Africa with Doctors Without Borders, I worked with child soldiers who’d been forced or psychologically coerced into committing atrocities far worse than anything you could possibly have experienced. My job was to help put their shattered psyches back together, but to do that, they needed to talk to me about what they’d done. With all due respect, don’t tell me what I’ve seen in my twenty-nine years.”

The room was silent.

To Dani’s surprise, Detective Casey looked embarrassed.

“I apologize for my thoughtless comment, Dr. Harris,” he said. “I was 100 percent out of line. I hope you can forgive me.”

Dani was impressed. He understood that when an apology was in order, one didn’t say, “I’m sorry, but . . .”

“I can do that,” she said. “And I do appreciate your sense of humor, Detective, but I think it’s better if we can all work as a team.”

Casey gave her a nod and gestured for her to continue.

“I was saying that it’s very difficult for a normal human being to take responsibility for this kind of behavior—to initiate it. It’s not so hard to say, ‘I was just following orders,’ or ‘So-and-so made me do it, and I was afraid he’d kill me if I didn’t.’”

“You seem certain the killer is male?” Irene said.

“
Certain
isn’t the word I’d use,” Dani said, “but in order to do something like this to another human being, you have to depersonalize the other. Most of us have the capacity for empathy, but it’s not necessarily something we’re born with. A child has to learn it. It’s pretty well established that girls can identify and understand emotions much sooner than boys can.”

“Some of us are still working on it,” Stuart said.

“That’s why little girls are so much sneakier than little boys,” Dani said. “They’re playing sophisticated head games while little boys are still firing imaginary laser beams from their fingers. Developing empathy is essential to creating the attachment bonds we need to survive, but when the faculty is damaged, you get disorders on the autism spectrum—Asperger’s, autism, and a variety of other cognitive developmental impairments. And about 80 percent of all the children who have disorders on the spectrum are male.”

“What about the markings?” Casey asked, shifting the discussion. “And why fire? If it’s ritual, what kind? Does this guy get some sort of kick out of it?”

“I agree that it seems ritualistic,” Dani said. “What somebody might get out of it varies. Psychologically, people with OCD, for example, use ritual to control the chaos that threatens them. Sociologically, human beings have always needed rituals. Some mark the passage of time or some special event, like putting candles on a birthday cake. Some designate a group identity, ‘We-are-the-people-who-always-do-this.’ Some mark an initiation or rite of passage—like a bachelor party where the groom goes out with his buddies to a strip club where he’s supposedly tempted, and then in front of all his friends he resists the temptation and says, ‘Sorry, guys, I’m getting married tomorrow.’ He shows the world he’s willing and ready to become a husband.”