No one had ever said they were proud of her before, and so she let Leandro show her just how proud he was.
One Week Later
Monday
10
FBI agent Maggie O’Dell watched from the riverbank and wondered when she had started associating dead bodies with political fallout. Actually, that was a step up. Floaters used to be a reminder of her divorce. Years ago she’d lost her wedding ring while helping to pull a body from the Charles River. It had been cold that day, the water frigid. Debris ripped apart her latex gloves. Her hands were too numb to care or feel the cuts and scratches from the sharp branches and piercing vines.
It wasn’t until hours later, after she had warmed and cleaned her hands — pouring rubbing alcohol over them — that she noticed the ring was gone. The worst part — she didn’t remember feeling sadness or even regret, but rather, a calm acceptance. The lost ring seemed to only symbolize what she had avoided acknowledging. Her marriage had been lost long before the ring slipped off her finger and disappeared into the cold, dark waters of the Charles River.
O’Dell wiped sweat off her forehead. Today was the opposite of that day, with heat and humidity at the other end of the spectrum. It made it challenging for the forensic recovery team, but they were being careful. Not an easy task. Even from fifty feet out she could see that the floater was swollen and bloated. That meant eight to ten days in the water.
That many days in the water, along with the summer heat, made the recovery even more difficult. The skin would be loose. Tissue and organs would be fragile and susceptible to damage with the gentlest of knocks and jolts. The skin of hands and feet tended to separate from the bone.
“I can’t figure out why you’re here,” Stan Wenhoff said to her.
The question could have been taken as an insult, but O’Dell knew the District’s medical examiner well enough not to take offense, or at least not to take it personally.
He stood next to O’Dell on the muddy riverbank. They were shoulder to shoulder. Neither of them took their eyes off the action in the water. Stan Wenhoff had been the District’s medical examiner for almost twenty years. Over the last decade O’Dell had worked with him on dozens of cases, ever since she was a forensic fellow at Quantico.
She and Stan had a tempered relationship, but as a rule Stan didn’t much like anyone in law enforcement. He didn’t like having them stand over his shoulder during autopsies, second-guessing or questioning him. And he had no patience for newbies making inappropriate jokes, or worse — getting wobbly in the knees or freaking out about maggots. Nothing personal. It had taken O’Dell a few years and a whole lot of maggots — which she truly hated but had not once freaked out over — to understand how Stan worked.
As for his comment, she didn’t take offense. She had no idea why she was here either. Lately her boss, FBI Assistant Director Raymond Kunze, had been sending her on all kinds of wild-goose chases. Several of them involved some form of payback or political cover-up. It was a price he seemed willing to pay in order to stay in the good graces of certain senators and congressmen, along with a handful of presidential advisers.
“Any chance the body’s been dismembered in some way?” she asked Stan in response to why she might be here.
“Don’t know. Could be.”
“Well, there you go.” She said it matter-of-factly. No sarcasm intended, and Stan didn’t question or comment further.
A part of her hated that she’d become a de facto expert on dismembered bodies. In her career as a profiler, she’d seen body parts stuffed into take-out containers, fishing coolers, Mason jars, and even wrapped in butcher paper inside a freezer. But standing in the midsummer heat and anticipating the insects, as well as the smell, she’d almost rather deal with a few body parts than a floater.
Bodies tended to sink in water. It was one of those things movies and TV shows rarely got right. It wasn’t until days later, when gases started to form and collect, that the body began to float. From the apparent buoyance of this one, O’Dell suspected the gases were in full force.
“So what are you doing here?” she asked Stan, suspicious of why he had taken this assignment instead of sending one of his assistants. For as much as he hated law enforcement, Stan did enjoy the media. If there was even a whiff of a high-profile case, Stan tended to keep it for himself.
“What do you mean?” he asked halfheartedly.
Still, neither glanced at the other. The recovery team was making progress toward them.
“Why would you choose to be here in this heat? I’m guessing there must be something that piqued your interest.”
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Stan shrug and knew this was the most admission she’d get from the man. He surprised her when he said, “The call that came in said there was ‘a package in the Potomac.’”
“A package? That’s creative.”
“But that’s not even the interesting part,” Stan said, and finally he glanced over at her. “The caller promised that this was only the first.”
“Oh, wonderful.” O’Dell restrained a groan. Now she understood why she had been sent here. It was just another frickin’ serial killer case to add to her collection.
11
“The body’s been in the water at least a week.” Stan offered what O’Dell already knew.
The recovery team had splayed the floater on a tarp spread out on the muddy riverbank. They wouldn’t even attempt to fit the victim inside a body bag. Instead, they’d wrap the tarp as gently as possible around the bloated flesh, sealing up the ends for transport to the morgue. In the meantime, the team backed away and let Stan and O’Dell take a look before one of them started taking a series of photographs.
The body was male. That was about all that O’Dell could determine. But that alone was unusual. More than seventy percent of serial killers’ victims were female. Being in the water for a week would suggest the body would be washed clean, but debris dangled from the man’s hair, long and wet slimy weeds that made it look like snakes were coiling around his head and into his face. Pieces of his flesh had already been compromised, scavengers in the water — fish or insects — teasing and tasting to see if this foreign object was something they could feed on.
O’Dell watched as Stan’s short, stubby fingers took temperature readings. Slow and methodical, he began his on-site checklist. She stood over the body, but kept out of the medical examiner’s way, even making sure that she didn’t cast a shadow over him. But while he worked, she continued her own visual examination.
She had chased her share of serial killers in the past decade. It wasn’t something that she chose to do. It wasn’t as if when she was a little girl, she’d said, “When I grow up I want to be an FBI profiler.” Just like her reputation for being an expert on dismembered bodies, hunting down killers had also developed into an accidental specialty.
O’Dell had an eye for details that others missed. She recognized patterns and suspected rituals while her colleagues thought she must be crazy. The strangest statistics and the most absurd facts stayed planted in her brain. She could easily become obsessed with a killer’s MO, learning and gleaning psychological tells that the killer never intended to share. And once in a while — to O’Dell’s detriment — a killer became obsessed with her, too.