“The ME’s checking dental records and DNA on all of them,” Bree said. “But figuring out who they are is going to take time.”
A BATF agent named Fred Allen introduced himself and said his men had taken pieces of the bomb and samples of the chemical residue in the old printing plant to the lab and were forwarding samples to the FBI lab at Quantico.
Mahoney promised full cooperation but also gently reminded Bree that because M’s crimes crossed many state lines and almost certainly involved kidnapping, the FBI would direct the hunt for him.
“Absolutely,” Bree said. “But we are going to work this case hard, and we will share everything we find.”
Chief Michaels took a few steps forward. A big, rawboned man, Michaels had been a U.S. Army Ranger in a previous life and carried it within him.
“We have no description of this M?” he asked. “No one’s ever seen him?”
Bree said, “Not to my knowledge. Dr. Cross, is that correct?”
Chapter 68
I thought about that for a moment and then said, “I can’t say positively that I’ve seen M, but I have absolutely seen someone who claims to be in contact with M. We call him Pseudo-Craig because he looks a heck of a lot like Kyle Craig, or what Kyle Craig might have looked like had he not had plastic surgery and had he lived.”
Chief Michaels squinted at me. “You have a picture of Pseudo-Craig?”
“We do,” Bree said and gave her laptop a command. The stills I’d gotten from the detention center appeared on the screen.
The chief said, “I can’t remember what Craig looked like.”
Bree typed and said, “I can show you the last known photo of him.”
A third picture appeared, this one taken when Craig was first processed into the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons system. Despite the prison jumpsuit and the handcuffs, he sneered arrogantly at the camera.
“That is an incredibly close resemblance,” Michaels said. “You’re sure there’s no way it could be Craig? What if he hadn’t gotten his face changed?”
“He did.”
“How do you know?”
“Craig told me. He mocked me with it right up until the time I saw him blown up.”
“Still doesn’t answer my question,” Chief Michaels said. “Did you do DNA testing on whatever was left?”
Bree said, “I was there, Chief. He had a different face, but it was Kyle Craig. We didn’t need to do any DNA testing.”
Chief Michaels said, “Well, I think we need to do it now, don’t you?”
I said, “I think we should. Just deal with it and get it done. But I’m telling you, there is zero doubt in my mind that the real Kyle Craig is dead.”
Ned Mahoney said, “I’ll submit the necessary paperwork to exhume what’s left of him, but it will take a few days.”
Bree ordered detectives back to the neighborhood where the bomb went off, all of them armed with pictures of Pseudo-Craig. The BATF promised a preliminary assessment of the bomb by day’s end, and the meeting broke up.
I was getting ready to leave with Sampson when a female FBI agent who’d been sitting behind Mahoney came up to me. She was in her early forties with short brunette hair and a no-nonsense style.
“Kim Tillis,” she said, shaking my hand. “It’s an honor to finally meet you, Dr. Cross. It turns out we have a mutual acquaintance.”
“Oh? Who’s that?”
“Marty Forbes,” she said. “Once upon a time he was my partner.”
“Okay?”
“I had a lot of problems with the guy, but — and this is not a popular position within the Bureau — I think Marty is innocent.”
“As a matter of fact, I do too.”
Tillis seemed both relieved and confused. “Chief Stone didn’t mention Marty.”
“Come again?”
“Marty said he’s been contacted by M multiple times.”
“It must have slipped Chief Stone’s mind.”
The veteran FBI agent raised her eyebrow and tilted her head toward her shoulder before saying, “And see? That’s the key, I think.”
“The key to what?”
Tillis twirled her finger around. “This whole thing. I tried to tell Mahoney, but he wouldn’t listen when I told him to focus on Marty’s case. Still, it’s what my gut says will lead us to M, especially with all the headless bodies on that yacht and now these heads in play.”
That took me aback for a moment, but then it made total shocking sense.
Chapter 69
Sampson, Bree, special agent Tillis, and I hustled into the DC Medical Examiner’s office early that afternoon.
Every single one of us was a seasoned veteran of law enforcement. But none of us looked forward to what we were about to do. Dr. Stacy Abbott, a senior ME, buzzed us through and led us down a hallway past the three autopsy rooms.
In nearly every morgue I’ve been in, there’s a distinct disinfectant odor in the air and an odd array of lights, some soft, others harsh, alternating in a way that throws me off a little and makes me slightly nauseated even before I confront a corpse.
I’ve learned to live with the feeling because, in a murder investigation, a morgue is where the dead still speak. It takes a gifted pathologist like Dr. Abbott to hear them. But more often than not, their bodies will yield valuable information in homicide cases.
“How many have you examined so far?” Sampson asked Dr. Abbott before we pushed through the doors into the actual morgue.
“Several,” she said.
“Similarities?” I asked.
“They were decapitated in the exact same way,” said Abbott. She was in her late thirties, a little quirky, but very sharp upstairs.
The ME said the first cut was made from behind, a violent slice across the front of the neck, lateral left to right, and deep, going through the carotid, the larynx, and the esophagus to the spine. A second cut started on the right, went around the back, and joined the initial anterior wound.
The head was then twisted powerfully enough to rupture the spinal column below the sixth cervical vertebra. The exposed cord was severed to complete the process of detaching the head from the body.
“Any thoughts on the kind of knife?” Bree asked.
“A substantial one,” Dr. Abbott said. “Three of the John Does in here were big men with muscular necks, and the initial cuts were still very deep. My best guess is you’re looking for a stout knife handle with a razor-sharp ten- or twelve-inch scimitar blade attached. The kind of knife a butcher might use.”
I closed my eyes a moment, thinking about Tanner Oates, the Meat Man. Every one of his victims had been killed by a butcher knife and then decapitated below the C6 vertebra.
“Ready?” Dr. Abbott said.
“As ready as you can be for this kind of thing,” Special Agent Tillis said.
“You’ve never done anything like this before, have you?” Bree asked.
“A few times, but it’s not on my regular diet.”
“You’ll do fine,” Sampson said, and we followed the ME through the double doors.
The air was chilly inside the morgue, a tile-floored, rectangular space with cold lockers for bodies stacked three high the length of the room on both sides.
Abbott said, “Where do you want to start?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “We want to look at them all.”
Abbott consulted a chart, went to a locker on the right wall, and drew it open to reveal a thick, opaque plastic evidence bag with a head in it.
“Jane Doe number twenty-eight fourteen,” Dr. Abbott said, lifting the head. “Female, Hispanic, roughly late twenties, brown-eyed, history of dental care.”
Bree and Special Agent Tillis were looking at a laptop. They both shook their heads. “I’m not seeing her here.”