The Burying Place

'Of course they do. But they get grabbed off the street, not whisked out of their lakeside mansions in the middle of the night. Look, I can't prove it, and it's not my case anyway. I'm just telling you what I think in my heart of hearts. OK?'

'I understand.'

'There's one other thing,' Denise added. 'Marcus said he was alone tonight, right? Just him and Callie?'

'That's right.'

'Well, if that's true, it would be the first time ever. Valerie took care of her. The babysitter took care of her. Not Marcus. No way. Don't you find it a little odd that Marcus is alone with the baby for one night, and she disappears?'

Chapter Four

Maggie Bei parked her yellow Avalanche on the outskirts of the crime scene near the Lester River. She could see the abandoned cinder block dairy illuminated under the light poles erected by her team, and she watched her evidence technicians pawing through the grass surrounding the building and in the woods on the other side of the rapids. The crew from the medical examiner's office had a more gruesome task. Two of them, in white scrubs, attended to the dead body in the field.

The fourth victim.

Maggie steeled herself to join them. For years, she had built up an immunity to the grisly discoveries of her job, but the assaults in the previous month, one after another, had tested her objectivity. She knew she could have been any one of these women. It was too easy to imagine herself on the ground, lifeless and humiliated.

Fingernails tapped on the passenger window of her truck, interrupting her thoughts. Maggie saw the round, cherubic face of Max Guppo, who waved at her and pulled open the door. She held up her hand, stopping him in his tracks.

'Freeze! What did you have for dinner?'

Guppo thought back. 'Chili con carne.'

'Shit, what are you trying to do to me? Don't you dare get in this truck.'

'I take Beano now,' Guppo protested. 'The commercials all say, "Take Beano before, there'll be no gas."'

'Beano never met your digestive tract,' Maggie told him. 'Stay where you are, I'm getting out.'

Maggie hopped down from her truck. She cursed as her square-heeled boots landed in the wet dirt and splashed mud on to her jeans. She slammed the door and bent over with her hands on her knees and sneezed. She sniffled, yanked a tissue from her pocket, and blew her nose loudly.

'You got a cold?' Guppo asked, coming around the front of the Avalanche.

'Yeah. Just what I need. I'm hopped up on vitamin C.'

Guppo pointed at the tiny diamond stud in Maggie's nose. 'Doesn't that hurt when you sneeze?'

'I shot it halfway across the room once.'

'So why not take it out?'

'Because I like how it looks.' Maggie whiffed the air as Guppo came closer. 'Did you think I wouldn't smell that?'

'Sorry.'

'Chili con came,' Maggie told him. 'Unbelievable.'

The two of them headed across the Strand Avenue bridge over the river. They were an odd couple. Max Guppo was in his mid-fifties and had led crime scene investigations for the Detective Bureau for as long as Maggie could remember. He was only four inches taller than Maggie, who barely made it to five feet tall in her boots, and he waddled through life with cannon-sized thighs and an oversized snow tire permanently anchored around his waist. He had worn the same three suits — brown, brown, and blue — on any given day for the past decade. Maggie, by contrast, was a diminutive Chinese cop who snagged Hollister fashions off the racks for teenage girls. The closer she got to forty years old, the more she dressed as if she were twenty-five.

As they neared the dirt road that led to the white dairy building, Maggie pointed her thumb and forefinger like a pistol at Kasey Kennedy, who sat in the rear of a patrol car twenty yards away. 'How's the kid?' she asked Guppo.

'She's shaken up.'

Maggie nodded. Kasey had the door of the squad car open and sat with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She wore a baggy blue sweatshirt and ripped jeans. She stared into space with eyes that were nervous and shell-shocked.

'Wow, check out that red hair,' Maggie said. 'Is that natural?'

'Beats me,' Guppo replied, smoothing down the strands of his comb-over.

'No way that's natural,' she continued. 'Did Kasey give you a statement?'

'Yeah. She thinks you're going to fire her.'

'I'll calm her down,' Maggie said. 'Have you pieced together how this all happened?'

Guppo nodded. He led Maggie along the shore by the river. The water tumbled frantically over the rocks in the narrows and then calmed as the valley widened below the highway bridge. Maggie tested the ground with her boot. It was soft.

'The three of them came across the river here,' Guppo said, pointing to the spot where the current was fastest. Twenty feet separated them from the opposite bank that led sharply uphill to the dead woman's farmhouse. 'The victim, the perp, and then our girl Kasey.'

'They came down that hill?' Maggie asked.

'Yeah. Kasey took a header.' He dug in his pocket. 'Here's her badge. We found it in the weeds on the other side.'

'Then what?'

Guppo led Maggie up a shallow slope under the evergreen trees, around the rear wall of the cinder block dairy, and into the small grassy field behind it. Twenty feet away, the medical examiner's team was zipping the woman's body into a black vinyl bag.

'Hold on a minute, guys,' Maggie called. She turned back to Guppo. 'Kasey confronted them here?'

'Right. The perp held the vic with a garrote around her neck. Kasey took a shot. Pretty ballsy move, if you ask me. It was foggy, and she didn't have a good angle on the killer.'

'She missed?' Maggie asked.

'Yeah, but the perp got the message, dropped the vic, and ran. Kasey says she took one more shot and missed again. He sprinted toward the highway and disappeared. We're still trying to figure out where he parked his car, in case he left anything behind. Kasey tried to revive the victim, but she was already gone. Two minutes earlier, and she would have been the big hero.'

Maggie shoved her hands in her pockets and marched over to the dead woman in the wet grass. 'What's her name?'

'Susan Krauss.'

'Married?'

'Divorced. She's got a teenage son in Florida with his dad.'

'What did she do for a living?'

'She was a personal trainer at the Y.'

'Have we found anything that ties her to the other victims?'

'Not yet.'

Maggie pushed her black bangs out of her eyes and stared at the body of Susan Krauss. She looked violated, the way murder victims do, probed by the technicians in white, stripped of dignity by the men who hunted through the grass around her as if she weren't even there. Her skin leached of color. Her hair wet and messy. Her clothes ripped, exposing most of her private parts. Her neck, slashed open and practically severed by the wire that had killed her.

'OK,' Maggie said quietly, nodding to the medical techs. 'You can take her.'

''Susan Krauss. Number four.

The first was Elisa Reed in mid-October. Single, never married, twenty-three years old, a first-year teacher. She'd lived with her parents on a farm three miles north of here. Elisa vanished on a Tuesday night while her parents were vacationing in San Francisco. They'd called her that night, but she didn't answer, and when they hadn't reached her by Thursday, they decided to call the police. There was no evidence of Elisa in her bedroom, other than traces of blood on the sheets and a smashed alarm clock on the floor.

Two weeks later, on Halloween night, Trisha Grange disappeared, becoming the second victim. Thirty-five years old, married seven years, mother of two. Her husband Troy had taken their oldest daughter to a Halloween party, leaving Trisha at home with the baby. When he returned at ten o'clock, the baby was sleeping, but Trisha was gone. They'd found no blood this time, but they found Trisha's shoe in the field behind their farmhouse and strands of her blonde hair caught in the screen door that led outside. She'd lived seven miles northeast of Susan Krauss.