“Jesus, what—”
“I’m on my way to your apartment now. Get dressed and meet me out front as soon as you can.”
“What’s going on?”
“They found another body. Out in the boonies about fifty miles northeast of Raleigh. Bird’s already being puddle-jumped from Fort Bragg as we speak. We go airborne in twenty minutes.”
Chapter 16
In no time a black Bell Huey II had whisked Markham and his team from a nearby heliport, sped them through the North Carolina skies at 120 knots, and touched them down in Otis Gurganus’s field just after 9:00 a.m. A storm was almost upon them, and the pilot had warned that the landing would be tight—ended up having to circle the small clearing twice to accommodate for the wind and to allow time for the state police helicopter to clear out.
During the flight, Schaap brought Markham up to date on what the FBI knew so far: the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the body, the preliminary time line of the murder, the similarities to the other victims, and the length of time the body had been exposed to the elements. They had a good idea who the guy was—had already laid some groundwork in conjunction with the missing person reports from February—but Markham didn’t need any database to tell him that the victim had been out in the woods since the first crescent moon of March.
From the air, he’d not been able to see him; only the blue tarp and the half-dozen or so state troopers surrounding it. And once they were on the ground, as the FBI agents approached from the Huey, the troopers, like children in a schoolyard, formed a curtain in front of the crime scene—held down their hats against the wind from the propellers and stared back defiantly, as if to say, “Red Rover, Red Rover, don’t you dare come over!”
“Who’s in charge here?” Schaap hollered.
“I am,” a voice hollered back, and a tall man with a red face and a lump of chew beneath his lower lip stepped forward. “Sergeant Powell,” he added. “You boys got your fingers deep in this one, don’t you?”
Markham and Schaap held up their ID badges, introduced themselves, and thanked the state troopers as the Huey’s propellers winded to a stop. The forensic team sprang into action, and the line of state troopers reluctantly broke apart.
Sergeant Powell looked annoyed.
“I’ve already secured the site, goddammit,” he said. “Fucker’s been out here for over a month it looks like. You boys ain’t gonna find nothing that the animals ain’t already dragged away.”
“You’ve established a perimeter on the nearest access roads?” Schaap asked.
“How the hell you think we got in here?”
“I don’t have time to get in a pissing contest with you, Powell,” Schaap said. “All right with you then if my men have some room?”
Markham suppressed a smile as the red-faced trooper spat and signaled for his men to move away. Finally, the FBI agents had a clear view of what was waiting for them beneath the tarp.
“Jesus Christ,” Schaap said amid the clicks and flashes from the forensic cameras.
The corpse was little more than a skeleton and appeared to be impaled up through the rectum. The victim was male, Markham could tell, but his genitalia had been torn away, and his legs were missing below the knees. The rest of the body was intact—shriveled, hairless, the flesh mostly gone, and what little of it remained looked tanned and dried like leather. The victim’s head was still lashed to the stake, the nose an open triangle, the hollow eye sockets gazing downward in what was not their original position. The head had moved as the body decomposed. And had it not been for the little crossbar under the victim’s groin, the man with the tattoos and the missing pecker would have slid all the way down to the ground.
“Word’s been on the wire for some time now about who you feds’re looking for,” Powell said, spitting. “Same guy who spiked ’em in Raleigh, I reckon.”
“Same guy,” Schaap said absently.
Markham stepped under the tarp, donned a pair of rubber gloves, and removed a small flashlight from his Wind-breaker. He slowly circled the corpse, shining his light as close as he could on the victim’s arms without touching them.
“All them tattoos,” said Powell. “He’s got one on the back of his head, too. Skin is covered in them. What’s left of it, anyway. Looks like the animals got to him soon after your boy spiked him. More woulda been gone if he wasn’t hanging like that. Dried him out quicker, I suppose. Tats will make it easier to ID him. Looks like the fella in the database. Kept his head shaved, it says, so whatever hair’s there grew in after he disappeared. Prolly some after he died, too.”
Markham held his light on the victim’s sunken chest and studied the yellowed symbols for a long time.
A rumble of thunder in the distance.
The skies were darkening.
It would rain soon.
“He took the time to thoroughly bleach these out,” Mark-ham said finally. “The symbols are larger. Wrote only one line of each language, too.”
“You mean them white marks is some kind of writing?” Powell asked.
“Yes.”
“What’s it mean?”
Markham clicked off his flashlight and turned back to the trooper, stone-faced.
“It means he’s getting better.”
Chapter 17
Two hours later Markham sat alone at his laptop, the rain beating heavily on the hunting-lodge roof as he studied the driver’s license picture on the screen before him. The profile had been forwarded to him by the NC State Police. The guy had been on their missing persons list since mid-February.
William “Billy” Canning: thirty-eight, local boy originally from Smithfield, owner of a tattoo parlor in Cary—Billy’s, it was called. No criminal record, last seen on February fifteenth by his lover Stefan Dorsey. Keyword search in the missing persons database brought up a description of the tattoos. They were a perfect match to the markings on the corpse. The body had already been airlifted to Raleigh; would have an official ID in less than an hour and then it was off to Quantico for analysis.
The handle on the outside door rattled, and Markham looked up to find Andy Schaap entering with his jacket over his head. He plopped a stack of rain-stained papers on the table and sat down in one of the big chairs.
“Those are the only records he’s got,” Schaap said. “Dis- organized, takes cash mostly. Got a feeling there’s nothing there.”
Markham glanced briefly at the papers as his partner sunk deeper into his chair. Schaap slipped off his ring and began rolling it between his fingers.
“Sixteen,” he said, his eyes fixed on the large deer head above the fireplace. “That’s a big one. Sixteen points. You have to go by the spread, too—the distance between the antlers. Never understood the appeal of it—killing a beautiful animal like that. Wonder where they go when it rains. Raining like a bitch out there now.”
“Gurganus tell you anything else?” Markham asked. “Talk about any hunters who acted strange while they were here?”
“No one he could single out specifically.”
“His kid give you anything?”
Schaap shook his head and began bouncing his ring on the arm of the chair. Markham rose and went to the window—gazed out past the line of black FBI vehicles and into the woods.
“You really think he’s been here before?” Schaap asked.
“Yes, I do. Easy enough to get lost out there during the day unless you know exactly where you’re headed.”