The Last Victim (A Ryker Townsend Story) Read online

  Seeing my name in print, in a message from the killer, had been unsettling, but as leader to the investigating team, I couldn’t let it show. I had to remain objective. My reaction wasn’t about saving face or being the tough guy. My show of strength was for my team, for Crowley who would one day be in my shoes and lead her own investigations.

  “I’m fine. The job is still the same.” I handed her back the killer’s note. “Who found the bodies?”

  “Local cops got an anonymous tip to 911. If it’s like the others, tracing the call won’t give us anything. TK loves prepaid burner phones, but we’ll go through the usual paces.”

  Crowley’s dark hair was tied in a pony tail that jutted out the back of her FBI cap and her pale blue eyes squinted as she stared up the Totem of dead bodies. She had a quiet intensity, but her eyes never hid her humanity. That vulnerability had been her strength and weakness. No one walked away from a crime scene like this without being indelibly marked by it.

  “I saw tire tracks from the ridge,” I said. “Did the locals have any ideas how our killer gained access to such a remote location?”

  “Yeah. They said whoever did this, they must’ve known about the service road. This is private property, but there’s a gravel road that gives access to a cell tower.” She pointed toward a stand of trees and a metal structure jutted above them. “The road’s only used when there’s service trouble. The lock at the gate was busted with a bolt cutter. No traffic, no interruptions would’ve given TK plenty of time to work his perverted magic.”

  The Totem Killer had been operating in the Pacific Northwest for nearly two years, abducting and killing several men at a time to create a grotesque steeple. Late last year, there were two discoveries, a few months apart. Winter hadn’t been a deterrent. This year there were two more Totems and it wasn’t even July yet. The body count had grown to fourteen, including the five bodies on this tribute pole.

  A new record of victims meant the killer had ratcheted up the abductions and he’d gained confidence in honing a more distinctive signature, given the more detailed mutilations and dramatic posing of the bodies.

  “Five this time means it’s getting easier, but with the escalation, his high isn’t lasting. He’ll be looking for more. He won’t wait. We have to monitor missing person cases to see if we can get ahead of him.”

  I felt my jaw tighten and my fists clenched as I stepped closer to the severed limbs. Like the other staged scenes, the flesh of the arms and legs were carved into and stripped away with an elaborate scrolling, done with a fine surgical knife. A box cutter or serrated blade would have puckered the skin. I didn’t need Dr. Martinez to tell me what I could see. The bone joints were cut with precision, not jagged as I’d seen in the first victims. The UNSUB’s tools had become more refined.

  When I saw Dr. Martinez walking toward me, I said to my medical examiner, “He’s become a true artisan with flesh and getting better at his craft.”

  “Like a good butcher.” The man grimaced. “Similar to the last known victims, there’s bruising and deep abrasions on ankles and wrists where they were bound. It appears they were abducted and held like the others.”

  A short man with intense dark eyes, Dr. Martinez never got rattled, even at the most heinous crime scenes. He was a good husband and father of three boys. I always wondered how he kept the demons from his door, but maybe his family kept him grounded by giving him something to go home to. Because of my dreams, I didn’t let anyone get too close—for their sake and mine.

  “TOD will be a challenge,” the doctor said. “If these severed limbs and facial skin are like the others, they could have been frozen after death. If that’s the case, rigor would’ve started when they were thawed. We’ll have to run tests on other factors to give you an estimated time of death.”

  “The dead guy at the top appears to be the last killed, a work of art he wanted to flaunt,” I said. “He’s whole for a reason. He’s our best bet to find out more about our UNSUB.”

  Identifying the last victim would allow my team to back track a time line of the killer’s activity to determine when the guy might’ve been abducted…and how.

  “With any luck. As for identification of the limbs, we’ll look for other aspects to help us, like an age approximation from bone joints, blood characteristics, any obvious medical conditions, scars or birthmarks, and we’ll look for old bone fractures or surgical pins through x-rays. I’ll put a rush on it.”

  “Thanks, doctor.”

  My ME waved a hand as he left and I got back to work. Alone with my thoughts again, I flashed on the body parts as if they were a riddle to solve. I took a knee and removed my sunglasses for a better view after I saw a pattern. With my head cocked, I glanced up at the Totem from a different angle. The move intensified the pain of my throbbing headache, but I had to do it.

  As I gazed up the tree strapped with severed limbs, a pair of eyes found mine. It was an instant connection, like locking eyes with a stranger across a room, except that one of us was dead. I couldn’t turn away. Whatever I felt, it was visceral and real.

  My eyes burned and everything blurred around the edges as if I stared down a shadowy funnel. Any noise I had heard before faded to a muffled and distant hum. I couldn’t stop my reaction. I tried to break the link, but no matter where I moved, the dead eyes followed me. That had never happened before.

  I won’t lie. It scared me.

  Most people would question their own sanity. They’d know with certainty this wasn’t normal, not even a little, but in my experience, ‘weird’ had a broader definition. So the fact I wondered if this feeling came from a dead man reaching out to me—because he had something to say—didn’t feel like a stretch in the bendy rules of my world.

  It should have.

  A dead guy staring at me should’ve been a warning that I was unstable and unraveling like the thread on my windbreaker, but I preferred to believe that I had a way with the dead than deal with a harsh fact.

  I’d become desperate to understand what was happening to me, something I wasn’t sure I could—or should—stop, because the big picture wasn’t about me. No matter how this investigation tore into my life, fourteen families had lost a son.

  The killing had to stop, no matter what it cost me.

  Chapter Three

  Snoqualmie Pass- Cascade Mountains

  Outside Seattle

  Ryker Townsend

  The eyes of the dead man at the top of the Totem fixed on me as if he were still alive and trying to tell me something. His lifeless eyes had turned milky white and had become sweet candy to a cloud of gnats and flies, but I could’ve sworn his head moved.

  Oh, God. What the hell?

  After I heard the click of a camera, I blinked and took a deep breath. I put my sunglasses back on and Crowley’s voice came next.

  “At the risk of sounding like a pain in the ass, I gotta ask. Do you feel okay?” She wasn’t giving it a rest. Her attention to detail was what made her good at her job, and a relentless friend when she smelled trouble.

  “Yes, but I’m waving the white flag.” I turned from her. “The headache has won.”

  This time when my eyes found the dead man’s face, I’d lost my strange connection to the body. No muffled white noise. No blurry edges that made it easier to focus on those dead eyes. All of that had gone and I felt…lost. But when my gaze shifted back to Crowley, she didn’t look satisfied. I knew her well enough to know I needed to distract her.

  “Come here and check this out,” I told her. “The Totem has a different feel from this angle.”

  She knelt by me and looked up to where I pointed. The symmetry of the arrangement as it silhouetted the sky took on a different feel. It struck me that the killer had designed every aspect of the array, right down to the strategic placement of the metal stakes used to tie the parts together with rope and wire.

  “You’re right. The structure is remarkable,” she said.

  “Everything is incorporated and ha
s its place as a…thorough design element. I can almost see the online blueprint of how he conceived this.”

  I got the sense the killer had mapped out the sequence and balance on a computer using a software program to play with the gruesome elements until he crafted the ultimate design. Such a plan would allow assembly to be executed into a step by step ‘paint by the numbers’ exercise.

  “The UNSUB left a metal hoist behind…to get the body up there without breaking a sweat. An elegant solution,” I told Crowley.

  “We’ll do a search for the make and model sold in the area…or online,” she said. “It could turn up something.”

  “Yes. Good.” We both knew the search would likely come up empty, but we had to do it.

  The precision and the grandeur of the showy spectacle—paired with my memory of the raven that I’d seen earlier—triggered something I’d read. I didn’t believe in coincidences. Even the chance sighting of the bird meant something to a mind willing to believe everything held a purpose. Whenever my brain jumped, I trusted the leap. Crowley and the members of my team were used to my odd idiosyncrasies.

  “Ever hear of the Trickster archetype in mythology, Crowley?” I asked, as she took photos of the scene.

  “Don’t geek out on me. All I remember about mythology I got from the Avengers movie. Thor is hot. He can hammer me anytime.”

  Crowley had her moments when she made me smile, even at a crime scene. I fought a grin inside, but didn’t let it show.

  “A Trickster gets off on disobeying normal rules of conventional behavior, often in malicious ways.”

  “I’d say severing bodies into Lego pieces falls into the malicious category.” She stopped working long enough to listen.

  “A Trickster varies its appearance to create an illusion. It uses wit and cleverness, rather than brute force, to evade trouble and it thrives on manipulation.”

  “You think our profile is off. I mean, really off base, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know. After seeing this new one, it feels like smoke and mirrors to me. A grand illusion of misdirection. Our UNSUB flaunts what he does. He’s organized. He thinks through every detail and plans his moves, knowing he’s way ahead of us. He’s holding all the cards and we’re only reacting to whatever he does.”

  Any profile was a work in progress and with every crime scene, my team’s view of the killer was constantly checked to make sure it was still valid, but with all the CSI shows on TV and in movies, it was too easy for criminals to know how law enforcement worked. Killers had notions of forensics or they planted evidence from another crime scene to distract the police and mislead them. Most serial killers were of average intelligence, but TK felt like an exception.

  The last thing I wanted to do was underestimate him.

  “He definitely has an ego.” She aimed her camera toward the top of the Totem and took a photo of the last kill.

  I looked up to where her camera lens pointed.

  “Our guy likes playing God. He put him at the top and kept him whole to show how special he was in life. The rest of these bodies are part of an aesthetic design. They’re chum in the water, second rate meat fillers compared to him. He’s the main course, the real reason for all of this. He meant something.”

  “Meant what?”

  “I don’t know yet, but this has scope and depth. There’s a story here and it’s central to him. The meat fillers have been…foreplay.”

  Sometimes the callous way I declared what was in the killer’s head made it seem as if those thoughts were mine. It shocked me to hear the words come out of my mouth. Sometimes even the tone of my voice sounded gruff and malevolent, as if it came from someone else.

  Crowley did a double take when she heard me.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I say things without filter. It’s my process. Sometimes I want to apologize, but I won’t. Not with you.”

  “No, I understand. It’s okay,” she said. “You’re scary good at your job. It’s like I can hear the UNSUB…through you. What made you think about the Trickster mythology?”

  “It struck me when I saw a raven in the woods on our hike in. In certain Native cultures, the raven is a Trickster.”

  “You should consider donating your brain to science.”

  “After I’m dead?”

  “Whenever.”

  When I shot her a raised eyebrow, she smiled and asked, “You got a new theory on the Totem design?”

  “Totems are used to honor the dead or tell a story or express a belief. If there’s a story here, it’s about our killer and his connection to the body positioned at the top. His shining star feels like a misguided attempt to pay tribute or ‘out him’ somehow, but there’s nothing that honors the dead here. He’s tossed us a morsel by giving us a corpse. He’s confident and getting bolder. All the other displays that came before were only practice runs…for this one.”

  I raised a hand to point at each body down the line.

  “After his crowning achievement, the progression of bodies diminishes their status. Their placement could be based on the timing of each kill, but more than likely it’s a ranking system. Our killer targets and culls out certain victims of his choosing. He humiliates and uses them while they’re still alive. After he tires of them, he harvests a body part he perceives as their strength…to show he can take it from them. That he has the power, the control.”

  I sank slowly into my dark world, alone. Everything around me clouded over. If Crowley had asked me any more questions, I didn’t hear them. I stared up at the bloodied victims—rapt in the head of the killer—and puzzled through what TK had left me to figure out. The steady rhythm of my heart thrummed the inside of my ears as I let my eyes take in everything.

  “Why here? Why leave a whole one? And why didn’t you freeze him?”

  I didn’t expect an answer from Crowley or anyone. I only needed to keep talking.

  “You ever trust someone you shouldn’t have, Crowley?” I didn’t wait for her answer. “These guys did. Our UNSUB knows how to be invisible and blend in without anyone taking notice. He gets them to trust him before he steals their lives.”

  I paced around the totem and stared up at the horror.

  “Can you imagine...the fear? It’s like a lingering energy coming off these bodies. TK lulled them in and…tricked them. He got off on looking into their eyes. He had to see the moment when they knew he would take everything from them.”

  Being alone—in my forced mental exile—it helped me go where I needed to go. I puzzled through questions that led me to a reconstruction of events, the sequence and the reasons that would motivate the UNSUB. I needed to make a checklist of what the new scene revealed and compare it to my profile notes. After I stepped back to the edge of the clearing, I made a slow circle around the grim Totem.

  “Overkill, ante mortem mutilations, posing. These things are part of your fantasy.”

  Our UNSUB embraced his signature with a flourish. He tortured his victims. I saw him as a mixed offender. He left contradictory messages at the body dump, appearing highly organized and intelligent in his MO, yet frenzied when he actually killed, selecting a knife as his weapon of choice.

  Look in the mirror. What would you see?

  I’d become engrossed in the mind of a psychopath and pictured a house of a thousand mirrors. Everywhere he turned his face reflected whatever he needed to, in order to stay hidden. If anyone looked at him, they only saw what he wanted them to see. Psychopaths were often charming, definitely manipulative, and they knew how to gain trust. They could mimic emotion and appear normal. Some even had families and were capable of holding onto long term relationships.

  This one carefully planned out every detail, from how he hunted, how he tortured his victims, and how he disposed of the bodies. I saw his design in everything—the things he let me see—but his face was nothing more than a shadow behind the curtain in my vision. I was chasing smoke, yet I felt his taunting menace.

  I would savor what I saw—to bank
it for later in my dreams—but the next time I blinked, time had stuttered to a stop and I was alone. One second I’d been surrounded by investigators and evidence techs. The next I stood on the edge of a silent, depleted crime scene. My ERTs would be hauling evidence to the vehicles and Dr. Martinez would’ve taken responsibility for the body bags.

  My team knew how I operated. They knew I needed isolation until I called it quits on my own, but something made me turn toward the mountains behind me. Still in the throes of wherever my mind had gone, I heard a whispered voice on the wind saying the words in the message.

  This one is for you, Ryker Townsend...Golden Boy....

  Fragments of my dream, the flashing red light and the never-ending drone of the flies magnified, until the weighty presence of a dark and faceless body drew near me. No one was around me, yet I knew what I sensed. I took off my sunglasses and squinted into the Cascade Mountains.

  I didn’t question the feeling that somebody watched me.

  I had felt it at every scene where TK had left his bloody trail of severed limbs, but the sensation had deeper roots here—roots that I’d brought with me. Being close to Seattle, my conscience easily played its part in stirring ghosts from my past. Maybe it didn’t matter what or who had instigated the feeling. All of it welled inside me—the good and the bad of a past that defined me—to provoke my paranoia.

  TK stalked his victims and got off on watching law enforcement chase their tails. Now the Totem Killer had my name. I told Crowley that it wasn’t a big deal, but it had been.

  To me.

  ***

  The look on Ryker Townsend’s face while he read the message addressed to him had been worth every effort, every risk. From a ridge in the Cascade Mountains, the Totem Killer peered through high-tech binoculars to watch every facial flinch, every grimace, every telling nuance of the FBI agent’s face. Sprawled in the dirt, the Totem Killer had stayed motionless in the growing heat of the day and kept a low profile so as not to be noticed.