Criss Cross

Chapter 45

Ned Mahoney went ballistic after I laid it all out for him outside Rivers’s bunker, late on the night of the crash.

“There’s no copy of the message he sent?” Mahoney asked, suspicious.

“I told you, it disintegrated, Ned, but it’s burned in my brain.”

“That won’t do it!”

“Put my decades in law enforcement and my reputation behind it, and it will. And the heads we found? We were meant to find them, just as I was meant to see that Wickr message, Ned. Rivers or M did all this by design. It’s clear as day he’s imitating not only Mikey Edgerton but also the Meat Man.”

“He might be, but nothing about this is clear to me,” Mahoney said. “Make your statements, then go home and sit until I can see things clearly. In the meantime, I’ve got a crime scene to run.”

I wanted to argue, wanted to stay and look for evidence, but I did as he asked.

We drove back to DC in silence. Sampson wanted to drive, despite his wounded hands.

I sat in the passenger seat trying to stay awake, but my eyes kept closing. As I dozed, I saw the severed head in the locker, then the second one tumbling from Rivers’s Porsche, then the head M had put in our car the week before.

My chin hit my chest, and I woke up, groggily thinking, He’s doing the Meat Man, just like Ali...

In my dreams, I relived what had happened more than a decade ago in West Texas.

There was a tornado watch in effect that sweltering afternoon. The wind was already starting to pick up.

Lightning flickered on the darkening western horizon, and distant thunder rumbled when Randall Peaks and I climbed over a locked cattle gate and walked up a dusty lane through sagebrush and live-oak thickets. We were way out in the boondocks, somewhere northwest of Lubbock, Texas.

“There rattlers around?” I asked.

“No doubt,” the Texas Ranger said.

Peaks carried a nickel-plated Colt Python revolver in a leather holster on his hip and wore a starched white shirt, a bolo tie, a straw hat, and tooled cowboy boots despite the fact that it all made him stand out like a sore thumb in the foliage around us.

“What do we do if we see one?” I asked.

“Jumping’s a good idea,” Peaks said as we came to a second gate. “There she is.”

I looked over the gate into a large, dusty, and overgrown industrial yard. At the back of the yard, there was a two-story wooden structure with a corrugated-steel roof maybe four hundred feet long. You could see a sign in faded paint on the side of the clapboard building; it read king processing.

“This is where they happened?” I asked. “The first two? The parents?”

Peaks nodded. “Dale and Lucy King. They ran a one-stop shop for cattlemen clear to the panhandle. Slaughterhouse and meatpacking. Real successful in its day.”

By then I had been working on the Meat Man case for more than ten months. My involvement had begun when a decapitated naked male was found in a panel van abandoned in an empty lot in Southwest DC.

A headless corpse I’d seen before, but not one with segmented black lines drawn with a felt-tip pen all over its torso, arms, and legs.

Two weeks after that, a second body was found in a car trunk. Female this time, she too was covered in similar segmented black lines, which we finally deciphered as the kind of cutting guide a novice butcher might use to take apart a cow and turn it into steaks and chops.

We ran a crime bulletin on the decapitations and the diagrams and quickly got hits from seven different states, including Texas, as well as three foreign countries.

It turned out that eleven decapitated bodies scored with similar diagrams had been found during the prior seven years, and two had been found nearly thirteen years before.

“Nothing bombproof to tie Tanner Oates to it?” I asked.

Peaks shook his head, then pinched some tobacco and stuck it between his cheek and gum. “Oates was the Kings’ foster kid for a while, but that was years before. And he had a solid alibi. Until she conveniently died in a wreck a couple of years later.”

“But you think Oates is the Meat Man?”

“I do,” Peaks said, and he spit. “Whatever he’s calling himself these days. You want to see where it happened?”

“Came all this way to get a better handle on him.”

We climbed the second gate and crossed through weeds as the winds whistled.

“How are we gonna know if there’s a tornado coming?” I asked.

“Hopefully, we’ll see it first,” Peaks said, spitting tobacco again as we came to a chained and padlocked door. “If we hear it before we see it, we’re out of luck.”

“You’re full of good news.”

“Just factual.”

On the door was a notice stating that the property was condemned and a sign warning against trespassing. The Ranger ignored both, grabbed the lock, and spun the combination he’d gotten from the bank in Lubbock that had foreclosed on the property.

Peaks pushed the door open. As we flipped on our flashlights and went inside, the wind began to gust, no longer whistling but moaning and howling through the eaves of the old slaughterhouse.