Prime Witness

Chapter Four

The state crime lab is an immense, low-lying block of a building, a modern concrete fortress. It is set back the length of a football field from the street, behind a verdant lawn bisected by a ten-foot-high iron fence that surrounds the entire facility.

The largest of its kind outside of the FBI’s lab in Quantico, Virginia, this place is the province of the state attorney general.

Claude Dusalt has set up this meeting. He wants to familiarize me with the evidence early, in case his investigators need a quick search warrant. The Putah Creek killer is drawing increased press attention and Claude wants to be ready to move on a moment’s notice with the first break.

Derek Ingel, Davenport’s answer to Roy Bean, has been looking over my shoulder on every move, wanting to know the state of our evidence. No doubt so that he can pass it back to the Coconut. So far I’ve been able to keep him in the dark, because that is where I am. Ignorance is bliss.

I fill out a form and get a security badge from a guard in a kiosk inside the main entrance to the crime lab.

A few minutes later I hear the click of heels on concrete. A woman is approaching down a long corridor. I can see her through the slotted glass of the security door. From a distance she has the look of a secretary. Her eyes reading me as she walks tells me this is my escort. She is short and a little dowdy, to the far side of middle age. There’s something familiar about her, but I can’t place it.

“Mr. Madriani.”

She is stone-faced, seemingly preoccupied. But in her tone I sense this is no receptionist.

“Kay Sellig,” she says. “The director has asked me to brief you.” Brown eyes caught between a few wrinkles and crow’s-feet look at me from under a salt and pepper wedge cut, something easy to care for. She doesn’t offer her hand, but instead reads my mind.

“Not what you expected?” she says. She is a quick study.

“I don’t know,” I lie.

Finally there’s a smile, not amiability, but satisfaction at having read my thoughts.

In the limited universe of criminal forensics the name Kay Sellig conjures legend, a reputation that belies the image standing before me now.

We make small talk as she leads me through the labyrinth, the maze of little chambers inside this building.

Then as I watch her walking from behind it settles on me, this sense that we have met before.

“You were there,” I say. “On the creek.”

She nods. “I processed the scene.”

I have heard the name Kay Sellig for a dozen years, mostly banter in courthouse corridors, the war stories of lawyers, embellished with each telling. But I have always accepted as fact my good fortune that I have never had to cross this woman in court. In her time she has buried more than her share of criminal defendants behind the concertina-wired walls of Folsom and San Quentin.

Three more turns, down a short hallway, we enter a larger room, and she slows to half speed. I sense that we have arrived.

The place is not unlike a high school chemistry lab in one of the upscale suburbs. Bathed in fluorescent light are a dozen large stainless steel tables bolted to the floor.

“Has Lieutenant Dusalt given you much detail so far?” she asks.

“We’ve had one meeting,” I tell her. “What I know so far is what I read in the papers, and the few files that Mario-Mr. Feretti-compiled before his death.”

“You want to ask questions, or should I do a narrative?” she asks.

Not having read the file, I’d rather listen. I tell her so.

“Fine.” Not looking at any notes she wings it, impromptu. “The killer usually doesn’t leave ID’s, wallets and purses. He takes them. Except for the last murders, we’ve never found any of them. He probably has a shrine somewhere, someplace where they’re all piled up. We’ve had to roll prints each time to identify the victims.”

She moves toward a big chalk board, one of those things supported on a rolling wooden easel. She flips the board to the other side. Here the surface is cork. Pinned to it is an array of glossy colored pictures. Faces, head and shoulder shots of death, taken against the stainless steel autopsy tables of the county morgue.

“The first one was nineteen-Jonathan Snider.” She points. Even in death this face has the artless countenance of youth.

“His girlfriend was eighteen. Her name was Julie Park.” From her picture she was Asian, young and pretty. “They were found on the Putah Creek twelve days ago. The killer made no attempt to conceal the bodies.”

She moves down with her pointer. “The next two were found four days later. Sharon Collins, twenty-two, Acosta’s niece, and Rodney Slate, same age. Again no ID’s. The bodies were left exposed on the ground.”

She points to the next faces of death, more aged this time, staring out at me from the cork board. “The last two you saw at the scene, Abbott and Karen Scofield.”

The woman’s head reveals a dark forlorn cavern on one side of her face, the grotesque image of an empty eye socket, several sharp cuts on the cheek and brow around the vacant cavity.

“For some reason he left their wallets and her purse. Maybe something disturbed him, we don’t know. Scofield and his wife were divorced. He was a member of the faculty at the university, a scientist. Ornithology, I believe.” For the first time, she is looking at notes.

I make a face, like this is Greek to me.

“Study of birds,” she says.

She approaches one of the tables, this one heaped with clothing. It might be anyone’s laundry, except for the large blotches of dried blood on the white shirt and trousers in one of the piles. These are sorted on separate areas of the table, ready for placement in large paper bags numbered and marked for identification, part of the budding chain of evidence.

I notice that the buttons are all missing from the dress shirt. She tells me she cut these off at the crime scene and bagged them for evidence. They have gone down to latent prints, to be smoked in a chamber of heated super glue. It’s a long shot but maybe the killer got careless and touched one of the buttons without gloves.

If the local politicos are worried about a botched crime scene, in Kay Sellig they have been smiled on by the gods of good fortune.

Sellig tells me that the stains on the victims’ clothes were caused by gravity, blood flowing along the ground to the neatly folded articles of clothing placed around the bodies. There are no cuts or tears in any of these items, no evidence of any physical altercation.

“The pattern is always the same,” she says. “The victims are always naked when killed.”

They have found one other piece of evidence. At the first murder scene police believe the killer may have inadvertently left a large plastic trash bag, the kind used to line trash containers. It was found near the creek, probably carried by the wind. It was empty, but a hole had been poked in the bottom. Sellig thinks this may have been used by the killer to carry the stakes and cord, the implements of death. She thinks one of the stakes may be responsible for the hole.

She has not had time to examine the stakes and the cord from the Scofield killings. The cord appears to be similar to that used in the other murders. The stakes are downstairs in latent prints.

“Any evidence of sexual assault?” I ask.

“Not that we can find,” she says. “Medical examiner found sperm in the vaginal vault of the Park girl, but whoever left it there was a secretor, and the blood type matches her boyfriend. Pubic combings turned up some foreign hair on the boy that matches the girl’s.” She pauses for a second to let the obvious settle on me.

“Kids on the campus say the two were an item. We’re thinking the victims got it on together, maybe an hour or two before they were killed.”

“How does he do couples?” I ask. “A little risky, isn’t it?”

“He’s probably armed, he may have help, we’re not sure yet. The victims were all taken from deserted areas, abandoned parking lots late at night. In every case they were the last ones to leave some social function, or a workplace. The killings were done in remote areas, except for the last one. The last one, the Scofield thing, was gutsy,” she says. “He got a little close to the road.” She speculates that this may be part of his growing MO, an unmet desire for added chance. “But he was also lucky,” she tells me. “We’re looking for motorists who might have passed that spot late at night, people who might have seen something. So far we’ve come up with nothing.”

She tells me that the profile experts, psychologists who make their life’s work the study of demented minds, have, despite the lack of any evidence of sexual assault, not ruled out the possibility that the crimes might be driven by a sexual psychosis.

“Some of them think the metal tent stakes are phallic,” she says. “According to this theory, what he does with them may be his own sick form of intercourse.”

They already have a psychological profile of the killer. There was a time when I would have given this all the credence of tarot cards. But I have become a believer.

“Except for the last two, he doesn’t know his victims,” she says. They have deduced this from the fact that the faces of the victims were untouched, not battered or mutilated. Psychologists have determined that it is usually only in cases where the killer knows his victim that the face is battered. The closer the relationship, the more severe is the facial disfigurement.

“You say except for the last two. What’s different there?”

“I’ll get to that,” she says.

“He’s probably white,” she says. Statistics show that in mutilation murders the victim is most often of the same race as the killer.

They gauge the age at between twenty-five and forty. Teenagers who kill are usually violent and impulsive, not the measured ritual of the Putah Creek killer. And anyone too old would have had his hands full with the male victims.

According to the profile the killer probably lives alone. This is almost a “touchy-feely” surmise, I think. But the shrinks reason that the killings evidence signs of alienation-the murderer sees himself as an outsider, not part of any family group or close social setting. This may account for the fact that he always takes couples, his way of lashing back.

“We think he’s spent a lot of time around the creek, he might live near there, or maybe he worked there in the past,” she says.

They have come to this conclusion based on the ritual nature of the crimes; the meticulous arrangement of the bodies on the ground, the careful array of clothing around the victims all indicate that the killer was taking his time, confident that he would not be disturbed.

“He sees this area as his turf,” she says. “He feels safe here.”

The cops are now keying on this last one, canvassing the area for anyone who might have worked or been seen living in the area, a field hand on one of the ranches, maybe a transient who camped there for awhile.

One aspect of the psychological profile is most troubling.

“Killers who rely on ritual,” she says, “don’t usually stop until they’re caught.” It is a sobering thought, but it gets worse.

“We don’t know if he’s becoming more violent,” she says, “or if maybe he might have known the Scofield woman.”

I look at her, a question mark.

“He appears to have gouged the eye from her head,” she says. “We’re still trying to figure why.”

Since the panties were drawn tight over her head, I could not see this at the scene.

We talk in more general terms about the investigation. Except for the profile, the cops are dabbling in the dark. According to Sellig, police can find nothing that connects any of the couples killed.

“The last ones, the Scofields, present a real problem,” she says.

I look at her, my interest piqued.

“Their age,” she says. “He’s broadened the boundaries. He’s not confining himself to the college-age crowd anymore.”

“Maybe it’s not age,” I tell her. “Maybe the common link is the academic set, the university.”

She makes a face like this is a possibility. But she is still troubled. It is an axiom of serial crime that, when killers depart from the usual order of things, those pursuing them have even more reason to worry. The fact that the Putah Creek killer has now taken victims in their fifties injects a random element into the equation of pursuit. We talk about this, but she is stymied. Until Sellig gets the autopsy report on the Scofields she can form no real conclusions.

“What about the thing in the trees?” I ask. “The platform.”

She’s taking her shoes off now, moving toward a locker against the wall. It appears that even the half-heels were a concession to the company dress code, something used only for greeting the public. She is warming to me now, a little more casual. I take this as a sign of trust.

I ask her whether this perch in the trees is connected with the murders.

“We’re still looking into it,” she says.

I probe her on what they found up there.

She makes a face. “Some feathers, and blood,” she says.

“Animal or human?”

“Mostly animal, but there were traces of human blood as well. And some small bones, avian, we think.” There are more puzzled looks from Sellig on this. Like the loose ends just keep piling up.

“We’ve sent the bones and feathers off to the National Wildlife Forensics Lab, up in Oregon,” she says, “for analysis.”

It seems there are only two people in the country who have any background in such things. One of them is eighty-seven years old, a woman on the east coast. The other is a younger woman, her protégée, who has now been enticed away from the Smithsonian to the wildlife facility in Ashland, a kind of criminalistics lab for offenses against nature and the environment.

“They should have some answers for us in a few days,” she says.

“Your best guess?” I ask her.

“Based on the little bit we have?” she says.

I nod.

“I’d say our guy,” she’s talking about the Putah Creek killer, “had nothing to do with the blind in the trees.”

“Then who did?”

“It’s only a hunch right now. I’d rather wait till we get something back from the lab up in Oregon.”

I accept this, and back off.

“Did they find anything like this at the other two sites, down in Orange County and up in Oregon, a platform in the trees, feathers, bones?” I say.

She shakes her head. “No. And we’ve gone back to check the area again at the other two sites here in Davenport. We thought maybe we missed something. But there was nothing there either. No platform or ropes.”

She is pulling on a pair of white running shoes, the kind secretaries around the capital use for fast walks at lunch, their answer to midday aerobics.

“You didn’t happen to go up there?” I ask. “On the platform?”

She nods. Suddenly she’s all cryptic gestures.

Looking at her, somehow I knew that, after the platform was processed by the evidence tech, she could not resist going up and looking.

“Pretty good view?” I ask her.

“An understatement,” she says. There’s a sly smile. She moves toward the locker against the wall and opens the door again. I think she’s putting the half-heels away. But when she turns to face me again she’s holding a long cylindrical object wrapped in a terry cloth towel. As she unwraps this I can see metal and glass and on the side, some lettering, the words “Mirador TTB.”

“It was found on the platform,” she says. “The owner appears to have left in a hurry.” She hands this to me, to inspect.

“It’s a spotting scope. This is a good one. It would cost about a thousand dollars. Shooters use them for long-range shots, to zero their weapons, to find the strikes on a target without walking two hundred yards.”

I’m turning it over in my hands looking at it.

“It’s been dusted for prints,” she says. “We got one smudged latent, unusable, and found some traces of blood on it.”

“It makes no sense,” I say. There’s an instant of dead silence between us as I look at the scope.

“You think whoever was up in the tree had nothing to do with the murders.”

She makes a face, like this is a definite possibility.

“But they may have seen the killer?” I say.

She smiles. “Take a look,” she says. She’s motioning toward the scope in my hands.

I look through the thing, out one of the windows on the far side of the room. Across the broad verdant lawn like the gardens at Versailles, a secretary is taking lunch, seated on a bench with a brown bag. I turn the focus ring, a fraction of an inch, a view like water through crystal. There is moisture on her cheek. She is reading, a little paperback cushioned in one hand-the title clear as the morning newspaper, Erich Segal’s Love Story.

I consider for a moment in my mind’s eye the elements presented; the magic of this little cylinder I hold in my hand, the scaffold high in the trees along the Putah Creek. I conjure the sum of this equation, the thought that perhaps somewhere, out there, is an aimless spectator to death, a prime witness to the murder of Abbott and Karen Scofield.