Verses for the Dead

41

Fauchet, having already seen the file on Jasmine Oriol, knew it was much sketchier than Laurie Winters’s. Oriol had been found in a motel outside Savannah, Georgia. The case had been handled not by a medical examiner, but by an elected county coroner without an MD, who in turn farmed out the autopsy to an intern at the local hospital. This might very well have been his first real autopsy, and it was a piece of work. The forensic photographs were amateurish and underexposed. The report that accompanied them was almost useless. No photographs of the hyoid bone were sharp enough to show anything useful. The toxicology report indicated that, as with Winters, there were no drugs or alcohol in her system — and that was about it. Shaking her head, Fauchet gathered up the photos and returned them to the file along with the coroner’s report. Short of an exhumation, she’d have to take the report of the broken hyoid wings on faith. But again, it was the nonmedical aspects of the crime that now intrigued her — especially the possibility of the investigating cop having, as in the case of Laurie Winters, made a record of license plates.

She flipped open the police reports. Jasmine Oriol had been on her way from Miami to visit her fiancé in New York City, where he was in medical school. This was the first night of her cross-country trip. Florida was a long-ass state, and maybe Jasmine had gotten a late start — in any case, she hadn’t made it far.

Much to Fauchet’s disappointment, the investigating officer had not copied the motel register, or listed the other guests and their license plate numbers. At least there was an interview with the motel manager, a man named Wheaton, who had been eager to help to the point of volubility: the transcribed interview ran to four single-spaced pages.

Fauchet began reading. Oriol, the manager said, had arrived around six o’clock, asked for a restaurant recommendation, then gone to a diner across the street. Wheaton saw her returning around seven thirty. She stopped in again at the front desk at eight and asked for a hair dryer to use the next morning. The manager didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary — she seemed cheerful and had talked in passing about her fiancé.

The next morning, he was surprised when she slept in: he thought she’d be eager to be on her way. But he didn’t bother her until noon, when he finally sent the maid around. He heard screams, came running, and saw the woman hanging from the ceiling fan, having kicked over a chair underneath her. From this point, the manager went on and on, bemoaning the tragedy and its effect on business, saying that nothing like this had ever happened before, why would she ask for a hair dryer before killing herself, this was a respectable place, and so forth almost interminably until the interviewing officer gently but skillfully ended the interview.

But it was a good question: why ask for a hair dryer to use the next morning and then go hang yourself? Spontaneous suicides, Fauchet knew from medical school, almost always involved drugs or alcohol. But her toxicology report was clean.

There was a file of the maid’s interview, just half a sheet. She read through it and found it a hysterical, babbling mess.

Fauchet sat back, lips pursed. If only the police officer had thought to copy the motel register listing the car makes and license plates, she would know whether the same Mercury Tracer with the Florida plates had been at that motel. She wondered if the motel still existed; a quick Google check indicated it was gone.

She went back through the folders for the other three murders, which still sat on a corner of her desk: Baxter, Flayley, Adler. In no case was there a police officer as thorough as in Bethesda; there were no lists of car models or license plates. Then again, why should there be? All three murders were thought to be suicides.

But she still had the Florida plate number from the motel where Winters was killed. Okay, now it was time to call Pendergast. He could run that plate in ten seconds.

She dialed his number and was immediately directed to voice mail. She tried Coldmoon and the same thing happened. She then dialed the Miami FBI number and, after a lot of being bounced around, learned that the precise location of Agents Pendergast and Coldmoon was unknown, but it was believed they were out in the field.

She set down her phone. She had a brother, Morris, with the Florida Highway Patrol out of Jacksonville. Maybe he could see whom the plate belonged to. She picked up the phone and dialed his number.

“Hello, Sis,” came the deep voice.

Fauchet exhaled with relief. She explained what she wanted and why. There was a long silence, and then Morris said: “Sis? Let those FBI guys deal with it.”

“Listen, Morris—”

“I know you were really into Harriet the Spy as a kid. But you’re an M.E., not a detective.”

She felt crestfallen. “I can’t get hold of the ‘FBI guys.’”

“Call Miami Homicide, then.”

She didn’t want them to have the collar; Pendergast was the one who’d put the critical pieces together. “Can’t you just give me a name? There’s a serial killer out there, and he might kill again at any moment.”

“All the more reason you should leave this to the professionals.” A long sigh. “I love you, Sis, but sorry. They flag those kinds of checks these days — you wouldn’t want me to get fired, right?”

She didn’t answer, waiting him out.

“You know,” he said finally, almost reluctantly, “under the Florida open government act, everyone now has access to a section of the MVD database. You can’t run a plate, but you can check on citations, accidents, DUI, fraud, criminal stuff.”

Fauchet thanked him and said goodbye. Then she put down the phone and ruminated.

The killings ceased after Ithaca. Pendergast had speculated that the murders might have stopped because the killer, or killers, died. And Coldmoon had taken the speculation further, wondering if maybe the apprentice had killed the master. That was possible, of course. It was also just as possible something else happened: some sort of accident — like a car accident — ended the killing spree.

Okay. It was a long shot, but worth a try — to see if the license plate from the Bethesda motel had been involved in an accident in the weeks following the Ithaca murder.

She logged into the morgue’s computer system and moused her way through the labyrinth of governmental menus until she reached the MVD. A minute of poking around brought her to a database search page, where she typed in the license plate number and the date parameters of her query.

Bingo.

A 1997 Mercury Tracer wagon, Florida license plate JW24-99X, was involved in a fatal accident on I-81 south of Scranton, Pennsylvania, in March 2007... just one week after the Ithaca killing.

Fauchet quickly searched the internet and brought up a local newspaper article about the accident. It was brief: the vehicle had gone off the highway, hit a guardrail, and rolled. The car’s registered owner, a man named John Bluth Vance, had been killed in the resulting crush of metal. His fourteen-year-old son, Ronald, had been taken to the hospital with serious injuries. The cause of the accident was “under investigation.”

And that was it. There were no subsequent articles about Vance’s death, the accident, or his son’s movements. It was as if Ronald Vance simply vanished — that is, if the accident hadn’t ultimately killed him.

Fauchet felt her heart pounding. This could be it. Admittedly, the evidence was thin — she’d only matched the car to the site of one killing — but the date and place of the accident matched with the sudden cessation of homicides... as outlined by Pendergast.

The killings stopped after Ithaca because of the fatal accident — which ended the brutal road trip. That wasn’t all. They — a father-and-son team — had been traveling under assumed names. They drove a car with Florida plates. And they had stayed at the same motel as Laurie Winters on the night she was killed.

The son, Ronald Vance — alias Travis Lehigh — would now be twenty-four, maybe twenty-five. If she was right, this fourteen-year-old boy had been forced to participate in a series of horrific murders that — as Pendergast hypothesized — culminated in his committing the final murder at Ithaca himself, shortly before his father was killed in a car accident.

On a hunch, she did a meta-search of the medical databases at her disposal. Nothing showed up on a sweep of the Miami area, or for the state of Florida, either. But when she did a nationwide search, she learned that a Ronald Vance, aged twenty-four, had been released from the King of Prussia Subacute Care Center in September of last year. Digging deeper, she found Vance had been transferred to the center from Powder Valley State Hospital outside of Allentown, nine months before.

Powder Valley Hospital, she quickly discovered, specialized in long-term rehabilitation of neurologic trauma. And like King of Prussia, it wasn’t far from Scranton. If Ronald Vance had been admitted to Powder Valley as a minor, the records would be sealed. That’s why she could only see the recent transfer and release dates.

No wonder the guy was so utterly messed up: he’d been dragged on a monstrous road trip by his father, then gravely injured in a car accident. And that accident resulted in some kind of head injury that took him a decade to recover from. Assuming he recovered... what if he’d developed a psychosis that, to those caring for him, appeared to present itself as trauma instead?

It all made sense. Ronald Vance was Brokenhearts. He’d been released from the subacute care center less than seven months ago — half a year before the new murders started up. Now he was trying to atone for those previous murders — by killing more people! There was a motive here, even if it was insane.

She took a deep breath. Admittedly, there was more due diligence to be done. But this felt right.

This felt huge.

Fauchet turned to a people-search app on her phone and typed in “Ronald Vance, Miami.” It took her less than ten seconds to get a hit.

Holy shit: there it was. So he had come home!

Golden Glades — where was that again? She pulled up her keyboard and typed in the address, and a map of the endless Miami sprawl appeared on her screen. There: abutting North Miami Beach, only a few miles from Pendergast’s safe house. And not too far from the site where the first heart was left.

A half-hour drive. Maybe less, if the traffic cooperated.

Once again she tried to call Pendergast and Coldmoon, but the calls still went straight to voice mail.

She went over the train of logic again, slowly. Was it actually possible she was right? Could Ronald Vance be Mister Brokenhearts — and could he really be living just a short drive away?

She stared at the screen and the map it displayed, with the little red arrow blinking just above the street named Tarpon Court.