Bone Deep

7

The were on display in the FBI forensic lab in New York like a paleontologist's dream-complete skeletons laid out from head to foot, everything in its place, nothing left to speculation. Lying side by side, teeth grinning ironically in the horrible skeletal grimace, they looked like a horizontal chorus line of phantoms, frozen in time and space in a Halloween dance. There were six of them in all, and each was identified by a tag placed between the, feet that read "Fl — Becker,"

"F2-Becker," and so on, with the date on which it was exhumed. "F" meant female.

Becker looked at the identification tags with distaste, as if the bodies had been assigned his name because he had had something to do with their deaths, not because he was the case officer. Grone, a forensic technician, spoke of the skeletons with pride. "You don't see a display like this outside of medical school," he said. "Everything's there, each in its own little bag, neat as a pin. You could bring students in here and teach them right off the slab. Becker's beauties." Becker glared at him. "What did you say?"

"We're calling them that, Becker's beauties."

"Don't," Becker said. "No offense intended," Grone protested. "Well, there's offense taken. These are not mine."

Grone nodded and turned away to hide his consternation. He realized they were not Becker's, Becker had his own bodies, everyone in the Bureau had heard about Becker's bodies. Eight of them, ten, twelve-the numbers varied according to the legend or the excitement of the teller, because people in the Bureau became exercised and imaginative when discussing Becker and his feats, real and imagined. As certain men grew impassioned describing the exploits of great athletes, agents in the Bureau, trained to the craft, thrilled to Becker's record. Enough of the deeds ascribed to him were true, or sufficiently true, to lend credence to the rest. He had killed a number of men-and one woman-each of whom was a serial killer, a dangerous, desperate sociopath; but it was the rumored zest with which he did it that aroused adniiration, fear, and disapproval in almost equal parts from his fellow agents. They thought of him as a ferret, born to the hunt and specially equipped by nature with a feral understanding of his prey, a bloodlust that matched his victims'. Becker was a serial killer himself, it was pointed out by his detractors. Licensed to it by the FBI, lauded for it. What they did not say was that he was also haunted by it. He knew what was said about him, he heard the whispers and saw the furtive looks from those not bold enough to confront him. Just as hard to bear were the congratulations and misapplied approval of those who thought him a hero.

Hardest of all was that he knew the truth on which all the exaggeration was based. There was no need to exaggerate, Becker thought grimly. The truth was bad enough.

"Naturally we'll be putting names on them when we can make IDs through dental records. Right now, we haven't got a clue."

"That's a poor choice of words for a criminalist," Becker said.

Grone tried to smile. Becker frightened him, not because of his reputation but because of a certain keen concentration that set him apart from the others. It was said that he could look at the evidence and see things with his naked eye that the technicians had missed with their microscopes. Grone did not believe that, he knew it was hyperbole, part of the gentle hazing applied to new men in the lab, and he had said it himself to intimidate rookies, but it was true that Becker looked at things differently. As if he had a contrary understanding of evidence. As if he had the point of view of the one who had created the evidence, not the ones who had discovered it.

"Well, still, the fact is, we have very little to work with here. The bones have been in the ground a long time, the flesh has long since putrefied, some of the nutrients probably taken up by the trees-the roots had penetrated the bags, in some cases they even penetrated the bone, amazing how persistent nature is with growing organisms — Everything soluble has leached out into the soil and all we have left are the bones-and of course, the hair."

"What about the bags?"

"Standard lawn-and-leaf trash bags, buy them in any SUpermarket or hardware store in the country. They are double-bagged in each case, by the way. They'd pretty much have to be if he carried the bodies at all.

There are no fingerprints on any of them, and none on the little wire ties he sealed them with. Johnny was wearing gloves."

"Fibers?"

"A few, very few-fibers don't stick that well to the kind of plastic used in those trash bags, especially after several years underground.

The orchard was on the side of a hill, right? They got runoff water after every rain and a lot of that was percolating over and around and past those bags. I mean, they've been washed and washed and washed."

Becker stared at Grone, waiting for him to finish his excuses. Grone shifted uncomfortably under Becker's scrutiny. He suspected there was something he had missed, something Becker was just waiting to point out to him.

"The fibers we do have are synthetics, the kind used in industrial carpeting. What they call indoor/outdoor, but it's usually indoors. The kind of carpet you'd find in a public place, an entry hall to an office, the interior of a shop, just about anywhere you get a lot of traffic."

"Would you find it in a hotel?" Becker asked.

Grone considered, contorting his lips. "Have to be a pretty cheap hotel, I'd think. This stuff is not high-quality carpeting. I can show you under the scope if you like."

"How about in a cheap hotel? Or a motel?"

"Maybe," said Grone. "I don't spend that much time in cheap motels myself." He tried to grin, immediately regretted it.

"It's not your habits I'm concerned with," said Becker. "He cut them up someplace. He had to put the bag down when he did it. Is this the kind of carpet somebody might put in his basement, his den?"

"You think somebody cut these girls up in his den?"

"Why not?"

"Why not? In his house? Like it was his hobby?"

"You're not new at this job, are you, Grone? Do you think Johnny kills girls for a living? It's his passion, his joy, his greatest thrill. He might very well do it at home. He might do it in the den while the wife and kids are in the living room watching television. What's your passion, Grone? Where do you exercise it?"

"I… don't have a passion. Not like that."

"Johnny's one up on you then, isn't he? At least he knows what his passion is." Becker immediately felt ashamed of himself. He had sensed Grone's fear and been offended by it, and had lashed out at him for it.

It was not the act of the man he had hoped he was becoming. "Sorry," he said. "Hey," said Grone, shrugging, wondering if perhaps Becker was right. "No problem." He wanted to add that he, too, had passions, but he wasn't certain what they were. "We're still working on the manufacturers. If we identify them, they can help us limit things a little bit anyway."

"See if it's used in cars, too."

"Cars, right."

"Cars, trucks, vans, whatever. Especially in trunks. He had to transport them some way." Grone nodded dutifully, took notes.

"So tell me about the bones," said Becker.

Grone had been dreading the question. "Well, first off, we have dated them, rather loosely I'm afraid, according to the degree of microbial damage and the rate of ion exchange with the minerals in the surrounding soil. Number six was in the ground the longest. I'd make it just over six years. Number five is about five years, and the rest all about a year apart down to number one, which has been underground about a year, give or take. If the roots hadn't penetrated the bags and exposed the tissues to water and the microorganisms in the soil, and of course the worms, the beetles, the grubs of various kinds, the deterioration would have progressed much more slowly, of course. I mean, if he'd buried them in a coffin, the process would have been retarded by a factor of many years."

"Don't you suppose he knew that? Whatever else he is, he's not stupid.

He's got six successful murders to prove it."

"Well, that raises a question," Grone said, feeling more comfortably on solid footing for a change. "Was it murder at all? I mean, one assumes it was, but with this extent of decay, with the soft tissue gone, there's no way for me to tell how they died. He didn't shoot them-there are no holes in their skulls, no fractures of the bones. These were healthy young women, there's no sign of disease in the bones that would account for anything fatal. Tuberculosis could show in the bone, for instance. Syphilis, lots of things. One of these broke some ribs-number three, it isyeah, there, you can make it out with the naked eye, but not recently, I mean not prior to her death. Another must have had a problem with her shoulder at some time-that's number five-see that bone spur there? An athletic injury of some kind. Throwing something, serving too many tennis balls. Again, that's not going to kill her.

Number six had a broken leg that had healed, oh, two years before she died, more or less. These are normal childhood traumas, — irls are active athletically these days, None of this could have caused their deaths."

"If they were smothered, for instance, would anything show now?"

"Not unless a vertebra had been cracked during the act."

"If they'd been given lethal injection, bled to death, drowned?"

"Nothing. If they'd been subjected to slow poisoning, that would show up-if I knew what poison to look for."

"It wouldn't surprise me if they died slowly," Becker said. "But not that slowly. What else can you tell me?"

"Well, Johnny likes very clean women. There are traces of soap or detergent in their hair. All of them."

"is that unusual?"

"That depends on how you wash your hair. Usually it takes more than one rinse to get all the detergent from shampoo out. Most people carry around traces of their last shampoo until the next one. You wouldn't expect to find as much as we found after six years though. Especially soap. Soap's organic, you would expect it to be gone after a few months, unless there was a lot of it. In other words, a big lather, a bad rinse. In fact, if you had that much soap in your hair to begin with, you'd probably notice, it would bother you.

"Meaning..

"Well, meaning they didn't put it in in the first place. I think Johnny did, I think Johnny washed their hair just before he killed them."

"Or just after," Becker added.

"You think he's a hairdresser?"

"Any way to tell what brand of shampoo?"

"Not now, the formulas are all much the same anyway. It's not good soap though. The percentage of fat content seems rather low, although that might be as a result of microbial degradation. It's hard to say."

"Laundry soap?"

"I don't think so. The chemical balance doesn't look quite right for that. Just cheap soap, would be my guess."

"Some were soap and some were shampoo?"

"Right."

"Were any both?"

"No. Just one or the other."

Becker looked at the displayed skeletons. The samples of hair, enclosed in plastic bags, lay next to each skull.

"So he took whatever was at hand," Becker said. "But something was always at hand. That means he had access to soap, or shampoo, and water every time. Cheap soap. A bathroom, maybe a kitchen, a laundry room, anywhere there was a tap and a drain."

"Or a hose," Grone volunteered. "He could have done it outside."

"He's not apt to have soap available at an outdoor hose, and I'm assuming he didn't bring it with him or he'd probably be more consistent in his choice. They develop their favorites, you know. They like to do things in the same way, once they perfect their rituals. Johnny is showing more flexibility than most… Sounds like a cheap hotel to me.

If they have samples of shampoo, he uses those; if not, he uses the hand soap… What else from the hair?"

"They 're all Caucasian, Numbers six, five, and two had used some form of bleach, although they were blondish to begin with. None of them were too particular about their roots. Again, maybe a hairdresser, he got to know them as customers…"

"You like that idea, don't you? Do you have something against hairdressers, Grone?"

"What's wrong with it?"

I 'Nothing, it's just a little early to categorize him. You shut off too many other possibilities that way. Any pattern in the length of hair?"

"Four of them shoulder-length or longer. Two of them much shorter, fairly tight cuts. In addition to the three semiblondes, there were two brunettes and a kind of rust-colored one. She had curly hair, the others were relatively straight He has eclectic tastes."

"'Anything else about the hair?"

Grone shrugged. "What would you like?"

"I'm surprised at you, Grone. It's not all chemical analysis. How was it cut? Scissors? Razor? Professionally? Did they cut it themselves with kitchen shears, or did they go to your favorite hairdresser?"

Grone was embarrassed. He breathed deeply before responding. "I'll check it out."

"And the bones. How did he hack them up?"

"He didn't hack them. They were separated at the joints with an instrument with a small blade. An awfully timeconsuming way to do it, it seems to me. Johnny doesn't seem to be in any hurry."

"True. But he may not have any choice. Assuming he cut them up to make them easier to transport, he would need something big and heavy to cut through the bones, right? A butcher's cleaver or a big chef's knife at the least.

You can't carry that around in your pocket like a penknife. Someone is going to notice-the girls are going to notice. He probably wasn't carrying his equipment with him in anticipation of what he was going to do, no briefcase, no shopping bag, or else he would have his own shampoo with him. Sound right?"

Grone nodded.

"He may have been making a virtue of necessity. The wonder is that he managed at all."

"He managed, but he was pretty clumsy at it," said Grone.

Grone went down the line, lifting the bones with his gloved hands-the femurs, tibiae, humeri, and ulnae-and showing the end of each in its turn to Becker.

"Here and here and here and here," he said. "Slash marks. See them?"

"Like on the first bone we saw," Becker said. "The humerus."

"He had trouble getting through the joints. It's not surprising."

Becker stared at the display for a moment, then donned a pair of disposable plastic gloves and picked up one of the thighbones himself.

"Similar, aren't they?"

"How do you mean?"

"The cut marks are almost parallel. They look pretty much the same in every case. Right? Or is it my imagination?"

"You're right," Grone agreed. "They're very similar." Becker walked the length of the grisly display, picking up one bone, then the other, holding them together where they joined, examining the two parallel lines on each end, seeing where they joined. In some cases he made fine motions with his hand over the bone, looking to Grone rather like a priest making the sign of the cross in miniature.

"I should have noticed that about the similarity, I'm sorry," said Grone.

"It's not your job," Becker said. "Don't worry about it. You're looking at things through a microscope, it's very hard to see a larger picture that way. Not your fault at all."

"Well…" Grone let the thought fall away. Becker was offering him a graceful way out; he decided to take it.

"A question," Becker said, holding the tibia and femur of number five in either hand.

"Sure."

"Am I holding these right? Is this the way these bones line up-in life?"

Grone adjusted the bones slightly.

"Okay. Like this?" Becker said. "You're trying to separate these two with your pocketknife. There are those two parallel cuts on both sides of the joint, right? Almost exactly opposite each other."

He placed the bones on the table in the position Grone had indicated.

The ends of the two bones were a quarter-inch apart.

"Show me how those cuts in the bone got there," Becker continued. Using his forefinger as a knife, Grone made slashing motions in one direction, then turned his hand and made the same motions in reverse order. He looked to Becker to gauge his reaction.

"Fine, if the cuts were on the side of the bone, but they're not," said Becker. "They're on the interior of the joint. Make those cuts on the interior of the joint."

Grone picked up a pencil and tried to do as he was bid. "Can't do it," he said. "You can't get the right angle at it. "

Becker then separated the bones and held them a foot apart. Grone simulated the cuts with ease.

"He made the cuts after the bones were separated?" Grone asked.

Becker shrugged. "I don't know enough about it to say, but it looks like I'd better find out."

"Why would he do it afterwards?"

"Who knows? A ritual of some kind. It all becomes ritual to them after a while. These guys have fetishes about the way their victims look, the way they die-why not about the way they're sliced apart? Maybe these parallel cuts are a totem of some kind. Or maybe he's trying to leave a signature."

"Leave a signature so we can find him?"

Becker shook his head. "Myth," said Becker. "The tormented killer leaves a note saying, 'Catch me before I kill again'? Not very damned often. These boys are happy in their work, believe me. They're doing exactly what they want to do when they murder somebody, it gives them a greater thrill than anything else in the world. They don't want to get caught. They want to do it again and again and more often, and faster and quicker and sooner. Johnny has had these skeletons very effectively hidden for six years. That doesn't sound much like he's trying to be caught, does it? If we catch him, or any of them, it's only because of a lot of work and more dumb luck than we care to admit."