Springboard

17

Getting rid of a body was not nearly as worrisome as all the forensic television shows and movies made it out to be. The main trick was to make sure the corpse wasn’t discovered before you were far enough away that the authorities couldn’t possibly link it to you. And not to leave anything really obvious around that pointed in your direction — DNA, fingerprints, or your business card…

All that stuff where they took a hair and put it into some medical machine that whirred and fifteen seconds later spit out a picture of the killer? Total fabrication.

Locke had wrapped the blackmailer up in the bed’s top sheet, waited until dark, and taken the corpse to his rental car, where he put it into the trunk. He’d located the motel’s cleaning woman, waited until she had gone into an empty room to clean it, and taken a clean sheet from the stack on the cart to replace the missing one.

The next morning — one did not want to skulk around late at night with a body in one’s car trunk and risk being pulled over by a bored policeman — Locke drove to a nearby industrial district and scouted it. It took but half an hour for him to find what he was looking for. He found the number of a real estate agent on the sign in front of the building, made a call from a pay telephone, and determined the information he needed. Luck ran his way — the place was perfect.

From there, he drove to a local mall and bought supplies. From a hardware store, he purchased a hand-truck dolly, a battery-powered Skil Saw, a tree saw, and a hammer, along with a small machete, a painter’s drop cloth, and a box of green plastic leaf bags. He also picked up a set of painter’s coveralls, shoe covers, and rubber gloves, and several bottles of spray cleaner and paint thinner.

At an art supply store, he bought a large roll of plastic wrap and another of white butcher’s paper, along with a black marking crayon.

He found a cyber cafe, bought an hour on a computer, and logged on to the Internet. There, he found an appliance store, and using a PayPal account into which he had deposited several thousand dollars under a phony name months before, bought a chest freezer and arranged to have it delivered immediately to the address he had found in the industrial district.

At a long-term parking lot near a new commuter airport, he stole a minivan, swapping the license plates on it with the car parked next to it. He wore a basic disguise when he did this — a hat, a pair of sunglasses, and a fake moustache — and paid the lot fee on the stolen car at an automated exit teller. He drove back to his rental car, parked in a lot next to a cinema complex, and transferred the body and supplies to the new vehicle.

He drove out into the Virginia countryside, found what looked like an old and mostly unused logging road in a pine forest, and drove until he was several miles away from the main road.

He got out, dressed in the coveralls and shoe covers, and put the gloves on.

He carried the rest of his supplies and the body into the woods. He laid out the drop cloth and unwrapped the body onto it. He removed the clothes and put them into a trash bag.

It took a couple of hours to get the body reduced to packages of five pounds or less, fifteen minutes alone to saw the head into small bits and knock all the teeth out. Each part was wrapped in plastic, then in butcher’s paper and marked with a crayon: steaks, roasts, ribs, chops.

When he was done, he rolled the bloody drop cloth up and put it into a plastic bag, cleaned the saws and machete carefully, then loaded these into three different plastic bags. He removed the coveralls, gloves, and shoe protectors, and put them into another bag.

He packed up and left.

Back at the industrial site, which was a recently emptied building, he parked in the back where he’d had the freezer delivered. He picked the lock on the door, and used the hand truck to move the small freezer into the building. He removed the freezer from its corrugated cardboard box, and took the styrofoam packaging out. As the real estate agent had told him, the electricity was still on, and was supposed to stay on for at least a month, because there was a new tenant due to move into the building then. He found an outlet and plugged in the freezer.

He transferred the packages from the van and put them into the freezer, all except the bits of head and fingers, closed the freezer, relocked the door, and drove away. It wasn’t recommended, to load a freezer that way before it got cold, but if the meat was burned a little, that didn’t really matter. Eventually it would go solid.

At a Dumpster behind a butcher shop, he put the leaf bag with the drop cloth in it.

At an apartment complex eight miles away, he got rid of the bag with the dead man’s clothes. He kept the wallet, watch, and keys, along with a ring.

The freezer’s packaging went into a different trash bin.

The wallet, empty, and the watch, ring, keys, and saws went into a lake in a park, heaved far enough from shore that nobody was apt to step on them if they went wading, which they probably wouldn’t, since there was a sign that forbade swimming. He tossed the teeth into the water, too. Even if somebody found any of them with the fillings, there was no way to put them into context to match a dental chart.

The rest of the supplies went into trash bins or Dumpsters in four different locations. The last bags, containing his coveralls and gloves and the contents of the dead man’s wallet, he set afire in an old oil drum behind a junk yard, using the paint thinner to get them flaming good. He made sure the gloves burned — no fingerprints left there.

He drove to a cemetery and found an open grave awaiting a new tenant. He remembered the old joke about grave-yards: Why were there fences around them? Because people were dying to get in. He put the bag with the chopped-up head and fingers into the empty grave, covering it with enough dirt so that it wasn’t visible. He very nearly was discovered at this by somebody visiting nearby, but managed to finish his chore before they got close enough to see him. He had considered finding a dog kennel or going to an animal shelter and feeding the bits to the dogs, but he remembered the old urban legend about the choking Doberman, and while the brains and skull bits wouldn’t give anything away, a finger would, since government security guards had their prints on file.

He returned to the airport lot, put the minivan back in the same slot it had occupied before, switched the license plates to their original vehicles, and left.

As he drove toward a different motel, he considered what he had done. Yes, it had been a lot of work — he could just as easily have buried the headless/fingerless body in the woods, It might not have lain there undisturbed forever, but it probably wouldn’t have been discovered for weeks or months, if not years. And once it was found, the authorities probably wouldn’t have been able to ID the corpse — most people did not have DNA records on file.

But when the new tenants of the industrial space opened the freezer, they would either toss the packages of meat, or somebody would take one home for supper. If that happened, unless that diner happened to be a cannibal, there would be an immediate uproar. Such a heinous crime could only be the work of some twisted sociopathic psychotic, a real loon, and the FBI profilers would have themselves a fine time.

And what they would come up with wouldn’t bear any resemblance to Jack Locke…

He smiled. He had given them a show, and they would buy it, because they wanted to buy it. Locke was, he felt, an artist, and this kind of thing was part of his art and craft. The last person they’d be looking for would be a Hong Kong businessman.

A simple sleight of hand. And clever, too, if he did say so himself.

Meanwhile, he still had to deal with the issue at hand, Net Force and CyberNation, and while that shouldn’t take any violence, it was always an option…