Alex Kava Bundle - Alex Kava [608]
Last time there had been many more pots, huge ones, boiling on the burners, filling the room with the smell of cooked flesh. Thankfully the burners were empty this time, perhaps because of the holiday weekend. Even the dryers and the sinks in the far corner looked empty, no bony hands waving up at them.
The shelves that lined the back wall, however, were just as crowded as she remembered with jars and vials, bowls and cardboard boxes, all filled with jigsaw pieces of bone, some labeled, others waiting, perhaps forever, to be identified or claimed.
A streak of sunlight came in the classroom’s double-paned windows, a yellow-orange splash that cast an eerie tone over the entire room. Maggie couldn’t help thinking they didn’t need the added sense of drama. Bonzado already looked like an actor out of Hamlet with skull in hand and a soulful look. That is, of course, if you could imagine Hamlet in a purple-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt, khaki walking shorts and hiking boots.
“The one we found Friday might be identified by sight. I’ve got someone checking against the missing persons list. Dental’s intact, too. It was in much better shape,” Racine explained, and Maggie wondered if she was simply trying to fill the silence. Bonzado didn’t seem to be listening. “Well, better shape if you don’t count all the fucking maggots it had on it. Jesus! I haven’t seen that many in a long time.”
“You’re lucky in this heat. The little suckers work fast,” Bonzado said. So he had been listening. “Where was this one found? Was it close to the water, too?”
“Is that Jane Doe A or B?” Racine asked, looking for the toe tag Stan Wenhoff had attached to each bag. Without the tags it was difficult to tell the two skulls apart. Racine rummaged through the cooler, searching for any ID that may have been left behind.
“It’s Jane Doe A,” Racine finally said, pulling out the tag. “This one was found in Rock Creek Park. A wooded area down away from the running trail. A woman and her dog found it. She called it in and gave the directions. Said her dog stumbled upon it.”
“It was preserved fairly well for being in the woods.”
“It was covered with leaves and dirt.” Racine was checking her notes from the file.
“Did you say a woman called it in?” Maggie didn’t remember seeing a name in the file and now she realized it may have never been given. “She didn’t take you to the site or meet you there?”
“No, she didn’t even come in to file a report,” Racine said. “Called it in to 911 and the dispatch operator took all the information.”
“And she didn’t leave a name?”
“No name.” Racine looked up from her notes and met Maggie’s eyes.
She could see the detective was thinking the same thing she was. Had it been the same woman caller who directed them to the bank of the Potomac on Friday? To another one of the killer’s dump sites?
“Did a woman call in the other one?”
Racine pulled out another file folder and started riffling through it. “Here it is. Jane Doe B was found outside a construction site for a new parking garage. The owner, a Mr. Bradford Zahn, contacted the police. Hmm…no mysterious woman caller.” She wasn’t pleased and shrugged when she looked up at Maggie. “So much for our theory.”
Bonzado appeared unfazed by it all. Instead, he had laid the head on its side and was examining the marks at the base of the severed skull.
“I can’t be certain what he used to cut off her head, but I’m thinking it was more like he chopped it than cut.”
“Chopped and ripped,” Maggie added. “The last victim’s neck had a lot of rips and tears.”
“This reminds me of a case I had a couple of months ago,” Bonzado told them. “All that was found was the right leg. It was fairly decomposed, too. Somebody fished it out of the Connecticut River. The chop marks were very similar to this. I kept trying to reproduce the marks, using just about