Crush - Alan Jacobson [59]
It didn’t help. And there was nothing she could do now but wait for the call.
IT CAME EXACTLY three hours later. Brix sent a text message blast to the task force members that was as chilling as it was short:
new vic. meet me.
And he gave them the address.
Dixon made it there in ten minutes, driving the speed limit—keeping it a low profile approach, at Vail’s urging—despite her desire to floor it, lights blazing.
When they drove up, Vail noted that the parking lot to Crooked Oak Vineyards in the Georges Valley District was full of unmarked county vehicles. Even Lugo was in a plain vanilla white Chevy Impala. Vail and Dixon got out and walked past the parked cars, looking for their comrades. Approximately a hundred feet away, amidst an adjacent, well-kept vineyard, they were all huddled around something, their heads down, hung low. Looking at a body, Vail surmised.
But as she and Dixon got closer, Vail was not prepared for what she saw.
VAIL STOOD OVER THE BODY trying to process what she was seeing. But no matter how hard she tried to focus, she couldn’t hone in on what she was feeling, what she was thinking. Come on, Karen. They’re all looking at you—to you—for answers.
But I’ve got nothing.
“Karen,” Brix said again. She barely heard his voice, off in the distance. Then a hand on her shoulder. “Karen, what’s the deal?”
Vail kept her gaze on the victim. On the male body that lay before her. The right shoe and sock were removed. And the second toenail had been forcibly extracted.
VAIL KNELT BESIDE THE BODY. Buying time. Trying to figure out what the hell was going on here. “Forensics?” she asked.
Lugo said, “On the way.”
“This vic, he’s a guy,” Brix said.
“Yeah, I got that. Thanks for pointing it out.” Vail tried to push the confusion from her thoughts. She needed to focus. Look at the body. See it. See the behaviors. Her mental checklist said: right second toenail missing. Breasts—or where they would be had the victim been female—had been sliced away. Bruising over the neck, so they would likely find a crushed trachea. There was linkage to the other murders—the toenail was a detail only those on the task force knew about. And the coroner.
“We’ve got linkage,” she said, hoping that talking aloud would help put it together and bring her to a logical conclusion. “The toenail, the . . . breasts, and the COD—I think we’re going to find out his trachea was crushed. Just like the others.”
“But the others were women,” Brix said.
Vail fought the urge to respond with a sharp retort. Brix was merely looking for answers, and it was anger at her own inability to mentally process this victim that was threatening to bubble to the surface.
“I don’t know,” Vail finally said. She looked up at everyone. They were huddled over the body, looking down at her. “I don’t understand it.”
They seemed to slump en masse. Or maybe she was projecting her sense of inadequacy onto them. Imagining their disappointment. Perhaps she was giving herself too much credit and they were thinking nothing of the sort. They were professionals. Cops, investigators. This was their business.
But they hadn’t dealt with serial crime. Not like this.
And, Vail suddenly realized, neither had she.
TWENTY-THREE
Vail looked over the immediate vicinity: well-pruned rows of leafy grapevines stretched a few football fields into the distance, leading up to tree-dense mountains that rippled the muscular countryside.
The new victim was nestled in the gently concave dirt floor of the area between the vines, with a dark blood puddle pooled beneath the body, the liquid having largely been absorbed into the porous earth. Vail closed her eyes and cleared her mind. “It’s not unheard of for a male to be a victim of a serial killer,” Vail said. “But like I told you yesterday,