Angel Killer Read online

As we enter the cemetery, he explains that Gladys is the county medical examiner, well respected and often brought in for outside opinions. He walks us past the stone markers toward what looks like a large catering tent. It’s actually a wall of white fabric to block the crime scene from the front road and the press.

  “We’ve cleared the area, but please don’t pick anything up or touch anything you don’t have to.” He knows he’s talking to professionals, but he has to say it. “When we got the GPS coordinates we had someone call the caretaker. He was the first one on the scene this morning and didn’t let anyone else in the cemetery.”

  I look around at the grave markers. Most of them are small. There’s none of the really fancy sculpture or stonework you’ll see in big city cemeteries. Like the houses we passed on the way in, this feels working class. Clean, utilitarian, but nothing more. The dates are all over the place. Some are recent. Some are a half-century old. The recent ones tell me it’s the kind of place that could get visitors on a Saturday morning.

  Shannon turns around and gives us the field report. “We called in local police to verify, then I came out here. County did a preliminary forensic examination on-site and drew blood samples before we contacted the parents of the girl and showed them a photograph. They confirmed her as their daughter. And there begins one of several mysteries.” Shannon looks at the grass and realizes he’s resting his foot on a grave marker. He pulls it away. “Chloe McDonald was declared dead almost two years ago. Her body was found in the bay three miles from here. She’d died from multiple stab wounds. Killer still unknown. An autopsy had been performed. There was no doubt about her identity, cause of death and, well, the fact that she was dead.”

  I notice the way Special Agent Shannon says the last words. There’s a moment of hesitation there. He meant them to sound forceful, but they weren’t. He has a sense of doubt about everything. This can’t be the same girl, but it’s gnawing away at him.

  Obviously this is just some sick game the killer is playing. However, I get the feeling that something about it unsettles Shannon more than usual. Guys like Shannon tend to like straight-up, predictable crimes. Bank robberies, kidnapping for money, a murder of passion. It’s the kind where the motives are the most alien that give them stress.

  I suspect because it’s easier to think about things when you can imagine yourself doing them. We can all fantasize about the perfect caper, like how we’d pull off the perfect bank robbery. But to try to understand the motivations of someone who is just plain disturbed is much more difficult and stressful. There’s no predictability there. We don’t want to see any part of ourselves in people capable of that.

  We want to hunt monsters, not be them.

  Danielle speaks up. “What kind of forensic evidence do we have that it’s the same girl?”

  Shannon walks us over to the edge of the white screen. “Blood tests. We’re trying to do a hair sample too. As I mentioned, the parents confirmed it was her. There are even scars in the same spots where Chloe was stabbed. They had no doubt.”

  “What about fingerprints?” asks Danielle.

  “Well, that’s a little complicated. You’ll see in a second.” He nods to a deputy who waves us through a gap. “When we found her, the first thing the examiner did was take a core temperature and measure elasticity and other signs of necrosis. This girl died less than twenty-four hours ago.”

  A field technician is taking photographs of the scene. I blink from the light of the flash. As my pupils dilate, the body of Chloe McDonald comes into focus.

  Danielle gasps. I’m sure I do as well. It’s not the dead body that unsettles us, it’s the look on her face. Mouth open, eyes wide. It’s a look of sheer terror frozen in time.

  This is the gut reaction Ailes wanted me to have. I think of him as a sadist for not warning me. He had to have known. I’m sure on his desk or on his computer screen was a photograph of the crime scene. But he didn’t show it to me. He didn’t prepare me for this.

  He wanted me to see what the Warlock wanted us to see. This wasn’t watching from the wings, this was sitting in the front row. The reaction is visceral.

  6

  CHLOE MCDONALD’S FACE is filled with horror. It’s an expression of agonizing fear because her body is still half buried in the ground from which she appears to have emerged. Her fingernails are a bloody mess, and deep furrows in the grass where it looks like she tried to claw her way free of the earth are still visible. Her burial dress is in dirty tatters, torn to expose her left breast and a red scar presumably from where she had been knifed two years prior. Her skin still has the pink sheen of the living.

  This is no two-year-old corpse. This body is recently dead. She was probably alive this morning while I went jogging.

  I was sipping coffee and going through e-mails while she was being murdered.

  The grave marker behind her is her own, showing her name, dates of her birth and her death. Yet in defiance of that, her apparently recently living body is thrust out of the earth, as if she climbed out of her own grave.

  A heavyset young man with a ponytail kneels down beside her. He’s wearing thick rubber gloves up to his elbows. His ID says he’s a county forensic technician. “We did a gas chromatography examination of the soil immediately around the body. Its oxygen levels indicate it hasn’t been disturbed in over a year.” He points to the grass. “We haven’t found any evidence that the roots have been cut either. It would appear as it seems.”

  That last sentence is a peculiar way to phrase things. It’s like an honest magician. “The box appears empty.” He doesn’t want to describe to the apparent truth that a dead girl came back to life and crawled out of her grave.

  Words are scary. Spells and prayers are words we use to ask for magic. The technician, by all accounts an intelligent young man, is afraid to say what we all see, lest he make it real with an invocation. He can only affirm that we all see the same thing.

  Danielle gives the girl a sad look and shakes her head. She’s not worried about the trick. She just sees the girl. I like Danielle for this. The emotion is gone from her face and she’s all business. She has purpose. “All right, then. Let’s take a look at what’s down there.” She and the other members of the team open their cases and begin taking out equipment.

  I stand back and hand them cords and boxes when asked. Out of the corner of my eye I feel like I’m being watched. I turn around.

  A few yards away a middle-aged woman with her arms folded is observing us with a cross expression from under a canopy. Her dark hair, streaked with silver, is pulled up into a bun. She looks like a professor in her lab coat. I’d bet anything she’s Gladys, the medical examiner.

  I can tell she’s not thrilled with us near the body, even though we’re careful and trying to be mindful of jurisdiction and the chain of evidence. I keep my distance because I don’t even want to get into the reason for my presence. Her eyes still drift toward me as she notices that I’m not really helping set up the equipment. I get the feeling I’m about to be grilled by one of my professors. Smart and analytical, she’s trying to decide why I’m here.

  I realize part of the look on her face is probably due to the fact that she did the original autopsy report on Chloe. I don’t think she buys the idea that the girl crawled her way out of her grave almost two years later. But the presence of this body in such a state suggests that she made a mistake somewhere. I don’t see how that could be. Yet the evidence is right in front of us.

  To this woman, it’s a professional insult to her made worse by a group of FBI techs flying in from D.C. to go over the scene. It’s not personal, but it always feels that way.

  The most basic thing a medical examiner should be able to do is spot death. When you hear stories about infants coming back to life or grandmothers waking up at their own funerals, they always happen in other countries—places where stethoscopes are considered high tech and your average medical professional has less education than a high school teacher.

 
A woman like Gladys doesn’t make those kinds of mistakes. They’re impossible on a body you’ve autopsied. In one of my college classes we watched a human dissection. The examiner made the offhand comment after he sawed into the chest that if the subject isn’t dead at the start, there’s no doubt by the end.

  One of Danielle’s team members places a disk-shaped object a few feet away from the girl. A black cable leads from it to a laptop set up on a foldout table. I walk over to have a look at the display behind everyone else.

  The screen shows an overhead green grid. I assume the disk is in the center. Danielle presses a button, and a low humming sound comes from everywhere, like the woofer on a stereo. Circles radiate from the center of the grid, indicating the sound waves. I don’t know if they are the actual sound waves or a simulation the programmer put in there so people would know the thing was working. It reminds me of a submarine’s radar.

  She presses another series of buttons and the disk makes the weird sound again. The circles radiate away and a rectangular outline becomes visible on the screen.

  The image resolves and I can see we’re looking at the coffin below our feet. I’ve seen hazy ground radar before. This is nothing like that. This image is clear, like a monochrome picture. I imagine what it would be like to use that on the other side of a wall in a hostage situation. Along with armor-piercing rounds, you could take out the bad guys without ever setting foot in the door. I get why this is military grade.

  One of the other agents calls out a number from the screen. “Two-and-a-half meters depth.”

  Danielle nods and hits a key.

  Two-and-a-half meters. Eight feet under. Most coffins aren’t buried this deep. In some places you can bury them under just eighteen inches. This cemetery is old. They probably do so out of habit. Occasionally you bury them deep because you have animals that like to dig. Sometimes those animals walk on two feet.

  The screen pulses again and another image begins to form. We all lean in to get a better view, consciously ignoring the gruesome body just a few yards away. The screen is reassuring. The numbers are precise and scientific. The body is unearthly.

  Gimbal whispers something to Shannon about them already doing this with the local field office radar.

  Danielle overhears him. “Can your system do this?” She touches the trackpad and the coffin spins in 3-D space. It’s not just a 2-D image system. The computer has built a 3-D map of everything underneath us.

  We’re watching a real-time image of the entire area below our feet. Gimbal grumbles something, then shuts up.

  As the coffin rotates, the resolution begins to improve. The hinges and engravings stand out. Danielle spins it to one side, then to the other and stops.

  We all see what she’s looking at.

  The lid is partially open.

  The edge is raised only a few inches, but as she switches to a closer view, we can see the gap.

  It looks like Chloe pried the coffin open and climbed through eight feet of dirt. This isn’t just a planted body. This is a complete illusion.

  “Holy shit,” mutters Gimbal.

  I quietly second that reaction.

  “I can also check the moisture and the soil density.” Danielle glances up as a tech hands her a memory card. While we were staring at the display, he’d used another disk attached to a handheld computer to take readings from other grave sites to create a baseline of the surrounding soil. She plugs the memory card into her computer and a row of numbers fills the screen. “This dirt is just as old as everything else here. Ain’t nobody been digging here for some time—down at least.”

  “Impressive,” Gimbal remarks. It’s obvious he’s talking about the machine and still hasn’t processed what that means.

  Danielle clicks back to the 3-D image. “You ain’t seen nothing.” Danielle types in a sequence and there’s another wave of humming coming from the disk. “Y’all want to take a look inside the coffin?”

  7

  THE EXTERIOR IMAGE of the coffin begins to dissolve away and reveal the interior.

  Empty.

  Chloe’s coffin is empty.

  I catch myself looking back at the body of Chloe. Her glassy eyes, still moist, gaze out in terror. In my mind I can see her crawling out of her grave.

  I know that’s not what happened. It can’t be.

  I’d say it was impossible, but I know better.

  The sight of the coffin gives me a chill different from what everyone else is feeling. I’ve had my own close encounter with death in one. It was the breaking point for me with my family. But I came out on the living side. Not Chloe.

  I walk away from the display while it renders and start searching the ground. I know why Ailes wanted me here, or at least part of the reason. It didn’t hit me until I saw the empty coffin.

  It’s a magic trick.

  The whole thing is one giant magic trick.

  Ailes must have known about my own history with that coffin. What happened in Mexico . . .

  Coffins and magic have gone together for hundreds of years. It’s the ultimate symbol of death, and the greatest miracle a magician can perform is cheating death. It’s what made Houdini famous. People didn’t watch to see him escape from shackles and chains, they came to see him punch the Grim Reaper in the jaw. A defiant little man with an attitude to challenge fate.

  Ironically, Houdini never performed the buried-alive stunt. Tanks filled with water, ice-covered rivers, barrels full of beer—he tried them all. His next illusion, before he died, was going to be an escape buried beneath the Egyptian desert. Others have done the trick. It’s simple enough; a magician gets sealed inside a coffin and covered with dirt, only to miraculously emerge. It’s more than a hundred years old. The most famous version started a religion you may have heard about.

  Before Mexico, before I had enough of the life of performer, I did the buried-alive stunt on Japanese television when I was seventeen. Wearing a diamond bustier and short miniskirt, chained and shackled, I was placed into a clear plastic coffin and buried in a corner of the Tokyo Dome. It was a dumb trick, really. My father and my uncle had created a secret passage the night before. But on television it looked great. I’d done more dangerous things. Stuff that almost got me killed. But none of that ever involved me literally crawling out of the grave. It’s probably physiologically impossible. The weight of the dirt is too heavy and you’ll run out of air.

  Alive or dead, Chloe couldn’t have crawled out of her grave. Not without a trapdoor or a secret passage.

  I pace the ground looking for some evidence of tampering. Some proof of a method. A telltale flap of grass like the one that hid my secret passage. I don’t see any. I kneel down and pull at the turf, just to see if it comes free. It doesn’t.

  I wipe my hands off and stand up when I notice the medical examiner is watching me. I ignore her gaze and look down at the grave markers.

  What if this isn’t Chloe’s grave?

  For a moment I wonder if it’s a kind of puzzle. Did the man who did this just move the markers? That would be the easiest way.

  I count twelve in this row and move on to the next.

  Agent Shannon walks over to me. “Counting plots?”

  “Yes,” I reply. My eyes stop on a marker for a woman who died the same week astronauts landed on the moon.

  Shannon gives a reverential nod to the markers. His voice is hushed like we’re in a church. “We did that earlier. Pulled the records on the graves. No dice.”

  “I didn’t think there would be any. But it’s worth a check.” I’m glad they already thought of it.

  “Ever see anything like it?” Shannon asks.

  “Besides in a magic trick? No. But that’s what this is.” I don’t mention that the last time I saw something like this I was on the inside of the coffin, or that I almost died. I don’t want to sound hysterical or try to make it about me. I don’t think my particular experience is relevant, just my general knowledge.

  He folds his arms and looks
back at Chloe’s body. “Hell of a trick.”

  He’s trying to understand what’s going on here. I’m sure he’s imagining her crawling out of the ground, while the medical examiner is wondering how she possibly could have screwed up and declared a living girl dead. Danielle and her team are trying to figure out the soil chemistry and look for clues there.

  I think of Ailes’s example with the deck of cards. We’re looking at the pieces of cardboard, but not seeing what really happened.

  We’re all distracted. Each one of us thinking along our own biases. Shannon, the physical solution. The medical examiner, the procedural error. Danielle, the scientific explanation.

  I walk back over to the table with the ground radar. The tech who had the handheld scanner, Agent Davis, is offering his theory. He waves his hand toward Chloe and shakes his head as he dismisses the whole thing. “We get this in the South all the time. The soil gets real damp, cracks open a coffin, and a body floats to the top in the mud. We even have tombs where the coffins get rearranged because of the flooding. People think it’s ghosts.” He seems confident in his theory, but I notice he doesn’t look over at Chloe when he says “ghost.”

  Words have power.

  He seems happy with his explanation and looks at the other members of the team, waiting for their approval.

  The medical examiner speaks up behind us. “Do your bodies manage to change their cause of death? Miraculously heal from their wounds, only to die two years later from asphyxiation? Spontaneously dry the mud in hours?” Gladys’s words are bitter.

  Detective Gimbal tries to calm her down. “Gladys, your judgment is the last thing anyone here is going to question.”

  She gives him a sharp look. “I’m not worried about that. I just want to get her out of the ground and onto my table so I can do a proper exam. The sooner you finish with the technology demo, the better.”

  “You got your blood samples,” replies Shannon. “And I think we’re going to need to evaluate where we do the autopsy . . .”