Julia Spencer-Fleming - I Shall Not Want

"Chief? This is Trooper McLaren." The state police K-9 officer who had joined the search. "We've got a body here. Over."

"Thanks, McLaren, I know. Isn't one of my officers already there? With the pathologist?" Belatedly, he added, "Over."

"No, Chief. We were briefed about the body the initial searchers found. This is something my dog's just dug out of the ground. It's a second dead guy. Over."

Monday. Memorial Day. Everybody in the United States was going to be hanging out and having a good time-except the sworn officers of the Millers Kill Police Department. Maybe this is why my social life sucks , Kevin thought, taking his seat for the morning briefing. At least it wasn't sucking alone. Everybody was on today, all shifts: the part-time guys and the volunteer fire traffic wardens, too. Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day-they were always big.

But they didn't always arrive with three unidentified homicide victims.

"The two discovered yesterday were both killed in the same way as John Doe number one." The chief, sitting in his usual spot atop the table, was grubby and crumpled around the edges. He, MacAuley, Hadley Knox, and Eric McCrea had been up half the night, working the scenes with the state CSI techs. "Single tap at the back of the head with a small-caliber weapon, probably a full jacket. Classic execution style."

"Scheeler's report noted there wasn't any signs the first John Doe'd been restrained," MacAuley pointed out. "If he'd been taken out to the woods for an execution, you'd think whoever did it woulda trussed him up beforehand." He was standing at the whiteboard, summarizing the briefing.

The chief paused. "Taken by surprise, then. Wham, bam, thank-youma'am."

"So what are we looking at?" Paul Urquhart said from the back of the room. "Gangland slaying? Organized crime? If we had something like that moving into our area, we'da noticed it before this."

The chief held up his hands. "Let's go through what we know step-by-step." He slid off the table and turned to the bulletin board, almost covered with photos of John Does one, two, and three, environmental placing shots, and the downstate rap sheets Kevin had looked at Friday night. "John Doe one."

"Juan Doe," Urquhart muttered.

"Male Hispanic aged between twenty-one and twenty-eight. Killed sometime mid-April. John Doe two. Male, possibly Caribbean or African-American, based on hair fragments-"

"DeWan Doe." Urquhart sniggered.

The chief stopped. "You got something you want to share, Paul?" Urquhart shook his head. The chief gave him a long look before continuing. "Age between twenty-one and twenty-eight. Killed sometime last year in the late fall or early winter. John Doe three: male, age between twenty-one and twenty-eight. Killed more than a year ago."

"The ME any more specific than that?" MacAuley asked.

"He had some fillings. Doc Scheeler's going to get a dentist to try to date the amalgam. We probably won't have anything until tomorrow at the earliest."

The chief crossed to the laminated township map that covered half the other wall. "Location of the bodies," he said. "John Does three and two were found roughly a mile north-northwest of the old Muster Field off Route seventeen in Cossayuharie." He marked a three and a two with a dry-erase marker. "They were slightly less than three-quarters of a mile away from each other"-he drew a broken line that slanted drunkenly northwest from the pale green rectangle representing the Muster Field-"buried along a natural flint formation that runs along this line and then drops off steeply into the valley below."

"Somebody walked in."

Kevin hadn't realized he said it aloud until the chief nodded. "Somebody walked in."

"And went as far as he could go along fairly level terrain," MacAuley added.

"Who owns that land?" Eric McCrea asked.

The chief looked at Noble Entwhistle. Noble was no Sherlock Holmes, but he gave you better results than Google if you needed a name or date for something that happened in Millers Kill. "The town," he said. "It used to belong to Shep Ogilvie, but they took it for unpaid taxes back in 'eighty-seven, when his dairy went under."

"Easy access from the highway," McCrea said. "If there's no snow, you can drive a car almost all the way back to the tree line on that field."

"That's one big difference between John Does two and three and the first guy we found," the chief said. "It's a coupla kidney-cleaning miles from the nearest public road to where John Doe one was dumped." He put a 1 on the McGeochs' farm.

"But it is in the same general area where you were out chasing those runaway illegals," MacAuley pointed out.

"I think we can safely say that's a dead end." The chief went back to his table and picked up his coffee mug. "The men running around in those woods were in Mexico last year when the last two John Does were killed."

"The Christies and their kin weren't."

The chief let his hand fall open. "Put them on the board."

"Chief." Kevin tried to control his face from pinking up as everyone turned toward him. "How do we know they were in Mexico a year ago? I mean, if they were illegals, there wouldn't be any trail, because that's kind of the point. I know they weren't employed by your sister and her husband, but maybe they were in the area working for somebody else." He paused. The chief made a "go on" gesture. "Maybe we should canvass area farms and see who might've had migrant workers last year and over winter."

"Maybe." The chief leaned against the table. "My problem with that is I don't see the connection between dairy hands and professional executions."

Kevin figured everyone was thinking the same thing. So he said it. "What if it's not professional?"

"What do you mean, Kevin? A sport killing? Somebody doing it for kicks? No." The chief pinched the bridge of his nose. "I refuse to believe we're dealing with some sort of serial killer here."

"You need to at least put it on the table, Russ." MacAuley wrote the words "Thrill killer" at one corner of the board.

"Serial killers go after vulnerable populations. Kids. Prostitutes."

"What about Jeffrey Dahmer?"

"Bob Berdella?"

"Randy Steven Kraft?"

MacAuley gave them a look that said shut up . He turned to the chief. "The vics already fall into a class," he said. "Young men in their early twenties." He ticked a point off one finger.

"Watch out, Kevin," Urquhart said.

"Non-Caucasians." The deputy ticked off another finger.

"We can't say that about three." The chief crossed his arms over his chest.

"Killed during tourist season." MacAuley ticked off his third finger.

"April? Nobody comes to Millers Kill in April."

"Bodies left in remote locations in Cossayuharie." MacAuley ticked off a fourth finger. "And finally, all three of them killed in the same fashion with the same-caliber weapon." He held his hand up and waggled his fingers. "We can't rule out a serial killer. Not with three bodies agreeing on five points."

"Why-" Hadley started to say, then shut her mouth.

"Go, on, Knox," the chief said.

She swallowed. "Why was the first guy-I mean, John Doe one-why was he dumped? The others were buried. Not deep, but they were buried. He was just laying out there in the open."

The chief slid up onto the table and braced his boots on a chair. "What do you think?"

Her face fell into the cool expressionless mask that had completely unnerved Kevin when she'd directed it toward him. She's panicked , he realized. She's afraid of coming across like an idiot . The chief looked at her patiently. MacAuley looked at her like a guy who was running late for his proctologist's appointment. Kevin twitched in his seat. Urquhart was smirking.