Tess Gerritsen - The Keepsake

“So he does it in broad daylight?” said Frost. “Drags her from his car and hauls her to the water? He’d have to have the location picked out ahead of time. A place he knew he wouldn’t be seen, and close enough to a road so he wouldn’t have to carry her far.”

“There are other conditions required,” said Vandenbrink.

“What conditions?” asked Jane.

“The water must be deep enough and cold enough. Temperature matters. And it would have to be remote enough so the body wouldn’t be found until he was ready to claim her.”

“That’s a long list of conditions,” said Jane. “Wouldn’t it be easier just to fill a bathtub with water and peat moss?”

“How can you be certain you’d properly replicate the conditions? A bog is a complex ecosystem that we don’t fully understand, a chemical soup of organic matter that has to steep over centuries. Even if you manage to make that soup in a bathtub, you’d need to initially chill it to four degrees Celsius and hold it there for at least several weeks. Then the body would need to soak for months, perhaps years. How would you keep it concealed that long? Would there be odors? Suspicious neighbors?” He shook his head. “The ideal place is still a bog. A real bog.”

But those broken legs remained a problem. Whether the victim was alive or dead, she would need to be carried or dragged to the water’s edge, over terrain that might be muddy. “How big was she, do you think?” Jane asked.

“Based on skeletal indices,” said Maura, “I estimate her height at around five foot six. And you can see she’s relatively slender.”

“So maybe a hundred twenty, a hundred thirty pounds.”

“A reasonable guess.”

But even a slender woman would weigh a man down after a short distance. And if she were already dead, time would be of the essence. Delay too long, and the corpse would begin its inevitable journey to decay. If she were still alive, there would be other difficulties to contend with. A struggling and noisy victim. The chance of being heard while you dragged her from the car. Where did you find this perfect spot, this killing place?

The intercom buzzed, and Maura’s secretary said over the speaker: “Dr. Isles, there’s a phone call on line one. It’s a Scott Thurlow from NCIC.”

“I’ll take it,” said Maura. She pulled off her gloves as she went to the telephone. “This is Dr. Isles.” She paused, listening, then suddenly straightened and shot a look at Jane that said, This one’s important. “Thank you for letting me know. I’ll take a look at that right now. Hold on.” She crossed to the lab computer.

“What is it?” said Jane.

Maura opened one of her e-mails and clicked on the attachment. A series of dental X-rays appeared on the screen. Unlike the morgue panograms that showed all the teeth at once, these were spot films from a dentist’s office.

“Yes, I’m looking at them now,” said Maura, still on the phone.

“I see an occlusal amalgam on number thirty. This is absolutely compatible.”

“Compatible with what?” said Jane.

Maura held up a hand to keep her silent, her focus still on the phone conversation. “I’m opening the second attachment,” she said. A new image filled the screen. It was a young woman with long black hair, her eyes narrowed against the sunlight. She was wearing a denim shirt over a black tank top. The deeply tanned face, devoid of makeup, suggested a woman who lived her life outdoors, who thrived on fresh air and practical clothes. “I’m going to look over these files,” Maura said. “I’ll call you back.” She hung up.

“Who’s the woman?” Jane asked.

“Her name is Lorraine Edgerton. She was last seen near Gallup, New Mexico, about twenty-five years ago.”

Jane frowned at the face smiling back at her from the computer screen. “Am I supposed to remember that name?”

“You will now. You’re looking at the face of Madam X.”

Forensic psychologist Dr. Lawrence Zucker had a gaze so penetrating that Jane usually avoided sitting straight across from him, but she’d arrived late to the meeting and had been forced to take the last remaining seat, facing Zucker. Slowly he perused the photographs spread out on the table. They were images of a vibrant young Lorraine Edgerton. In some shots she wore shorts and T-shirts; in others, jeans and hiking boots. Clearly she was an outdoorswoman, with the tan to prove it. He turned next to what she looked like now: stiff and dry as cordwood, her face a leathery mask stretched taut across bone. When he looked up, his eerily pale eyes focused on Jane, and she had the uneasy feeling that he could see straight into the dark corners of her brain, into places she allowed no one to see. Though there were four other detectives in the room, she was the only woman; perhaps that was the reason Zucker focused on her. She refused to let him intimidate her, and she stared right back.

“How long ago did you say Ms. Edgerton vanished?” he asked.

“It was twenty-five years ago,” said Jane.

“And does that period of time account for the current condition of her body?”

“We know this is Lorraine Edgerton, based on the dental records.”

“And we also know it doesn’t take centuries to mummify a body,” added Frost.

“Yes, but could she have been killed far more recently than twenty-five years ago?” said Zucker. “You said she was kept alive long enough for her bullet wound to begin healing. What if she was kept a prisoner for far longer? Could you turn a body into a mummy in, say, five years?”

“You think this perp could have kept her captive for decades?”

“I’m merely speculating, Detective Frost. Trying to understand what our unknown subject gets out of this. What could drive him to perform these grotesque postmortem rituals. With each of the three victims, he went to a great deal of trouble to keep her from decaying.”

“He wanted them to last,” said Lieutenant Marquette, chief of the homicide unit. “He wanted to keep them around.”

Zucker nodded. “Eternal companionship. That’s one interpretation. He didn’t want to let them go, so he turns them into keepsakes that will last forever.”

“So why kill them at all?” asked Detective Crowe. “Why not just keep them as prisoners? We know he kept two of them alive long enough for their fractures to start healing.”

“Maybe they died natural deaths from their injuries. From what I read in the autopsy reports, there are no definitive answers as to cause of death.”

Jane said, “Dr. Isles was unable to make that determination, but we do know that the Bog Lady…” She paused. Bog Lady was the new victim’s nickname, but no detective would ever say it in public. No one wanted to see it splashed across the newspapers. “We know that the victim in the trunk suffered fractures of both legs, and they may have become infected. That could have caused her death.”

“And preservation would be the only way to keep her around,” said Marquette. “Permanently.”

Zucker looked down, once again, at the photo. “Tell me about this victim, Lorraine Edgerton.”

Jane slid a folder across to the psychologist. “That’s what we know about her so far. She was a graduate student working in New Mexico when she vanished.”

“What was she studying?”

“Archaeology.”

Zucker’s eyebrow shot up. “Do I sense a theme here?”

“It’s hard not to. That summer, Lorraine was working with a group of students at an archaeological dig in Chaco Canyon. On the day she vanished, she told her colleagues that she was going into town. She left on her motorbike in the late afternoon and never came back. Weeks later, the bike was found miles away, near a Navajo reservation. From what I gather about the area, there’s not much in the way of population. It’s mostly open desert and dirt roads.”