James Swain - The Program

“Break time,” Wood announced.

Soon everyone was eating. Linderman had asked Wood to order the food, wanting to repay the group for their time in some small way.

“How’s it going?” Wood asked, biting into a slice of pepperoni.

“We’re making progress,” Linderman replied.

After break, the group studied the crime scene photos.

A plasma TV was wheeled into the room, and the police crime scene photos taken in the six cities were displayed. The majority showed the corpses after they’d been dug up from shallow graves. The sameness of the dead women was striking – the older victims were tall and thin, the youngest short and heavyset.

Looking at the dead was never easy, and the Jacksonville team viewed the bodies in silence, the only sound coming from their writing instruments as they jotted down notes.

“Who wants to go first?” Linderman asked.

Waller lifted a finger into the air. “The victims were all props,” he said.

The same thought had crossed Linderman’s mind. Not wanting to steal Waller’s thunder, he waited for the agent to continue.

“Crutch’s ritual requires four women of a certain size and age, an ensemble if you will,” Waller went on. “The victims are brought to the woods and put in specific positions so that Crutch can act out his ritual. Once the ritual is over, the women are tossed away, and he leaves. He’s more concerned about his ritual than hiding the bodies.”

The group nodded as one. Waller had hit the nail on the head.

“Very good,” Linderman said. “Now let’s figure out what Crutch’s ritual is.”

An agent named Jason Choy raised his hand. Choy was small and slight of build. The FBI had once placed height requirements on new agents that had prevented someone of Choy’s size from joining. Those requirements had been lifted when the bureau had realized that intellect was more important than physical size.

“Yes, Jason,” Linderman said.

“I think I found something,” Choy said.

The look on Choy’s face said that he’d struck gold. Choy spun his laptop computer around so the screen faced the room. On it was an aerial photograph taken by the police at the Atlanta crime scene. Aerial photographs were essential in recording crime scenes, as they clearly depicted geography, as well as physical relationships and distances.

Choy pointed at an object in the aerial photograph.

“Look at this,” he said.

Linderman crossed the room to have a look. The other agents leaned in to look as well. The object on the screen was rectangular, and within equal proximity to where the victims’ bodies had been found.

“What is it?” Linderman asked.

“It appears to be a picnic table,” Choy replied. “I think Crutch sat the bodies on the table as part of his ritual.”

“How can you be sure?”

Choy clicked the mouse on his laptop. Another photograph appeared. An aerial shot of the Raleigh crime scene. Linderman spotted the table in the photograph without having to be shown. It was right next to an outdoor barbecue in a clearing.

Choy ran through the other aerial photographs of the murder scenes on his laptop. There was a picnic table somewhere in each photograph.

Linderman was not going to jump to conclusions. He had the other agents pull up the aerial photographs on their laptops, with each laptop showing a different aerial photo. The laptops were placed on the table in a row, allowing the agents to view them side-by-side, and compare the murder scenes. By comparing the photos, it became clear that Choy had found a signature linking each of the crimes.

“I kept wondering how Crutch was propping the bodies up to perform his ritual,” Choy explained. “Then I spotted the table. It makes sense, don’t you think?”

Linderman swallowed the rising lump in his throat. Four women, one older, two early twenties, one a teen, sitting at a table like a family. His conversation with Bob Kessler came back to him. Kessler had said that Crutch may have killed his family. Was that what was going on here? Was Crutch killing his family over and over as part of his ritual?

He needed to call Kessler. But first, congratulations were in order. He walked around the oval table, and pumped Choy’s hand.

“That’s brilliant,” he said.

They took a break. Linderman went outside and walked around to the back of the building. The afternoon had heated up, without a whisper of breeze in the air. He spotted a heron fishing at the edge of a retention pond. Keeping his distance, he pulled out his cell phone, and punched in Bob Kessler’s home number.

Kessler’s voice mail picked up. The retired profiler’s message was firm but polite. Leave a message and he’d call you back. Linderman had always liked direct, which was why he supposed he’d gotten along so well with Kessler when he’d worked for him.

He left a message and folded his phone. Already starting to sweat, he stood beneath a shady stand of oak trees. It was better here, the darkness a welcome relief from the uncompromising glare of sunlight. His eyes fell on the picnic table a few yards away.

The table was empty. It had recently been occupied, the smell of cigarettes lingering in the air, a plastic ashtray overflowing with butts. He’d smoked when he’d first started in the FBI, along with practically everyone else. He’d quit the week his daughter had been born, but the cravings were still there.

He leaned against a tree, and waited for Kessler to call back.

He thought about the significance of the table in the aerial photographs. Tables were communal places where people got together to eat and talk and share stories. They did not generally fit into the killing patterns of madmen, but he supposed there were exceptions to every rule, and this was such an exception. In each city where he’d lived, Crutch had propped his victims’ bodies around a table before he’d discarded them. Why?

A few minutes later his cell phone rang. It was Bob.

“Hope I’m not getting you at a bad time,” Linderman said.

“There are no bad times when you’re retired,” Kessler replied. “You still working on the Jason Crutchfield case?”

“Yes.”

“How’s it going?”

He gave Kessler a rundown of the events which had happened since their phone conversation the day before. His ex-boss let out a deep breath when he was done.

“This isn’t good, Ken,” Kessler said.

“We’re doing the best we can,” Linderman replied.

“I’m not talking about the investigation, which I’m sure you’re handling properly. What bothers me is that you’re letting Crutch get close to you. The guy’s pure evil. He brings out the worst in people.”

Linderman thought back to strange and horrible things which had happened to him since he’d talked with Crutch in the chaplain’s study that morning.

“Are you speaking from experience?” Linderman asked.

“Yes, I am,” Kessler said. “I got close enough to him, and his crimes, for it to affect me. It wasn’t good.”

“Would you mind telling me what happened?”

“Sure. I couldn’t sleep, and I lost my appetite. Ended up losing about fifteen pounds. I argued with my wife a lot, and also with strangers who upset me. I got so fatigued, I started to hallucinate.”

“Were your hallucinations violent?”

“Yes. I wrote them all down. I thought I was having a mental breakdown, and wanted to chronicle what was happening to me in case I had to be institutionalized. I figured it would give the doctors a head start on figuring out how to treat me.”

He could see Kessler doing this, his degree of organization far above anyone else he’d ever worked with. He said, “Did you end up going into the hospital?”