report?”
“Originally from Homicide, but turned up nothing. The state medical examiner reported that the Hispanics had been dead before they were skewered. Donovan, however, was not.”
“You mean he was impaled alive?”
“Yes. They found his body early Sunday morning; had deep ligature marks around his wrists, his ankles, and across his waist as if he’d been strapped down. However, the state medical examiner found nothing near his mouth or on his face to indicate he’d been gagged. Killer wasn’t worried about anyone hearing him scream. He’d been dead for almost four days before he turned up in center field.”
Markham was silent.
“Homicide still doesn’t know where Rodriguez and Guerrera were shot. Rodriguez was reported missing by his parents the day after he disappeared, but no one said anything about Guerrera until the authorities found him. Prints turned up a match in IAFIS. Both lived in the Fox Run apartment complex in the southeast part of town.”
“And their bodies? Discovered in the same general area as Donovan’s?”
“No. The two crime scenes are in rural areas on opposite sides of Raleigh, neither site near Fox Run. Rodriguez and Guerrera had both been dead for about forty-eight hours and appear to have been shot at roughly the same time. MS-13 activity has picked up recently in the Fox Run area, but it looks as if Rodriguez was not associated with the gang or any of its enemies. Guerrera, on the other hand, is known to have been a member of a low-level gang back in Mexico. Can’t tie him to anything here. Problem is, we can’t tie Rodriguez and Guerrera to each other, either.”
“I’m sure Raleigh has their informants. What’s the word on the street?”
“Nothing. No chatter at all about any gang connections.”
“What about Donovan?”
“Only thing we know for sure is that he was taken from outside his home in Cary, next town over from Raleigh. Happened late Saturday night, a week and a day before he turned up dead. He’d just returned from a fund-raiser downtown. Wife and kids asleep. No blood, no sign of a struggle, keys to his fancy Peugeot found in the driveway. ME said the back of his head showed blunt-force trauma. Killer used chloroform on him, too.”
“You said killer. How do you know there was only one?”
“There’s a wall of hedges separating Donovan’s property from his neighbor’s. Forensics found a set of fresh footprints in the surrounding mulch. Same tread, only one set, size twelve. Matched a group of partials from the baseball field. Forensics is working on tracking down the shoe model.”
“And where the Hispanics were found?”
“Again one set, same tread partial. Looks like our boy uses a posthole digger. Kicks up a lot of dirt, doesn’t seem too concerned about covering his tracks.”
“May I see the file on Rodriguez and Guerrera?”
Gates slid it across the table.
Jose Rodriguez, age seventeen, born in Honduras; Alex Guerrera, age twenty-seven, originally from Mexico. Rodriguez: legal, clean, high-school senior. Guerrera: illegal, back and forth across the border at least twice, and a bit of a record—gang activity in Mexico, petty theft, misdemeanor drug possession in the States. Nothing hardcore, however, and appeared to have gone straight; had a wife and three kids back in Mexico, worked as a dishwasher at a restaurant in downtown Raleigh, and sent the money home every month.
Markham removed a photo of the victims: naked, side by side, impaled like Donovan, heads fastened to their stakes with the same thin black cord. However, unlike Donovan, the cord was tied tightly across their cheeks, causing their vacant, open eyes to stare straight ahead and giving their faces a strange, squished expression that reminded Mark-ham of Sylvester Stallone getting his face slow-motion punched in Rocky.
“Other than his record,” Gates said, “Guerrera is a bit of a mystery. Hadn’t been in Raleigh very long; was living with a cousin and two other men, illegals, all of them sending their pay back to families in Mexico, all ruled out as suspects. Guerrera’s cousin is still there, but the other two men have taken off. Raleigh PD has turned it over to ICE.”
“Looks like the Rodriguez kid was a straight arrow,” Markham said, reading. “Good grades in school, planned on attending community college for computers, it says.”
“He also had a part-time job at Best Buy and told the family he worked Wednesday and Saturday nights at a Mexican restaurant downtown. Raleigh PD followed up, found that the restaurant job was bogus. No record of him anywhere. Left open the possibility of the drug connection. Checked the kid’s cell phone bill and saw a number of calls from prepaid, untraceable calling cards. All that’s pretty standard for the drug dealers nowadays, but they couldn’t prove anything. Regardless, looks like whatever the kid was into on Saturday nights got him killed.”
“What about the kid’s brother?” Markham asked. “Says here Rodriguez has a sister, eleven, and a brother, fifteen. About the time the gangs usually start recruiting, isn’t it?”
“Nothing there. Family, the kids are devastated; parents moved them out of Fox Run to live in another apartment complex in North Raleigh. All dead ends since the beginning of March. Of course, Raleigh’s abandoned the MS-13 theory now that it’s been turned over to us, but who knows what will happen if the media gets wind of the similarities between the crime scenes.”
“What about the possible link between Donovan and the Hispanics exclusive of outside entities?”
“That’s being explored, yes, but nothing so far.”
Markham scanned through the Donovan file again.
“You’ll find what you’re looking for at the end,” Gates said.
The FBI forensics report. Alan Gates knew him well; knew that his former student would look next for the real reason why his boss had decided to pay him this early-morning visit—the answer to Markham’s “Why me?”
“The field office in Charlotte’s got a good team,” Mark-ham said at last, reading. “And I’ve heard of Andy Schaap—used to be one of the best forensic specialists around until the restructuring went down and he took the supervisory position in Charlotte. State medical examiner’s got a decent setup, where Schaap’s been working so far. ME’s preliminary report shows no physical evidence. No semen or saliva, no trace DNA; nothing left by the killer except—is this right? Comet residue?”
“Yes. Looks like our boy scrubbed the lawyer clean. Sound like a hit to you?”
“And the others? State ME find anything on them?”
“No Comet residue, no. Killer just shot and impaled them, but it looks like he did scrub them clean. ME found traces of water in their ear canals.”
“Covering his tracks?”
“Maybe.”
“But a bit too cliché, too simple if we’re speaking metaphorically of dirty drug dealers and a dirty lawyer—the Comet, the cleaning. You wouldn’t be here if you thought it was that easy a read, would you?”
“No, I wouldn’t. The killer wasn’t
