CHAPTER FIVE
Their destination was not an address or zip code, but coordinates.
Ella hadn’t used coordinates since her Intelligence days, and there was no cab waiting for them at the Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport either, so Ella and Ripley made do with a rental.
Ella was the designated driver because, despite her claims, Ripley was in no condition to operate machinery.
‘Vernon gives us the jet but not a cab. I told you. He wants us to hit the ground running. Literally. The GPS calls this a road?’ Ripley said. They hit a patch of black ice on a path barely wide enough for a small car. Trees leaned in from either side with their branches scratching the windshield.
‘It gets us there.’
‘It gets the car there. I don’t know about us.’
‘We can’t be too far out now. This must be 20 miles outside of the city.’
‘You’d think so. This is why we need details. Addresses.’
‘It’s not Vernon’s fault that the body’s in the middle of nowhere.’
Ripley said, ‘The woods should have zip codes. Everywhere else does.’
'Here. Up ahead. What's that?' Ella had briefly turned the heater off, so the windshield had fogged up. She cranked it to the maximum again. Around a hundred yards ahead were strobing reds and blues.
‘Cop cars. Aim for them.’
Ella coaxed the car down the rickety dirt path at a pathetic five miles an hour.
They bumped until two cruisers came into full view, and behind them, through skeletal trees, stood a cabin.
The structure looked like it had been waiting here for decades, slowly rotting, hoping someone would eventually care enough to burn it down. ‘There’s our scene.’
‘You’re not kidding. It looks on the verge of collapse.’
‘Strange place for a murder.’
‘Dark, it’s the perfect place for a murder.’
‘Fair point.’
As they hit the icy mud and dead leaves that passed for the ground, a gentleman emerged from one of the cruisers. He was dressed for a siege against the cold, and only a sliver of his weathered face was visible between the scarf and the fur-lined hood of his parka. ‘FBI?’ he asked.
‘That’s us. Agents Dark and Ripley.’
'Thanks for coming. I'm Sheriff Bartram. I'd offer a hand, but they're both frozen solid.'
‘Understandable. We came as quickly as we could. Can you give us the details? Our director didn’t provide much.’
‘You’re in good time, because the forensics team haven’t even been yet. We’ve kept the scene secure, although it’s not like anyone is going to find this place by accident.’
‘Who called it in, sheriff?’ Ripley asked.
‘A dog walker stumbled on it around 7 AM this morning. He was actually walking up on the main road two, three hundred yards over there. But his dog ran like hell to this cabin and wouldn’t stop trying to get in. The walker found the dog here, took a look inside the cabin and, well… found it.’
‘You’ve checked the walker?’
‘The guy is pushing eighty. I’m surprised he made it down here in the first place.’
‘Got it. Anything else?’
‘Not yet. We won’t know any more until we get the body to the slab. The good news, I guess, is that the cold has preserved the body pretty well. It’s helped maintain the conditions of the scene, so you folks might be able to catch something the perp didn’t plan on.’
Ella thought that, for a small town cop, Sheriff Bartram knew the ins and outs of homicide investigations quite robustly. ‘You get many cases like this out here, sheriff?’
‘God no. Never anything like this.’
She inspected the frozen ground. It was solid, dusted with a thin layer of frost. However, two parallel lines cut through the white sheen. The ruts of a vehicle.
Ella went over to it, inspected it, then called out, ‘Sheriff, are these tracks from one of your vehicles?’
‘No. We came from the main road. What have you got?’
‘Tracks. Heavyset, non-commercial.’
Ripley came over and touched them. ‘Did it rain here last night?’
‘Yeah. Sometime in the early hours.’
'Then these must have been made last night, and the cold has flash-froze them. Looks like a van or SUV to me. Sheriff, order a mold on these. If we can narrow down the make and model of the vehicle, it'll give us a good starting point.'
Sheriff Bartram tipped his woolen hat. ‘Shall do. You ready to head inside? Just be warned. Try not to throw up, because what’s in that cabin, I ain’t never seen before.’
Ella prepped herself, ready to face the unknown.
But even from twenty feet away, she could already smell death through the old wood.
***
The door scraped open on a sound of stone against rust. Ella stepped in after Sheriff Bartram, and there, in the heart of this old cabin, lay a woman bound to an old, scarred wooden table that had clearly been repurposed for this display.
A circle of light beamed through the cabin’s single dusty window, highlighting the gaping wound in the bound woman’s stomach.
The victim was still fully clothed – jeans, black boots, white top – except everything around the stomach area had been eviscerated.
The woman's head was turned to the side, and her long brown hair was matted to the wood.
Her eyes were open, staring at the wall.
‘Christ in heaven,’ Ripley said. ‘A heads-up would have been nice on this one, Vernon, you prick.’
In this case, Ella had to agree. ‘She’s been disemboweled.’
‘Sure looks like it.’
Ella moved across the dust-covered floor toward the body.
The air was thick and rotten, but the sour tang of blood was nowhere to be found.
Ella stood five feet from the victim and embraced the wave of sympathy that came with proximity to the dead.
This woman had been a daughter, perhaps a mother, or a sister.
Her life, with all its complexities and joys, had been cruelly snuffed out, leaving behind a defiled shell of a human being.
‘Female, thirties, clothed,’ Ripley said. ‘No signs of sexual assault.’
‘No wounds on the face or neck. Nothing on the shoulders. No rips to any of her clothing except around the abdomen.’
‘So our unsub captured this woman, loaded her up in his vehicle, and brought her here. This is a high level of planning.'
'Yes, it is. He brought her here for absolute privacy. Even if this poor woman screamed, I doubt anyone would have heard her. This is our killer's torture chamber.'
‘But there’s no blood anywhere. I can’t even smell any blood, just decomposition. That and animal crap.’
Ella pointed to some scattered animal droppings in the corner of the shack, probably mice. ‘So he killed her without needing to penetrate the skin. Poison? Strangulation?’
Ripley inspected the neck. ‘No marks around the neck, so definitely not strangulation. Poison is a possibility.’
‘But that’s at odds with what a sadist would do. He must have sadistic tendencies to go to these lengths.’
‘Maybe.’ Ripley inspected the gaping hole in the vic’s stomach. ‘Jesus, he dug in deep.’
Ella scrutinized the victim's identifiable features and etched everything from the contour of her cheekbones to the color of her fingernails into her memory. It was crucial not to see this victim merely as evidence, but as a person who had lived and breathed, who had a story that was brutally and abruptly ended. The face would haunt her, as did the faces of all the victims, but it was a burden Ella bore willingly. After taking in as much detail as she could, Ella turned to the centerpiece: the wound in the woman’s abdomen.
It was much more than a simple incision. It was an excavation that went right into her abdominal cavity. ‘He’s torn through everything. Muscle wall, intestines, spleen, liver. He’s nearly reached the spine.’
‘You ever seen anyone bore through a victim before?’
Ella checked her mental rolodex of historical killers and came up with two names.
‘Jack the Ripper did something similar to his final victim. Andrei Chikatilo would sometimes rip out his victims’ guts.
But they both attacked in frenzies, and they certainly never took the time to chain their victims up. This killer is much more controlled.’
Bartram edged closer. ‘How would someone pull this off? What kind of instrument could tunnel into someone’s stomach like this?’
Ripley slipped on a pair of latex gloves and traced one finger around the inside of the wound. ‘Something bigger than a knife but smaller than a chainsaw.’
Ella added, ‘Even a chainsaw would struggle to do this. He’s cut through flesh, bone, muscle tissue, internal organs. A surgeon would struggle to pull this off.’
‘The whole thing is uneven and jagged,’ Ripley pointed out. ‘It’s like the killer was digging for something, but with no precision. It’s like an animal clawing its prey.’
Ella locked onto the wound again. There was certainly a ritualistic component carried out here, yet it bore the hallmarks of a psyche that hadn’t yet crossed the threshold into insanity.
Despite the brutality, he was still in control.
‘Whoever did this, he’s not some deluded maniac.
He’s got brains as well as brawn. He would need some serious physical strength to abduct an adult woman and restrain her like this, and he’s got the self-awareness to scope this cabin out in advance.
He’s sadistic, organized. Nothing here is an accident. ’
Ripley patted down the victim's pockets one by one. 'Nothing. No wallet, no phone, no keys.'
‘Our killer must have taken them. He knows what he’s doing.’
Ella stepped back and worked through the details.
This had to be much more than a simple thrill kill because the circumstances were too specific.
Thrill killers did the deed and maintained as much distance from their victims as possible.
They didn’t hang around, nor did they take the time to restrain their victims and unleash the contents of their innermost sadistic fantasies.
By the same token, this was more than a lust killing because sadists usually incorporated elements of sexual assault.
Which left one conclusion.
They were dealing with an abnormal psychology type that didn’t fit neatly into any box.
‘We need to wait for forensics to finish up before we jump to any conclusions,’ Ripley said. 'First, we need an ID on the victim, and if we can find out what tool he used to do this, it might give us a little more insight.’
'Agreed. We need to look at who owns these cabins too. They're old as hell, but they might still be registered to someone.'
Ella turned away from the victim and swept over the cabin's interior once more, taking in every detail.
The dust on the floor caught her attention.
It was disturbed, but not in a way that left any recognizable footprints.
Someone had taken care to sweep away their tracks, thus leaving a barren landscape devoid of any meaningful traces.
She walked the perimeter, guided by instinct. In the corner, still covered in dust, she saw something.
‘Ripley, look at this.’
Her partner crossed the room. 'What am I looking at?'
There were four perfectly-symmetrical marks in the dust. 'Something was here. Something heavy enough to leave impressions.'
Ripley leaned closer. ‘Our guy brought his own apparatus.’
‘But what apparatus? What’s so big that it needs to be placed on the ground like this?’
Ripley turned towards the victim, then back to the marks in the dust. ‘Maybe it’s from the table? He could have stored it in the corner then set it up at showtime.’
‘Maybe.’
A new chill settled in the room, colder than the Wisconsin air outside. Their unsub didn't just find this place. He brought his own equipment. He came here to work.
‘Okay,’ Ripley said, ‘first we find out who this woman is. We’ll head to the precinct and check missing persons reports. Then we’ll wait for the autopsy and forensics results and go from there.’
Ella looked around the cabin once more and committed every detail to memory.
After five minutes, she found there was nothing left here for her, just an eviscerated body and a hundred unanswered questions.
Whoever had killed this woman had turned this cabin into a theater of their own design, and Ella needed to uncover the story he’d written in blood.
Yes, Wisconsin was where they bred them.