Chapter 4
Marcus King stood in the middle of his Guardian Security office and stared at the three whiteboards that were lining the walls.
He leaned back against his desk. It was late, most of the staff had gone home, but he’d stayed, working on a case that wasn’t officially Guardian’s.
He started looking into this particular case as a favor to his Grandpa Frank.
A murder in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The granddaughter of a friend.
The murder had happened years ago, but Frank had just found out about it.
It hadn’t been solved and was arctic cold
What had started as a favor had turned into an obsession.
The woman had gone out for a run and never returned.
They’d found her three days later. Obtaining the investigation and ME report had been easy.
Guardian’s federal access made it easy. Blunt force trauma was indicated, but ligature was the cause of death.
The local cops had run with the assumption that the murderer was someone connected to her.
Everyone on the canvas had been cleared.
He dug further into the investigation, and that was where he’d found out about the ritualistic postmortem posing.
He’d been running this particular search string for eleven weeks.
He modified it four times as the parameters of the case sharpened.
His first search was initially too broad, pulling in everything with isolated female victims and blunt force trauma, which was a depressing volume of cases.
When he got the information, he'd narrowed it by body staging.
Specifically, crossed arms, crossed ankles, eyes closed, or a combination of those poses.
The combination was unusual enough to function as a filter.
Not unusual enough, apparently, to have triggered a connection across jurisdictions … at least not before he found the link.
He was on the hunt and determined to catch this bastard. He looked at the women on the boards. Something had to tie these women together. His immediate boss, Asher Hudson, walked into his office and stood next to him, looking at the boards. “Anything new?”
Marcus shook his head. “The ritualistic posing … connects some of them. But … there’s nothing else.
Some were strangled, blunt force trauma, electrocution here, drug overdose here.
The locations of the body dump are all over the map.
” He looked at the pictures of the women on his board.
All full of life, happy, and in no way expecting their demise.
He glanced at Asher. “Are you pulling me off the case?” He’d been working his assigned cases and this case at the same time.
“Hell no. I brought you this. Just came in on ViCAP. Same postmortem posing.”
He grabbed the sheet. The Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, better known as ViCAP, was a national database. The only drawback to the damn thing was that it wasn’t mandatory, and departments didn’t routinely update it with new information.
He read the sheet. Nashville, Tennessee.
Victim: Angela Porter, thirty years old.
Found Shelby Bottoms Greenway. Staged. Right index fingernail absent.
A notation in the ME's preliminary exam excluded probable animal interference post-mortem due to the sharp angle cuts, which led them to suspect that a metal instrument was used.
He'd stared at that notation for a long moment.
Excluded probable animal interference. Animal interference … “Shit, that’s it.”
“What?” Asher asked.
“The hand … or the finger.” He grabbed the stack of files on his desk and started pulling out files. “There were mentions of animal interference at the scene. Damage to the right hand or fingers. Help me go through these.”
Asher grabbed a stack, and they sorted the cases.
Five other case files. Five other ME reports.
Notations that mentioned wildlife may have moved the body due to damage or something close to those words.
He looked up from the files. “They’d been left outside where the wildlife could access them. I didn’t put it together.”
Asher nodded. “Because each medical examiner had only one body and no reason to suspect an animal didn’t cause the damage on the hand.”
Marcus nodded. “And because ViCAP is only as good as what agencies enter into it, and not every agency enters everything. The ones that do enter it with whatever understanding they had of the victim’s injuries at the time.”
“Pull the full preliminary from Nashville PD. This bastard is now officially your case. Let me know what you need.” Asher put his hand on Marcus’s shoulder. “Damn good work.”
Marcus glanced back at the other women who weren’t included in his killer’s stack. “A drop in the bucket.”
“Don’t do that. Help get closure for the ones you can. You’re damn good at this, Marcus. You see the patterns, the links that no one else sees. Catch this bastard.” Asher clapped him on the shoulder again and left.
Marcus sat down and started the request to pull the full Angela Porter preliminary, the incident report, and the Nashville PD case number.
It took three hours to get everything he needed.
Then he opened the other files and laid them out across his desk and did what he'd been doing for eleven weeks.
He looked at them together instead of separately.
Together, they were unmistakable. Blunt force trauma, ligature, posed, missing right index fingernail.
He picked up his phone and called Asher.
“I need to go to Nashville,” he'd said.
“Figured. It’s authorized. I contacted Nic and told him you had a serial killer. He’s informing the big boys.” Nic DeMarco and his wife, Jade, were in charge of domestic operations for Guardian Security.
“Thanks. I need to make some calls and get confirmation of the missing index fingernail on the right hand for the rest of these posing and ligature cases. I have a gut feeling on this one. There are six now, and if we put out a flag for MEs who request files for any deceased missing right index fingernail, my gut is telling me there will be more.” He sighed.
“Damn it, Asher … Six connected homicides across five states and one Canadian province. How did someone not catch this sooner?”
“I can’t answer that. But you’ve got a lead on him now. Elliot said he was calling the FBI to let them know we’re working this case. Do you need additional manpower?”
“A task force. Let the FBI know I’m taking the lead on this, but if they want to send a behaviorist, that would be welcome.
Nashville PD will need to be made aware.
If they can host the task force, all the better; they know the terrain.
I want this bastard off the streets. I don’t need a pissing contest. We’ll work together, or I’ll find him by myself. ”
“God, you remind me of your old man. I’ll call Nashville first thing in the morning.”
“Thank you, and I’ll take that comment about my dad as a compliment.” Marcus was up and stacking the files as he spoke. He had eight phone calls to make before he packed.
* * *
Marcus landed at BNA at 6:40 p.m. on a Wednesday.
He was in a rental vehicle and on I-40 East by 7:15 p.m. He'd read the full case file on the Angela Porter murder twice while on the plane.
Nashville PD had transmitted it through Guardian's federal liaison channel before he'd gotten to work this morning because that was how it worked when Guardian came calling.
Agencies didn't decide whether to share.
The framework that governed Guardian's mandate made that decision upstream of the local level, and everyone in the building would already know it by the time Marcus walked through the door.
He checked into the hotel on West End at 8 p.m.; set his bag down without unpacking it; spread the case files across the desk, the bed, and the small round table by the window; and stood in the middle of the room looking at them.
He checked his email and marked off each of the files when he received photographic confirmation of the missing right fingernail on each of the bodies.
He also added two case files to the mix.
Eight women, not counting Angela. Seven states.
One Canadian province. All isolated. All staged identically.
All missing the same fingernail from the same hand, all notated by separate medical examiners with different annotations and verbiage.
The geographic corridor ran northwest to southeast. From Boise down through Spokane, Missoula, Calgary, then bending south through Fargo, Sioux Falls, Omaha, Kansas City, and landing here. Nashville.
This wasn’t random. It wasn’t opportunistic.
It was a route.
He pulled out the legal pad he used for working problems and wrote one question at the top.
What moves a person through those cities?
He wrote three columns underneath it. Professional.
Personal. Criminal. Then he started populating them.
Most of the professional entries were obvious.
Sales, consulting, service work, transportation, logistics.
He worked until midnight before he lay down beside the Angela Porter murder file and fell asleep with the lights on.
* * *
First thing Thursday morning, he was at Nashville PD's Criminal Investigations Division.
The homicide lieutenant's name was Carver. She was in her fifties, and Marcus learned she’d been running CID for seven years.
That was the kind of institutional knowledge that made a division actually function versus just technically existing.
She met him in the corridor outside her office rather than making him wait at the front desk, which told him something about how she'd decided to play this.
Professional courtesy was extended proactively.
She knew who Guardian was, and she knew what Guardian's federal standing meant for the conversation they were about to have.
She'd chosen to meet it straight on rather than make it awkward.