I shook my head.
“Then go back and start again. We need any lead we can possibly get.”
“Do you really think someone smart enough to think of using coyote urine to fool the dogs would be careless enough to leave anything resembling a trail leaving this clearing?”
I shot him a look that said he had about three seconds before I shot him with something else. Whatever else he might have been, Sykora was not a stupid man. He and his dogs vanished back in the same direction from which we had come at about the same time the other agents finally arrived. The younger version of Wilford Brimley crinkled his nose.
“Coyote bitch,” he said.
Apparently you could also tell the sex of an animal by the smell of its piss. There was a whole world of urine intricacies out there to explore. I was totally missing out on all of the fun.
It wasn’t until that moment that I realized just how out of my element I truly was. I was going to have to modify my approach if I had any hope of catching the unsub. He wanted us to catch him, but not yet. Not until he’d completed his grand design and delivered his message. And he wanted to have a little bit of fun at our expense in the process, namely by demonstrating his superiority by outthinking and outmaneuvering us. He knew the established law enforcement protocols, both federal and tribal, and had spent much time planning clever ways to subvert them.
I walked away from the other agents and crested the adjacent ridge. The Sonoran Desert stretched away from me into the darkness, past where the agent was picking his way uphill with his flashlight, past his car with its headlights staring blankly in our direction, and all the way to the unmarred eastern horizon.
He was out there right now.
I could feel it.
Coyote is the master of deception. If anyone knew his tricks, he would undoubtedly find his paw in a snare.
The King of Lies.
You mock me, but you don’t know the desert. Coyote is the most mischievous trickster of all, and it’s thanks to the ineptitude of your policies that we have so many coyotes running amok out here.
The Killer.
I had a Beretta Px4 Storm .40 caliber under my left arm, there was a sawed-off twelve gauge Remington bolted to the console between us, and Antone had a Smith & Wesson M&P .357 magnum semiautomatic in a holster under his right.
The Coyote.
Somewhere in the distance, an animal I was beginning to revile yipped and howled at the moon, its voice echoing off into eternity.
TWELVE
A serial killer is defined as someone who kills three or more people in a timeframe of greater than a month with a cooling-off period in between. Conservative estimates suggest there are between thirty-five and fifty serial killers at-large in the Unites States at any given time. Some theorize a more realistic estimate places that number between one hundred and one hundred and fifty. That’s roughly the same amount of American-born hockey players currently in the NHL. Who do you think you have a better chance of running into on the street?
I’ve worked a grand total of five cases involving serial killers. That’s almost one a year. The first was the kind that didn’t garner a whole lot of attention. Not at first, anyway. I was fresh out of Quantico and part of a task force composed almost exclusively of local law enforcement agents. My partner and I were essentially sent in to act as an FBI presence. You know, as a show of support. After all, we weren’t entirely convinced we were dealing with an actual serial killer. Considering the crimes had been committed right there in our own backyard, it seemed prudent to at least pretend we cared until we could either dismiss the situation or assume authority over it. At that point, we were only looking at two murders with similar, although not necessarily identical, MOs. Both involved dark haired women in their early thirties who had been strangled with some sort of ligature and dumped at construction sites in the northern part of downtown Denver, where gentrification was in full swing. It wasn’t until a third was discovered in the carcass of the Gates rubber factory that we knew for sure.
Fortunately, the victim hadn’t gone quietly. The killer had been identified using a tissue sample scraped from the back side of her right upper incisor, which brought us to the residence of a man named Lester Frye, who worked for the staffing agency that provided night security guards for the construction sites. As such, he’d been at the periphery of the investigation from the start, just close enough to realize when we were about to nail him. We found him with his big toe in the trigger guard of his shotgun and the bedroom ceiling of his apartment painted with blood and gray matter.
Our involvement might not have been what brought resolution to the case, but my preliminary, informal profile had been spot-on and my then-Assistant Special Agent in Charge Nielsen had rewarded me by getting me a small, largely observational role on the Boxcar Killer task force. By the time I was handed the assignment, five bodies had been discovered in freight cars along the main north-south railroad route from Wyoming through Colorado and all the way down into New Mexico. The only connection between the victims was the nature of their deaths: blunt impact to the base of the occipital bone with enough force to sever the spinal cord. Internal decapitation, they called it. No other physical or sexual violation, despite the fact that they’d all been discovered completely naked. My task had been to track the credit card activity of the victims both prior to and after their deaths. I had taken it a step further, though. I had isolated the final transactions of the victims on the established dates of their murders and utilized the various security cameras at nearby ATMs, street lights, and inside the stores themselves to establish what the victims had been wearing, the only thing the killer had taken from them in addition to their wallets. Three of those cameras—one each in Cheyenne, Fort Collins, and Pueblo—had also captured an image of the same man following them from a distance. Facial recognition software did the rest.
Andrew Stanton, a fifty-three year old railroad engineer who’d been out of work since the economy started to founder, had been downsized by the very freight line on which the bodies were discovered. We picked him up at the Burlington Rail Station in Casper, Wyoming, wearing a dress and makeup belonging to his most recent victim. Apparently, he’d been using whatever cash the victims had been carrying to purchase tickets, dressing in their clothing so no one would recognize him, and simply riding from one end of the line to the other and back again, essentially living on the trains since he knew no other life.
My ingenuity garnered me a larger role in the task force investigating the Drifter, a name I never really found fitting. To me, that moniker made him sound like a man who traveled the country, searching for the place where he belonged. I envisioned him as looking a lot like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause based solely on the name, which was a preconceived stereotype I had to fight against the entire time. In actuality, the Drifter was a rather plain looking man named Dennis Howard, who fashioned homemade rafts he could set adrift on the Mississippi River. He just strapped the bodies of his victims to the undersides of these floating heaps of junk and trusted the mighty river to eventually destroy them and bounce the corpses along the bottom, one of which ended up as far south as Natchez, Mississippi. Considering he lived and hunted in St. Louis, that was no small accomplishment. Lord only knew how many others were still tangled on the bottom or buried in the silt or washed up in any number of vast marshes.