She wondered how a muscle-bound guy like Bull Cullen actually found time for much of anything else. Then she noticed that he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. She figured that his life must be about his job and working out, and not much else.
He appeared to be good-natured and not especially shocked by the unusually grisly nature of the crime scene. Of course, he’d been here for a few hours now—long enough to get somewhat numbed to it. Even so, the man immediately struck Riley as rather vain and shallow.
She asked him, “Have you identified the victim?”
Bull Cullen nodded.
“Yeah, her name was Reese Fisher, thirty-five years old. She lived right near here in Barnwell, where she worked as the local librarian. She was married to a chiropractor.”
Riley looked up and down the tracks. This stretch was curved so that she couldn’t see very far in either direction.
“Where is the train that ran over her?” she asked Cullen.
Cullen pointed and said, “About a half mile down there, exactly where it stopped.”
Riley noticed an obese, black-uniformed man who was crouching next to the body.
“Is that the medical examiner?” she asked Cullen.
“Yeah, let me introduce you to him. This is the Barnwell coroner, Corey Hammond.”
Riley crouched down beside the man. She sensed that, in contrast to Cullen, Hammond was still struggling to contain his shock. His breathing was coming in gasps—partly due to his weight, but also, she suspected, from revulsion and horror. He’d surely never seen anything like this in his jurisdiction.
“What can you tell us so far?” Riley asked the coroner.
“No sign of sexual assault that I can see,” Hammond said. “That’s consistent with the other coroner’s autopsy of the victim four days ago, over near Allardt.”
Hammond pointed to mangled pieces of wide silvery tape around the woman’s neck and shoulders.
“The killer bound her hand and foot, then taped her neck onto the rail and immobilized her shoulders. She must have struggled like mad trying to get loose. But she didn’t stand a chance.”
Riley turned toward Cullen and asked, “Her mouth wasn’t gagged. Would anybody have heard her screaming?”
“We don’t think so,” Cullen said, pointing toward some trees. “There are some houses through those woods, but they’re out of earshot. A couple of my guys went from door to door asking if anybody had heard anything or had any idea what had been happening at the time of the murder. No one did. They found out all about it on TV or on the Internet. They’ve been instructed to stay away from here. So far, we haven’t had any trouble with gawkers.”
Bill asked, “Did it look like anything was stolen from her?”
Cullen shrugged.
“We don’t think so. We found her purse right here beside her, and she still had identification and money and credit cards. Oh, and a cell phone.”
Riley studied the body, trying to imagine how the killer had managed to get the victim into this position. Sometimes she could get a powerful, even uncanny, feeling of the killer just by tuning in to her surroundings at a crime scene. Sometimes it almost seemed that she could get into his thoughts, know what was on his mind as he committed the murder.
But not right now.
Things were too jangled here, with all these people milling about.
She said, “He must have subdued her somehow before he bound her up like this. What about the other corpse, the victim that was killed earlier? Did the local coroner find any drugs in her system?”
“There was flunitrazepam in her bloodstream,” Coroner Hammond said.
Riley glanced at her colleagues. She knew what flunitrazepam was, and she knew that Jenn and Bill did as well. Its trade name was Rohypnol, and it was commonly known as the date rape drug or as “roofies.” It was illegal, but all too easy to buy on the streets.
And it certainly would have subdued the victim, rendering her helpless although possibly not fully unconscious. Riley knew that flunitrazepam had an amnesiac effect once it wore off. She shuddered to realize …
It might well have worn off right here—just before she died.
If so, the poor woman would have had no idea how or why such a terrible thing had happened to her.
Bill scratched his chin as he looked down at the body.
He said, “So maybe this started off date-rape style, with the killer slipping the drug into her drink at a bar or a party or something.”
The coroner shook his head.
“Apparently not,” he said. “There wasn’t a trace of the drug in the other victim’s stomach. It must have been given to her as an injection.”
Jenn said, “That’s odd.”
Deputy Chief Bull Cullen looked at Jenn with interest.
“Why so?” he asked.
Jenn shrugged slightly.
She said, “It’s a little hard to imagine, that’s all. Flunitrazepam doesn’t take effect right away, no matter how it’s delivered. In a date-rape situation, that typically doesn’t matter. The unsuspecting victim maybe has drinks with her soon-to-be assailant for a little while, starts feeling woozy without knowing quite why, and pretty soon she becomes helpless. But if our killer stabbed her with a needle, she’d immediately know she was in trouble, and she’d have had a few minutes to resist before the drug took effect. It just doesn’t sound … very efficient.”
Cullen smiled at Jenn—a little flirtatiously, Riley thought.
“It makes sense to me,” he said. “Let me show you.”
He walked behind Jenn, who was markedly shorter than he was. He started reaching around her neck from behind her. Jenn stepped away.
“Hey, what are you doing?” Jenn said.
“Just demonstrating. Don’t worry, I’m not really going to hurt you.”
Jenn scoffed and kept her distance from him.
“Damn right, you’re not,” she said. “And I’m pretty sure I know what you’ve got in mind. You’re thinking the killer used some kind of choke hold.”
“That’s right,” Cullen said, still smiling. “Specifically, a so-called blood choke.”
He twisted his arm to illustrate his point.
“The killer approached her unexpectedly from behind, then crooked his arm like this around the front of her neck. The victim could still breathe, but her carotid arteries were shut off completely, cutting off the blood flow to the brain. The victim lost consciousness within seconds. Then it was easy for the killer to administer an injection that rendered her helpless for a longer period.”
Riley easily sensed the friction between Cullen and Jenn. Cullen was obviously a classic “mansplainer” whose attitude toward Jenn was condescending as well as flirtatious.
Jenn clearly didn’t like him one bit, and Riley felt the same. The man was shallow, all right, with a poor sense of appropriate behavior when it came to dealing with a female colleague—and an even worse sense of how to behave at a murder scene.
Still, Riley had to admit that Cullen’s theory was sound.
He might be obnoxious, but he wasn’t stupid.
In fact, he might be genuinely helpful to work with.
That is, if we can stand to be around him, Riley thought.
Cullen stepped off the tracks and down the slope and pointed at a space where the ground had been taped off.
He said, “We’ve got some tire tracks, from where he drove down here after turning off the main road back at the railroad crossing. They’re big tracks—obviously some kind of off-road vehicle. Here are some footprints too.”
Riley said, “Have your people take pictures of these. We’ll send them to Quantico and have our technicians run them through our database.”
Cullen stood with his arms akimbo for a moment, taking in the scene with what seemed to Riley almost like a sense of satisfaction.
He said, “I’ve got to say, this is a new experience for me and my guys. We’re used to investigating cargo theft, vandalism, collisions, and the like. Murders are few and far between. And something like this—well, we’ve never seen anything like it before. Of course, I guess it’s nothing really special for you FBI folks. You’re used to it.”