Chapter Text
Getting a call from Jack Crawford about going out to a murder scene was one thing; having him say he couldn’t make it out there with Will was another thing entirely. It meant that he wouldn’t be there as a buffer between Will and the rest of the investigators, who could sometimes say insensitive or abrupt things when Will was trying to think. It meant that the scene was remote, and hard to access. And it meant that it was going to be a very, very long day.
“I’m afraid I won’t be coming out there with you Will. I need to be able to get back to Bella at a moments’ notice, and there’s no way into this site other than partially hiking in.”
“Sounds great. Nothing like a nice long trek through a swamp in 95 degree weather.”
“You can take ATVs part of the way, but then it’s walking. You’ll need a lot of bug spray, and you’ll have to wear waders.”
“At least I have those.”
“It’s more or less a wetland until you reach the location. He did a good job in hiding it.”
“How was it found?”
“Some folks from the DEC were doing routine wildlife population checks.”
“So the scene was intentionally devised for animal predation.”
“I’m pretty sure that was part of the set-up. Will, from the pictures I’ve seen, this place better than what we have at all the major teaching facilities. There’s a greater variety of animals, the damp conditions are perfect for the acceleration of decomposition.”
“So they’ve put together their own body farm.”
Will thought the idea staggering. There’s only one way someone could have done this, and it was to have received a great deal of education in forensic pathology.
“Given that the set-up was so close to Quantico, it was likely they’d been in training,” Will speculated.
“I would have to agree. In fact, they’re already starting to call them, whoever they are, ‘The Profiler’.”
“I find that monstrous, Jack.”
Will sat in silence for a moment. If the killer had been studying at Quantico, there was a decent chance that they’d been in one of his classes at some point.
“Have you checked any lists of former students? Any who might have washed out, but still stayed in the area?”
“That’s a pretty big list as it turns out. We’re working on it right now.”
After he had ended the call, Will sat back on his chair, and covered his eyes. Something told him that this was not only going to be dirty, hot, and messy, but that if this killer had been training to be a profiler, it would tax him in ways he didn’t want to consider.
. . . . .
Jack hadn’t exaggerated about the conditions. It had been unusually wet, and unseasonably hot in south central Pennsylvania, where the body farm had been found in a remote corner of the Michaux State Forest, about two hours from both Wolf Trap and Baltimore. The scene was described him as, literally, being in the middle of a swamp, or something like an island in the middle of one. It may have been there for almost two years. No one went out there regularly, as it was too overrun by biting insects, and the only way to get there was to wade through the swamp itself.
The investigators that secured the area manage to canopy it with yards and yards of parachute fabric so it could be worked on with a little cover from the blazing sun, and not be further corrupted by rain. They surmised that the killer waded out there pulling bodies and equipment in a small boat of some kind; and sure enough, on one of the outer banks where the swamp met land, a canoe made from birch bark had been found concealed under heavy brush.
Will was met at the outer gate of the forest; the entire place had been closed, all entrances were being guarded, and helicopters patrolled the area day and night (then with heat sensors). A black SUV took him to where the ATVs could take him to the edge of the swamp; and after that, it was a hot, sticky, sweaty slog with waders to the place where he’d be spending an undetermined amount of
The scene was about fifty yards in at the closest point; ten yards in and the smell hit.
There were respirators waiting for those who got to the land, a small staging area where one could change out of the hot rubber protective waterproof gear, but there was nothing that could be done while actually getting there; masks would be too hard to breathe through, and it was exercise to get through the thigh-deep muck.
No wonder Jack wanted nothing to do with this, Will thought. First time I’ve ever envied him the excuse of his sick wife to take care of.
Will stripped out of the waders as fast as he could, and put on a respirator. It was a little bit of a relief, but he still had to put on Tyvek pants; even though they were was lighter in weight, and he could leave his upper body free, it did little to alleviate how overheated he was.
As expected, Price, Katz, and Zeller were there in similar gear; they’d have to practically shout to hear each other with the masks on. Will didn’t waste any time with greetings before getting straight to the point.
“How did they die?”
Beverly Katz filled him in: “It looks like every last one of them had their skulls fractured. Not enough to break the skull open, but enough to kill them instantly. It’s not possible to confirm that visually on the more decayed ones, but the fresher ones, the indents on the skulls are extremely obvious.”
There was something Will couldn’t put his finger on. Inconsistencies in the way the bodies were killed and brought to the swamp island, roughly and without finesse, and the way that they were so meticulously arranged, and in so many different ways. Will figured he would have been able to think his way through this puzzle if it weren’t for the fact that he kept getting distracted by the undeniable truth that this person had clearly been studying to be a profiler, or a forensic investigator, or something that Will felt much too close to disentangle himself.
Katz continued her preliminary guesses: “The area is clearly divided into five zones, which can all be viewed from this center point.”
“Like a wheel of death,” Will said flatly.
“That’s a poetic way of putting it!” Price, was kneeling over a lower area in front of them, said a little too brightly.
Will looked at him with his lips in a flat line, and Price understood he was to back off on the remarks.
Zeller cleared his throat, and pointed to the first area. “There’s four spots that are more-or-less protected with chicken wire cages, but this one isn’t. It looks like it’s been purposely left open.”
“To animal and bird predation,” Will observed. Several of the bodies had their faces upturned, as if to make it easier for carrion birds to peck at their eyes.
“No religious significance?” Katz asked. “Their faces pointed to heaven?”
“No...there’s no spirituality here. It’s all very instrumental. How many in each?”
“About ten per. So about fifty total, more or less,” she added.
“This next one looks to be bodies buried in various depths in the soil...shallow versus deeper graves,” Price pointed out the section he was examining. “This next group is all missing parts...and here’s the next, all submerged in various levels and types of fluids. Some mostly water, others a thicker mud.”
“This last one is like an insect lab,” Katz noted. “One of your areas of expertise.”
It was the insect predation zone that really got to him. There were various bodies, laid in order of where the bug activity would be least to most. It was like a real-world tableau of a chart he’d designed and had illustrated that appeared in his monograph.
He closed his eyes, and stood there for what the others considered to be rather a long while. He was going over scenarios in his head. There was the incongruity between how they were killed, and what happened to them afterwards, but he put that aside for now. As he always did, he visualized himself as the perpetrator; the pendulum in his mind swept away all the investigators and their equipment, and left only the scene before him.
I carefully select the insects based upon what would be most active in this place in each season.
There were five bodies, and the oldest looked to be there over a year; it was summer now, so this started probably early the summer of the year before; there was a much fresher body with much more active insects than the other four.
I need to finish my education. It had been cut short somehow.
I gather the insects described in the monograph, since I didn’t get to this part in my courses. I have to teach myself since I was forced out too early to learn much. If they’d have let me stay, none of these people would have had to die.
If this former student held the Academy responsible, going after whoever dismissed them might be part of their endgame. Or other types of death arrays; after all, now that this “lab” had been discovered, perhaps the subject would go on to other parts of forensic or profiler training they felt it necessary to learn.
Seeing it brought to writhing life was too much. The idea that someone would want to enact it in the real world, and that they’d gotten the instructions from him was the limit.
Will saw not just through the eyes of whoever had done this, as he commonly did, but saw himself as the perpetrator, as if his life’s course had suddenly altered, but uncomfortably only slightly; that if things had been different, such an obsession could have led him to do this, rather than actually teach about it.
He jerked back into reality, so much so, that his phone, which had been sitting in his pocket, flew out and landed right in the middle of spring’s insect experiment. The everyday mundane nature of something like wrecking your phone brought him back to himself a little; and even if it were salvageable, he wouldn’t want it back now.
“Shit,” he said aloud.
“What happened?” Price asked as he stood up.
The sudden reminder that he wasn’t alone brought him back more, but not before he was startled into tripping over a log, and landing inelegantly on one knee, which smacked a rock quite hard; not hard enough to break anything, but the pain sharpened his senses enough to know the impact had splashed his shirt with...something he would rather not think too much about.
Zeller helped him up, but by then, his mind was three steps ahead of his feet, and he was rushing back to the staging area, sweating, covered in an unholy muck, and not thinking particularly clearly.
The others knew it was best to let him go, and radioed ahead to the crew on the other side of the swamp to be ready to get him to his car, if he was in any shape to drive.