CHAPTER 41

“I guess I get so used to being around this all day, I forget. Sorry about that,” Bonzado apologized for the third time. “Let me make it up to you. How ’bout I take you out to dinner?”

“You don’t have to do that. Really. It’s not a problem. It just surprised me, is all.”

“No, really, I insist. There’s a place called Giovani’s close to the Ramada.”

“Okay, if you insist.”

“Now, let me show you some stuff.” He finished peeling off the mask and shoved the goggles up atop his head, messing his hair and not caring. Finally he returned to his enthusiastic self. “On to our body-snatcher case.”

“Body snatcher?”

“That’s what the kids are calling him. Actually, I think that’s what they’re calling him in the news media, too. You have to admit, it has a ring to it. Don’t you FBI types nickname your killers?”

“I think everyone watches too much TV.” But it was true. They often did give killers nicknames. She remembered some of her most recent ones: the collector and the soul catcher. But it wasn’t a matter of policy or even morbid name-calling. Perhaps it came out of a need to define, maybe a need to understand and control the killer. Body snatcher seemed appropriate. Appropriate but too easy.

Bonzado waved her over to a table where freshly cleaned bones lay on a white drop cloth.

“This is the young man from barrel number three.” The numbering was one of those things that unfortunately had come from necessity. She had watched Watermeier request the number be painted onto the barrel and its lid. And now she saw that all the paper tags with strings attached to each of the skeletal remains were also given the number three.

“Young man? How can you tell?” This was one of the barrels that she hadn’t seen inside. The one Stolz had said was a bunch of bones. She wondered if there could have been enough tissue to indicate sex, let alone age.

Bonzado picked up what Maggie recognized as a thigh bone, or the femur. She did, after all, have a medical background, not that bones had been a favorite subject.

“At birth there are several places where there is an epiphysis, or a separate element, separate pieces of bone that throughout childhood and into young adulthood end up getting larger and slowly ossify…or rather, it eventually joins or unites. The end of the femur is one of those places. Right here—” he pointed “—at the knee. Can you see the slight separation? It’s just a groove now, sorta looks like a scar on the bone where the growth has occurred. In adulthood it disappears.”

He bent over the bone so that his forehead almost touched hers, his elbow brushing her side. For a brief moment his closeness distracted her. She seemed suddenly and acutely aware of his scent, a fresh deodorant soap perhaps with a subtle hint of aftershave lotion, despite being surrounded by the ghastly odors of the lab.

“Do you see it?” he asked again.

She quickly nodded and shifted her weight to put some distance between them.

“Now, because the groove hasn’t totally disappeared, I’d say he was a young adult, between eighteen and twenty-two, maybe twenty-three or twenty-four at the oldest. Sometimes with adolescents and young adults it’s difficult to determine sex, but this was definitely a young man. You’ll notice his bones are thick, the joints are knobby, the skull has a square jaw and a low, heavy brow.”

“Which means this killer has chosen a fortysomething-year-old woman, an elderly man who had already been dead and embalmed, and a young man. What about the fourth barrel? The one with the waffle pattern imprinted on the back? Do we know anything more about that victim?”

“Not much. Stolz faxed me the head wound, only because I asked. It’s a woman. He’s having a tough time determining age.”

“Most serial killers choose a particular type of victim. Ted Bundy even went as far as choosing young women with long, dark hair, parted in the middle. This guy is all over the place. There doesn’t seem to be a pattern to the victims he chooses.”

“Oh, I think there is a pattern. But not the kind we’re used to seeing. That’s why I think you’ll find this interesting.” Bonzado put down the femur and reached for its pair or a part of what was once its pair. This one looked like it had been sawed above the kneecap. “Take a look at the end of his right femur.” He handed it to Maggie and she examined the bulbous growth of bone or cartilage that stuck out at the end. Part of it had been sawed away as well.

“What is it?”

“It’s probably been there from birth. I’m guessing it was some form of bone spur. Maybe it’s a progressive disorder that they may have been waiting to remove or correct after he finished growing. This part on the femur would have been a small part of the problem so it’s difficult to tell. He probably would have had a limp. I’m not sure how pronounced a limp. Depending on what shape the tibia and fibula is in I could probably tell you more.”

“But let me guess,” Maggie said. “You can’t tell me because that part of his leg is missing, right?”

“I’m afraid so. That’s your pattern. The first woman’s body was missing her breast implants, right? And the old guy had a brain tumor and the killer took the brain. This kid’s bum leg must have been what the killer wanted. The barrel was sealed when we found it. As far as I can tell, everything else is here.” He indicated the tabletop with the man’s skeletal remains stretched out and in place.

“Even the woman with the waffle pattern on her back from livor mortis,” he continued. “Stolz hasn’t been able to figure it out yet because the maggots made a mess of her, but I bet he finds something, some imperfection or deformity missing. That’s got to be our connection. He wants to remove the deformity. Maybe he’s a perfectionist? Maybe he feels like he’s cleansing the earth of imperfections.”

He stopped and waited. She could feel him watching her, gauging her response. “So there’s your victimology. That’s what they all had in common. It can’t be coincidence, right?”

“No, you’re right,” she said. “I don’t believe in coincidence. But there’s something else they all had in common.”

“What’s that?”

“They all knew the killer.”