University of New Haven
New Haven, Connecticut

Maggie stood back and watched Professor Adam Bonzado turn the flesh-eaten skull around in his hands, holding it and examining it as if it were a jeweled treasure. She had never realized before how strong his hands looked. The long fingers like that of a piano player, careful and gentle yet probing the loose flesh, inquisitive without hesitating and without cringing. Gwen had given her a hard time, suggesting she had met her match with Bonzado—finally a man just as obsessed with evil as she was.

“I know there’s not much to go on with either of these,” Racine said, also standing back. She had placed the metal cooler on one of his classroom lab tables and let him open it. Maggie wondered if it wasn’t a professional courtesy so much as Racine wasn’t anxious to handle a human head with or without maggots.

“These are in much better shape than some of the ones that pass through here,” Bonzado said, lifting and looking at it from all angles. “I enjoy teaching, but this is the stuff I live for. Keeps me on my toes. Besides, I get to take two attractive women out to lunch.”

Maggie thought she saw Racine blush, but she looked away, pretending to be preoccupied with the contents of the room. Was it possible Racine had a crush on Bonzado? Long before Racine had hit on her, Maggie had heard rumors that Racine was bisexual. Still, it had come as a surprise. At the time, Maggie was married, obsessed with her work and naïve—or perhaps oblivious was a better term—to anyone’s advances whether they be male or female. Actually, when she thought about it, that wasn’t much different than what she was like now. Except for the married part, she was still pretty oblivious.

“And Maggie, I promise lunch will be much better than vegetable soup on one of my Bunsen burners.”

He glanced up at her as if to see if she remembered or perhaps to see if she would catch this one, this advance, this attempt at flirting. Case in point. Could he read her mind? Maggie couldn’t help smiling. Of course she remembered. The last time she had been to his classroom lab he had a pot of soup cooking alongside a boiling pot of human bones. It had sort of freaked her out when she saw him scooping up a bite. That was before she knew it was his lunch and not more human remains.

Bonzado laid the skull down carefully on the table in front of them and brought out a penlight, bending over to examine the inner orifices. The table was one of only two not filled with boxes of bones or lines of skeletons. Many of the skeletons looked like failed attempts at putting the pieces together, missing major sections.

Last time there had been many more pots, huge ones, boiling on the burners, filling the room with the smell of cooked flesh. Thankfully the burners were empty this time, perhaps because of the holiday weekend. Even the dryers and the sinks in the far corner looked empty, no bony hands waving up at them.

The shelves that lined the back wall, however, were just as crowded as she remembered with jars and vials, bowls and cardboard boxes, all filled with jigsaw pieces of bone, some labeled, others waiting, perhaps forever, to be identified or claimed.

A streak of sunlight came in the classroom’s double-paned windows, a yellow-orange splash that cast an eerie tone over the entire room. Maggie couldn’t help thinking they didn’t need the added sense of drama. Bonzado already looked like an actor out of Hamlet with skull in hand and a soulful look. That is, of course, if you could imagine Hamlet in a purple-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt, khaki walking shorts and hiking boots.

“The one we found Friday might be identified by sight. I’ve got someone checking against the missing persons list. Dental’s intact, too. It was in much better shape,” Racine explained, and Maggie wondered if she was simply trying to fill the silence. Bonzado didn’t seem to be listening. “Well, better shape if you don’t count all the fucking maggots it had on it. Jesus! I haven’t seen that many in a long time.”

“You’re lucky in this heat. The little suckers work fast,” Bonzado said. So he had been listening. “Where was this one found? Was it close to the water, too?”

“Is that Jane Doe A or B?” Racine asked, looking for the toe tag Stan Wenhoff had attached to each bag. Without the tags it was difficult to tell the two skulls apart. Racine rummaged through the cooler, searching for any ID that may have been left behind.

“It’s Jane Doe A,” Racine finally said, pulling out the tag. “This one was found in Rock Creek Park. A wooded area down away from the running trail. A woman and her dog found it. She called it in and gave the directions. Said her dog stumbled upon it.”

“It was preserved fairly well for being in the woods.”

“It was covered with leaves and dirt.” Racine was checking her notes from the file.

“Did you say a woman called it in?” Maggie didn’t remember seeing a name in the file and now she realized it may have never been given. “She didn’t take you to the site or meet you there?”

“No, she didn’t even come in to file a report,” Racine said. “Called it in to 911 and the dispatch operator took all the information.”

“And she didn’t leave a name?”

“No name.” Racine looked up from her notes and met Maggie’s eyes.

She could see the detective was thinking the same thing she was. Had it been the same woman caller who directed them to the bank of the Potomac on Friday? To another one of the killer’s dump sites?

“Did a woman call in the other one?”

Racine pulled out another file folder and started riffling through it. “Here it is. Jane Doe B was found outside a construction site for a new parking garage. The owner, a Mr. Bradford Zahn, contacted the police. Hmm…no mysterious woman caller.” She wasn’t pleased and shrugged when she looked up at Maggie. “So much for our theory.”

Bonzado appeared unfazed by it all. Instead, he had laid the head on its side and was examining the marks at the base of the severed skull.

“I can’t be certain what he used to cut off her head, but I’m thinking it was more like he chopped it than cut.”

“Chopped and ripped,” Maggie added. “The last victim’s neck had a lot of rips and tears.”

“This reminds me of a case I had a couple of months ago,” Bonzado told them. “All that was found was the right leg. It was fairly decomposed, too. Somebody fished it out of the Connecticut River. The chop marks were very similar to this. I kept trying to reproduce the marks, using just about everything I could think of. The closest match was a small hatchet, the kind you’d use for camping.”

“So it was literally a hatchet job, huh?” Racine laughed at her own joke.

Bonzado didn’t. But he did smile even though he went on to point out gashes on what was left of this victim’s split vertebrae. “Usually when a body’s dismembered, the joints and bones are sawn or cut with a blade. A sharp, blunt object like a hatchet or ax—or he could have even used a machete—leaves gashes in the bone from the attempts that didn’t quite slice through. That probably explains the rips and tears you were seeing in the skin and tissues, too.”

“There’s one thing that bothers me,” Maggie said as she watched Bonzado add some cleaning solvent to the bone. The liquid seemed to highlight the chop marks. “This guy has to be disciplined and organized enough to plan not only the murders, but the drop sites. And yet, it’s almost as if he completely loses it after he’s killed them. The last victim showed signs of being strangled and hit over the head with a ball-peen hammer. A hatchet or machete just contributes to this idea that he sort of loses it.”

“Yeah, and what about that? Why not a saw or knife?” Racine asked. “Is it poor planning? Does he use whatever is handy?” Racine asked, but she was directing her question to Maggie, the FBI profiler, instead of Bonzado.

“He has to take them someplace safe to cut them up,” Maggie said. “Where could he go that just happens to have a hatchet or machete handy?”

“My dad keeps a machete in his garden shed,” Bonzado offered. “He claims it works for anything from hacking off tree branches to plucking up dandelions. As for the hatchet, someone who camps a lot might actually carry one around in his trunk with other camping supplies.”

“Even if he keeps it in his car, where the hell does he take them?” Racine wanted to know. “Cutting off someone’s head is a messy job. And it’s not like there’s a whole lot of gardening sheds in the District.”

“We can’t assume he kills them in the District,” Maggie said. “Just because their heads are dumped there.”

“Fair enough,” Racine said with no argument. Maggie thought she was awfully agreeable this trip. “So he could possibly have access to a cabin or toolshed, but he probably lives in the District, right? From what I know about serial killers, they don’t usually display their handiwork too far from where they live or work.”

“Excuse me, ladies.” Bonzado now had forceps and was bent over a patch of loose flesh, pulling it away from the base of the skull. “I might have something here. Mind if I pluck this off?”

“Whatever you need to do.”

Maggie came in close over Bonzado’s shoulder, but she wasn’t sure what had gotten his attention. The flesh was so decomposed it had turned gray and black in the areas where it remained attached. Even the cleaning solvent couldn’t help here.

“What is it?” Maggie finally asked, thinking something had been embedded in the flesh.

Bonzado carefully ripped off a piece of tissue about two inches in diameter. He held it up in the sunlight, but Maggie still couldn’t tell what it was that had gotten his attention.

“The epidermis is gone and I need to clean this up.” He was grinning now and it reminded Maggie of a proud schoolboy with a show-and-tell project. “If I’m not mistaken, I think this may be a tattoo from the back of her neck. The killer may have thought he removed it when it ripped off the top layer, but tattoos actually show up better deep under where the ink settles.”

“You think there’s enough to figure out what it is?”

“Hard to tell.” And now he was holding it up under a fluorescent desk light. “But if there is enough, tattoos can be pretty unique. We’ve identified victims by their tattoos in other instances.”

“So maybe the killer slipped up.” Racine sounded hopeful.

“Oh, yeah. I’d say he may have made a big-time boo-boo.”