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Chapter
1
If it was a good day, she’d soon be looking at a corpse that had been rotting in the ground for over two years.
FBI Special Agent Cynthia Strode shook her head at what now passed for a “good day.” The bar was getting lower by the week.
It was a rainy morning in Southern California, and she was part of a twelve-car caravan driving down a remote two-lane road east of the San Diego burb of Pine Valley. The FBI agents, local cops, and two corrections officers were escorting serial killer James Michael Barrett to the body of his first victim, twenty-four-year-old U.S. Foreign Service employee Dayna Voyles. Barrett had just completed the third week of his murder trial when he obviously realized that the witness testimony and forensic evidence were too much for his defense team to overcome. In his quickly negotiated plea deal, Barrett agreed to reveal the location of his victim’s body in exchange for having the death penalty taken off the table.
FBI Special Agent Roland Metcalf sat in the passenger seat next to Cynthia. He’d just turned thirty, and the Barrett investigation had been one of his first big cases. They’d worked it together, and she was impressed by his intelligence and instinctive ability to separate the relevant from the irrelevant, the truth from the bullshit. Metcalf had impressed a lot of people at the Bureau, and she was sure he would be impressing many more in the years to come.
Strode knew this was probably one of her last big cases, at least as far as media attention went. Although she was still two years from the Bureau’s mandatory retirement age of fifty-seven, she’d been getting none-too-subtle inquiries ever since she passed her qualifying twenty-five years of service a while back. Nothing like a gentle shove out the door just when you think you’ve found your groove.
Metcalf turned toward her. “Have you ever been on one of these?”
“A perp-led body hunt? Once before, when I was still working out of the Dallas office. A guy showed us where he’d hidden his high school math teacher’s body.” She upped the speed on the windshield wipers. “But I’ll tell you, it was a lot nicer day than this one. How about you, Metcalf?”
“Nope. Never had a perp so accommodating. I’ve been on two body digs, but Stan and Ollie led the way each time.”
She smiled. “I love those boys.”
Stan and Ollie were cadaver dogs employed by their team.
“I’m surprised Barrett agreed to this,” Metcalf said. “I visited him in jail three times in the last few months, and he was never interested in a deal.”
“I guess he thought he was going to beat it.”
Metcalf shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“What makes you say that?”
“You remember when we brought him in? He seemed like he was glad to be caught.”
“He did. But that didn’t stop him from hiring the best lawyers his daddy’s money could buy to try to beat the charge.”
Metcalf furrowed his brow. “I know. But every time I talked to him, he seemed…resigned. Like he knew he was never getting out.”
“But this isn’t about getting out. It’s about avoiding a lethal injection. Maybe he didn’t like how the jury was looking at him.”
“Maybe.”
The lead car pulled over to the side of the road, and the others followed. One by one, the cast of characters emerged. Half a dozen forensics team members pulled shovels and a pair of dirt sifters from the back of a police van. A photographer and videographer jumped from their cars with cameras already in their hands. Four uniformed cops placed traffic cones and signs on the slick road, directing passing cars around the parked convoy. A few detectives were also there, with no real purpose other than to be on hand when they finally recovered Dayna Voyles from her lonely grave.
Strode couldn’t blame them; there was no way in hell she’d miss this, after years of assuring the grieving parents that they’d never stop looking for their daughter.
She and Metcalf climbed out of the car just in time to see two officers emerging from the department of corrections van with killer James Michael Barrett, adorned in an orange jumpsuit, handcuffs, and leg irons. Barrett looked different than he had when they caught him; his round, bearded face was now clean-shaven, and his long hair was now cut and in an attractive conservative style. A classic defense attorney makeover.
Barrett smiled. “Strode and Metcalf. All the big guns are here.”
Strode shook her head. “You’re the big gun here today, Barrett.”
“You flatter me.”
“Never.”
The corrections officers pulled Barrett across the tall wet grass bordering the road, toward a clump of trees that looked remarkably like the sketch he’d drawn the morning he entered his plea.
The group was strangely silent, Strode thought, probably sobered by what they knew was waiting for them just ahead. It wouldn’t last; she’d visited enough crime scenes to know that the wisecracks would soon start flying. If called on it, the cops and agents would trot out that old canard about their jokes being a defense mechanism. She never bought that. Some of those guys were just sick assholes.
