Melissa could smell the bodies all the way from the roadside, thirty yards from the house. Even here in the country, surrounded by sprawling green fields of soybeans and corn, the vast open space and gentle morning breeze did nothing to dilute the stench in the air.
She turned off the county road and onto the property’s dirt driveway, pulling to a stop behind the two Corcoran squad cars already on the scene.
She got out of the car and found herself in the shadow of a tank-like man who identified himself as Officer Davis. Melissa put the man at six-foot-four from the soles of his shoes to the top of his crew cut blonde hair. Despite his formidable size, a sickly pallor dominated his facial complexion. Beads of sweat dotted his forehead.
“I’m Detective Humble,” she said. “Hennepin County Homicide.”
After floundering for a response, Davis merely nodded.
“First body?” Melissa asked, giving the man time to recover.
“Yes, Ma’am. I’m sorry.”
“What can you tell me so far?”
“There’re, ah, two victims,” Davis said, leading her toward the farmhouse. “Mel and Florence Patterson, ages sixty-five and sixty-two. We found their IDs inside. One of’em’s in the house, the other’s in the garage.”
“Who found them?”
“Xcel Energy employee,” Davis answered. He pointed past the squad cars, to a white pickup truck with the power company’s logo on the door. “Guy’s name is Kevin Porter. He was doing scheduled maintenance both here in Corcoran and down the road in Loretto. He said he’d finished checking the transformer back near the road when he noticed the service pole feeding the house was down. He didn’t have a report on it, so he figured the people who owned the place were out of town and didn’t know their power was out. When he came up the driveway to have a better look at the damage, that’s when he saw the garage.”
The officer gestured to the large detached garage. The white aluminum door buckled outward at the center, as if someone had tried to drive out without raising it.
“That’s nothing compared to what’s inside,” Davis added in a whisper.
They approached the two-story home and ascended the front steps into the cooler shadows under the covered porch. Davis led her around the building’s front half, passing a cedar log bench swing and decorative bouquets made of dried cornstalks and sunflowers. He stopped at a side entrance to point out the first signs of destruction amidst the pristine yellow paintjob on the walls and the white trim of the doorway. Melissa crouched down to examine the splinters of wood that jutted from the doorjamb and strike plate like a vertical row of needle-sharp teeth.
She looked at the officer. “This door was kicked out.”
“From the inside,” Davis agreed.
He opened the door for Melissa and the smell of decay intensified to an almost unbearable level. Davis took a step back.
“It’s bad,” he warned her.
She glanced at him, knowing her small frame and youthful appearance often made other officers—male officers—feel inclined to treat her like a rookie on the first day of the job. But when she noted the unfeigned look of repulsion on his face, she strode inside without comment.
The door opened onto a true farmhouse kitchen, one that boasted two big ovens and a gas range that looked large enough to serve in any major restaurant. Copper pots and iron pans hung in neat order on ceiling racks over a central cooking island, and the dinner table looked like a marvelous solid oak work of art from a previous century.
Beyond those items the pleasantries stopped.
At the far end of the kitchen, between the counter and the ovens, Mrs. Patterson’s corpse hung on the wall like one of the knickknacks on the porch.
Melissa stopped in her tracks, gazing in disbelief.
The woman’s corpse had been nailed in place with every cooking utensil imaginable, pinning her back to the wall, arms outstretched. Knives, forks, tongs, skewers, corkscrews—even wooden cooking spoons pierced the body; their straight handles had been thrust into the eye sockets. The air hummed with flies.
“You ever seen anything so horrible?” the officer asked, now staring out the window rather than look at the deceased.
“Not like this, no.”
“We got us a real problem here, don’t we?”
Melissa didn’t answer. Instead, she moved closer to the body.
“Decomp has to be three or four days old,” she said, swatting at flies that darted for her face. She knew the coroner’s examination would determine if anything had happened to Mrs. Patterson prior to being stapled to the wall, but it seemed likely the bizarre crucifixion would prove to be a posthumous act, done as a deranged display by the killer. Then again, she knew anyone capable of taking a life was also capable of unthinkable cruelty.
Suddenly, something caught her eye, a mark half-hidden behind the hair drooping over the dead woman’s face. Melissa pulled a pen from her pocket and pushed the strands aside.
“Oh, shit,” she thought aloud.
Her comment jolted Officer Davis from his thoughts, and he turned his back on the blooming countryside out the window. “What is it, Ma’am?”
She stepped back to allow him a view of several incisions on the woman’s forehead. Maggots squirmed under the skin, but she knew it was the marking itself that caused the cop’s expression to pale in awe.
Melissa now knew that this would be an even stranger case than it already seemed. She’d found two overlapping twin Ks, the horrifying signature of serial kidnapper and mass-murderer Kale Kane. She knew the mark well. The maniac’s freakish signature that had become synonymous throughout the state—maybe even the country by now—with fear, malevolence, lunacy, and death.
“Oh, Jesus,” Davis whispered. “We got a copycat.”
Melissa looked out the kitchen door at the sound of approaching vehicles. The coroner van and the crime scene investigators had arrived.
“We don’t know it’s a copycat,” she warned.
“How many will this one kill?” he whispered, still staring at the corpse.
Melissa ignored the officer’s comment and edged past him, exiting the kitchen to go meet the forensics team leader. Outside, the rising sun’s heat did little to dissuade the shiver that ran through her.