Once Bound

Just as Meredith had said, Riley and her colleagues were greeted on the tarmac at O’Hare by a pair of uniformed railroad cops. They all introduced themselves, and Riley and her colleagues got into their vehicle.

“We’d better hurry,” the cop in the passenger seat said. “The railroad bigwigs are really breathing down the chief’s neck to get that body off the tracks.”

Bill asked, “How long will it take us to get there?”

The cop who was driving said, “Usually an hour, but it won’t take us that long.”

He turned on the lights and siren, and the car started wending its way through the heavy late afternoon traffic. It was a tense, chaotic, high-speed drive that eventually took them through the small town of Barnwell, Illinois. After that, they passed through a railroad crossing.

The passenger cop pointed.

“It looks like the killer turned off the road right next to the tracks in some kind of off-road vehicle. He drove alongside the tracks until he reached the place where he did the killing.”

Soon they pulled over and parked next to a wooded area. Another police vehicle was parked there, and also a coroner’s van.

The trees weren’t very dense. The cops led Riley and her colleagues straight through them to the railroad tracks, which were only some fifty feet away.

Just then, the crime scene came into full view.

Riley gulped hard at what she saw.

Suddenly gone were any corny images of mustachioed villains and damsels in distress.

This was all too real – and all too horrible.

CHAPTER FIVE

For a long moment, Riley stood staring at the body on the tracks. She’d seen corpses mangled in all kinds of horrifying ways. Even so, this victim presented a uniquely shocking spectacle. The woman had been beheaded cleanly by the wheels of the train, almost as if by a guillotine’s blade.

Riley was surprised that the woman’s headless body seemed unscathed by the train that had passed over it. The victim was bound tightly with duct tape, her hands and arms taped to her sides, and her ankles taped together. Clothed in what had been an attractive outfit, the body was twisted in a desperate, writhing position. Where her neck was severed, blood was spattered on the crushed stones, the wooden ties, and the rail. The head had been thrown some six or seven feet down the embankment along the tracks. The woman’s eyes and mouth gaped up at the sky in an expression of frozen horror.

Riley saw several people standing around the body, some of them wearing uniforms, some not. Riley figured they were a mix of local police and railroad cops. A man in a uniform came toward Riley and her colleagues.

He said, “You’re the FBI folks, I take it. I’m Jude Cullen, Deputy Chief of Railroad Police for the Chicago region – ‘Bull’ Cullen, folks call me.”

He sounded proud of the nickname. Riley knew from her research that “Bull” was general slang for a police officer on the railroad. Actually, in the railroad police organization they held the titles of Agent and Special Agent, much like the FBI. This one apparently preferred the sound of the more generic term.

“It was my idea to get you guys here,” Cullen continued. “I hope the trip proves to be worth it. The sooner we can get the body away from here, the better.”

As Riley and her colleagues introduced themselves, she looked Cullen over. He seemed remarkably young and had an exceptionally muscular physique, his arms bulging below the uniform’s short sleeves and the shirt stretched tight across his chest.

The nickname “Bull” suited him pretty well, she thought. But Riley always found herself put off rather than attracted by men who obviously spent many hours in a gym to look this way.

She wondered how a muscle-bound guy like Bull Cullen actually found time for much of anything else. Then she noticed that he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. She figured that his life must be about his job and working out, and not much else.

He appeared to be good-natured and not especially shocked by the unusually grisly nature of the crime scene. Of course, he’d been here for a few hours now – long enough to get somewhat numbed to it. Even so, the man immediately struck Riley as rather vain and shallow.

She asked him, “Have you identified the victim?”

Bull Cullen nodded.

“Yeah, her name was Reese Fisher, thirty-five years old. She lived right near here in Barnwell, where she worked as the local librarian. She was married to a chiropractor.”

Riley looked up and down the tracks. This stretch was curved so that she couldn’t see very far in either direction.

“Where is the train that ran over her?” she asked Cullen.

Cullen pointed and said, “About a half mile down there, exactly where it stopped.”

Riley noticed an obese, black-uniformed man who was crouching next to the body.

“Is that the medical examiner?” she asked Cullen.

“Yeah, let me introduce you to him. This is the Barnwell coroner, Corey Hammond.”

Riley crouched down beside the man. She sensed that, in contrast to Cullen, Hammond was still struggling to contain his shock. His breathing was coming in gasps – partly due to his weight, but also, she suspected, from revulsion and horror. He’d surely never seen anything like this in his jurisdiction.

“What can you tell us so far?” Riley asked the coroner.

“No sign of sexual assault that I can see,” Hammond said. “That’s consistent with the other coroner’s autopsy of the victim four days ago, over near Allardt.”

Hammond pointed to mangled pieces of wide silvery tape around the woman’s neck and shoulders.

“The killer bound her hand and foot, then taped her neck onto the rail and immobilized her shoulders. She must have struggled like mad trying to get loose. But she didn’t stand a chance.”

Riley turned toward Cullen and asked, “Her mouth wasn’t gagged. Would anybody have heard her screaming?”

“We don’t think so,” Cullen said, pointing toward some trees. “There are some houses through those woods, but they’re out of earshot. A couple of my guys went from door to door asking if anybody had heard anything or had any idea what had been happening at the time of the murder. No one did. They found out all about it on TV or on the Internet. They’ve been instructed to stay away from here. So far, we haven’t had any trouble with gawkers.”

Bill asked, “Did it look like anything was stolen from her?”

Cullen shrugged.

“We don’t think so. We found her purse right here beside her, and she still had identification and money and credit cards. Oh, and a cell phone.”

Riley studied the body, trying to imagine how the killer had managed to get the victim into this position. Sometimes she could get a powerful, even uncanny, feeling of the killer just by tuning in to her surroundings at a crime scene. Sometimes it almost seemed that she could get into his thoughts, know what was on his mind as he committed the murder.

But not right now.

Things were too jangled here, with all these people milling about.

She said, “He must have subdued her somehow before he bound her up like this. What about the other corpse, the victim that was killed earlier? Did the local coroner find any drugs in her system?”

“There was flunitrazepam in her bloodstream,” Coroner Hammond said.

Riley glanced at her colleagues. She knew what flunitrazepam was, and she knew that Jenn and Bill did as well. Its trade name was Rohypnol, and it was commonly known as the date rape drug or as “roofies.” It was illegal, but all too easy to buy on the streets.

And it certainly would have subdued the victim, rendering her helpless although possibly not fully unconscious. Riley knew that flunitrazepam had an amnesiac effect once it wore off. She shuddered to realize …