Today's Reading
I approached Deputy Hollings. Ten minutes ago, he had been giddy to see us. "Fan-boyish," Cassie would say. But now his face looked green.
I remembered a piece of advice that my mother taught me years ago. To add bits of information at the starts of conversations. To be perceived as more likable. Emotional.
"I'm sorry this is happening here," I said. "Ashland seems like a beautiful town."
Hollings nodded in appreciation. "Thank you for saying that."
"You have pictures from before Dr. Ward flipped the body?" I asked.
The deputy retrieved a phone from his back pocket. He showed me a wide shot of the kitchen. Then a close-up of Ross Tignon, lying on his back.
"I need a sponge," I said, turning to the doctor.
Ward fished through his kit. Handed me what appeared to be a brand-new construction sponge. Yellow and rectangular. Three inches thick. Three dollars and eighty-nine cents at the nearest Home Depot.
After wetting it at the sink, I leaned over the body. Used the corner of it to slowly clean Tignon's upper chest.
The numbers 5 and 0 were carved into his skin, two inches high and an inch apart, right between his nipples.
"The number fifty mean something to you?" Ward asked.
In my head I combed through every detail from the three murders Ross Tignon had been accused of in 2013. His victims' ages were twenty-six, twenty-nine, and thirty-two, and each had been knocked unconscious, the depth of their stab wounds 4.2, 5.3, and 6.1 centimeters past the chest wall.
My mind cycled through a half dozen other variables.
The number fifty...meant nothing.
CHAPTER TWO
SEVEN YEARS AGO, A WOMAN NAMED DAISY CARABELLE had been abducted from a parking lot near The Beachcomber in Sandstone, Florida, where she worked as a bartender. Daisy was twenty-six, with no boyfriend or ties to the community. By the next morning, her body was found in a stolen Chevy Astro van on the side of Highway 60.
Seventeen days later, another woman was killed, and a day after that, a third.
The FBI pairs young with old. And in March of 2013, my partner Saul was three months from retirement when we were invited in by local police. And so the case was mine to lead: my first time in charge at the FBI.
We arrived in Sandstone on a Tuesday afternoon. By Thursday night, we had narrowed our suspect pool to one man: Ross Tignon, the man who owned that stolen Astro van. As I interviewed Tignon, I'd found a thread that local police had missed in their initial questioning, and I kept pulling. By late that night, I woke a judge up, got an arrest warrant signed, and called in support from SWAT.
But as we arrived at Tignon's house, the place was engulfed in flames, and we were lucky to get his wife Beverly out.
The next day the case was over, and the result deemed a success. A serial killer was dead, all without the expense of a trial.
Or so it seemed.
I glanced at Ross Tignon's body on the kitchen floor. Then stared into the sink, two feet away. A hard plastic container bore the words "Magic Bullet," the remains of something blended visible inside.
"What are you thinking?" Cassie asked.
"Soft food," I said, recalling a detail that helped us identify the body in the fire in 2013. "Cass, check if the victim is missing teeth. A molar on each side."
Cassie crouched by the body. She reached a gloved hand into Tignon's mouth and scuttled around. Lifted out a pair of partial dentures.
Below where the dentures had been—on each side of the victim's mouth—was a black gap toward the back.
"Savage," Cassie exclaimed. It was an expression she used in three different ways, more often than not to describe the craziness of her twenties. Her "savage days," as she called them. But today, I knew to interpret the word more literally.
The body in the 2013 fire had been charred beyond all recognition, the skull bashed in from a fallen beam. But we had found a pair of molars, loose at the rear of the mouth. An FBI forensic odontologist had extracted DNA from their pulp and verified that the molars had come from Tignon.
"So he yanked out his own teeth back then?" Cassie said.
"Then hid them in a stranger's mouth," I replied.
When one thing is not as it seems, look for more.
...
