Prologue
Michael
It was a hot, sticky summer with an oppressive humidity that made the living miserable; the kind of weather that brings out the worst in people. The suburbs of Gambrills, Odenton, and Woodwardville, all three in Anne Arundel County, Maryland had been hit with rash of missing persons, all women in their early to mid-twenties. All of the missing women had similar hair and eye color, height and body type, but there was no known connection among them. So far, none of them had shown up. About a month after the third woman went missing under identical circumstances to the two previous disappearances, County police suspected they were dealing with a serial abductor. Then, after three additional women went missing and were feared dead, my partner, Lenie, and I were asked to take a more active role in the investigations. A couple of days into our assignment the body of the first woman to go missing was found by two local boys hoping to pull a few catfish from the Patuxent river. Instead what they snagged was the beginning of a journey into madness.
What had once been a living being now lay clad in only a bra and panties some 150 feet down an embankment that poured into the river. It was hard to tell from where I was standing, but there appeared to be some kind of grayish substance covering her skin; possibly some kind of clay or plaster. I stood at the top of the embankment staring down at the body. I then surveyed the area and tried to gauge from which vantage point the killer had lobbed the body, based on its position and the river’s current. Once the body was brought onto land and placed on its back we found her driver’s license inside her bra cup. Lenie tagged and bagged the license, then gave it to me to follow up while she stayed with the body.
I went to the address given on the license to look for answers to the questions bouncing around inside my head. I showed the landlord my ID and asked for the keys to the victim’s apartment. Once inside, I expected to look for photos to match up with the photo on the license, but all of that melted away when I went into the living room. Lenie and I have both seen our fair share of the sick and tragic aftermath of the human psyche gone bad, but what I found in that living room on that maddening day in July went far beyond the inner sanctum of human darkness--a place that bears no name. What I saw in that apartment affected me on a deeply personal level, because it tapped into my own inner place with no name. In the middle of the room was a statue, but this was no ordinary statue.
This was a macabre spectacle of perversion that had to be connected to the body recovered from the embankment. The statue was a replica of Auguste Rodin’s “Danaid” with a few exceptions. At its core was the body of a woman completely encased in what appeared to be plaster of Paris. There were several punctures in the statue that revealed the bloated and discolored chunks of flesh.
I wondered if she was one of the reported missing women or if she were someone completely new. For now, the only thing I had to go on was a toe-tag subbing for a price tag for his bent artwork. That was the first time Lenie and I encountered “The Artist,” and we’ve been chasing this fucker ever since.
Lenie
Anne Arundel County police had received a frantic phone call from two brothers fishing in the Patuxent. They were fishing for catfish when the younger brother cast his line too far and got his bait rig caught in the dense foliage below the embankment. They had to row closer inland to prevent his line from snapping and losing his rig. As he went to untangle his rig, he spotted the body resting on a fallen tree and nearly fell over backwards out of the boat. His older brother tried to convince him that he’d just seen a broken and discarded mannequin. “People throw stuff away all the time.” he said.
To calm his brother he decided to prove him wrong by taking a closer look. He realized that his brother was indeed right when the stench from the decomposing body hit his nostrils. Sadly, both brothers were correct: it was a body and it looked like a life-size broken doll.
There was a 150-foot drop directly onto the downed tree. The County police used several of their boats to gain access to the body and were kind enough to allow me to tag along. Whoever did this to her must have decided that some where down the line she didn’t make the grade. There appeared to be hundreds of puncture wounds covering the entire back of her body. I wouldn’t know about the front of the body until she was flipped over, but first we had to get the body on land. I digitally recorded and took photos of everything within a 300-foot radius, looking for anything that might render some answers. It was much easier to conduct a preliminary exam of the body once we’d gotten it on land. We carefully rolled the body over and beneath the mud and bloodstains were bits of hard plaster of some sort. The body had as many puncture wounds on its front as it had on its back.
When the medical examiners lifted the body onto the body bag the plaster covering her breasts cracked and out slid the woman’s driver’s license from inside of her bra. I marked it and cataloged it for evidence, then handed it to Michael. I went with the body to the medical examiner’s office. I needed to collect trace and forensic evidence from the body. I collected samples from her hair and from under the fingernails and toenails, and then collected oral, anal, and vaginal samples to run a rape kit. I also had the plaster analyzed.
It’s difficult sometimes to do the job that I do when you witness such ugliness first hand. If you don’t maintain an emotional and psychological distance it’ll eat away at you until either you lose yourself to a variety of addictions or your health declines in some unpleasant manner. I have been there and it is not a place that I ever want to revisit. I didn’t have a good feeling about this. Every once in a while, no matter how hard you try to maintain a professional distance, something comes along and grabs you by the throat. I have a wicked feeling that this was just the beginning of the choke hold.
