The agents swarmed inside, clearing the rooms one by one until they came to the stairs. They headed up, cleared six bedrooms, and then stopped at the last one.
“Holy shit,” said one of the agents, lowering his weapon.
Bogart and Decker entered the room and stared down at the two chairs situated in a sitting room off the main bedroom area.
There was a body in each chair, entirely wrapped in plastic that was compressed tightly around their figures. The faces visible through the plastic were of a man and a woman.
“Mr. and Mrs. Wyatt, do you think?” asked Bogart.
“Anything is possible,” replied Decker.
* * *
Eight hours later the forensic team and ME had finished their work. The bodies had been identified as Lane Wyatt and his wife, Ashby. Their time of death was hard to pin down because they had been embalmed.
“Damnedest thing,” said the ME. “But it’s well done. Whoever did it had some experience doing it.”
“So all the blood removed and the fluid pumped into them?” said Bogart.
The man nodded. “And then they were wrapped in the plastic, and it looks like someone used a heat source to compress and then seal the plastic. Probably used a hair dryer. That and the embalming really preserved the body. No air could get in. The bodies are in remarkable shape.”
“And they could have been here a long time or a short time?”
“I’ll try to work up a TOD window for you, but it won’t be easy.”
Bogart said, “The cars in the garage are between two and four years old and the registrations are still current. And the food in the fridge, while expired, is not that old. And the house is in reasonably good shape. I don’t think they’ve been dead for years, unless someone has been living here while they’ve been in their ‘packages.’”
He looked at the ME. “Cause of death?”
“Not particularly evident. No visible wounds on the bodies. Could have been poison, but obvious signs would be long gone. There might be some trace of it in their tissue. And I might be able to get some blood out of them. There’s usually some left even with embalming.”
“Find what you can,” urged Bogart.
The ME nodded and left.
Bogart turned his attention to Decker and Jamison, who were sitting at the kitchen table going over some papers they’d taken out of a shoebox. Bogart sat across from Decker.
“Well, at least there were no cryptic messages to you painted on the walls.”
Decker nodded absently and said, “I doubt they expected us to get to here. Which is actually a good thing.”
“Why?”
“It means they’re fallible. And it means we’re closing the gap. The tortoise and the hare? Remember?”
“But why leave the bodies like that? They must have assumed someone would find them.”
Decker looked at him. “According to what your people found out, the Wyatts were retired. They had no family other than their daughter, and no friends. They kept to themselves.”
“So folks might not have missed them,” said Bogart. “At least for a while.”
“We should check to see if they used a pool service company. The pool was probably only winterized a couple months ago. If they came up to do it, they might have seen the Wyatts.”
“Good idea.”
Decker said, “The Wyatts had money. This place is over ten thousand square feet. And there’s a Range Rover, Audi A8, and Mercedes S500 in the garage.”
“Money can’t buy you happiness,” remarked Jamison.
Bogart looked back down at the papers. “What do you have there?”
Jamison said, “Letters from Belinda to her parents when she was at the institute. Your team found them in that shoebox stuffed under some junk in a closet upstairs.”
“What do they say?”
Decker said, “To sum it up, they’re letters from a frightened young woman imploring her parents to come see her. To come take her home.”
“Marshall said they never visited her.”
“Then give us some examples of reasons,” said Decker.
Bogart leaned in, and while his voice grew softer, it also grew firmer. “It can be symbolic of a hatred of women and what they represent—being mothers, giving birth. The female genitalia are the gates to the birth canal, to be a little crude about it. I’ve seen killers do that to women because their mothers abandoned them. Or let them be abused by others. Mothers are supposed to protect their children, always be there for them. When a mother doesn’t do that it can lead to some really messed-up minds. The mutilation is a way of closing those gates, shutting off the birth canal permanently—not that murder didn’t already do that. But in their minds they’re actually doing something positive.”
Decker said, “Meaning another child can’t be born to that woman? And won’t be abandoned or abused?”
“Exactly.”
Jamison interjected, “Well, Belinda’s parents abandoned her to her fate at the institute. They never visited her there. They ignored her pleas to come and get her. And could she have seen the rape and beating she endured as her mother’s not protecting her?”