by Mindy Mejia
“You include Rochester in that deduction?”
“Hmm.” He thought about that.
“See if you can find anything outside the entrance.” I handed him the camera and crept back out toward the edge of the water. It hardly creaked without Jake there—compared to him I suppose I was tiny, whittled down to bone and gristle after thirty years on the job. I squatted next to the girl and cupped my jaw in one hand, looking for what I wasn’t seeing. She was drained pale and her face was turned slightly to one side. Her eye sockets, pooled with dried blood, had caught some of her hair. The cuts were mainly to her eyes and cheeks, short jabs except for one long diagonal slash from her temple to her jaw. An exclamation point. Except for the stab wound to the chest the rest of the body was fairly clean. Someone wanted this face to go away pretty bad.
I glanced over at Jake to make sure he was out of earshot, before leaning close.
“Henrietta?” It always riled her when I used her given name, which was why I’d done it for practically eighteen years. Everyone’d called her Hattie since the day she came home from the hospital with a lacy bow tied around her sweet, bald head. That memory just about undid me, so I cleared my throat and made sure Jake was still busy before conceding the name I’d jokingly refused to use in life. “Hattie?”
I wasn’t expecting a reaction or a dove from God or anything, but sometimes you have to say something out loud and see how the words land, how they end up sitting in your gut. These words felt like knives inside me. I stared at her build, the long brown hair, the skimpy dress too early for the season. No matter what I’d said to Jake, these details told me who I was looking at when I first walked in the barn.
When Bud came into my office this morning and told me he had to file a missing persons on Hattie, both of us figured she’d taken off. Nothing that girl ever wanted more than to get out of town, but Bud’s wife wasn’t so sure. Hattie was starring in her high school play this weekend and Mona didn’t think for one second that Hattie would leave town before finishing the show. Some Shakespeare play. Mona also said Hattie wouldn’t’ve left two months before graduation. What she said made sense, but hell would freeze over before I bet on the common sense of a teenager. I put out the standard missing persons alert, all the while thinking Bud and Mona would get an email from her next week saying she was in Minneapolis or Chicago.
Now, as I stared down at what was probably the remains of my fishing buddy’s only daughter, a worse question started tearing at me, the question that would gut Bud’s life as easily as we’d gutted sunnies and carp not five hundred yards from this very spot.
Who could have murdered Hattie Hoffman?
By the time the crime lab team arrived and the ambulance negotiated the overgrown trail to the barn to load up the body, I’d already gotten two dozen phone calls. The only one I answered was from Brian Haeffner, Pine Valley’s mayor.
“Is it true, Del?”
I stood off to the side while the forensics boys combed over the entire barn like ants at a picnic.
“Yeah, it’s true.”
“Accident?” Brian sounded hopeful.
“Nope.”
“You’re telling me we’ve got a murderer on the loose?”
I walked outside and spat near the side of the barn, trying to loosen the dead taste from my mouth. The grass was untrampled, waving toward the lake in a light wind.
“I’m saying we’ve got an open homicide case on an as-yet-unidentified victim and that’s all I’ll be saying.”
“You’ll have to make a statement. We’ll have every news station in the state calling.”
Brian always exaggerated the hell out of everything. He’d likely get a few calls from the County Gazette. The truth was, his wife probably wanted to know all the details so she could spread it around at Sally’s Café, where she baked muffins every morning. Brian and I went back pretty far, since we were both long-standing public officials. We endorsed each other every time an election rolled around and he was a good mayor, but I couldn’t take more than one drink with him at a time. He yammered on about every little thing and was always wanting to know about cases and “crime trends.” Sometimes he reminded me of one of those excitable dogs that can’t stop licking your hand.
“You just got my statement, Brian. We’ll release the victim’s ID when it’s confirmed.”
“I need to know if the town’s at risk, Del.”
“So do I.”
I hung up on him and pocketed the phone as one of the medics walked over.
“Sheriff, we’re ready to take her in.”
“Okay, I’ll follow later. I’ve got some things to check first.”
“Some leads?” The girl looked hopeful. I’d never seen her before—she wasn’t from the county.
“No such thing as leads.” I walked back into the barn. “You either got the guy or you don’t.”
The forensic boys bottled and bagged everything that wasn’t nailed down and dragged every inch of the water in the barn. They turned up an empty wine bottle, a kerosene lantern, five empty cigarette packs, some generic matchbooks, and three used condoms.
I watched as they taped up the door and window.
Jake came up next to me. “No murder weapon.”
“Nope.” We waited for the team to finish up and clear out. They’d found a few hairs and were going to test the condoms, too, to see if there was any DNA left. Beyond that, they’d hold the rest until we either told them what we needed or closed the case.
After their vans disappeared over the horizon, there was only the sound of the wind drying out the fields and an occasional sparrow call from the lake. It was easier to think that way.
“She was in the far corner from the door.”
“So she either got backed up into the corner or someone found her there.” Jake was right with my line of thought. This was why I’d picked him as my chief deputy.
“No visible wounds or marks on her hands, so there wasn’t much of a struggle.” I walked toward the barn door and faced out, like I’d just left. Farmland stretched to the horizon in gentle hills in every direction, empty fields shedding the last of their snow. There wasn’t a single house or building in sight of the barn. “He kills her and heads out. Doesn’t leave the knife. He needs to get away and deal with the weapon and his clothes.”
Jake pointed at the trail that circled around the lake toward the beach and the boat launch. “That’s our best bet. He parked in one of the lots and went back the same way.”
“It’s either that or cross-country to the highway or past the Erickson house to Route 7. Both are about a mile.”
“Why would he park so far away? Doesn’t make sense.”
“No, it doesn’t. But most killers are stupid. And they usually don’t plan on killing anybody, so they don’t think about details like the best getaway route.”
Jake grunted to let me know he wasn’t on board with a cross-country escape.
“We’re going to need dogs to go over the fields. A mile in every direction. Call Mick in Rochester. And get the boat out on the lake with a metal detector. The killer might have tossed the knife in on his way back to the car.”
“I agree with that. I’ll have them go over every inch of the lake and shore.”
We left the scene and bumped the cruisers back over the fields to Winifred Erickson’s house. Jake kept on going toward town, but I tried her door first. No answer. Didn’t mean she wasn’t home. Most folks around here threw open the screen door at the first dust trail over the horizon, but Winifred took her notions. Sometimes she’d go weeks without showing her face in town, and I’d been sent more than once to see if she’d fallen over dead in her kitchen. She never answered the door until I was ready to bust it down and then it was with curlers tying up the leftover strands of gray on her scalp and Lars’s old pipe jutting out of her mouth, asking me if I knew how much doors cost and was I damn ready to buy her a new one. A few days later she’d appear on Main Street again, as friendly as you pleas
e. She’d been odd like that ever since she killed her husband.
I left her a note about the dog search and headed back to town.
The phones were ringing like fire alarms when I got into the office, but Nancy wasn’t at the desk. I found her in the break room getting a cup of coffee. Jake was scarfing down a sandwich while holding his phone.
“I’m on hold with Rochester,” he got out between bites. Glad to see the kid’s appetite wasn’t affected by a mutilated corpse.
“Grab me some coffee, too, Nance, will you?”
“They won’t stop, Del. They’ve been pouring in like water since about twenty minutes after you got called out there.”
“Who?” Jake asked.
“Everybody I’ve ever met, for starters, and I’m telling them to keep their noses in their own business. But the papers, too, and Shel called to see if you wanted him to come in.”
Shel was one of our four full-time deputies. With only twelve people in the whole office, we were gonna be pretty thin on the ground during a murder investigation.
“How the hell did he hear about it so quick?”
“He’s cousin to the Sanders. They called him as soon as the boy came home.”
“No, tell him we’re fine. Jake can take any emergencies from here.”
“But I’ve got to open the case,” Jake protested.
“I’m opening this case.”
“I lead the investigations unit, Del.”
“And I’m the sheriff of this county.”
I didn’t pull rank on him that often and he didn’t look any too pleased that I had now. Didn’t matter. This was my case. Nancy followed me into my office with the coffee.
“No calls for the next twenty minutes. And this case needs to be locked down. Not a word or a nod to anyone before I tell you. We can confirm one dead female by stabbing. That’s all.”
“You know me, Del. I’m a black hole.”
She made to leave and then turned around. “Was it bad?”
I looked up the number on my phone and sighed. “It’s going to get worse.”
“I’m sorry, Del. I’ll get a press release ready for when the ID is confirmed.”
Nancy shut the door behind her. I sighed and looked at the picture on the wall of me holding up a thirty-pound muskie on Lake Michigan, the biggest fish I’d ever caught in fresh waters. Bud had called him my monster and then practically outdid me the very next day with a twenty-six-pounder of his own. Jesus Christ. I hit the call button before I could think any more about it.
He answered on the first ring. “Is it her?”
I gritted my teeth, took a breath. “You’ve heard.”
“Mona’s out of her mind for worrying. What do you know?”
“Can’t say who it is yet.”
“Can’t or won’t?” Bud’s voice didn’t rise or change at all, but I’d never heard him ask that kind of question of me in the twenty-five years we’d been friends.
“Can’t, Bud. There was some . . . trauma . . . to the face and we can’t make a positive ID.” He didn’t say anything to that, although I knew he was taking it in somehow, and his picture of the dead girl who could be his daughter just got a whole lot uglier.
The last time anybody’d seen Hattie, according to Bud, was on Friday night after her play up at the school. Bud and Mona’d gone to see it and they hugged her afterwards and said not to be too late, but Hattie never came home.
“You remember what Hattie was wearing last night, Bud?”
“Her costume. It was a dress.”
“A sundress?”
“No, a white dress with blood all over it. Fake blood. And she had a crown on.”
“Would she have changed out of that before leaving?”
“I guess.”
“Does she own a yellow sundress with some ruffly stuff on it?”
“Hell if I know.” Bud checked with Mona. I could hear their voices low and tense.
“No, Mona says she doesn’t.” He came back on the line, sounding almost relieved. I didn’t share the feeling.
“Hmm. Still no idea who she got a ride with from the school?”
“Mona and I keep thinking it should have been Portia. She was in the play, too, but she says she didn’t see much of Hattie afterwards.”
“Okay, Bud. Listen, I need you to release Hattie’s dental records to my office. I’ll have Nancy stop by with the form and you’ll be the first to know about this girl one way or the other. I promise you that.”
He made a sound like a shaky acknowledgment and hung up the phone.
Before I could think too much about what I’d just asked of my best friend, I called Rochester and confirmed the autopsy was scheduled first thing tomorrow. It didn’t matter that tomorrow was Sunday; morgues didn’t keep business hours.
While Nancy took care of the paperwork and pictures, I opened the case file with Jake’s fancy new software that made it impossible to get any work done. Couldn’t grumble about it now. After getting the damn thing open, I filled in the few details we had. It was bleached bones, almost nothing.
Female.
Caucasian.
Stab wounds and possible head trauma.
Body found by two local juveniles at the old Erickson barn on Saturday, April 12, 2008, 4:32 p.m.
I swallowed and rubbed my jaw, looking at all those blank fields. I was worried for the first time I could remember, thinking about what I might have to type in there. Girls didn’t get murdered for nothing, not in Wabash County. There were no drive-by shootings here, no angry boys unloading an arsenal inside the high school. All that crazy city shit was a world away from us, and that’s why a lot of the folks who lived here stayed. Sure, the Pine Valley storefronts were always half empty. When crop prices were down, people might not scrape out their mortgage payments, but this was a community. A place stuck on the idea that people still mattered. Something certainly had mattered enough to draw this girl out to the Erickson barn in the middle of nowhere. And whatever it was had also mattered enough to someone else to kill her over it.
It was getting late so I walked home, but who knew why. I ate most of my meals at the station and hardly slept anymore. It used to be just during big cases, but lately I was only down about four hours a night. I owned the top half of a duplex a block off Main Street. The Nguyens, the folks who ran the liquor store now, lived downstairs. They were practically the only Asians in the county and although their cooking smells were downright pungent—nothing like Chinese restaurants—they were quiet and never banged on the plumbing to tell me to shut up like the last old woman did before she had a stroke and died. I kept it down anyway, especially in the middle of the night when I wasn’t sleeping. I played records sometimes, but I never watched the TV anymore; it just made me feel dead already. I got my news in the paper and listened to ball games on the radio, so there was no point even having the thing except the Nguyens’ cat liked to jump in through the window and lie on top of it. Even though I’d never liked cats, this one was all right. He didn’t strut around demanding food or rub his fur all over the place. He just sat on the TV on one side of the living room and I sat on the couch on the other side, and we were okay.
I sat up all night long thinking about that body. If I dozed off a little, I didn’t remember it. I made notes and lists of people to talk to and watched the clock turn slowly toward 7:00 a.m., while the cat’s tail twitched.
“Well, Sheriff Goodman, whose remains should I thank for the honor of this visit?”
Dr. Frances Okada hadn’t changed. Sure, her hair was a silvery bun now and there was a stoop in her back, but she still sauntered around the morgue like the unholy queen of the dead and she still separated my name—“Good man”—like it was some great joke nobody got except her.
“That’s the same question I’ve been waiting to ask you for an hour while I sat in that damn lobby, Fran.”
“Yes, such a shame for you that this young man”—she tossed her head in the direction of a body in the corner
that a technician was working over—“had the nerve to have an aneurysm during his baseball practice last night. He should’ve had the courtesy to check your schedule first.”
I walked over to the table wordlessly. My mother always told my sisters and me that silence ends an argument quicker than words. It worked pretty well with snooty medical examiners, too, and pain in the ass or not, Fran was going to give me an ID. Bud and Mona were waiting.
The body had changed again. She was gray under the lab lights and the bloating had gotten worse. She didn’t look like anyone anymore, let alone Hattie.
“I sent your girl down to Radiology as soon as she arrived. These are her teeth.” She slid the pictures into the viewer. “And here’s the film that arrived on your suspected victim, Henrietta.”
“Hattie,” I corrected, stepping forward to inspect the pictures.
“See the cavity here and here.” She pointed to both sets. “The fillings are a spot-on match and there’s an identical profile from either side.”
Fran’s finger lingered on a slightly crooked tooth in the bottom jaw. “There’s no need to go to DNA for this one. She’s Henrietta.”
“She’s Hattie.” It came out a little angrier than I meant.
“I’d estimate she was dead for twelve to eighteen hours before she was discovered, judging by the rate of decomp.” Fran snapped on a new set of gloves and her voice softened a bit. “You knew her?”
“Doesn’t matter now, does it? I need a full workup with a mind toward murder. Foreign blood, hair, anything she’s got on her that can point somewhere. And I need it quick, you understand? Call me when it’s ready.” I was already on my way out the door.
“Why don’t you just stay and witness the autopsy for yourself?”
I glanced back to see she was finally looking me straight in the eye, standing like a guardian over the disfigured remains that, two days ago, had been Hattie.
“I’ve got something to do.”
Bud’s truck was there when I pulled into the driveway, even though it was still early on Sunday morning and church couldn’t have let out yet. Bear, their black Lab, came panting at my leg for his usual scratch behind the ears as I headed up to the house. I didn’t look at him. Before I’d gotten halfway up the sidewalk, Mona jerked the door open.