No Justice; Cold Justice; Deadly Touch

by J K Ellem

  They all smiled except Micky. He was looking around the workshop. His eyes finally settled on what he was looking for on the far wall: tree spikes. Twelve inches of crude hardened metal with a thick flat head that tapered to a sharp point like an oversized nail, thicker than a human finger. They were typically driven into tree trunks to provide hand and foot holds for scaling the tree.

  Or they could be used for other, more sinister purposes.

  15

  It was obvious what had happened. There had been a landslide. The side of the hill had sheared away, like someone had taken a knife and cut through the layers of a cake, exposing the various colors of strata. Maybe it had come away under the weight of the snow, or there was a hollow space below the surface, a large pocket of air that collapsed. Whatever the reason, nearly two tons of soil, rock and snow had slid away exposing a raw vertical edge of the hillside that was almost thirty feet long.

  At first Clare didn’t know what she was looking at. She thought it was perhaps a tree root, twisted, gnarly and white, protruding from the exposed side of the hill. But it was human limbs. Six feet below the surface a leg jutted out perpendicular to the exposed hill face, like a foetus kicking out, frozen in death.

  “Holy Shit,” she said, her words forming wisps of white. It was late afternoon and the temperature was dropping fast. The wind had picked up and it moaned through the forest like a clutch of lost souls.

  A forensics team from Denver had set up a semi-circular cordon around the hillside where the body sat in its cocoon, about six feet up from the mound of soil that had fallen away. A ring of portable lights bathed the scene in a harsh glare. Two forensic technicians in Tyvek coveralls were on either side of the body, on foldable ladders, and worked away at the edges of the hole, scraping away the hardened soil, careful not to disturb the corpse. A camera flashed every few seconds, the skin of the body leached of all color momentarily each time.

  It looked strange to Clare, a visual contradiction, birth and death together, a dead person partially hatching from a womb of soil and rock. It was a sight she might never forget.

  “Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen.” Beside Clare stood Officer Dan Reynolds. Reynolds was mid-forties, tall with graying hair. He was competent, but had never risen as fast in the ranks of the Denver PD as some of the younger officers. It didn’t seem to bother him and Clare had worked with Reynolds on a few investigations. Nothing too serious, but nothing like this.

  “What happened?” Clare asked without turning, her eyes transfixed by the macabre sight.

  “We got lucky, totally,” he replied. “There were no tracks from the spot that you showed us this morning, so we just followed a line back into the forest. Spent a few hours going in circles basically and were about to call it a day. Then we came across this. I reckon from the unearthed soil it looks like this landslide is recent. Maybe only happened a few days ago.”

  Clare looked around. The location of the body was much deeper in the forest than she expected. The place was remote and she would have never trekked this far alone.

  Parked nearby were two Denver PD SUVs with snow chains on their tires. They had brought them as far as they could up the hillside, before the ground got too steep and forest too dense to drive any farther. A young officer had met Clare lower down the forest then drove her to the location.

  “Let’s take a look,” Reynolds beckoned forward. They stepped inside the circle of light and climbed up the mound of dirt.

  The body was naked and turned partially away from them, facing into the hole, translucent skin pulled tight across a hunched curve of knotted vertebrae, one leg bent backwards, out of the hole.

  Clare felt sick in her stomach when her eyes saw the pale curve of a small breast. It was a female, small framed, a child, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old. Long dark hair, brittle and clogged with soil and leaves. At first Clare thought the skin on the back was covered in filth and dirt. Then she realised they were large bruises and deep cuts, from the base of the spine all the way to the top of the neck. A patchwork of pain and suffering inflicted on the poor child.

  Clare ground her teeth silently behind closed lips, her shock replaced by a slow burning rage. To see a dead child was breathtaking in its sadness. Innocent, defenceless, vulnerable. Words could not describe the feeling. To see a child who had been tortured, beaten, was beyond comprehension.

  Snowflakes started to spiral around them and Clare tilted her face skywards and closed her eyes, hoping to shut out the horror. But the image was burned in her memory and drifted in her darkness.

  One of the technicians on the ladder looked down and nodded at Reynolds. They were ready to extract the body.

  “OK, let’s get her out before the snow gets heavy.”

  Slowly they extracted the corpse and placed it carefully on a plastic sheet. The body was rigid and well-preserved.

  “Christ,” Reynolds muttered. He had done a stint in the Child Abuse Unit in Denver and hated it—not the work, just the perpetrators. He wanted to kill them all. He had never seen torture to this extent. There was severe bruising around the neck, not ligature marks. She had been strangled. One arm was broken, snapped back at an acute angle, the bone protruding from the skin.

  That wasn’t the most alarming concern for Clare.

  Both hands were intact. Neither was missing.

  16

  Yellow pages of notes were scattered around the lounge room floor of Clare’s home. It was a small, cozy weatherboard house on the outskirts of Lacy. A wood-burning stove crackled in the corner giving off ripples of heat and flickers of light while snow drifted silently outside.

  Shaw sat cross-legged on a rug, a bottle of beer within reach. Clare sat on the floor opposite him, and had opted for something much stronger to soften the horrors of the long day. A tumbler of whisky was cradled in one hand, a legal pad on her lap.

  As soon as she got home from the crime scene, she took a shower for nearly twenty minutes, standing under the steaming stream of water, trying to wash away the grime and filth of the day. But the memories remained.

  She flipped the pages of the pad, reading back what she had written. She looked slightly dishevelled, her hair damp and shaken around her shoulders. She wore draw-string pants and a Denver Broncos sweatshirt, bare feet. No bra, no panties underneath. She didn’t care. She was tired, pissed off, needed a drink and just wanted to be comfortable. No airs and graces for once. Her day had turned to shit and she wanted Shaw’s company, badly.

  For a third time she re-read the initial forensic report of the severed hand.

  The body of the young girl had been sent for autopsy. It was dark by the time Denver PD had packed up and left the site in the forest. Reynolds said he would call her in the morning once the post-mortem was done. He was going to return with his team and do a thorough search of the site tomorrow, but the weather was closing in. His team had secured the site as best they could to preserve what trace evidence was in the hole. Thick groundsheets were stretched across the opening with rope and tied at the corners then pegged down above and below with heavy-duty steel pickets. There was a concern that more of the hillside may tumble down and destroy the integrity of the crime scene, but there was nothing they could do. They simply didn’t bring the equipment or resources to conduct an overnight or a prolonged crime scene operation in worsening conditions.

  Judging from the state of the body, it had been buried for some time. Any trace evidence on the fringe of the site, like footprints or tire tracks, would have disappeared months ago under fresh layers of snowfall or from the partial collapse of the hillside.

  They would have to rely on forensic evidence gathered from the body and the autopsy to determine cause of death, and see if the perpetrator left any trace of their DNA behind.

  Clare had prepared a simple meal for them of tossed vegetables in pasta with sun-dried tomatoes. She really didn’t feel like cooking when she got home, but it took her mind off the dead girl buried in the hillside. She also didn
’t want Shaw to think any less of her—after all, she had asked him over for a drink and she could hardly get takeaway.

  “The autopsy on the hand says that time of death is probably no more than a few months,” Clare said. She passed Shaw the two-page report.

  He scanned the pages. To Shaw it was just lines of technical jargon talking about tissue rates of decay, blood coagulation and biochemistry. However, the summary at the bottom of the second page was written in layman’s terms he could understand.

  Definitely female. The hand hadn’t been sliced or cut. The tissue damage was consistent with the chewing and tearing by large canine teeth. The cougar had mauled the hand, chewing through the sinew and bone. Tendons and muscle had been ripped and torn rather than sliced through.

  There was no DNA match on the hand and the post-mortem results on the girl should be back first thing in the morning. Clare couldn’t believe they had found a body with both hands intact. Now they had two unrelated cases to solve.

  “So somewhere out there is another body.” Shaw looked up at Clare.

  “Unbelievable. I thought we had found the missing body. Now we have a completely separate case and still another body, buried somewhere else. You still think it shows she was buried alive?”

  “It’s just a theory from looking at the pictures you took. The dirt under the finger nails. The missing fingernail. It just seems like whoever she was, she was digging or pulling through dirt, trying to get out of somewhere.”

  “But no one has reported anyone missing recently.”

  “Which means she could be someone who wouldn’t be missed.”

  Clare looked perplexed.

  “The report says the hand is from a corpse only a few months dead, from the rate of decay, temperatures and so on. No one has been reported missing in that time-frame. Maybe no one knows they are missing.”

  Clare nodded, following the line of reasoning, “Like someone with no family or close friend?”

  “Or someone who is off the grid, so to speak. Travelling around, doesn’t want to be contactable.” Shaw was describing himself. If he went missing, no one would worry.

  Clare drained her glass and closed her eyes, savouring the heat and fortitude of the alcohol. It was too grisly a picture to imagine.

  Shaw looked at her for a few moments. She looked good. Real good. Out of her uniform, gun belt and boots, and with her hair down, she looked different, sensual. She still had an assertive air about her, in control, strong-headed, and he found that very attractive.

  Clare opened her eyes again, catching him staring at her.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” he replied, slightly embarrassed.

  Not bad for forty-five you think? she thought. She felt like saying it, but didn’t. She was pleased to no end that he was looking at her, not as the sheriff, but as a woman. A fully grown, fully developed woman, not some ditzy college girl or bimbo waitress. She looked at her empty glass and suddenly felt very warm. She wasn’t sure if it was from the whisky, the wood stove or the fact that a young, good-looking man was in her home and she was feeling slightly more adventurous.

  “I’m going to get another drink.” Clare stood and looked at Shaw. “Do you want anything?”

  Shaw regarded her for a moment, then said, “No, I’m good.”

  He watched as Clare walked towards the kitchen, her bare feet pattering on the floor. Is she wearing no panties? he thought as he regarded her wiggling butt cheeks.

  Clare returned with another drink and sat back down on the floor. “Great, so there is another body out there.” She searched through the pages on the floor until she found one.

  The wind outside buffered the window shutters.

  “Are we dealing with two homicides committed by the same person?” Shaw asked.

  Clare looked at the points she had jotted down. The page was a summary of what she knew so far, a mix of question marks, arrows and words vigorously underlined. Plenty of questions with very few answers, and arrows that led to nowhere. “Let’s look at what we know. We have the hand of a woman who has been dead no more than a few months. So we are looking for another body that may also be buried.”

  “Not in the same vicinity as the body of the young girl you found today,” Shaw said.

  “We don’t know. The cougar could have carried it for miles before it saw me, or not. The two bodies could be side by side or miles apart.”

  “I’d say the cougar didn’t carry the hand far. Why would it?” Shaw offered.

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Well, think about it. It’s a predator. It’s winter, food is scarce. It found something buried in the snow, close to the surface because I don’t think mountain cats like to dig. But it couldn’t pull the entire body out otherwise it would have an arm or a leg in its mouth, something bigger. Also, it was probably hungry so why didn’t it just eat the hand?”

  Clare thought for a moment. Then it dawned on her. “A litter of young or a female to feed?”

  Shaw nodded. “Correct. It was getting food for maybe its young. So they shouldn’t be that far away. Maybe in a cave or lair. Somewhere close by to where you found the hand and the body of the young girl.”

  “So it was heading back to its litter when it saw me.”

  “Which means where it dropped the hand should be close, no more than a mile away from where the body is,” Shaw said.

  Clare could see the logic. It would have been something she would never have thought of. But Denver PD had searched the area and came up with nothing.

  “I would guess it’s the same perpetrator, same victim type, young women, buried in the same general location. How far away from the hand was the body found?”

  “Maybe a mile deeper into the forest. Maybe more,” Clare replied. The location of the girl was a difficult hike carrying a body. There were easier places to bury a body in the forest. “So it’s likely to be the same person,” Clare said. She wrote something down on the page. It made sense that she was dealing with a single perpetrator if the two bodies were within a few miles of each other—that’s if they could find the second body. If they did, then it would be too much of a coincidence for it not to be the same person.

  “It could be a local or an out-of-towner,” Shaw said. “Could be a tourist, maybe a skier passing through to the snow fields each ski season. Comes here maybe just to bury his victims, then leaves.”

  “So we have a travelling serial killer who is on vacation?” Clare asked.

  “Maybe. The victims aren’t locals. You said there have been no recent reports of missing persons.”

  Clare nodded.

  They spent the next hour debating if a travelling killer was a plausible theory. That’s all it was at the moment: just a theory. Clare believed it was possible. In contrast, from past history she had gleaned from Alice Munroe, nothing like this had happened since the last murder on the mountain over twenty years ago, a crime of passion.

  “Has anything more recently happened around here?” Shaw asked. He didn’t want to tell Clare about the man following Emily Bell.

  “Like what?” Clare replied.

  Shaw shrugged. “A new face in town. Maybe someone hanging around.”

  “We get plenty of new faces in town. None stay for too long. Tourists or skiers during the season. Then there is you. You’re a new face in town.” Clare looked at him questioningly.

  “I don’t mean me. What about strange things. Something odd and maybe out of place.”

  “What, like a total stranger kicking the ass of three workers from the logging camp? That was pretty odd for around here. Most men would have walked by, looked the other way. Bunch of sissys.” Clare took another sip of her drink then remembered. She looked at Shaw, indecision on her face.

  “What?” he asked

  “How odd are we talking? You know, strange occurrences and the like?”

  “Just tell me. No matter how crazy.”

  Clare took a deep breath. “We have a ghost in to
wn, if that helps?”

  17

  Shaw frowned. “A ghost?”

  “Yep. Don’t worry, Ben. It’s a joke. One of the townsfolk, Alfred Beckett, rang yesterday saying he’s seen a ghost around town. He did the same thing last week too, called about seeing a ghost. Claims it only comes out at night and walks around town when the place is deserted.”

  This did interest Shaw. It was only the barest of threads, but it could mean something. “What else did he say?” Shaw sat upright.

  “Are you kidding me?” Clare replied. “Surely you don’t believe in ghosts. Al Beckett is an old recluse who lives by himself in a rundown old house up on the ridge. He’s been there since time began. He’s a bit of a hoarder. The place looks like a junk yard, but he keeps to himself so I leave him alone.”

  Now Shaw was definitely interested. Most towns had an old recluse. They tended to be some cranky hermit who lived alone and was the oldest living resident. They had an intimate knowledge of the history of the town and everyone in it, because they had been there the longest.

  “He’s probably gone senile. Either that or he drinks too much,” Clare scoffed.

  “Maybe we should pay him a visit,” Shaw replied. Maybe there was more to it, or maybe Clare was right. Perhaps it was just the rantings of an old man.

  “You can go and visit him tomorrow. It’s a decent walk out of town, but I’ll drop you up there. I’ve got the Denver police back out at the crime scene at first light.” She had already told Shaw the details of the body they had found, the cuts, and the bruising and obvious torture.

  Clare suddenly went very quiet as her thoughts strayed back to the battered body. Imagining what the poor girl must have experienced. It seemed far more horrible to her than witnessing the violence itself. The crime scene had taken her to a very dark place and when Clare returned from the forest afterwards, she was a different person. She held nothing back from Shaw when she described it. She shouldn’t have, but she trusted him. Maybe more than the cops from Denver.