The Body Finder

by Kimberly Derting

  She passed other searchers, as voices called out from all directions, but nothing could penetrate the musical chimes of the bells.

  She saw the oil-slick echo, like the one that had come off the dead girl in the lake, clinging to him before she saw anything else. It seemed to glow, shimmering over him in slippery ripples that danced over his skin, obscuring the rest of him from her immediate view.

  Violet felt as if her airway were squeezing shut, making her feel unexpectedly light-headed.

  It was him.

  Brooke’s bells…the oily sheen from the body in the lake…both attached to him. And there were other echoes too…tastes…and smells…and colors. There were too many for Violet to differentiate one from another, as they created something less innocuous than the staticky white noise created by those who had been laid to rest. Instead he carried them, in all their furor, parading them around like a bonfire that signaled to her.

  She almost couldn’t believe that she’d never sensed him before.

  He didn’t see her, and amid the chaos of the search, with all the activity in the area, she stood out no more than any one of the hundreds of volunteers in the woods this morning. She drew back, only a little, to watch him, unnoticed from behind the wide trunk of a tree.

  His back was to her, and she could see that, beneath the imprints of death, he was wearing the same exact vest as the other searchers that milled around the forest. He had joined the search for Mackenzie Sherwin. But to what end?

  He turned sideways, and she glimpsed his face. Violet observed him. Only his behavior was different from the other volunteers. He was there, wearing the conspicuous vest, but he wasn’t searching. He wasn’t really even moving. He hovered…waiting… in the same place.

  No one else seemed to notice, because to their eyes, and with their attention on other matters, there was nothing out of the ordinary about him. He wasn’t young and he wasn’t old. He was neither attractive nor unattractive. His bland expression looked passive enough. And Violet thought that he could probably live his entire life in anonymity, barely given a second glance. He certainly didn’t look like a killer. He blended perfectly.

  She waited for anything unusual to happen, noting that he moved slowly, if at all, but never actually left his spot.

  It was as if he were standing guard.

  And then it hit her. And she saw it so clearly then that she couldn’t believe she’d missed it before.

  One of the colors, a sparkling, radiant green that he wore like an aura, shining through even the oily sheen that painted him, was also coming up from the ground at his feet. It shimmered brilliantly, hovering over the sediment on which he stood. Coming from the spot he was guarding.

  There was a girl down there.

  That was why he was here among the searchers, camouflaged like a chameleon in plain sight. To make sure that the girl in the ground was never unearthed.

  Violet stumbled backward, nearly tripping over her own feet in an effort to escape him. She covered her mouth with her hand, stifling her own terrified yelp as she caught herself before she fell, and then froze, praying that he hadn’t noticed the sound of her clumsy feet crushing the twigs beneath her. Suddenly everything she did seemed too loud to her…each carefully plotted step she took echoed loudly off the trees, each labored breath she took was like an explosion. She tiptoed away, but even that seemed too obvious, and she told herself that she needed to act normal…to behave as though nothing had happened, and to sneak away unnoticed.

  He never even looked up from his position.

  Once she was far enough away from him, she looked around for help. It would have been too much to even hope to see her father or her uncle standing nearby. She wished she had her cell phone. She wished she had her pepper spray with her…and she cursed herself for leaving both of them back in her car.

  She stumbled recklessly, no longer following the echo of a lost soul, but evading a killer. She was afraid now. Afraid as she had never been before, and she looked around for someone—anyone—that might be able to help her.

  A woman in a vest appeared from around a thick cluster of dormant blackberry bushes, and Violet practically fell on top of her, not realizing how panicked she was.

  “Where’s your team leader?” Violet asked hoarsely, grabbing the surprised woman by the sleeve. “I need to find someone with a walkie-talkie.”

  The woman looked shocked by Violet’s unexpected ambush, but she didn’t hesitate. “He’s…over there,” she said, pointing. “On the other side of those trees.” But Violet was already gone, rushing off in the direction the woman had pointed.

  She knew she looked wild. She felt wild. But she had just found the killer. She had just stood, practically within arm’s reach, of the man who had murdered God only knew how many girls.

  And she had just detected another body. Maybe Mackenzie Sherwin’s.

  She saw the man ahead of her, with a map in his hand, and she knew he was a team leader. She couldn’t see his walkie-talkie, but she was certain that he had one. Another man stood beside him, and they were talking when Violet exploded on them.

  “You have a walkie-talkie?” she asked, sounding breathless even to herself.

  The stern-faced man looked at her, taking note of the volunteer vest she wore before answering her. “You’re not on my team.”

  “I need you to call for help. I need you to ask for Stephen Ambrose.”

  The man placed his hand over his pocket protectively. Violet was sure that was where his walkie-talkie was stashed. “Where’s your team, young lady?” he asked with authority.

  Violet was suddenly angry, her fear eclipsed by something more potent as she lost her patience. “I need you to tell someone to send Chief Ambrose out here. Tell him Violet needs him!” she demanded. She couldn’t believe this guy was giving her a hard time about teams—they were all out here for the same reason: to find Mackenzie.

  A look of irritation flashed across his face as he slowly—hesitantly—removed the walkie-talkie from his pocket. He eyed her suspiciously, gauging whether he should be following the orders of a hysterical kid demanding to see the police chief.

  “Now!” she screamed at him when he took too long. And then she fell to her knees. She looked up at him, pleading now. “Please!” she begged the man. “Please… call my uncle and tell him I need him.”

  Something, either in her actions or her words, must have gotten through to him, because he was suddenly on the walkie-talkie, telling whoever was on the other end that he needed to get in touch with Chief Ambrose, and that it was an emergency. When he was finally patched through, it wasn’t her uncle on the other end but one of her uncle’s police officers who was acting as an intermediary for the chief on this chaotic day.

  The team leader in front of her repeated what she’d told him, only pausing to ask her to state her name again, to make sure he’d gotten it right. The man was asked where he was and he repeated his coordinates twice. The officer on the other end told the team leader to wait a moment, and there was an extended silence that ensued.

  Violet shivered there, staying where she was on the ground, unable to find the strength to get back up again. She thought that she should feel uncomfortable, huddled at this man’s feet, while they waited for word from the other end. But she was too tired, and too afraid, to care what any of them thought of her.

  Finally there was a crackling sound from the walkie-talkie that filled the silent space, and Violet heard the words she’d been waiting for.

  Chief Ambrose was on his way.

  Violet leaned forward, putting her face in her hands, and started to cry tears of relief.

  CHAPTER 18

  BY THE TIME HER UNCLE REACHED HER, VIOLET felt only a little more in control of herself. She was still terrified by the secret she was carrying, but her resolve had returned, strengthening her will and building an outer wall of composure. She had stopped crying and she was pacing around in circles while the team leader stood impassively, waiting to se
e how this played out.

  She ran toward her uncle when she saw him heading like an unstoppable force in her direction. His arms closed up around her, and she felt safe at last.

  She didn’t want to waste any more time, and she couldn’t afford for anyone else to hear what she knew. “He’s here,” she whispered against her uncle’s chest.

  He didn’t let her go, and she thought that his grip might have even tightened a little bit. “What are you saying, Violet?” he asked, even though she thought he knew exactly what she was saying.

  She pulled away, just enough to breathe but not enough to be overheard by listening ears. “I saw him. He’s just over there.” She nodded her head in the direction from which she’d come.

  Her uncle Stephen stiffened like a statue, and Violet thought that he was probably deciding what to do next. “Are you sure?”

  She nodded.

  He mulled that over for a minute. “Have you sensed her?” He seemed to have a hard time asking the question. “Mackenzie Sherwin?”

  Violet wasn’t sure how to answer that, so she answered the only way she could. She kept her voice to a pale whisper. “There’s someone there…buried. And he’s watching over the body.” She swallowed, only half wondering what she and her uncle looked like right now, huddled together and exchanging whispered words. “I think he’s making sure that no one finds her there.”

  He chewed his lower lip as Violet looked up at him, watching and waiting to see what he planned to do. He looked down at her and it was no longer her uncle staring down at her, it was the police chief of a town terrorized by the disappearances of its own children. His resolve was matched only by her own. “What does he look like?”

  Violet shook her head, wishing she could tell him. “I don’t know, really. Just ordinary-looking, I guess. I only knew it was him….” She struggled for the right words, and as always when she tried to put her feelings into words they somehow seemed inadequate. “…You know, because of what I sensed around him.”

  “Violet! Violet!” The shouts were from her father as he came crashing toward where she and her uncle stood.

  He pulled Violet away from his brother and buried her in an embrace that was as comforting as her uncle’s had been but in a completely different way.

  “Oh my God, I’m so glad you’re safe,” he breathed against her head. “What are you doing out here? How long have you been here?”

  Violet silently glanced at her uncle for help. She knew that her dad was going to freak out when he realized what she’d really been out there doing…and what she’d discovered.

  Her uncle winked at her but offered no rope to save herself with. “By the way, I let your dad know you were here.” And then he looked over her head to her dad and, all business again, he said, “We need to talk.”

  Normally this would have been the time when Violet was brushed aside so the adults could speak in private. But her father refused to release her, and everything her uncle had to say to him was the direct result of what Violet had just confessed. They moved away from the prying ears of both volunteers, who had begun to gather with the appearance of the police chief, and away from his own officers, most of whom he’d brought along with him when he’d gotten his niece’s distress call.

  Stephen Ambrose quietly repeated what Violet had told him, about what she’d seen, and with each word she could feel her dad’s heavy arm tightening around her shoulders protectively until she felt as if she might splinter apart beneath his iron grip. Her dad asked almost the exact same questions her uncle had but directed them at his brother instead of at her, as though by pretending Violet wasn’t there he could somehow shield her from reliving the experience.

  When they were finished with their hurried whispers, her uncle told her father the plan he’d come up with. Her father didn’t like it a bit.

  “Greg, I need you to bring Violet with us…back to where she saw this guy,” her uncle said in his no-nonsense, chief-of-police voice.

  “No way, Stephen. This is my daughter we’re talking about. She’s not going near that monster again. It’s bad enough she ran into him once.” Violet was surprised by the icy tone in her dad’s voice, especially since he was normally so soft-spoken and calm.

  “Look, all she has to do is make sure we’re getting the right guy. She doesn’t even have to say anything; she can just squeeze your hand and then you can let me know.” Her uncle’s voice was tactfully diplomatic as he appealed to her father’s resolute sense of justice. “After she does that, you guys take off, head back to the house, and I’ll meet up with you later. No one will ever know that Violet was involved at all. But we need to catch this guy…we need to stop him before he strikes again. And Violet’s the only one that can point him out.” He waited to see if his words had the impact he’d been hoping for, and then he said, “Surely, as a father, you don’t want this maniac doing any more damage than he already has.”

  Neither of them spoke for a moment as they faced off, each standing their ground. Violet thought that maybe her father would win this one. She could feel every muscle in his body tightly wound as he stood toe to toe against his younger brother.

  And then she felt him give, relaxing just slightly, so slightly that if she hadn’t been standing right beside him, she might have missed it. “That’s all, Stephen. No one knows it was her. And we won’t wait around to see what happens.”

  Her uncle nodded, agreeing to her father’s terms, and then he looked down at Violet. “Are you okay, Vi? Can you do this?” he asked her.

  “Of course.” It was what she’d wanted all along…to catch this guy.

  It took Chief Ambrose all of three minutes to update his men, and another ten to have the volunteers who’d been hovering around them discreetly pulled back from the area. He used only the officers he’d brought with him when he’d come to find Violet, and he told them nothing except that one of the volunteers thought they’d seen something suspicious.

  His plan was simple, and it was to be executed quickly and quietly. He didn’t want trouble. There were too many civilians in the vicinity, and he wanted to make sure that no one was hurt.

  When they were ready, her uncle Stephen gave the signal for his men to follow. Nobody questioned why Violet and her father were tagging along behind the police chief and his officers.

  It was all over in a matter of minutes, at least her part of it.

  Violet found the man again easily, the one they were searching for. He was in the exact spot where he’d been when she’d first encountered him, hovering over the body of an unnamed dead girl.

  Violet squeezed her dad’s hand as hard as she could, and her dad gave her uncle the signal that confirmed that this was, in fact, their guy. Looks were silently exchanged between the men who worked for her uncle, and then Violet felt herself being half dragged by her father back through the trees, past the volunteers who were unaware of the drama unfolding deeper in the woods and toward the very epicenter of the search-and-rescue efforts. She clung to him as strongly as he did to her, neither wanting to let the other one go for a moment.

  When they emerged into the opening at the edge of the forest, Violet heard her father breathe a heavy sigh of relief as though they had just cleared a minefield and come out unscathed. And she supposed that, in a way, they had.

  “Will Uncle Stephen come by later to tell us what happened?” Violet asked as they approached her parked car. She handed her keys to her dad.

  “He’ll come as soon as he can, but it may take a while,” he answered her honestly. “This is big, Violet. Really big, and he’s going to have to explain to everyone how he found the guy.”

  Violet didn’t care how he explained it, even if it meant using her by name, because this was it, this was the ending she’d been hoping and waiting for.

  They had the killer.

  The next few hours went by in a blur for Violet.

  She escaped to her bedroom as soon as was humanly possible, which was almost immediately, since her dad
would need some time to talk to her mom. He would need to explain what had happened this morning out in the woods behind the Hildebrands’ house and then to try to calm her down afterward. And Violet didn’t want to be anywhere near them during that conversation, knowing that her mother was going to have a fit about what she’d done…hunting for a killer all by herself.

  She waited until she was away from the prying eyes of her parents before checking her cell phone for messages. It was something Violet had been dying to do ever since she and her father had gotten into her car and she’d heard the phone’s vibrations, alerting her that she had missed calls.

  She flipped it open and scrolled through the call log. She realized that she’d been holding her breath, hoping to see Jay’s number. His was the only number she’d wanted to see, and even though it was noticeably missing from the list, there were two numbers that she didn’t recognize.

  She checked her voice mail and the automated voice told her that she had fourteen voice messages.

  She listened, erasing each message after she’d listened to it, her frustration mounting with each disappointing message that wasn’t from Jay. When she was finished she tallied the calls in her head.

  Chelsea had left one message. One was from her mom, wondering if she’d found her dad and what time they thought they’d be back. Twelve were from Grady, who apparently had been the one to call from the two unknown numbers, probably on the chance that Violet had been screening her calls. She hadn’t been, but only because she hadn’t had access to her phone, otherwise she would have.

  None of the messages were from Jay.

  Grady’s messages had been pathetic, teeming with profuse apologies and lame excuses about his having had too much to drink. Admissions of guilt and explanations were a common theme throughout all twelve of his messages, as he first asked, and then begged for her to call him back, so he could tell her just how sorry he really was. As though he hadn’t already said it at least a dozen times.