The Truth Seeker

by Dee Henderson

  Even as she absorbed that compliment, he nodded toward the briefcase in back. “Bring the file? I’ll go locate Mr. Barberry.”

  The stables were located near the back of the estate grounds, providing easy access to riding trails that disappeared into the heavily wooded forest preserve. There was also a swimming pool, adjoining pool house, and a tennis court on the estate grounds. Lisa remembered the house as being traditional English inside—heavy fabrics, polished wood. There had been a full suit of armor guarding the hall, rather hard to miss with its invisible man holding a jousting spear and four-foot sword. Grant Danford had been a man who liked to make a statement with his surroundings.

  The estate grounds had lost some of their elegance; they gave the sense of being subtly neglected. It wasn’t obvious—the sculptured flowerbeds, evergreens, and white birch trees were still beautiful—but nothing had been added, everything had simply grown and it had thrown off the balance.

  She carried the briefcase and delayed joining Quinn, in no hurry to step back into this case. It had been a hot summer afternoon, not unlike today, when she was called out to the scene. The police had cordoned off the area, and while they tried to maintain need-to-know on details during the early investigation, the press had already staked out the roads to the estate when she arrived. Grant Danford was a man with financial and political power and had the enemies that went with it. This case had created a firestorm of interest in the press.

  For three days she had labored here at the scene, painstakingly recovering the remains. The subspecialty of forensic anthropology took years to learn all its nuances, to read everything bones could say, but her years hunting fossils and going on archaeological digs had helped hone her skills. She knew how to recover remains and read a burial site, and those were the most critical steps in the process. Burial sites were the most fragile of recovery sites for evidence even though they looked the most sturdy.

  An expert from the Museum of Natural History had joined her to help with the three-dimensional grid work, the careful record of the dig. How long Rita had been dead before being buried, how and even where she had been killed—the potential evidence in the gravesite was enormous and this one had yielded all of those markers.

  She had worked in focused concentration with a scribe, a photographer, and an evidence technician to document and preserve each clue uncovered. By the time the remains were lifted to the black vinyl body bag, Lisa knew Rita Beck better than most people had when she was alive.

  She’d been proud of the work she had done.

  And now Lincoln thought the man convicted of Rita’s murder might be innocent.

  She wasn’t supposed to feel it was a personal slap.

  It was her job to speak for the evidence. She was legally required to be impartial, to state the facts contained in the evidence, to remain silent when the evidence was silent, to be persuasive in explaining when the evidence spoke. It was not her job to speak to guilt or innocence of the person accused. Sometimes her testimony helped the prosecution, sometimes the defense.

  In this case, with the media swarming around it, she had been true to that impartial mandate down to the very choice of adjectives she used. When she had given her expert opinion at trial, she had limited it carefully to what Rita’s body and grave had revealed. But the defense lawyers had tried their best to shred not only her statements but her reputation. She could feel the anger building just remembering those grueling days in court.

  She rubbed her forehead. She did not want to be back in this case. If Grant had been wrongly convicted, her testimony had been part of that injustice. What she had said played a large part in the conviction; the body of the victim always did. It wasn’t much help to know that it had only been part of the case the jury had heard. The jury had heard a total case and rationale for the crime and convicted Grant Danford on that record. But had she missed anything? Anything that would have been exculpatory?

  “Lisa.”

  She moved to join Quinn and Mr. Barberry; they were talking at the door to the stable. She shook hands with Mr. Barberry, not surprised that he remembered her.

  “We’d like to simply look around if that’s okay with you,” Quinn said.

  “Take your time. I’ll just be puttering around here.”

  Quinn nodded his thanks.

  They left Mr. Barberry and turned to the stone walkway that curved between the barn and the large exercise ring. The open pastureland was to the west.

  Quinn paused her with a hand on her forearm. “You don’t have to do this if you would prefer not to.”

  She wiped her expression of emotion, annoyed that she had let her disquiet with the situation show. “It’s no problem.”

  His eyes could pierce someone’s soul. “Lisa—” he hesitated, obviously choosing his words with care—“you worked this case. It was gruesome. You don’t need to be involved again. I can follow Lincoln’s notes on my own, ask questions if something is unclear.”

  “You need to understand Rita’s life and death if you’re going to get a handle on her friendship with Amy. Did they stay in touch after that summer camp? Did they have other common friends? Did Amy ever talk about coming back to Chicago? Is it anything more than a coincidence that two friends both disappeared years apart and one of them turned up murdered? No, Quinn. I’m staying.”

  She forced herself to smile. “The main reason this case is unpleasant is the memory of the publicity that surrounded it. As a crime . . . Quinn, working a scene this old is one of the easiest cases I can have. Time consuming, but not that hard. Bones don’t have skin that feels cold and empty eyes that look back at you.”

  “To watch you work, it isn’t obvious the victims bother you like that.”

  Did he think she didn’t remember the faces and the crimes? They lived with her, gray, terrified ghosts, trapped in the moment of death.

  “The children are the worst.” She shifted the briefcase to her other hand, needing to change the subject. “It’s my job, Quinn. Let me do it.”

  She couldn’t interpret his expression, but she was very aware it had changed. She wanted to squirm under that intensity. She could feel herself being summed up, prior assumptions rethought. If this was what suspects felt . . . It was hard to remain quiet and not start babbling.

  “You see the victims, don’t you? See the struggle to stay alive through their eyes and relive with them their deaths. That’s why you’re so good at figuring out what happened.”

  “Something like that.” She looked away. He was hitting too close to the truth for comfort.

  She started when his hand closed over hers on the briefcase. “Who’d you see die?”

  She jolted and tried to jerk away at the soft question, but he had hold of her hand and wasn’t letting her move away. His expression was grim and she instinctively tensed.

  “Lisa.”

  She wasn’t going to say anything. She didn’t lie . . . and she didn’t talk about it.

  “Have you told anyone? Kate, Marcus? Any of the O’Malleys?” His voice was steady, calm, but she heard beneath that the intensity and the disbelief with the realization she hadn’t.

  He was pushing into turf that was off limits, and she mentally recoiled, her expression turning stony and cold. She lived with that ghost and victim because she had to, but she wasn’t sharing the secret . . . especially not with Quinn.

  His hand over hers tightened and his free hand turned her face back toward him. He held her gaze with his and rubbed his thumb against her chin. There was compassion in that gaze, so deep she could drown in it if she let herself. “I’m sorry for that memory.”

  “Let me go,” she insisted, hating him.

  “When you need to talk, I’ll listen.”

  “I won’t.”

  He pushed back the hair blowing across her face. “You don’t need to defend yourself against me. I won’t use the truth against you.”

  “So you think.”

  The hot emotion in his gaze frightened her. “
Don’t fight me, Lisa. You’ll lose.”

  “You want too much.”

  “Yes, I do. I want your trust.” He released her chin and her hand, stepped back and paced away, then turned back, looking incredibly frustrated. “But you’re too stubborn to realize what you need.”

  He was into her past, was verbally hitting her with an intensity she had always known was part of his personality. He had his bone to worry now, just like the O’Malleys had theirs, and he’d be at it ruthlessly until he had answers. He’d crush her if he invaded that concealed truth. She couldn’t afford his interest but didn’t know how to deflect it.

  “Quit looking like that.”

  “How?”

  “Like I stepped on some favorite pet of yours,” he muttered.

  “Quinn—”

  “Forget it.” He rejoined her and took the briefcase from her hand. “Let’s get to work.” He took off his hat and dropped it on her head. “And I could do without your getting a case of sunstroke.”

  She watched him walk away, relieved to be out of the quicksand subject but distressed at the fact he was mad at her, and worse, that he was deciding she wasn’t worth the trouble.

  She awkwardly adjusted the too large hat, finding that abrupt action of his disconcerting. Even when mad, he still paused to shove his hat on her head.

  He opened the file and looked back at her. “Take me through what happened here.”

  She pushed her hands in her pockets and reluctantly walked forward to join him. It was hard to get focused on work, but he’d made the transition with a completeness that was almost ruthless. “She was found back here.”

  She felt nauseous. She’d been weighed and found wanting; it wasn’t a new feeling, but it made her regret what she’d said. Kate wouldn’t have responded that way to him, or Jennifer. He wanted her trust. She’d concede reality: She already trusted him. She just didn’t want to give him what he was asking for. Her past was private, and for her sake best left alone.

  The terrace was formed from a curving wall of rocks about four feet high. She walked down the five stairs to the lower level, walked north along the path, her steps slowing, and then she stopped. It was like walking back in time. She let herself remember and then realized she had been standing there silently for several moments; Quinn was patiently waiting, watching.

  “They were excavating this turn in the stones, reinforcing it so they could enlarge the exercise ring in this direction. They uncovered her left foot, still wearing the remains of a blue tennis shoe. We were called out.”

  “What did you find?”

  “She was lying face down, buried immediately behind the rocks at a depth of about two and a half feet. She would have been buried deeper than that originally; the ground along here had been washing away over the years with the heavy rains, being pulled down to the river.”

  She crouched down, ran her hands along the weathered, flat smooth stones, each one heavy and about ten inches deep. “When we began work, this wall of stones had a back and forth tilt, they had been undisturbed for years and had settled. It looks neat now, but then . . . you could see grooves where the rains had cut into the soil and torn away the packed dirt between the stones. Nothing had been disturbed since she was buried here.”

  She sighed, remembering. “Her hands were behind her back. There were remnants of the duct tape used to bind them still around the bones.” She frowned.

  “What?”

  She stood, glanced back at him. “Her hands weren’t just bound at the wrist. The backs of her hands were pressed together and tape also wrapped around her palms. She had two broken fingers, as if she’d been grabbed, bound in that fashion, and thrown to the ground on her back, her fingers breaking under her own body weight.

  “She had a dislocated left shoulder and wrenched vertebrae in her lower back indicating a struggle, consistent with how she had been bound. No skull fractures recording a blow to the head, no nicks in bones recording a bullet. The hyoid bone in her neck had mostly decayed, but I found a pressure fracture in the left branch of the U-shape bone and a break at the forming fuseline.”

  “She was strangled.” Quinn’s voice was cold. He had a special hatred of men who used physical violence toward women; that was so clear it was painful to see.

  “Or at least put in an injury-inducing choke hold,” she replied quietly. “At twenty-five, the three bones in the horseshoe formation of the hyoid had just begun to fuse. The pressure fracture indicates it was serious, but was it the fatal act? She may have been suffocated or even drowned as the actual cause of death. What I do know is she was grabbed by the neck during the time of her death. But the vertebrae damage is inconclusive as to how she was held.”

  Quinn took a seat on the steps between the terrace levels, opened the file, and laid out the pictures, studying them again. “You have a hard job.”

  She didn’t need his pity. “We die and we turn to dust. I just know a bit more than most people about how that actually happens.”

  But the pictures pulled at her. She took a seat beside him and picked up one of the gravesite photos recording the excavation. She’d been lying beside the body in the deeper side trough they had dug to create a pedestal for the skeletal remains. They had to record what they found by grid and depth, for below the body was often trapped a treasure trove of evidence.

  This photo was typical: She had her gold pen clamped between her teeth and a frown of concentration on her face as she tried to retrieve a fragment of thread and a button from the dirt with a long pair of tweezers, apparently not bothered that she was stretched out inches from a skeleton. The gold pen was more than a fashion statement, blood and bacteria couldn’t get into the casing; it could be wiped clean with one of the foil-wrapped medical swabs she carried by the handful in her pocket when she worked a scene.

  “What other evidence did you find?”

  “Her only jewelry was a ring on her right ring finger. She wore no watch. Her clothes had decayed, but there were remnants of threads from a white polyester shirt with a blue front pocket. Her jeans had decayed to the seam threads and a zipper—cotton always decays fast—and she wore blue Nike tennis shoes.

  “That clothing is significant because it matched what she was last seen wearing the day she disappeared years before. The ground around her body was unusual; there was a much heavier concentration of black topsoil than was found at the same depth just a few feet away.”

  “Not uncommon around a stable and landscaped grounds.”

  “True, but it made her remains decay faster than say a clay-based shallow grave.”

  “She was buried here. No one would notice the turned-over dirt?”

  “The month she went missing, this stone wall terrace was built. It’s why the police think this spot was chosen for the grave instead of somewhere in the forest preserve—an animal might have dug up the body there. This apparently had sod laid down to the edge of the stones, making it relatively easy to conceal the site if he had the time to work and dig the grave. And back then Grant Danford did not have the full-time staff working this property.”

  Quinn looked around the area. “How far back does the Danford property extend?”

  “Roughly to that line of trees. From there you are on forest preserve land.”

  “No one from the house could see here.”

  “And as you can see, the forest preserve trails are nearby but not in the line of sight. From evidence in the grave, the type of bug cocoons found, she had been dead for a few hours before being buried. Small bits of gravel and wood shavings found on her shoes and under her body suggest the murder occurred somewhere in the forest preserve.”

  “She was killed the day she went missing?”

  “An assumption, but reasonable. She was wearing the same clothes.”

  “Statistically, killers who abduct and kill in the first hours are strangers to the victim.”

  “This is a case, not a statistic. Grant Danford knew Rita; they had been casually dating for six m
onths when she disappeared. During the missing person’s investigation, he told the police he hadn’t seen her the day she disappeared; during the investigation of her murder, a witness was found who placed them together walking the forest preserve trails that very afternoon.”

  “Was he ever really a suspect when this was just a missing person’s case?”

  “Not really,” she admitted. “He had put out a large reward for information, cooperated with the police, added his political pressure to keep the case alive. But the case eventually became cold from lack of evidence.”

  “The cynical interpretation being that he stayed so close to the investigation he made sure they never looked where evidence could be found.”

  “Yes.”

  “And when her body was discovered here on his property, Danford became the chief suspect if not the only one,” Quinn speculated. “They never looked any further once they had a witness who contradicted his original statement to the police.”

  “They moved pretty fast on making the arrest.”

  “He was overseas when the stable manager found the body?”

  “England.”

  “If he was guilty of the crime, why in the world did he risk leaving the body here all those years?”

  “Arrogance? He thought he had gotten away with it. Fear? Why mess with something he had dodged once? The vast majority of buried murdered victims are never found. That’s a statistic you know as well as I.”

  “A crime of passion?”

  She got up, walked a few feet away before turning back to face him. She didn’t like that question because of its answer. “That’s what the police concluded and the DA proved to the jury’s satisfaction.”

  His eyes narrowed. “But?”

  “That never felt right, not with the bound hands. Those case notes—you’ll find interviews with practically every woman Grant ever went out with. He didn’t type as a guy with dark fantasies, and that’s what the bound hands, the struggle suggest.”

  “So he was convicted because of association with the victim and location of the grave.”

  “And testimony of a witness. Christopher Hampton testified that he saw Grant and Rita together the afternoon she disappeared. And by the way—you met Christopher’s brother the other day.”