The Girl in the Woods

by Chris Culver

  He took my money and stepped out of the vehicle. Once he disappeared, I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. Once I had my breath back, I called my station. The phone rang half a dozen times before somebody—Darlene, a forensic scientist in the crime lab—picked up.

  “Hey, it’s Joe Court. My team and I got caught out in the storm. We missing anybody?”

  “Mark off Joe. She’s alive,” said Darlene. Her voice sounded distant because she was shouting to someone else. “Are you injured?”

  “No,” I said. “I have Sam from Dr. Sheridan’s office with me. We were the last ones out of the crime scene. You heard from Dave Skelton yet?”

  “He’s on his way here with your victim. Where are you?”

  Relief flooded through me. Aside from me, Skelton was the last officer out. If he survived, the others did, too. Our crime scene may have been toast, but at least no one had died.

  “I’m at the McDonald’s on Highway 62. I’ll head back to the crime scene and see whether there’s anything I can salvage.”

  “Negative,” said Darlene. “The boss needs you to come in. We’ve got emergency calls all over the county.”

  “Any word on casualties yet?”

  “So far, we know the tornado hit a custom cabinet shop out by Ross Kelly Farms. Their building was a pole barn on a concrete slab. We don’t anticipate finding survivors.”

  I nodded to myself as I processed that. My case and the dead woman in Dave Skelton’s SUV mattered, but this storm had shifted my priorities.

  “Tell the boss I’m on my way to the station. And tell Dr. Sheridan that his assistant made it out.”

  “Will do, Joe,” said Darlene. She told me to drive safe. I stayed in my car and watched the storm. There were occasional flashes of lightning, but the sky didn’t look as threatening as it had a few minutes earlier. I got out of my truck and walked toward the restaurant to get Sam.

  As much as I wanted to work my case, my victim would be as dead tomorrow as she was today. Life was for the living, and my friends and neighbors needed my help.

  5

  I spent the rest of the day knocking on doors, talking to my neighbors, and trying to track down missing persons. No further tornadoes hit the county, but several severe thunderstorms rolled through, causing everyone to flee for cover. St. Augustine lost four people. We got lucky. If that tornado had hit the plant at Ross Kelly Farms, Reid Chemical, or Waterford College, we would have been looking at hundreds of casualties instead of four. As wrong as it felt to be thankful for four dead people, I was.

  My adrenaline faded as the sun went down, leaving exhaustion in its wake. I ended my shift twelve hours after it started and drove home to my ancient two-story farmhouse. The man who had built my house had ordered it from a Sears catalog in 1913 and had lived in it with his family until he died. When my realtor showed it to me, its most recent inhabitant had been a family of raccoons.

  The real estate listing had called it a teardown on a great piece of property, but it wasn’t a teardown at all. Where others saw a cracked foundation and shattered windows, I saw a home waiting for someone to restore it. I saw something broken that I could make beautiful again. I liked that.

  As I stepped onto my porch, I whistled and waited for my dog. The tornado had come nowhere near my house, but thunderstorms had left branches and leaves strewn across the front yard. Roger, my aging hundred-and-forty-pound bullmastiff, trotted from his house in the backyard to greet me.

  “Hey, sweetheart,” I said, kneeling and reaching to his cheek and ear for a good scratch. He barked a contented bark and wagged his tail. I wouldn’t be alive if not for Roger. Many people say that about their loved ones, but in this case, it was a literal truth. “Your breath stinks, dude. What’s Susanne been feeding you?”

  As if in response, he licked my face. I laughed and ran my hand down his back. I’d worry about getting him cleaned up later. For now, I was too tired to care.

  “Come on in,” I said, fishing in my purse for my house keys. My house wasn’t much, but it was all mine. When I bought it, I ripped down the old plaster and replaced both the plumbing and drain systems and put in thick insulation. Now, I lived in a comfortable home. Or at least the first floor of a comfortable home. I had yet to touch the second floor beyond tearing out the plaster and ripping out the knob-and-tube wiring. One step at a time.

  The moment I got in, I flopped on the couch and pulled out my cell phone to call Susanne, my neighbor, and make sure she was okay and to thank her for looking after Roger while I was at work. That done, I called somebody I should have called hours ago.

  Julia Green hadn’t given birth to me, but she was my mom. She and her husband had adopted me and given me my first real home when I was sixteen years old. I loved them both.

  “Hey, Mom, it’s Joe,” I said. “I finally got in.”

  “I’m glad. You have any damage to your house?”

  “The yard’s a mess, but the house is okay,” I said, yawning. “How are you and Dad getting along?”

  “Haven’t killed each other yet, but it’s been close,” she said. “Retirement’s harder than I thought.”

  Mom and I didn’t talk long, but the conversation grounded me and reminded me of all the good things in my life. My adopted family was my anchor in the world. Without them, I became unmoored. With them, I had stability and love. Meeting them had been the best thing to happen to me in my entire life.

  After I hung up, I ate Chinese leftovers in my fridge, showered until the hot water ran out, and then crashed into my bed, where I slept the dreamless sleep of the exhausted.

  As was his custom, Roger woke me up the next morning by stretching and shaking my bed so violently it felt as if I had just been through a minor earthquake. As my eyes opened, he left his spot at my feet and licked my face. I pushed him away.

  “Enough, butthead,” I said, sitting up and stretching. Roger’s face was so close to mine, his hot breath hit my cheek. I pushed him away again. “I’m awake. Go get your bone. It’s in the kitchen.”

  I watched and waited as he lumbered toward the stairs I had built for him. Even just a year ago, he would have jumped down from the bed and sprinted through the house like a crazy man at the mere mention of his bone. Now, age had forced him to use the stairs. Time slowed us all down, but it didn’t make it any easier to watch.

  I closed my eyes and sank into the pillow as the dog slurped his water in the kitchen. Roger still drank pretty well, but in the past four weeks, he had stopped eating well. When he was young, he’d scarf his food down within seconds of me putting it in the bowl. Now, it might take him all day to finish his breakfast. In the past week, he had even started to skip meals. My vet said he didn’t have long left. It hurt to admit that, but it was true. Nothing good lasted forever.

  Muscles all over my body ached, and my forearm had a purple and black bruise the size of a golf ball. It hurt, but it didn’t throb. I swung my legs off the bed and glanced at my alarm. It was a little before seven, which meant I had gotten about ten hours of sleep. I could have used another ten, but I doubted my boss would have appreciated me showing up that late to work.

  I got ready for the day, and then I walked Roger to Susanne’s house before going to work.

  My department operated out of a historic Masonic temple the county had purchased a few years ago. The building held the county’s small forensics lab, six cells for prisoners, and desks and private offices for the county’s forty-five officers. At the moment, we used most of the second and all the third floor for storage, but the county promised us that we’d eventually get funding to renovate the entire structure so we could use the spaces for interrogations or community policing functions. I wasn’t holding my breath.

  When I got in, Trisha, our day-shift dispatcher, locked eyes on me from her desk in the entryway.

  “Boss wants a status update on your Jane Doe investigation. There’s somebody with him from Ross Kelly Farms. They’re in the conference room.”

&nbs
p; I stopped in my tracks and sighed. “It’s too late to call in sick, isn’t it?”

  “Just a little,” said Trisha, winking. “Happy Monday!”

  I grunted.

  “Yep. Happy Monday.”

  Trisha laughed as I walked past her desk to the department’s bullpen in back. The Masons who owned the building before us had used the room as an auditorium for gatherings and meetings, but when the department moved in, we removed all the seating and put in a cubicle farm. With ornate stonework and moldings throughout, it was a beautiful room. Unfortunately, the cubicle partitions, wooden desks, and buzzing phone lines robbed it of some of its grandeur.

  I crossed the floor and walked to the first-floor conference room, where I found my boss and a tall, Hispanic man who looked as if he were in his mid-forties. They were talking to one another as I entered.

  “Hey, Harry,” I said. Harry Grainger, St. Augustine County’s recently appointed sheriff, glanced up from a document he was reading. Crow’s-feet ran from the corners of Harry’s deeply inset eyes nearly to his scalp line, making him look older than his sixty-one years. His hair was curly, gray, and thick, and his hands were big enough to palm a basketball. The County Council had appointed him sheriff two weeks ago after the previous sheriff, Travis Kosen, retired. I liked Harry. He stayed out of my way and gave me the resources I needed when I needed them. He had only been my boss for two weeks, but I couldn’t ask for more.

  “Morning, Joe,” he said, glancing to the man beside him. “This is Lorenzo Molina. He’s the chief of security at Ross Kelly Farms. He’s here because your Jane Doe’s body was found on company property.”

  I crossed the room to shake his hand. “Detective Joe Court. Nice to meet you.”

  “You, too, miss,” he said, smiling. Few wrinkles marred the olive-colored skin of his square face, and very little gray flecked his black hair. He would have been handsome had it not been for his cold, black eyes. After shaking my hand, he looked at Harry. “Unless there’s anything else, I’ll head back to work. You have my contact information if you need to get in touch with me.”

  “Thank you for stopping by, Mr. Molina,” said Harry. “We’ll call you later today.”

  Molina left, and I looked to Harry. “Is he running interference, or is he here to help?”

  “He gave me a list of troublemakers at Nuevo Pueblo for you to check out. He also offered to act as interpreter. I’m leaning toward saying he’s helpful, but I wouldn’t put my paycheck on it.”

  Nuevo Pueblo was the company town Ross Kelly Farms had constructed for its largely immigrant workforce. We rarely made it out there, so I didn’t know it well.

  “Give me the names, and I’ll check them out. Do I get a partner on this case?”

  “If you need another detective, I’ll fill in,” he said. “We’re short-handed right now.”

  And by that he meant we had half the officers we needed to run our department. Though many wealthy people lived in St. Augustine, the majority of our population lived paycheck to paycheck. We did our best with the resources we had. Most days, it was enough.

  “Sounds good,” I said. “Unless you need anything, I’ll get to work.”

  He walked around the table and slid a piece of paper toward me.

  “You’ve got seven suspects so far. Have at it. Good luck.”

  I picked up the list and nodded my thanks. Since I didn’t know the victim’s name, and the tornado had destroyed most of our physical evidence, a little good luck would have been nice.

  History had taught me not to get my hopes up.

  6

  I had met most of the troublemakers around town, but I knew none of the men on the list Harry had given me. According to the Missouri license bureau, four of them lived in the state and had active Missouri driver’s licenses, one had a suspended driver’s license, and two weren’t in the license system for any state. None of them had convictions for violent crimes in the United States, but several of them came from countries with which we didn’t exchange criminal records. I had work ahead of me.

  Since I didn’t speak Spanish, I called Sasquatch and asked him to meet me on the outskirts of town. After that, I called a repair shop that offered to pick up my truck and replace the front window. They promised to return it by the time I finished work. With all that done, I signed out a marked SUV and headed out.

  Ross Kelly Farms had built Nuevo Pueblo on a rolling hundred-acre spread east of downtown St. Augustine. I drove out and parked beside a Catholic church on a bluff overlooking the rest of the community. Not a single cloud marred the blue sky. From my car, I had a clear view to the Mississippi River and the chicken processing plant at which most of the town’s residents worked. A rail line ran to the processing plant from the west, while cornfields surrounded the property.

  It was a pretty piece of land marred by one unfortunate problem: When the wind stopped blowing, the whole place stunk like ammonia and animal shit left to rot in the summer sun. It wasn’t pleasant.

  I waited for about five minutes for Sasquatch to arrive. He smiled when he stepped out of the car, but then the breeze shifted and he caught a whiff of that foul country air and gagged.

  “That’s a powerful odor,” he said, covering his mouth with his shirt sleeve. “How can people live around here?”

  I looked around me. The houses near the church sat on pier-and-beam foundations, leaving them elevated above the soil. The piers prevented them from being flooded during heavy rains, but the wind would have whipped beneath them during the winter, making them cold inside. We were lucky the tornado hadn’t turned toward here. It would have taken out everything. I looked at Sasquatch before nodding to the chicken processing plant down the hill.

  “It’s a company town. Room and board is probably part of their compensation,” I said, reaching into my pocket for my list of names. I caught Sasquatch up on the case, double-checked an address, and walked to the first home on the list. The roads were gravel, and a thin layer of dust seemed to cover everything, including the grass.

  Our first potential suspect lived in a narrow home with gray siding. The front porch looked like construction-grade pine that had turned gray in the summer sun, while the wooden steps sagged under their own weight. To avoid that sag, the builder should have installed a third stringer in the center to support the weight of everyone who walked up and down, but—if I had to guess—he probably cared more for turning a profit than following the modern building code.

  I knocked on the front door and waited, but no one answered.

  “It’s Monday. You think he’s at work?” asked Sasquatch.

  “Maybe,” I said, looking around. Sasquatch and I were alone amongst the buildings. Waterford College was still in session, but the public schools were out for the summer. Even if the town had its own daycare center, older kids should have been riding bicycles and running around. Something wasn’t right. “We’ll talk to the residents and then visit the front office.”

  Sasquatch nodded, so we visited the next house on our list. Like the first one, nobody answered. We tried the third house on the list next, but again, nobody answered. I looked around. In front of one nearby house, I found geraniums in a terra-cotta pot. They were healthy plants, so someone was caring for them. Clothes hung on a line in front of another house, and two children’s bicycles leaned against the porch on another. People lived here. Someone should have been around. I looked at Sasquatch.

  “You hear any air conditioners?”

  He paused and shook his head. “No, why?”

  “I don’t, either. On a day like this, wouldn’t you open your windows if you didn’t own an air conditioner?”

  He tilted his head to the side. “If they open the windows, they let in the stink.”

  It made sense, so I nodded even if it didn’t convince me.

  “That’s true,” I said, putting my hands on my hips.

  “What are you thinking?” asked Sasquatch.

  “I don’t know, but something’
s wrong.”

  We knocked on one more door, but, again, no one answered. After striking out four times, we headed back toward our cars. About halfway to the church, a black SUV came down the road, trailing a long plume of dust. I covered my mouth so I wouldn’t inhale dirt and squinted as it pulled to a stop near us. Mr. Molina sat in the front seat.

  “Thought you’d be by, Detective,” he said, rolling down his window. “I brought your suspects into my office. It’s much more comfortable there.”

  I forced a smile to my lips. Having every suspect in one location saved me some walking-around time, but I much preferred talking to people inside their homes. It gave me an opportunity to see how they lived. Did they have pictures of their children on their mantels? Did they own a dog? Did the home smell like marijuana?

  All those things gave me leverage, the most important commodity a police officer had during an interrogation. Molina had wasted a valuable opportunity.

  “Where’s everybody else?” I asked. “Place looks abandoned.”

  He looked around before shrugging. “Everybody must be inside for the day.”

  I shook my head. It was in the mid-eighties, which meant the interiors of those homes with their asphalt roofs were probably in the mid-nineties. No one would have stayed in there without air conditioning and with the windows shut without reason.

  “You say the suspects are in your office, huh?” I asked.

  Molina nodded and pointed a thumb toward the back of his SUV.

  “Hop in. I’ll give you a ride.”

  I glanced at Sasquatch before opening the rear door. The SUV had dark tinted windows, an anodized metal grill guard in front, and a light bar on the roof. It looked like something the Secret Service might have driven if they needed a menacing off-road vehicle. Sasquatch and I rode in silence in the back for about five minutes before we reached an office building near the main plant. Molina parked in a nearly empty parking lot and looked at the two of us.