The Girl in the Woods

by Chris Culver

  “You get keys too, by chance?”

  “Nope,” he said, stepping to the porch and lifting his leg as if he planned to kick the door down. I whistled before he could move. He turned and looked at me with his eyebrows raised.

  “You got a better idea?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, reaching into my purse. “I’ll pick the lock. The victim’s got family, but even if she didn’t, I’m not into destroying property if I can help it.”

  He lowered his leg.

  “My partner never lets me kick the door down, either.”

  I pulled out my lock pick kit and stepped past him to reach the door. The deadbolt took about two minutes. Blatch whistled as I stood straighter.

  “Not bad, Detective Court,” he said. “Still, we would have saved time kicking it down. Would have looked cooler, too.”

  I stood and slipped my lock pick set back in my purse before walking into the home’s small entryway. Linoleum tile with a textured grip covered the floor. An odor of stale cigarette smoke hung in the air. I looked over my shoulder to Blatch.

  “How about you get the kitchen and public rooms, and I’ll get the bedrooms and bathrooms?” I said.

  Blatch nodded. “Sounds good.”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pair of blue polypropylene gloves before heading deeper into the house. The home was laid out like a double-wide trailer. Hallways branched left and right from a central family room. The kitchen was in back.

  I started my search in the guest bedrooms, and for twenty minutes, I didn’t find a damn thing. Detective Blatch, however, found a small Ziploc bag of marijuana in a flour canister in the kitchen and some car keys on a hook beside the interior garage door. The drugs were a good find, but nobody had killed Laura for a quarter ounce of weed.

  After striking out in the guest bedrooms, I turned my attention to Laura’s master suite. She had a king-sized bed, a chest of drawers, a dresser, and two nightstands in a matching dark stain. Dirty clothes filled a hamper in the corner, while dresses, blouses, slacks, and other less formal clothing filled the walk-in closet. Several dozen pairs of shoes lay scattered on the floor throughout the room. Before I touched anything, I snapped pictures to give us a record of how the room looked before we entered.

  Then, I got to work.

  She kept a pack of condoms in an end table beside her bed, but she didn’t keep men’s clothes or toiletries anywhere in the room. If she had a boyfriend, he didn’t live with her. Her other drawers held nothing but clean clothes.

  Beneath her bed, she kept long shallow totes, two of which she had filled with sweaters. The third, though, held a digital scale that weighed to the hundredth of a gram. If I had found that in the kitchen, I would have assumed she used it for baking. Hidden in the bedroom, though, it gave me pause. A lot of drug dealers kept scales like that for weighing cocaine.

  “Hey, Blatch,” I called. “I’ve got a digital scale that weighs to the hundredth of a gram.”

  Detective Blatch banged pots and pans in the kitchen before coming into the bedroom to see what I had found.

  “You find any drugs?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” I said. “Other bedrooms are clean.”

  He nodded and thought.

  “I’ll call my narcotics squad and get a dog to go through the house,” he said. “We know she’s got weed. If she’s got something else, we’ll find it.”

  “Sounds good,” I said, standing. Blatch left a moment later, and I walked into the closet. Laura had stacked shoe boxes along the walls and hung her clothes from racks around the room. The first couple of shoe boxes held strappy black and white shoes that would have looked nice with cocktail dresses. Laura had good taste, but that didn’t help my case.

  In the fifth box, I found dozens of two-inch-by-three-inch mylar storage bags—the kind high-end drug dealers used to package weed. I took out my phone and snapped pictures before setting that box aside. In the next box, I found seven well-used cell phones. I tried to power one on, but the battery was dead.

  I put that shoe box beside the one containing the mylar bags and opened the last four shoe boxes. One box held sealed mylar bags full of marijuana, while the other three held aluminum cylinders that looked like high-tech coffee thermoses. I unscrewed the top of one and heard the airtight seal break. Inside, I found a lot of weed. If the other containers held a similar amount, she was sitting on a couple thousand dollars’ worth of marijuana.

  “Detective Blatch. I need you in here.”

  He didn’t answer, so I called again. He didn’t answer me then, either, so I left the room and found him outside, searching Laura’s Honda in the driveway.

  “You find anything out here?” I asked, squinting in the sunlight.

  “She left a briefcase with some documents in it on the front seat,” he said. “Other than that, the car looks clean.”

  “Grab her briefcase. I’ve got stuff you need to see.”

  Blatch reached into the vehicle for a soft black leather briefcase with silver buckles. It looked like a nice bag. I led him to her master closet, where he saw the stash of drugs and opened his eyes wide.

  “Good find.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “She’s got cell phones, mylar storage bags, airtight canisters full of marijuana, and about a dozen individual packets of marijuana in vacuum-sealed mylar bags.”

  He whistled again and put down her briefcase before snapping pictures with his cell phone. Then he looked at me.

  “I’ll call my narcotics squad and my crime lab. We’ll get a proper search team down here to see what else we can find.”

  “Good idea,” I said, nodding. “You mind if I look at her briefcase?”

  “Go ahead,” he said. “I’ll call this in.”

  Blatch dialed, so I carried Laura’s briefcase to the small breakfast table in her kitchen. Flour had spilled onto Laura’s cheery yellow laminate countertops. Detective Blatch had left Laura’s Ziploc bag of marijuana out in the open. Before opening the briefcase, I stared at the drugs, thinking and trying to put the scene together. It didn’t add up.

  The airtight, opaque containers in her closet would have protected her drugs from both mold and sunlight, guaranteeing that her weed would keep its potency for years to come. The Ziploc bag in her kitchen wouldn’t even keep out flour. Already, light, fuzzy mold had grown on the drugs. If she had smoked that, she would have gotten sick. If Laura were a drug dealer—or even a frequent user—she would have stored her personal stash in a container that would keep it fresh.

  Not only that, I’d found vacuum-sealed bags of dope but no vacuum sealer. The drugs brought more mystery than insight. Something wasn’t right here.

  I turned away from the drugs and focused on her briefcase. Blatch had opened the latches already, so I flipped the top over to give me access to the interior compartments. In one compartment, she stored a very thin laptop complete with a power cord. If we were in St. Augustine, I’d search the laptop myself, but Detective Blatch came from a department with at least two or three thousand officers and hundreds of support staff members. They’d have their own technical people with skill sets far beyond my own. They’d search the computer. In the other compartment, she kept manila file folders. Those, I could handle.

  I pulled everything out and snapped pictures with my cell phone. The first folder held receipts and invoices from office supply stores, the phone company, and an accountant’s office. Nothing helpful.

  The second folder held two yellow legal notepads, both of which were full of handwritten notes. Laura was an attorney, so her conversations with clients were privileged. I wanted to flip those notes and see what she had written, but I couldn’t.

  I stacked them on top of each other and snapped pictures. The front page of the notepad showed nothing important, just a list of names. Aldon McKenzie, Austin Wright, Mike Brees, and Ruby Laskey. I didn’t recognize them, so my photograph alone shouldn’t have violated any privilege.

  The other folders held p
ersonal documents, including flyers from a realtor’s office in St. Augustine. If the flyers she printed off were any sign, she was looking for a three- to four-hundred-thousand dollar detached house with several acres. It was a healthy budget for our area. It was also surprising. If Laura owned a thriving practice in Mehlville and St. Louis, why would she move to St. Augustine? We weren’t the middle of nowhere, but we weren’t Rome, either.

  I left the briefcase and its contents on the kitchen table before returning to Laura’s master bedroom, where I found Detective Blatch talking on his cell. He nodded at me and then took his phone away from his ear.

  “I’ll knock on some doors and see what the neighbors say about her,” I whispered.

  “Sounds good,” he said before putting his phone back to his ear. He continued coordinating the rest of the search while I took my badge from my belt and hung it from a lanyard around my neck.

  I spent the next two hours walking up and down the street and visiting Laura’s neighbors. People weren’t excited to have me interrupt their dinners, but most of the neighbors were cooperative. Most of them liked Laura. Her friends came over occasionally, but she didn’t throw parties except on Halloween—and then, she invited everyone on the street. Few late-night visitors came by the house, and no one knew whether she dated. None of the neighbors knew she was considering moving to St. Augustine, either.

  Importantly, no one mentioned anything about drugs. If she dealt drugs—and it looked like she did—she kept it quiet and didn’t sell out of her house.

  The evidence told me she was a drug-dealing lawyer. Her neighbors told me she was a personable but quiet young woman with few friends. The two sketches weren’t incompatible, but neither gave me the complete picture of this young woman’s life. We were missing something. There was a bigger story here, and I needed to find out what it was before her murderer dropped another body.

  12

  Aldon McKenzie rocked on his front porch as his heart fluttered. He had bought his first firearm that afternoon, a Glock 19 nine-millimeter pistol. In an ideal world, he would have taken classes to learn how to care for the weapon and how to use it, but he didn’t live in an ideal world. Besides, he didn’t need to become an expert marksman. He only needed to stay alive long enough to protect his family until the threat passed.

  Aldon and his wife lived in a beautiful house they had built on a five-acre spread in western St. Augustine County. Aldon loved that house, but more than that, he loved the memories he had made in that house. He had watched Daria take her first step in the living room; she had said her first word in the backyard as she ate a snack on their picnic table; and the family had spent their first Christmas huddled together around the fireplace in the living room. As much as he loved that house and his family, though, he wished it were empty.

  As the sun set, Jennifer stepped outside, a concerned look on her face. She reached to his shoulder.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  He looked at her and reached for her hand. She was so gentle and good. She didn’t deserve this, and he didn’t deserve her.

  “It’s nothing, sweetheart,” he said. “Work stuff. I still think you and Daria should head to your mom’s house until all this settles. Might be easier for a while.”

  “We’ll do that as soon as you tell me what’s going on,” she said, crossing her arms. “You hate sitting outside, and now you’re sitting on the porch and watching that road closer than you watched me on our wedding night. Not only that, you’ve got a gun on your hip. You blew me off yesterday when you came home, but I’m not letting you do that now. What’s going on, Aldon?”

  He looked to his wife. Jennifer had brown eyes and dimples. Her beautiful smile made his whole world stop, and her loving gaze made him feel wanted. As if her physical attributes weren’t enough, she treated everyone with such kindness and graciousness that she had friends everywhere. He was lucky to have her. Knowing that made lying to her much harder.

  “The boss is changing things at work. We’re dumping most of our old contracts, and Mr. Stewart is hiring new hotshot chemists to develop our own chemical compounds. Everything’s changing at once. I’m worried about having a job.”

  She squeezed his shoulder. “Every company needs accountants, and you’re a good one. They need you.”

  “Yeah,” he said, trying to muster strength into his voice. “I guess so.”

  She said nothing. His gut twisted.

  “Mr. Stewart’s bringing in new business partners,” he said. “They’ve tightened security. Now there are biometric readers on the elevators, and I’ve got to give a retinal scan to log in to my computer. Our security guards carry guns now. It’s like I’m working in the Pentagon or something.”

  “Is that why you’re carrying a gun at home?”

  He shifted as if that would hide the weapon.

  “My dad kept guns in the house when I was a little girl,” said Jennifer. “I don’t mind them, but I wish you had consulted me before you bought one.”

  “It was an impulse buy,” said Aldon, not looking at his wife. She may have said something, but he wasn’t paying attention to her. In the distance, tires hummed as they rolled down the street. His body tensed as he held his breath. Jennifer squeezed his shoulder but said nothing until a minivan drove past the house. Then she relaxed her grip and patted him.

  “Okay, mister,” she said, nodding and stepping around so she faced him. “What’s going on?”

  Jennifer locked her brown eyes on his, but he said nothing for several moments. Then she raised her eyebrows. Still, he said nothing. She shook her head.

  “Damn it, Aldon,” she said. “Talk to me. I’m your wife. Your daughter’s inside. What the hell is going on?”

  He licked his lips and looked down. “I found a problem at work. Some dangerous chemicals were missing from our inventory. I brought it up with my boss, and he looked into it and told me not to worry about it. When I checked again, he had corrected the books like nothing happened.”

  Jennifer shrugged. “Okay. You found an error, you reported it, and Danny corrected it. What’s the problem?”

  “I’ve known Danny a long time. Something scared him. He told me I needed to forget what I’d found and destroy all my backups. The next day, IT came by and replaced my computer with another. They said it was an upgrade, but it was the same computer.”

  “Okay,” said Jennifer. “You wouldn’t be this upset if that was everything.”

  “Danny may not care about the numbers, but I could lose my license if I submit a false report. I didn’t trust the numbers my computer was giving me, so I walked down to the warehouse and searched the stockpile. We were short almost a million dollars’ worth of chemicals.”

  Jennifer covered her mouth. “And you think Danny’s stealing?”

  Aldon shrugged. “Might be Danny, might be somebody else. I contacted a lawyer and gave her what I had. She realized something shady was going on, so she looked into it. Now she thinks somebody at that plant is making drugs, and somebody high in the company is covering it up.”

  Jennifer closed her eyes and nodded, her skin pale.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll pack our bags. If you’re this scared, you need to call your lawyer and tell her we’re getting out of town.”

  “I can’t get in touch with her,” said Aldon. “I’ve been trying to call Laura for days, but she’s not answering my calls. I even drove by her office, but her assistant said she hadn’t been in for a while.”

  Jennifer raised her eyebrows. “Where is she?”

  “I think she’s dead,” said Aldon, blinking and staring at the trees across the street. “I got coffee at Rise and Grind this afternoon. Somebody said the police found a body out by the chicken processing plant. It sounded like Laura.”

  “That’s why you got the gun,” said Jennifer, comprehension dawning on her.

  Aldon nodded. “Yeah. Laura investigated, and they killed her.”

  Jennifer didn’t even hesitat
e. “Call the police. I’ll get Daria, and we’ll go to my mom’s house in Kentucky. You’re coming with us.”

  Jennifer started walking into the house but stopped when he didn’t move.

  “What are you waiting for? If they killed your lawyer, they’ll kill you as soon as they find out you’re her client.”

  “Laura told me not to go to the local police,” he said. “She was putting together a case. We planned to go to the US Attorney’s Office in St. Louis.”

  “Your lawyer is dead,” said Jennifer. “Call the police. If she’s dead, you could be next.”

  He shook his head. “Mason Stewart’s got at least one officer in his pocket. Laura told me. If we go to the police, we’re dead.”

  Jennifer closed her eyes. “Fine. Then we’re leaving now. I’ll get Daria. Get the car ready.”

  He swallowed and nodded. “Okay. Get your bags together. I’ll be inside in a minute.”

  Jennifer twisted around and ran into the house. Aldon stayed on the porch, watching the road. Then, he took out his cell phone and called Laura’s number again. As before, it went to voicemail.

  “Hey, Laura, it’s Aldon McKenzie. I’ve called you half a dozen times. I need to talk. This is getting serious. Call me back because I’m getting scared. My family and I are leaving town. I hope you’re not dead.”

  As soon as he finished speaking, he used the voicemail system’s controls to replay his message. His voice trembled so much he sounded like a teenager who had found out his girlfriend was pregnant, so he hit the button to delete his message and stood. He had called Laura enough. If she was still alive, she’d call back. If she wasn’t, one more message didn’t matter. He had things to do.

  He slipped his phone into his pocket and opened the door. Already, his wife’s footsteps carried throughout the house as she hurried from room to room, packing their bags. Her mom’s farm in Kentucky would be safe. If anybody came for them there, they’d find a trio of armed Marines—Jennifer’s father and two brothers—waiting for them. Now they had to get out.