Black Fall

by Andrew Mayne

  “So what are you saying?” asks Lewis.

  “If she was staying near here, it probably wasn’t going to be for more than a few weeks.” Tuft takes another bag off the table and shows it to us. Inside it is a pair of generic black panties. “See the crease here? It’s from a cardboard holder. She didn’t have these on very long. Straight from the package. Never washed.”

  I get what Tuft is saying. This woman had time to grab underwear from a store and plenty of opportunity to grab a new box of tampons. Yet she did the former, and not the latter. She was probably living out of her purse, or was even on the run. God, I know what that’s like. She just grabbed what she needed.

  “One more thing.” Tuft unzips the body pouch all the way and points to the feet. “I found some dry mud here. It’s typical to this area. Probably a week old. She was walking around barefoot within twenty miles of here about seven days ago.”

  “So she was staying locally,” Lewis replies.

  “That’s up to you to find out. I know Greer has been checking all the motels.”

  I don’t know if her crowd is the motel type. On a whim, I pull out my phone and do a rental search, and I find over a dozen rental properties in the more rural areas nearby. I pull up satellite views of the listings to see which ones are the most secluded. I find six promising locations.

  “What do you have?” Lewis asks me.

  I hesitate for a moment. I don’t want to start running her case. “This is your thing.”

  “Don’t worry about hurting my feelings. If you got something, I’ll just take the credit.” She winks.

  “Deal. How do you feel about checking on a couple potential places where she might have stayed that aren’t motels? I don’t want to step on Greer’s case.”

  “He’s an asshole,” Tuft whispers under her breath.

  Lewis laughs. “Well, that settles it.”

  “What about the clothes the woman was wearing?” I ask.

  “Store-bought, like the underwear,” says Tuft. “Same as the shoes. Like what you’d find at Walmart in a hurry.”

  “May I?” I gesture to the box of latex gloves.

  “Hell, you can prep her too if you want,” Tuft offers. She doesn’t seem the least bit threatened by my meddling. Confident enough in her own abilities, she just wants the thing solved. Her ego isn’t on the line.

  I slip the gloves on and grab a lock of the girl’s hair. It’s still wet from the preliminary examination; they wash the hair to see what particles are in there. Dust, dirt, hair from somebody else—the tiniest clues can break a case. I notice there’s still a red tint at her roots.

  “Bad dye job,” says Tuft. She raises a stained finger. “Done yesterday afternoon.”

  It looks like it didn’t take all that well. I pull at the girl’s hair, which barely reaches her collarbone. This is the kind of tiny clue that’s hard to get from a photo. You need to be in the room to realize what’s different. “She also cut her hair since I saw her.”

  Lewis leans in to get a better look. “She was trying to change her appearance?”

  “Yeah. But you don’t stop to dye your hair if you think someone is about to kill you. She probably did this right after our encounter, shortly before she was killed.”

  Where did she go after she ran from the loft?

  Probably to a safe house of some kind, maybe one of the rentals I found, where she had some time to get ready before she hit the road. I’d bet anything she was with her killers. Little did she know she wasn’t going to make it to the next stop.

  They killed her because she was no longer needed, or because she failed. Maybe both.

  “Anything else we should know?” Lewis asks Tuft.

  “I’ll send you the formal autopsy report when we’re done. However, I’ll just say this anecdotally.” Tuft pulls the girl’s right hand from the bag. “See the fingernails? Notice the ridges? Also, look at her skin.” She’s waiting for us to tell her what’s supposed to be obvious. But to me, our Jane Doe looks like lots of other young women I see walking around the city every day.

  “She’s malnourished,” Lewis observes.

  “Exactly,” says Tuft. “Like from some weird diet where you’re not hitting all the food groups. I have a niece who is vegan. The first few weeks, she looked like death. I had to explain to her how to be smart about it.”

  “You pumped the stomach yet?” I ask.

  “Pumped, but not examined.” Tuft points to a refrigerator. “I’ll get to it as soon as we can.

  I strip off my gloves and toss them into a garbage can, trying to distance myself from the touch of death. Most FBI agents go their entire careers without ever seeing a corpse, much less having to be in the room with one.

  Tuft begins to zip the girl back into her pouch so she can be sealed away in the freezer.

  Something is missing.

  I’m missing something.

  “Wait!” I shout.

  Tuft freezes.

  “Is this exactly as she was found?”

  “Yes, bar the dress, underwear, and shoes,” she says defensively.

  “Can I see one more thing?”

  “What are you thinking?” asks Lewis.

  “I’m not quite sure. I just want to see the back of her neck.”

  Actually, I have a hunch, but it’s just easier to look than explain my reasoning.

  “If you’ll help me turn her?” says Tuft, her curiosity engaged.

  The three of us flip the body over to reveal the woman’s neck, which is bare except for bruising where she was held by one of her assailants.

  “Is that it?” asks Tuft.

  “No.” I don’t want to say it aloud, lest I jinx it. I change gloves and probe the hairline, where I find a tiny red mark. It could almost be mistaken for a freckle. I point it out to Tuft.

  “Huh. I thought that was a scissor mark from the quick haircut,” she says, leaning in.

  “Can we magnify that?” I ask.

  Tuft brings over a small camera connected to a monitor. Magnified on the screen, we can see the abrasion much more clearly. There’s a defined edge to it.

  “What’s that look like to you?” I ask Lewis.

  “Like someone grabbed her chain in a mugging.”

  “She was wearing a distinctive red necklace when she showed up at my door. It was a little unusual, and I think it was more than decorative. It was symbolic. But she’s not wearing it now, and I don’t think she took it off to hide her identity. I think it was forcefully yanked off her neck. Dr. Tuft, can you tell if this happened before or after she was killed?”

  She examines the image on the screen and shakes her head. “It’s too difficult to tell. Clotting can still happen minutes after you die.”

  I’m not sure if it matters. The important part is that it was forcibly taken from her. Our Jane Doe had probably already changed into her disguise when it was taken from her. It meant something to her and to her killers. And this act of violence was intended as a punishment, not as an act of concealment, similar to a cop’s badge being revoked or a soldier being stripped of her rank.

  What does that chain signify? What could mean so much to them?

  Chapter Eleven

  Shunned

  Set back from a neglected road at the end of a gravel driveway, behind overgrown trees and a yard full of tall yellow weeds that’s slowly being absorbed back into the wild, the house is a faded white single story with what looks like a large attic. Its weather-beaten exterior siding gives way to bone-dry wood, and the rock foundation it sits on resembles something from the colonial era. It could be twenty years old, or a hundred. A dead, bloated raccoon lays by the mailbox, covered in flies.

  “Well, this is pleasant,” I say as I double-check that my service weapon is loaded before securing it in the holster on my hip.

  “Country weirdos freak me out,” says Lewis as she inspects and holsters her gun as well. “I prefer my city ones. They at least keep their yards nice.”

  The
owner of the house, Thomas Zwingli, a tax attorney who lives out in Richmond, has given us permission over the phone to inspect the property. His tenants had paid cash up front for the month. Today was the end of last month’s payment, and he hasn’t heard from them.

  On speakerphone, he described the occupants as rather odd. He’d thought they were Amish at first because the two men both had thick black beards. They looked alike, but only in the sense that they dressed in simple clothes and had similar hairstyles.

  Zwingli never saw the girl up close. He vaguely recollected there being someone else in the car when he gave them the keys to the house, but he wasn’t sure if it was a woman. He couldn’t even give us a make or model for the car, other than that it was some old compact that may have been red or blue.

  We exit Lewis’s car and she reaches the porch first. The boards creak so loudly it’s comical. She glances back at me, grinning, and shakes her head. “I guess the doorbell works.”

  I move to her opposite side, clearing the door and keeping an eye on the backyard, which is an untamed acre of weeds dotted with a few rusted metal drums.

  Lewis knocks on the door. “Hello? Anyone home?”

  There’s no answer.

  She gives it another minute. Still nothing. She reaches a hand out and turns the doorknob. It’s unlocked. “I guess people are trusting out here.”

  “Or in a hurry to leave.”

  Lewis steps inside and I cover her flank. It’s dark, except for a sliver of light from the gap between the drawn curtains.

  She takes the flashlight from her pocket and searches the room. “Guess they forgot to pay the electrical bill,” she says, flipping a useless switch.

  My light lands on a melted candle stub on the fireplace mantle. “I’m not sure they’ve ever paid one.”

  The house is Spartan, lit only by faded sun streaming through slits in the curtains that cover its few small windows. The kitchen is empty except for a dining set that looks like it came out of a Depression-era Sears catalog. Besides the kitchen and the bathroom, there are only two other rooms. Each one is empty, not even a bed.

  I get down on my knees and search the floor of the first of these rooms with my pocket flashlight. My fingers feel the wax droppings from a candle. I inspect the next room and find two more places where candles have been set.

  “Hey, Blackwood,” Lewis calls from the kitchen.

  When I find her, she’s standing in front of the fuse box. “What gives with this?” She flips a circuit breaker and the kitchen light comes on.

  “Huh.” I walk over to the sink and take a whiff. The disposal is dry. No scent of food or soap.

  “Looks like they never even used the kitchen,” Lewis observes.

  “Yeah, why didn’t they use it to wash spoons and store takeout containers like a normal human being?” I reply.

  “Oh, you’re one of those people,” says Lewis.

  “One of what?”

  “When was the last time you cooked a meal in your kitchen?”

  “I haven’t had company.” I also haven’t unpacked my dishes since my last move.

  She shakes her head. “You don’t need company to cook. It’s something you do for you. At the very least, invite a coworker over and cook for them.”

  “I like them too much to do that.”

  “You’re impossible. You come over next week and we’ll make up something.”

  I’m amazed at the effortless way she just invited me to hang out. It would take me weeks to ask someone I worked with to spend time together socially. I’m too much of a loner.

  “Thank you. That would be nice.”

  “I don’t want you turning out like these weirdos.” She gestures to the curtained windows. “Should we be looking in the basement for three coffins from Transylvania?”

  “You go down there first. I’ll be at a Starbucks in Richmond.”

  She waves her hand in the air. “You’re tougher than that.”

  I’m about to reply that it’s not a conscious choice, but something catches my eye through the kitchen window: an odd dark area on the ground of the backyard. “I want to check something out.”

  Lewis follows me out the back door. “Okay, the basement can wait.”

  Directly behind the house in the middle of the dry brush, there’s a patch of dirt with a fire pit in the middle. A couple of cut logs sit around it like seats.

  “Did they eat their meals out here?” asks Lewis.

  “Maybe.” I walk through the brush to the other side of the pit. A few yards away, in another clearing, I come to another fire pit. Three charred mattresses lie in a heap.

  Lewis joins me. “Were they trying to destroy forensic evidence?”

  “Possibly.” I go over to a couple of the oil drums I spotted earlier. Both of them have a layer of ash on the bottom.

  “If so, it’s not the most thorough job,” says Lewis.

  I agree with her. “This feels more like campers leaving an area, getting rid of any big traces, than killers trying to cover their tracks.” I grab a stick and start combing through the brush beyond the second pit.

  “Looking for anything in particular?”

  “Yeah.” I’m thinking about the orchid again. “What they didn’t want us to find.”

  I spot a third fire pit, this one much smaller and deeper than the other two. There appear to be several layers of ash. Trying not to disturb it too much, I poke through and discover the burnt spines of three books. They are too charred to make out the titles, but I take a photo anyway.

  Lewis walks toward me. “What did you—whoops.” As she navigates through the grass, there is a crunch under her foot. She freezes, looks down, and with a gloved hand picks up a piece of black plastic. “It was broken like this before I stepped on it,” she insists.

  “I believe you.” I know the feeling. When I was a Miami police officer I once came home from a crime scene and found a victim’s blood on the cuff of my uniform. I don’t remember coming anywhere near the body and it could have been an issue if I’d contaminated the scene. Thankfully, it wasn’t a problem.

  Lewis holds up her find to inspect it more closely. “I think this is part of a cell phone.” She looks around the field. “A burner. We get them all over the high-trafficking areas in DC.” She slips the piece into a plastic evidence bag.

  “I’m sure the rest of it is out here somewhere,” I reply.

  “And god knows what else.”

  I eye the ground suspiciously. “Methane probe?”

  “Yeah, I’ll tell Greer what we found. But to be honest, we don’t even have a connection to the victim.”

  “No. But I’d say the weird threshold has been crossed. If Greer doesn’t want to come out here, I’ll make some waves on my end. If he thinks the FBI is ready to swoop in, that might motivate him.” I don’t know what kind of weight I can pull in the middle of this crisis, but I’ve got a feeling this isn’t something we should be sitting on.

  Lewis calls Greer to fill him in on what we’ve found. From her side of the conversation, I can tell he’s not too thrilled we came out here without telling him. Technically, we don’t need to. Well, at least Lewis doesn’t. I’m just a bystander. If Greer wants to, he could give my supervisors crap, but I doubt it’ll come to that. Lewis seems more than willing to run interference.

  While we wait for him to show up, I try to figure out what the hell was going on here. We have three people who refused to use electricity. They didn’t even use running water, as far as we can tell. Yet according to Zwingli, they drove a car, and from what Lewis found, used cell phones.

  “So, are they some kind of cult?” she asks, trying to make sense of it all.

  “Maybe. Heck if I can figure out the rules.”

  “Well, they all make exceptions.”

  I think I know where she’s going with this. In some Amish communities, members rotate as designated drivers. One drives a pickup truck so the others can get around when need be. While he does this, they shun h
im. When his turn is up, another member drives the truck and gets shunned. It’s a pragmatic solution to a problem imposed by their theology.

  “So, were these the shunned ones?” I ask.

  “Like the Amish? Actually, I was thinking of terrorists. When they’re on jihad, the rules are different.”

  I know she doesn’t literally mean these guys are Muslim extremists. What she means is they use technology when it serves a purpose.

  The cell phone was important to their purpose.

  “You okay?” Lewis asks me.

  “What?” I pull back to the present.

  “You have a lost look in your eyes.”

  “Sorry. I’m fine.” But I’m not. Between the phone discovery and Lewis’s mention of jihad, I’m starting to see something, and I don’t like it.

  A few days ago, my biggest fear was that a psycho would show up at my front door. Then that happened. Things got worse when it turned out she had two accomplices—accomplices she lived with, until they killed her.

  But this is bigger than three people.

  I think I see it now.

  I’m not dealing with a couple of lone weirdos. They’re part of a group. They needed phones so they could coordinate.

  There’s a word for the way they are organized. Like the jihadists Lewis suggested, they’re part of a cell. One cell implies more. Maybe a lot more.

  I don’t think killing me was their primary goal. Otherwise the men who killed our Jane Doe would also have been at my front door, helping her.

  They came here for a purpose. If murdering an FBI agent is just one small part of the plan, what’s the bigger goal?

  I turn to Lewis. “I have to call Quantico, right now.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Paper Chase

  Evans, the senior agent in the conference room, raises an eyebrow and asks, “A cult?”

  I could have said we should all go picnic on Mars and received the same reaction. With graying blond hair and a coffee mug perpetually clasped in one hand, he’s the kind of bureaucrat who tends to come preinstalled in government buildings, like office chairs and cubicles. For him, investigations are just things that exist on paper. The world outside is irrelevant if it isn’t itemized on a form.