Collecting the Dead: A Novel

by Spencer Kope

  “Any idea who they are?” Nob asks; this time he’s looking straight at me.

  Tawnee Rich and Ashley Sprague, I think to myself, but for Nob I just shake my head and say, “They’ll be on Zell’s death list.”

  Nob seems satisfied and helps his assistant retrieve several waterproof cases from the van. As a ten-legged group, we make our way along the red-flagged trail.

  “I can’t tell you how long it’s going to take,” Nob says in response to a question from the sheriff. “This isn’t a normal crime scene for us; in fact, I don’t think I’ve done a shallow grave for at least five years. Every bone is going to need to be photographed in place, tagged, and bagged. I’m also going to need to take some soil samples and who knows what else. Our actions, and the time it takes, will be dictated by what we find.”

  Nob, Walt, and the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office still have a case to build. Zell may be dead, but they need to show the public that this was his work, that the real killer has come to ultimate justice, and that there’s no more danger. That comes from evidence.

  I don’t need evidence.

  I have shine.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  July 9, 12:13 P.M.

  “We’re burning daylight, Jimmy.”

  “I know.”

  “Then what are we waiting for? Walt’s got things under control here. We’re not CSI, this isn’t our show.”

  “We found them … I just want to make sure—”

  I step in front of Jimmy as he tries to move past, placing my hand solidly on his chest. “It’s—not—our—show,” I repeat. That seems to pull him back. Jimmy’s a cop at heart; I’m not. It’s hard to step back from a crime scene when your nature is to dive in and help; and it doesn’t matter what kind of help, you could be holding a flashlight for the world’s biggest jerk of a detective and it would be enough; you would know that you were helping in some small way.

  Pulling Jimmy away from a crime scene is like pulling an open bottle from the hands of an alcoholic: there’s bound to be some resistance. But we’ve wasted too much time standing idly by while we should be looking for Susan.

  “We save the ones we can.” The mantra spills from my lips out of habit or just some misguided hope. “Susan’s still out there and we’re close. I can sense it. If he’s burying bodies here, he must have a cabin or a bunker nearby that he’s operating from. It only makes sense. As remote as this place is, there’d be no reason to pack a body out for disposal. This whole area is one big hiding place.” I give Jimmy a light punch to the left chest; it’s like punching an oak wearing a T-shirt. “Come on, you know I’m right. Let’s go find her.” Then, in a softer voice, I add, “Please?”

  The word is long in coming: “Okay.” Pulling it out of him is like yanking a rubber boot from ankle-deep mud. “I’ll let Walt know,” he says.

  Jimmy wanders off and I wonder if I’m going to have to wait another hour before he breaks free again, but he’s back in less than two minutes and we make our way with long strides back to the quads.

  The dirt road is a logjam of emergency vehicles, with the Kawasakis hemmed in tight on the right shoulder of the road. It takes some maneuvering, but we skirt around the barrier of cars and SUVs and soon the hum and vibration of the Brute Force ATV again becomes my world.

  My eyes never leave the road, darting from the left to the right and back again, looking for any sign of Sad Face. Five minutes pass, then ten, twenty. I’m just about to suggest backtracking a few miles and taking a road that cut to the southwest.

  Then I see it.

  It’s not shine; it’s not even overly promising; but it’s worth investigating. At the edge of the road are two parallel tracks heading due north—vehicle tracks. The two narrow strips are well worn, suggesting frequent usage, but the driver was careful to always drive exactly in the same path each time, keeping the tracks narrow and less noticeable.

  I’m right next to the trail before I see it, and almost decide to just keep riding. Instead, I brake hard and hail Jimmy on the headset as I circle back.

  “Whatcha got?”

  “Looks like someone’s been off-road,” I reply. “You can tell the trail’s been here awhile, but there are also signs of recent activity.” I pull the quad onto one of the ruts and reach down. Picking up the crushed golden petals of a California poppy, I hold them up as evidence.

  “Very recent,” Jimmy confirms. He tips his helmet down the rutted way. “Lead on.”

  But there’s little leading to do; the trail dies quickly.

  Three hundred feet beyond the road, the earthen ruts suddenly sputter and fail. And spilled upon the ground at the terminus of this wayward spoor, as if in testament to the sudden death of the trail, a rust-textured amaranth shine lies upon the dirt. It paints the wild grasses and the low brush. Like the slime trail of a neon slug, it presses itself into the earth and leads north to a dense copse of trees.

  Blackness lies within.

  “This is it,” I whisper. “It’s all fresh.” My voice mutates into a barely controlled staccato. “He was here within the last few days, and he’s been here a lot.” I look around and gasp. “He’s all over the place.”

  The thicket is two, perhaps three acres, yet even in the midday sun, the belly of the small wood is cast in deep shadow. The trees are uninviting and the array of thorn-riddled bushes around the edge couldn’t have been better placed. It’s almost as if they were intentionally planted and cultivated … and perhaps they were. This is exactly the type of spot Zell would have chosen; his own woodland fortress. What better way to protect it than to plant a wall of thorns around the perimeter?

  “Over here,” I yell, bolting forward, weaving past the thorns and into the center of the copse of trees, where I tear into a pile of brush, tossing aside dead bushes recently stacked there and nearly hitting Jimmy with one of the shrubs in the process. It doesn’t faze him; he’s as eager as I am and tears into the brush pile.

  “I see it!” Jimmy shouts, kicking the last of the debris out of the way. It’s the end of the trail; the Holy Grail. Laid out upon the ground is a rectangular black metal hatch about three feet by two feet, with a thick clasp on one end that’s secured with a solid brass Master Lock padlock.

  “Call it in!” I cry, searching my pockets for anything metal that we can use to pick the lock and finding nothing.

  “Walt, this is Jimmy, do you copy?” There’s a pause, then, “We found it, Walt. We found Zell’s bunker.” He rattles off the GPS coordinates. “Hurry, Walt. We don’t know if she’s got air down there—or when she last had water.” As an afterthought he adds, “And we’re going to need some bolt-cutters.” Pause. “No, I think it’s too big to shoot off.” Pause. “Copy that.”

  Finding my pockets useless and nearly empty, I turn to the backpack and am just about to upend it and empty the contents on the ground when a thought suddenly occurs to me. Dropping the bag, I glance around, searching the ground.

  Jimmy’s yanking on the hasp to no avail and gives up in disgust. Like me, he begins to search the ground, but we’re searching for two different things. Ten seconds later, he has what he wants and returns to the hasp with a two-inch-diameter branch in hand. He’s trying to get an angle on the latch when he notices me and pauses, watching.

  “What are you doing?”

  I hold a single finger in the air; a signal for him to wait, a signal for patience. Following the various trails of shine drifting off from the main pool, I check eight locations before the hunch pays off.

  Tossing the three-pound rock aside, I retrieve the small treasure hidden beneath and hurry back to Jimmy, dangling the single brass key between my index finger and my thumb. Placing it in Jimmy’s palm, I close his fingers around it. “I was thinking like Zell,” I say, trying to control the fear and adrenaline coursing through my body. “If I had a place like this, I wouldn’t want to risk losing the key or driving all the way out here and forgetting it.”

  Jimmy’s quiet a moment, staring
at the key. “Good work, Steps.” His words are soft and I know he’s feeling the same apprehension. We’ve felt it before on too many cases; sometimes it ended well, sometimes it didn’t.

  We save the ones we can.

  It’s an odd sensation. I felt the same prickly panicky rush when we were waiting for the results of my mother’s biopsy last year. A mammogram turned up an “anomaly,” and we had to wait nearly two weeks for the results. They told us when to expect the lab report, so on the big day we all gathered at my parents’ place and spent the day playing cards, watching movies, watching the phone.

  The call came just before four.

  As my mother stood in the kitchen with the phone pressed to her ear, nodding and answering in one-word sentences, it felt like every pore in my body was open and sweating. My body tingled with panic and fear, and my stomach was a twenty-pound concrete ball.

  And then she turned and smiled … and it all washed away like so much dust under a warm spring shower. It was as if my soul just shrugged and let it all go. That night I slept for fourteen hours.

  “Are you ready?” Jimmy has the key in the lock.

  I nod and immediately hear a click as the key turns. Jimmy twists the lock from the latch and then pulls back the hasp. Together we lift the lid and reveal a rectangle of darkness yawning in the earth, like the lair of some feral beast.

  A foul smell oozes from the black hole … a familiar smell.

  I cover my nose quickly and reel back. “Jimmy, that’s—”

  “I know,” he says, trying not to gag. “Let it air out a minute.”

  “We’re too late, aren’t we?”

  Jimmy just shakes his head; he won’t look at me.

  I look around on the ground for Susan’s shine to see if it’s still vibrating, but there’s none to be found.

  Decomp.

  Even the truncated word is unpleasant—cop shorthand for decomposition. The smell is hard to explain and impossible to forget. The best description might be rank sweetness; a wretched stench that, if allowed to marinate, causes involuntary vomiting and seeps into every fiber of your clothes and every follicle of your hair.

  The body begins to decompose almost immediately upon death through two distinct and separate processes: autolysis and putrefaction. Autolysis can best be described as self-digestion. The enzymes within the body begin to break down the cells and tissue, much like saliva and stomach acid break down food.

  The uglier side of decomposition, putrefaction, is the process whereby bacteria in the body, particularly in the intestines, begin to break the body down. This causes massive bloating as the bacteria gives off gases that accumulate in the body’s cavities and in the skin. The skin itself becomes discolored, marbling into a spiderweb of green-black veins on the face, the torso, the arms and legs. Eventually the skin blisters, fingernails slough off, and purge fluids begin to drain from the nose and mouth.

  The speed of this process varies greatly depending on the environment. The most significant factor is temperature: heat speeds up the process, cold slows it down. Other factors come into play as well, such as whether the body is exposed, buried, or submerged. Bacteria react differently in each of these environments. The exposed body is also subject to a greater degree of predation—animals making a meal of it.

  That’s decomposition; the process is nasty, the smell is worse.

  Moving close to the opening, I peer in. “FBI,” I shout. “If anyone’s in there, call out.” I barely get the words out before having to force down the bile rising in my throat. At the same time, my body starts dumping saliva into my mouth, that telltale precursor to vomiting. I move back from the hole and gulp fresh air.

  “It’s pitch-black in there,” I gasp at Jimmy. “We’re going to need a flashlight or a torch or something.”

  Jimmy quickly shrugs off his backpack and sets it on the ground. I follow his lead and begin with the pockets in the front, working my way into the main pouch. We each find a small Maglite and numerous packs of twelve-hour tactical glow sticks.

  There’s something else.

  At the bottom of the bag is a sealed container of light blue surgical face masks. Next to it is a small brown bottle that looks like it came from a kitchen pantry; it’s peppermint oil. I hold them up for Jimmy to see. “I guess we don’t have to throw up after all.”

  Some people prefer a dab of Vicks VapoRub when dealing with decomp; you see it in the movies all the time, detectives walking in on an autopsy and dabbing some Vicks or other menthol-based gel under their nose to deal with the smell.

  The peppermint oil is a nice touch, a better option.

  Unwrapping two masks, I pour out three quick drops of oil onto each, hand one of the masks to Jimmy, and pull the other over my nose and mouth. The result is instantly pleasant, even soothing.

  Standing above the bunker opening, I snap two glow sticks and toss them in. They land on dirt ten feet down and reveal a metal ladder at a slight incline connecting to the metal frame of the hatch. I shine my light into the hole as Jimmy descends the steps with his Glock in hand.

  He moves forward into the darkness and I see the scattered beam of his flashlight as it sweeps left and right and left again. His back is to me and his figure is cast in shadow, but I see him slowly lower his gun, then, just as slowly, he holsters it.

  “Clear,” Jimmy calls, his voice slightly muffled by the mask.

  He comes back to a narrow wooden table to the left of the ladder and begins to fiddle with something as I make my way down two steps at a time. Just as I reach the bottom and turn around, a bright glow bursts from the table, and Jimmy turns around holding an electric lamp that casts light fifteen feet in every direction. It’s the type of lamp designed for hunters and campers, and uses fluorescent bulbs powered by a rechargeable battery pack. It puts off a good glow, but even so the bunker is large enough that the corners are in shadow.

  I pause to look around as Jimmy makes his way to the far left corner. The bunker is primitive by any standard: unpainted, stained cinder-block walls, a timber roof held up by a series of four-by-six beams, a dirt floor filthy with squalor.

  There’s a steady tap-tap-tap coming from the left and I turn to find the source: a six-inch puddle in the dirt. Above the puddle, sitting on a wooden frame, is a fifty-five-gallon white plastic drum about half full of water. The seal at the spigot is faulty and the water drips from it with a clocklike rhythm.

  Jimmy’s already in one corner and as I make my way over I notice he’s standing on a makeshift floor of two-by-six planks laid down over the soil. No other part of the bunker has a floor, just this corner. A mattress rests upon a portion of the planks and a still figure rests upon the mattress: a rag doll cast aside after play.

  Susan Ault.

  She’s covered in an old blanket with a quilt pattern, not a true quilt, just some knockoff made to look like one. A primitive, homemade manacle is around her scarred and bloody left wrist, secured in place by a small lock. A section of chain connects the manacle to the wall.

  As before, a key is nearby, this time in plain sight. A nail protrudes from the cinder-block wall just beyond Susan’s reach; a nail that holds the key. It’s as if he put it there intentionally, on display, to taunt her.

  A minute later she’s free of the manacle but still not responding. Her eyes are closed, her lips dry and cracked, her pulse weak. Jimmy takes her in his arms, blanket and all, and lifts her from the filthy mattress. As he does, her eyes flutter and then open to a narrow slit.

  Jimmy sees it. “We’ve got you,” he says gently, his voice breaking at the edges. “It’s all over. You’re safe.”

  It takes a moment for her to focus on his face, and then on the FBI logo on his jacket. “Thank you,” she says, her voice barely a whisper. “My … daughter?”

  “She’s safe,” I say, taking Susan’s hand and holding it to my chest. My mind is suddenly overcome by the image of little Sarah burying her small face in my chest when we found her in her crib. The memory
breaks me apart. “Your sister’s looking after her,” I manage. “She’s a beautiful little girl and she’s waiting for you.”

  “Thank you.” Her eyes close, and for a moment I fear that she’s letting go, drifting away, but then her breathing steadies.

  “We’ve got to get her out of here,” Jimmy says.

  “Let me get topside. I can pull—” The words fall away, fractured and spent.

  I stand rigid in the heart of the bunker, staring into the gloom of the right corner. The smell! My knees threaten to buckle and I stagger forward several steps. Oh, God. I should have known—I should have guessed.

  “Steps.”

  Jimmy’s voice does little to call me back.

  “Come on, Steps, I need your help. STEPS!”

  I don’t answer him. My next words are directed elsewhere: difficult words that are hard to think, let alone speak. I push them from my throat, from my mouth, through my teeth. I force the words out and feel the sting of salt in my eyes as I address the silent shadow slumped in the corner.

  “I’m sorry, Lauren. I’m so sorry.”

  Her naked body is bloated, discolored, and misshapen from decomposition. She’s unrecognizable, but I know her. I know her shine, sweet girl. It’s dull and flat now, with no vibration, like the locket, but it’s her.

  Seconds pass, minutes pass, maybe even hours. I feel a hand on my shoulder like someone reaching down from the rafters above. No … not rafters. I realize I’m huddled on the ground; folded over; broken. Jimmy takes me by the arm and helps me to my feet. He guides me away from the silent shadow and back to the light of the world above.

  Susan has already been rushed from the bunker and spirited away in the back of an SUV. An ambulance is en route and will meet them somewhere along the way to Red Bluff.

  Lauren is gone. I already knew that; I always know, I’ve known for days. But finding her body, seeing her … it makes it that much worse. My failure becomes tangible; in sight, in smell, in every way imaginable.

  This is on me.