Striking Range

by Margaret Mizushima

  She left her vehicle and climbed the short rise toward Johnson and his crowd. The Redstone-Balderhouse Campground was one of the official camping areas near Timber Creek, maintained by Colorado Parks and Wildlife. Each campsite had a picnic table, a metal ring and grill for fires, and a spot for pitching a tent or pulling in a camper. The grounds stayed full during the summer but emptied out around Labor Day, only to fill up again during fall hunting season.

  As Mattie approached Johnson, she scanned the faces in the crowd. At first she didn’t recognize anyone, but then her eyes were drawn to someone familiar—Ginger Beard Man from the car she’d stopped on the highway yesterday for speeding. He appeared to recognize her as well, his expression turning bitter as she quickly found his two companions.

  She gave no indication of recognizing the threesome and let her eyes drift through the crowd and then back to Johnson. He moved several yards away from the onlookers to meet her.

  Turning his back on the group, he spoke in a low voice. “Stella and Brody are just beyond this rise. Take the first fork to the left. Yellow tape is up. You can’t miss it.”

  “You need help keeping these campers away, Johnson?”

  “Nah, they’re staying where they’re supposed to. Stella said to send you over when you got here.”

  “Any family members here to identify the body?”

  He shook his head. “Negative. Still unknown unless Stella found ID.”

  “Is the person who found the body still here?”

  “Yeah, he’s in the crowd. Stella told me to keep these guys here so she can interview them later if she needs to. Not everyone came out of their campsites. Garcia will be here soon to help us canvass the entire campground.”

  A huge task in itself, and it was getting dark. Garcia was the night deputy and a seasoned member of the force. Mattie still thought of Johnson as the rookie, since he’d been added to their department last summer straight out of the academy, though he’d seen his share of action this past year and was becoming a fine officer. “Okay, I’ll leave you to it.”

  She hurried up the wide gravel road that led over the rise. The roads and pathways were well tended, at first wide and lined with stones and then narrowing and unlined as they branched off to the various campsites. Mattie took the left fork as the slope leveled off and wound downhill past a vault toilet. Its stench stung her nostrils as she hurried around it, spotting in the distance the glow of the yellow tape.

  A faint two-track road wound through the trees to an isolated area used for tent camping. This part of the grounds appeared relatively empty compared to the RV and camper sites at the front. As she drew near, she realized that the pine and spruce thickened to shelter the area beyond the yellow tape, blocking view of it from the road.

  The dim light of dusk had ebbed, and the temperature had dipped along with the setting sun. Her breath hung in a fog in front of her face before fading into the frigid air. She narrowed her eyes against sleet that pelted her cheeks and tugged her own orange stocking cap low on her forehead and down below her ears. This would be a miserable night to process the scene of a dead body.

  The only two people at the scene were Stella and Brody, both dressed in heavy coats, light from their flashlights trained on the corpse. Stella glanced at Mattie as she ducked under the tape. “You got here fast.”

  “We were near the base of the trail when the sheriff called.” Mattie went to stand beside Stella so she could see the body. Brody, shining his light on the dead girl’s face, lowered his large frame to squat on the other side, his bare head damp from snowflakes that melted into his dark buzz cut.

  The body lay faceup, eyes closed. Young—perhaps no more than a teen. Long, red curls surrounding the girl’s face grabbed Mattie’s attention. Snowflakes and sleet had begun to gather within her tresses and were catching on her closed eyelashes and cheeks.

  Recognition slammed a sucker punch to Mattie’s midsection. She’d met the girl before—at Cole’s clinic yesterday.

  She needed a second to catch her breath. “I think I know who she is,” she murmured, squatting down to get a closer look, wanting to make sure.

  “Be careful. Notice the pink residue at her mouth and nostrils,” Brody said, training his flashlight’s beam on the girl’s pale face. “If you do know her, that would give us a huge start.”

  She’d already noticed the pinkish discoloration smeared beneath the girl’s mouth and nostrils by the wet conditions, and she wouldn’t touch this body without gloves. The pink streaks reminded her of the foam cone she’d seen inside the nostrils of John Cobb.

  What was the likelihood of seeing this symptom on two unrelated bodies two days in a row? First at the Colorado state prison and now at a Colorado state campground, miles away from each other. Opioid deaths were climbing in the state, but still … this seemed like too much of a coincidence.

  The girl looked so cold, dressed only in jeans and a long-sleeved tee that was pulled low to cover her hips, a coat wadded up under her head like a pillow. Mattie wanted to cover her to protect her from the elements, though she knew she couldn’t. Pale and stiff, the young woman lay in repose with her lips parted—an ice maiden. Mattie scanned the rest of her body, and an incongruity struck her. This girl wasn’t pregnant like the one she’d met yesterday. Perhaps she didn’t know this ice maiden after all.

  “So, don’t keep us in suspense,” Stella muttered as she hunkered down beside Mattie. “Who is she?”

  “Now I’m not sure. I met a girl with hair just like this yesterday at Cole’s clinic. Tonya Greenfield. But Tonya was about nine months pregnant, and this girl obviously isn’t.”

  Already wearing latex gloves, Stella reached to gently push the bottom of the girl’s tee upward, revealing a soft spandex maternity panel at the top of the jeans and thin legs below, a bulge left where a pregnant belly might have once been. “Maybe it is the girl you met,” she murmured.

  Mattie felt sick to her stomach. Tonya, the girl who wanted to give her baby a better life through adoption, who planned to start fresh this spring with her track scholarship. Someone so vital and full of life … and full of love for her dog. Kip, wasn’t it? Where was Kip now? And more importantly, where was the baby? And why was Tonya lying here dead in this campground?

  “Theories?” Stella said. “What are we looking at?”

  “The obvious is opioid overdose,” Brody said, “but I’m not saying that’s what it is.”

  “And if overdose is what we’re looking at, was it accidental or a suicide?” Stella looked at Mattie as if she might have the answer.

  “I can’t say, but I don’t think suicide. The girl I met appeared to have a plan for her future.” Mattie scanned the area. “No car?”

  “Not that we’ve found here close by,” Stella said. “Let’s treat this like a homicide and a body dump. I don’t want us to miss something.”

  Mattie shared what she knew about Tonya, including the information about the baby’s adoption and the scholarship. “I would have never thought depression or even drug use, for that matter. That girl seemed focused.”

  “Okay,” Stella said. “So where’s the baby?”

  “Right.” Brody raised his gaze to make eye contact with Mattie. “Could Robo find a baby out here?”

  “I think so.” Mattie’s pulse quickened with hopefulness, but the temperature was below freezing and no telling how long ago the baby might have been born.

  Brody nodded. “Finding this baby, whether it’s alive or dead, is top priority.”

  “Agreed,” Stella said. “While you and Robo do your work, we’ll process this scene so we can move this girl’s body as soon as Dr. McGinnis is done with her.”

  McGinnis was the county coroner, charged with verifying death and estimating time of death at the scene. Since their rural county didn’t have a medical examiner, bodies found inside its boundaries were transported to a neighboring county for autopsy.

  “I’ll contact Sheriff McCoy,” Brody said. “He’ll
try to find this Tonya Greenfield and see if she’s missing.”

  “Have him call Cole,” Mattie said. “He’ll know how to reach her.”

  Mattie rose and jogged down the rise, passing Johnson as she headed to her unit in the parking lot. A white Chevy Tahoe was turning off the highway and rolled forward to park next to her unit. The beam from its headlights swept her car, highlighting Robo’s silhouette as he stood to stare at the newcomer from the back window.

  Mattie recognized the mop of gray hair atop the man’s head before he tugged on his cap and lowered the earflaps. That thick mane cut in Beatles style from the sixties belonged to Dr. McGinnis. He waved at Mattie as he exited his Tahoe and then opened the back door to retrieve his bag from the back seat.

  As she approached, he turned to face her. His horn-rimmed glasses fogged in the frigid air, and he took them off, giving her a view of the concern in his dark eyes. “Do we have an ID yet?”

  “Maybe.” She felt certain of the girl’s identity but still didn’t want to believe it. “We’re going on the assumption that this is a girl I met yesterday at Dr. Walker’s clinic, Tonya Greenfield. But if so, that girl was pregnant, and this one isn’t. She’s wearing maternity clothes, though, so …”

  “Is the baby with her?”

  “No. I’m going to see if Robo can find it.”

  The doctor took a sharp intake of breath. “For heaven’s sake.”

  “Brody’s having Sheriff McCoy check to see if Tonya’s missing. Brody and Stella are up there at the scene. You can drive a little closer if you want to.”

  “No, I’ll walk. I don’t want to disturb anything in case we have another homicide on our hands.”

  She gave the doctor directions, and he left to head up the rise, his shoulders bent as if beneath a heavy burden. Robo greeted her with his happy dance, evidently reenergized after his short rest. She opened the back hatch, and he pressed against her for a hug.

  “Are you ready to work?” She ruffled his fur and patted his sides in solid thumps. He swiped her cheek with his tongue, and she gently pushed his nose away.

  Her heart grew heavy as she considered how to prepare him for the job that lay ahead. In the end, she decided they would be searching for a human infant, either alive or dead, so she would dress Robo in the tracking harness he associated with searching for humans.

  But at the last moment, she decided to add his Kevlar vest. Neither of them had worn body protection today, but there was something about this scene that felt off—and they were surrounded by hunters with rifles. Brody would be busy processing the scene with Stella, so no one would be at her back. She shed her coat and slipped on her own Kevlar vest before zipping her coat back on. The added warmth felt good after the brief exposure to the cold air.

  She gave Robo his water and invited him to jump down from the unit. He circled her ankles and gave her the eye contact that meant he was ready to work. After clipping on a short leash, she told her dog to heel and turned to jog back uphill with him. They would begin the search near the girl’s body.

  As she passed the first picnic shelter, some of the folks in the crowd were stomping their feet against the cold and looking restless. Though she wondered how long Johnson was going to have to manage crowd control, she couldn’t help but think the wait outside in the elements might be a legitimate price to pay for their initial curiosity. She wished they could use the bystanders to help search for the baby, but without knowing for certain that no one in the crowd was a killer, she felt it best to search on her own.

  Dr. McGinnis had donned gloves and a protective respirator mask to examine the girl’s body, and with his glasses back in place, he looked like an alien from another world bending over her lifeless form.

  “Air temperature has been falling rapidly all afternoon,” he was saying, his voice muffled by the mask. “I’ll do my best to measure body temperature and current ambient air temperature for the medical examiner to decide. Rigor’s set. I’m guessing this girl’s been dead at least three hours, maybe four. The cold temperature might have slowed down the onset of rigor.”

  That seemed counterintuitive to Mattie—wouldn’t the cold stiffen a corpse?—but she knew that the rigidity of rigor was part of the decomposition process, sped up by heat and slowed down by cold.

  “We have access to temperature recordings for the day,” Stella said to McGinnis. “Once we know when this girl was last seen alive, the ME can track it.”

  “I suppose so.”

  Brody and Stella were both standing back but lighting the body for McGinnis. “See here,” the doctor said as he raised the girl’s shirt. “There’s a pattern of lividity here that doesn’t match up with her lying on her back. It looks like she might have been moved after her death. Let’s get some photos of this if we can.”

  Lividity referred to a discoloration of the skin associated with blood settling in the lowest parts, making it useful to determine body position shortly after death. This incongruence supported homicide. Though it wasn’t a surprise, Mattie shivered from a chill unrelated to air temperature.

  She squatted beside Robo, wrapping her arm around his neck and hugging him close. She decided to keep him on his leash so she could be near enough to protect him if necessary.

  “We need to find someone,” she told him as she stood to thump his sides. Then she gave him the command used to find a person: “Search!”

  He looked up at her as if expecting a scent article. When she didn’t offer one, he put his nose to the ground, sniffing the area near their feet and a few paces beyond. He seemed to quickly pick up a scent and began trotting up the path, back toward the parking lot. Mattie jogged behind him, trying to keep slack in the leash so she wouldn’t slow him down.

  Robo appeared confident, driving forward, giving the ground an intermittent sniff. The minutes were ticking by, and Mattie hoped they would find a living baby at the end of this track.

  ELEVEN

  Cole was alone in his clinic, finishing up some computer work before closing for the day. He yawned, rubbing his gritty eyes. The past twenty-four hours had been long but, by the end, very rewarding.

  He tilted back on the spring of the desk chair he was sitting in, rocking and thinking about the kids. Hannah had worked diligently getting that weak puppy to eat, and Sophie and Angie had supported her efforts, mixing the milk replacer and cheering her on all day. He was proud of them all.

  By midafternoon, the puppy had finally latched on when Hannah transferred her from the doll bottle to Sassy. Though Cole had to stifle Sophie’s initial boisterous celebration, more restrained high fives had followed all the way around. An hour later, the puppy had nursed again, and Cole had high hopes that she wouldn’t backslide. He felt like they’d turned a corner.

  When he’d discharged Sassy to return home, he’d given Hannah and Ruth instructions to make sure the little one latched on early during feeding time so she wouldn’t get aced out by the stronger pups, and he felt like she was in good hands.

  As he was pushing himself up from the chair, his cell phone rang. He picked it up from the desktop and saw it was Sheriff McCoy calling. “Hello, Abraham.”

  “Cole.” McCoy cleared his throat. “I’m not calling with good news.”

  Cole’s heart leapt to his throat. “Is Mattie okay?”

  McCoy spoke in a rush to reassure him that Mattie was fine. Cole’s relief made him miss the next few words, but the sheriff had snagged his attention again by the time he finished his sentence: “… found a body.”

  “Hold on a second.” Cole opened his eyes wide in an attempt to clear the cobwebs from his tired brain. “You said who found a body?”

  “Some hunters up at the Redstone-Balderhouse Campground. I’m sorry to say that Mattie thinks the deceased might be one of your clients. I’m calling to get contact information.”

  Cole reached behind him to stabilize the rolling chair so that he could sit again, bracing himself for the next part of the conversation. “Who does Mattie thin
k it is?”

  “A girl named Tonya Greenfield.”

  Shock took the wind from his sails, and he ended up speechless. My God, he thought, it can’t be. But Mattie had met the girl just yesterday, and she probably wouldn’t mistake the identity of a young woman with a headful of curly, red hair and almost nine months pregnant.

  “The deceased isn’t pregnant, though there’s some evidence that she might have been,” the sheriff was saying. “I need to call her or her family to see if she’s missing.”

  Cole didn’t hesitate. “Let me give you the phone number I have.” He opened his client tracking system, tapped a few keys, and brought up Tonya’s record. “Here, I have Tonya’s mobile number and a home phone that belongs to her aunt and uncle. She’s staying with them until after the baby’s born.”

  “Thanks, Cole. I appreciate it. And her aunt and uncle’s names?”

  “The aunt is Eliza Greenfield. I don’t have the uncle’s name.” Cole paused for a moment. “Sheriff, call me back and let me know what you find out, all right? I won’t be able to sleep tonight unless I know that girl’s okay.”

  After disconnecting the call, Cole stared at the record he’d pulled up on his computer screen. Tonya and her dog Kip … the record displayed spare details about this duo, but his memory held so much more. The friendly dog, a young woman on the brink of starting a new life, an aunt who seemed willing to help her wayward niece up to a point but didn’t seem too happy about it. He prayed Tonya wasn’t the girl in the campground.

  Cole stood, placed his cell phone in his pocket, and shrugged into his coat before going outside to take care of evening chores. He flipped on the yard light and headed for Mountaineer’s corral, ducking his head against the mixture of sleet and snowflakes that spattered his face. Garrett hadn’t returned the horse yet, but Cole tossed hay into the gelding’s feed bunk and checked to ensure there was plenty of water in the heated stock tank.