by MK Alexander
We crossed Boulder Canyon Drive to find ourselves cordoned off from the scene some fifty yards from the center of operations. The press was given very little access, the spectators even less. Douglas Drummond came strolling over to Cindy and I. He greeted us as usual with a nod and his unwavering smirk. He was also wearing a big green overcoat. I was not going to see his belt buckle today.
“Regular old rodeo this morning,” Drummond commented.
“Welcome back, Doug,” Cindy said without much enthusiasm.
“Cindy, Patrick… How are y’all today?” he asked, clearly not expecting a reply.
“How was your vacation?”
He returned a wary glance.
“Go any place warm?”
“What?” Drummond asked and rubbed his paunchy face. “Nah…” he muttered.
There was a long uncomfortable moment.
“Pull up any cars yet?” Cindy asked.
“No. Reckon they’re still waiting on that crane to get into position.” Drummond pointed.
“No ballast bags?”
“What the heck are you talking about, Jardel?”
“Those inflatable things… somebody mentioned them at the Trustee meeting last night.”
“Oh yeah, thanks for covering while I was gone. Anything big happen?”
“Aside from this, I’d have to say no.”
“Ha, looks like I made it back just in time then.”
“You don’t seem too surprised.”
“Surprised? Nah. Wouldn’t be the first time we had an accidental drowning… a hiker or somebody… It’s just another flood story. Crying shame though…”
I could see Doc Ollie talking to someone: a tall, gangly man with gray-white hair and dark skin. I recognized him as Jamal Morris. He had refused to speak to me last night and I didn’t suppose I’d fare any better this morning. The conversation looked heated, but I couldn’t hear a word. Every once in a while the two men glanced in our direction. Both Cindy and Drummond knew Morris and sought to make eye contact, though unsuccessfully.
“Who’s that guy talking to Fisher?” I asked even though I knew the answer.
“Captain Morris… Boulder PD, probably in charge by now.”
“In charge of what?”
“The whole investigation, the task force.”
“What task force?”
“You know they’re gonna saddle-up a task force.”
Drummond was right of course.
Captain Morris came trotting over. He looked at Cindy and Drummond briefly but said absolutely nothing. He stared at me instead. “Jardel? With me.” Morris grabbed my arm. I ducked under the tape, being dragged towards Doc Ollie. Even from this distance I could see the skinny lumber jack looked a little worse for wear.
“What?” I asked along the way.
“You said the whole reservoir is a crime scene. What did you mean by that?”
“Nothing really, just about the positions of the cars, the angles and stuff… might be part of a sequence…”
“Why not just the flood?”
“If the water came rushing down that hill, you’d expect the cars to be in an opposite curve, or no curve at all. It just looks deliberate to me.”
“Okay, that’s not the worst theory I’ve heard.” He flashed a wide smile. “What else?”
“Um… None of the cars are on their side, and they’re all facing the same direction more-or-less.”
“Could be the current moved them like that.”
“The current?”
“Sure, this whole place drains into the creek.”
“I don’t know, it looks more intentional than haphazard.”
Jamal said nothing but seemed to scrutinize me. “If it’s not the flood, how did the cars get dumped halfway across the reservoir?”
“Hard to say exactly.”
“Okay, what’s your theory then?”
“That,” I said and pointed to a group of shivering divers resting on a floating platform.
“What the hell are you talking about, Jardel?”
“The raft.”
“Huh… not bad. I guess it’s worth a look around the perimeter.” Morris paused. “But for now, I’m going to consider this a natural disaster. You can quote me, if you want.”
“Come on, Chief, I saw those bodies in the backseat of those cars… none of them are from last month. They’re like, ancient skeletons.”
“I’m forced to agree…” Jamal made a face. “You keep quiet about that for now, okay?”
“Why?”
“Out of respect for the victims and their families. It’s going to be a while before we ID anybody.”
“Okay.”
“Doc Fisher tells me you found the other four cars. How did you know they were there?”
“I just took a guess.”
“A guess, huh?” Morris eyed me with almost mock suspicion. “Didn’t you get my message? You were supposed to make a statement in my office last night. Never showed up.”
“I was covering the Trustee meeting,” I replied and stared back at Morris. “You were there. I tried to talk to you, and you blew me off.”
“Oh yeah, okay, my bad.” Captain Morris squinted hard. “And who came up with this hashtag, Murder Lake— was that you?”
“Um, well yeah.”
“Goddamn… Murder Lake? Isn’t that over the top?”
“Shock and awe… that’s what gets noticed on social media. Subtlety is not appreciated, and not rewarded.”
“Still, it’s a freaking reservoir, Jardel, not a lake— you know what I’m saying?”
“Okay, but I figured it would help if we got the public involved.”
“Help in what way?”
“Maybe somebody saw something.”
“You could be right…” Morris paused for a moment and looked over at Doc Ollie. “What about my property?”
“What?”
“The evidence you stole.”
“I didn’t steal anything.”
“No? Fisher told me about them sonograms you downloaded.”
“That’s not stealing, that’s copying. I made a backup, that’s all.”
“I should have you arrested.”
“Arrested, huh? That’s helpful.”
Morris shot me a glance and pursed his lips. “You’re going to have to hand it over.”
“I don’t have it with me.”
“Where is it?”
“Back at the office.”
“I do not want to see those on the internet,” Morris warned.
“It’s not up to me.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll have to take it up with my boss.”
“Okay, you tell Mr Wayne then.”
“That’s between you and him.”
“And you have no say in this?”
“I might… I can talk to him, if you want.”
Jamal smiled but it was not so friendly.
“Probably should check the NedCam,” I said.
“What?” Jamal turned to me again. “What do you know about that?”
“At the Trustee meeting last night, somebody mentioned it.”
“Hmm… might be right about that.”
***
In the end, even Cindy was somewhat thankful that Andrew Williams had dumped us at the scene. It was many cold hours before the first vehicle was raised. Andrew returned before then with coffee and donuts, enough to supply a small army, and a diet soda. “Kaiser’s orders,” he explained the expense with two words.
Just before noon the first vehicle was raised. It looked more like a planter than a car, a brown hulk completely covered with mud. Water rushed out at first, then it dripped with a kind of silt unceasingly for a good fifteen minutes. Under all the muck, the car was solid rust, and all through the inside, stuff was growing, plants or a slimy algae of some kind. I’m pretty sure I saw a couple of fish leap to safety before the car was swung to shore. The vehicle looked to be from the early 1990’s, maybe a
Ford Taurus.
We all stared at the horrific scene: a corpse, no more than a skeleton with a few patches of skin and an errant tuft of hair on its skull. Though by the clothes that remained, it was pretty clear that this first victim was a woman. Andrew was already snapping away with a huge telephoto lens.
“Look what she’s wearing,” Cindy whispered.
“What?”
“It’s a prom dress, if it’s anything.”
She knew better than me. Despite a myriad of stains and other colors, the gown was presumably pink at one time. Fashion aside, I was wondering if there was anything in the lake that would eat a body. It was not a question I liked to ask, let alone imagine. I was told only some carp, some catfish and trout were suspects in this regard. I still didn’t know if these fish were carnivorous, or had a special preference for carrion. When I asked the question aloud, I was brusquely informed that the Barker Meadow Reservoir was not a fishing hole.
* * *
chapter nine
co crime
The days passed into weeks. It took both to haul the cars from the reservoir, seven in all, each with an unidentified victim, and an eighth vehicle, an empty pickup truck from the 1930s. There was some speculation it had nothing to do with the crime. I wasn’t so sure, though I do admit its position didn’t seem to fit the V-shape I had first noticed. The makes and models of the other cars varied widely, and were decades apart. So far, no victim had been identified, at least not to the media.
A monstrously large task force had been organized by the state prosecutor’s office, which included every jurisdiction known to Colorado and beyond, from the Feds to local Fire and Rescue. News was not forthcoming. The Public Information Officer was tight-lipped, evasive, and held his press conference on Fridays, the day after our deadline. He made a weekly appeal for witnesses though none ever came forward. He was simply known as that prick, in Kaiser’s words. Even his real name escaped me, until I had to write up my weekly update.
There were the obvious first steps: identifying vehicles and victims. For the cars, that meant VIN’s, tracking down previous owners and paperwork that confirmed buyers and sellers, not to mention insurance records and license plates. Trace evidence was scant, certainly no fingerprints. All that could be said was each car had a dead passenger strapped to the backseat. Also, in every vehicle, the windows were presumed to have been closed, though I had seen otherwise. Once source told me, keys were found in every ignition, and curiously, the left blinker was in the on position. These were facts I was not supposed to report.
Identifying the victims was an order of magnitude more difficult. It meant cross referencing missing persons and cold cases. DNA was extracted for future reference, we were told. But dental records would be the only positive means of identification, and that would take time. Few personal effects from the victims had been found either— the only remnants of clothes were generally polyester. The rest had rotted away.
While it was assumed that the cause of death in each case was drowning, there was nothing to actually back this up. There was just no way to tell from a lungless skeleton. Still, the grisly idea of a passenger strapped in the backseat as the car sank to the bottom of the lake resonated in everyone’s imagination.
Cindy Ramirez and I had slipped into a regular routine. Every morning we had the same argument about whether to take my car or hers. The latter was a sleek two-door with a spoiler and tinted windows. She constantly told me that she was a bad passenger. I countered that it was illegal to text and drive, and eventually she left it to me, though she was relentless in her scorn for my old Saab. We sometimes had an extra passenger: ninety pounds worth of black lab named Axel, Cindy’s dog.
His giant head often came between us, and I was happy enough to put up with a little slobbering on the center console. This particular canine suffered from the joy of existence. I had never met a creature so happy to be alive, and I’ll admit, it was sort of infectious, watching Axel scramble along the scree at the side of the reservoir. He became very popular with the divers and the forensic crews as well. Axel got us across the yellow police tape more than once. “Not much of a barker, eh?” the crime scene techs would say while petting Cindy’s labrador, or make an obligatory joke about reservoir dogs.
Every morning we’d arrive at Barker Meadow and watch the muddy hulks raised from the lake bed, dripping. I took the pictures and Cindy handled the social media. I was never quite close enough to get really gruesome photos of the victims though, and for that I was glad. A few were unavoidable and bizarrely in sync with the Halloween season. Kaiser Wayne had a knack as a photo editor, picking just the right shot and cropping it to perfection: a skeleton covered in mud, sitting forlorn in the backseat, its arm slung to one side along the headrest. And with each new car raised, the Broadsheet had an exclusive: one of Doc Ollie’s original sonograms which were somehow even more unsettling.
Cindy was a master at the one hundred-and-forty character thing. And she really wasn’t such a bad passenger after all, usually busy texting on her phone. Her followers more than doubled overnight. Hashtag MurderLake was almost always trending. Any new scrap of information was immediately posted. Random speculation, questions and rumors also made their way onto her feed. Inevitably, it attracted the crazies. Theories about alien abduction, time travel and native-American burial grounds appeared with alarming frequency, as well as a few posts about the dangers of backseat driving.
There were also some who claimed to be witnesses. Someone posted they heard music from the reservoir, a weird sixties song… Another avowed to seeing blinking lights in the dead of winter, back a few years. I sometimes watched her posts appear in the feed, there for a moment, then swept away by some scrolling tide, like water evaporating, or frothing away to nothingness, into a meaningless current of mundanity.
Cindy had come up with one brilliant idea. Since it was difficult to keep track of all the cars that had been dredged up, she started to name the unidentified victims by their vehicle. Mr Buick, Ms Taurus, Mr Volvo, and so on. That idea caught fire on social media and even the task force was co-opting the names for now.
The biggest question of course was: how did the cars get to the bottom of the reservoir? And it remained unanswered for now. Everyone said it was the flood, or various floods, but about a week into the investigation, two rafts were discovered, one half-submerged, buried in muck on the northwest shoreline; the other, floating on the south shore, tucked away in a cove… exactly the kind of thing you would find at a lake, six oil drums lashed to a large wooden platform, large enough to hold a car, it was presumed. For me, this turned out to be one story of many. Though I was forced to speculate, it was imagined that the perpetrator floated the cars out in the dead of night and rolled them into the depths.
Nederland town officials were at a complete loss to explain the rafts. They were in no way sanctioned. Someone suggested they might have been left over from the construction of the Barker Meadow Dam in the early 1900’s. That did not seem probable. Others said they were used when the dam was renovated many years later. This was a story for Douglas Drummond to follow up.
For now, he seemed content to stay more or less on the sidelines, and only wrote a few background pieces about the reservoir, some profile stories on the investigative team, or how the crime impacted the tiny town of Nederland. Drummond didn’t seem to like me anyhow, so I didn’t expect things to get worse, and I avoided him as much as possible. Andrew Williams worked every angle he knew to find someone on the inside of the task force with little success. I learned that he and Jamal Morris were not the best of buddies.
Everything changed when the fifth car was recovered. The first non-skeleton was dredged up, a real corpse this time, and a recognizable car: a more-or-less brand new Mercedes CLS-550, paint job still intact. The victim however was in a terrible state, her face bloated and waxy. Not something I could bring myself to photograph. Rumor had it, both the victim and the car were identified in a couple of days… but no
one from the task force was talking. The final two cars were a Prius and an El Dorado, and both passengers were skeletons again.
***
One morning I found Andy in the office early. He was white as a ghost. His cubicle was in complete disarray, papers scattered everywhere. I spotted him with his face buried in the bottom drawer of his desk.
“What’s up, Andrew?” I asked, “Or should I say, what’s wrong?”
“I’m screwed, Patrick.”
“Why?”
“The car they dredged up yesterday. Did you see it?”
“Yeah. I took the pictures.”
“It was a goddamn El Dorado, nineteen sixty-nine, navy blue, white top.”
“What?”
“I used to own an El Dorado just like that.”
“How can you even tell it was blue? It looked like a rusty bucket to me…”
“I saw the vinyl top, underneath all that slime it was white.”
“It’s yours?”
“I’m not sure, could be.”
“What happened to it?”
“Sold it to some creepy guy, three or four years ago.”
“So, what are you doing?”
“Looking for the goddamn paperwork.”
“Here?”
“I already turned my condo upside down… nada.”
“How about the front seat of your car?”
“Funny, Patrick, only I don’t feel like laughing today.” Williams paused to grimace, but then a small smile crossed his face. “Holy shit, Jardel, you’re a genius. It’s probably still in the glove compartment… Cross your fingers, dude, I’ll be right back.”
***
Social media kept the tech twins Toby and Travis at full tilt, completely occupied with something other than their usual relentless typing. Kaiser had decided it was the perfect time to implement the new advertising strategy and so far it seemed successful. Clients were lining up for exclusive placement. I’d never seen Tom in advertising happier, nor the Texas Twins more miserable. All the pop-ups and gray boxes started disappearing from the website as well.