Vulnerable

by Mary Burton

  “As soon as we can make an identification,” Rick said, “we need to notify her parents.”

  “Sure. I’ll move as quickly as I can,” she said.

  She set her camera aside and donned a Tyvek suit as well as a small headlight, which she snapped on. Without another word, she crouched and began crawling into the cave.

  Her heart beat a little faster and beads of sweat formed on her face. She never relaxed in tight spaces. A stupid kind of fear. She was perfectly safe but her body always recoiled when the job required her to squirm into a tiny space. She’d been under the crawl spaces of homes, in small basement rooms, and low attic spaces. She should have been used to this kind of thing after a decade on the job. But she never made peace with it.

  She moved forward, her shoulders stooped and she turned toward the entrance. “Brad, I need my camera.”

  “Right here,” he said handing it to her.

  The body was bloated with decomposition gasses and in several places the victim’s skin had split, allowing bodily fluids to puddle around her body. This close, she could see the white button-down had subtle blue stripes. The right sleeve was ripped and the arm bloodied, suggesting the injury happened before she died. Her skirt was khaki and her shoes, or rather shoe, was a blue loafer. The shoe on her right foot was missing, revealing small white toes painted a vivid purple that matched the color of her fingernails. The funky color didn’t quite jibe with the overall preppy look, and Georgia wondered if the girl had harbored a risky side that might very well have gotten her killed. Her right and left hands where crossed over her heart and her face was turned to the side.

  She snapped more images and then allowed her gaze to skim the girl’s face. Death and time had ravaged what must have been a full and bright face into a very pale, drawn expression. Her lips were slightly apart.

  Snap. Snap. Snap.

  The victim wore simple gold earrings and a pearl necklace. Both looked as if they were expensive. Under the necklace, a dark purple band of bruises circled a thin white neck. This girl had been strangled, but it would take the medical examiner to determine if that had been the cause of death. She rose up above the body as much as the jagged low ceiling would allow.

  Snap. Snap. Snap.

  Peeking out from the white button-down was a pink, sleek lacy bra, another hint that this girl had harbored secrets.

  A class ring encircled the victim’s right pinky and as Georgia leaned in close, she discovered it was a newly minted college ring. So damn young.

  Her gaze trailed around the body as she searched for anything that might have belonged to the victim. She noted piles of leaves and rocks and along the rock wall several puddles of wax, remnants of candles burned down to the wick.

  On her knees, she passed through something wet and she glanced back to see decomposition fluid on her jumpsuit.

  “It just doesn’t get any lovelier than this,” she grumbled. A sharp rock on the cave’s floor cut into her palms and strained the protection of her latex gloves.

  Beyond the body, the cave narrowed like the neck of a bottle. She tucked the camera into a pocket of her jumpsuit and crawled past the body toward the narrowing space closed off by a pile of neatly piled rocks. The arrangement was too defined to be natural and was reminiscent of the rocks piled in the primary cave’s entrance.

  “How’s it look?” Brad asked.

  “Dark. Very, very dark.”

  “You okay?”

  “I’m doing just swell. You know I live for this.” Her nose itched and she rubbed it with her forearm. As she shifted to the right, she hit her elbow against a jagged rock. Pain shot up her arm and she muttered a curse. Every move had to be deliberate to ensure no evidence was damaged.

  The narrow light of her headlamp caught a wink of metal as she stared up at the rocks. When she leaned closer, she realized there was a pendant hanging from a chain dangling from the rocks. She snapped a picture of the pendant and then glanced in her viewfinder and blew up the image. The pendant was engraved with two scripted letters: BR.

  Shit. Bethany Reed.

  The death scent mingled with the musty wet mossy smells that belonged in caves. She glanced at the ceiling, praying the bats and hairy critters hiding in the darkness would scurry out of her path. Hating the space, she kept her focus on what she did best: cataloging facts.

  She photographed the pendant several more times and then the rocks stacked at the back of the cave. As she set the stones aside a second, smaller area appeared. “What the hell is this place?”

  Shinning her light into the second space, she could see it narrowed so much that once in she would not be able to turn around. The only way out of here was to back out so if something furry charged, she would have to choke back a godawful scream or suffer the jokes of the cops.

  She cleared more rocks so that she could move forward into the second chamber.

  Her left hand settled on something hard, brittle and narrow. She dropped her gaze, her headlight catching the object.

  It was a bone. Human.

  * * *

  Jake stood at the cave’s entrance, listening as Georgia burrowed deeper into the darkness. He admired her guts. He was street tough, but this scene put him on edge.

  Feet braced, he tapped his index finger against the butt of his gun. “Brad, I don’t hear her moving. What’s going on in there?”

  Brad, kneeling at the mouth of the cave, glanced back at Jake as if to caution patience. But when he took a good look at Jake, he silenced his comments and leaned into the mouth of the cave. “Georgia, what’s going on?”

  For a moment, she did not answer and the silence fueled Jake’s concern.

  “She’s fine,” Brad said. “She’ll holler if she needs help.”

  “I understand that.” A blunt tone sharpened the edges of each word.

  Rick shifted his stance. “Give her a few more seconds.”

  Jake’s lips flattened into a grim line. “Brad. Yell in there again.”

  “Georgia!” Brad hollered. “What’s your status?”

  Jake was quickly losing patience. He’d give her five more seconds and then he’d head inside. One. Two. Three.

  “I’m alive.” Her strong voice echoed out from the depths of the cave. The camera flashed a dozen more times. “It’s a bitch turning around in here. I’m on the way out.”

  He freed some of the tension banding his shoulders. “She’s taking a hell of a lot of pictures.”

  “She won’t miss anything,” Rick said.

  Finally, he saw her booted, muddied feet appear at the entrance. Next, a very nice bottom, also covered in dirt and sludge, a narrow waist, shoulders, and that crop of red hair pulled into a topknot.

  She straightened and rolled her shoulders as she turned. She wiped a curl from her face with the back of her hand. “Female, approximately twenty years old. Nicely dressed. My guess is that she was strangled, but that’s the medical examiner’s call. She’s well into the decomposition process and given the cool weather and fifty or sixty degree temperature in the cave, she’s been in there three or four days.”

  “You were in there a while,” Jake said.

  “I searched around the body. I found three candles burned down into puddles of wax, but nothing else. And I spotted a pile of rocks in the back of the cave. They’re too neatly arranged to be natural so I removed a few. Behind the first chamber there’s a longer, narrower tunnel that cuts deeper into the hill. That’s what took me so long.”

  “You get stuck?” Rick asked.

  She shot him an annoyed look. “No. Are you saying I have a big ass?”

  “Not at all.”

  She drew in a breath. “In the second chamber I found bones.”

  “Human?” Jake asked.

  She reached inside the front pocket of her jumpsuit and pulled out her camera. She scrolled back through pictures and handed it to Jake. Rick moved forward and the two studied the image. “You tell me. Looks like a human femur to me.”

 
“How many sets?” Jake asked.

  “One that I saw, but I won’t know until I get back into the cave and really look,” she said.

  “There is no chance that two killers would find the same hiding spot?” Rick asked.

  “Whoever hid the body in the exterior chamber had already hid a victim in the back section of the cave,” Jake said.

  Georgia pushed the back button on the viewfinder until the image of a gold pendant and chain appeared. “Found that dangling from one of the rocks blocking the back chamber. Look closely at the pendant. It’s engraved with the initials BR.”

  Both detectives studied the image. “Bethany Reed,” Rick said.

  “You’d think the hounds would have picked up the scent five years ago,” Jake said. “Jesus, there must have been two hundred people canvassing the park.”

  “That back chamber is tucked away and the entrance was covered with rocks,” Georgia said. “If the killer spread a little lye on the body, that would have masked the scent. But before I can think about excavating the second site, I’ve got to deal with our Jane Doe.”

  Rick removed a small notebook from the breast pocket of his suit jacket and flipped it open. “Elisa Spence, age nineteen, was reported missing on Sunday by her roommate. Five foot four, one hundred and fifty pounds, muddy brown hair.”

  “That fits the description of the victim,” Georgia said. “She does appear to be missing a shoe. Blue loafer. Bottom of her foot is torn up pretty good.” She pulled in a deep breath, as if needing the scent of fresh clean air to chase away the death. “Let me stock up and get back inside. I’ll need to bag her hands and find a way to wrap the body so that we don’t lose evidence dragging her out of the cave.”

  Jake shouldn’t care about Georgia going back into the cave. This was her job. She’d been knee deep in all kinds of nastiness. But it did bother him. He hated the idea of her returning to that dark stone grave.

  Expressing his concern would belittle her. She was a professional and regardless of how she felt about the horrendous task, she would do it.

  She moved to the truck and, stripping off her gloves, grabbed a water, and drank. Rolling her head from side to side, she gathered the supplies she’d need in the cave. She didn’t complain. Didn’t bitch. Didn’t decide to pawn off the work on Brad. But he saw the deep set lines in her forehead and the strain behind her eyes.

  Jake decided the kindest thing he could do was send her in just a little angry and dreaming of landing a punch on his square jaw.

  Grinning Satan’s smile, Jake said, “When you get back in the cave, try not to scare the bats, Georgia.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Tuesday, October 3, 6:00 P.M.

  Georgia lost track of the time. The artificial lights that had chased the darkness also dulled the lines between night and day. Only one technician could fit in at a time, so she and Brad alternated one-hour shifts. She began by searching the area around the body, shifting through the cool damp soil for anything a killer might have left behind. Other than the wax there was nothing. It seemed she barely searched a few square feet when Brad would shout in to her.

  When Brad yelled, “Time,” she glanced out the cave’s entrance and could see the glow of floodlights hauled into the remote location by uniformed officers. “I’ll be out in a minute. I’ve a few more details before I’m at a stopping point.”

  “That’s what you said twenty minutes ago.”

  “It takes time,” she snapped, rolling her head from side to side. “I’m not rushing this.”

  A layman would have expected the body to be stiff but this hardening of the body, rigor mortis, happened in the first two to four hours post death. After about six hours, the chemical reaction that triggered the rigor mortis ebbed, the muscles slackened and became flaccid again. Now at least forty-eight hours post death the limbs were malleable. The medical examiner would have to measure the body’s liver temperature to determine a more accurate time of death.

  Georgia sat cross-legged as she lifted the victim’s cold and badly swollen hand. Though the cuticles had receded, she could see that in life the victim kept them neatly filed and painted with a faint sheen of purple nail polish that still caught the light. Carefully, Georgia inspected the fingernails, crusted with dirt, searching for any sign that the victim might have scratched her attacker. Knowing the medical examiner would do scrapings under the fingernails, she covered both hands with paper bags. Porous, the paper allowed air to circulate so that moisture didn’t form and destroy any DNA that might be present.

  “Let’s hope you scratched the hell out of him. Maybe together, we can put this asshole away.”

  When both hands and feet were bagged, she gently rolled the body on its side. Pushing up the shirt, she noted a purplish discoloration darkening the backside of the girl’s legs and arms. Called stippling, the color change was caused by blood settling or pooling in the body’s lowest point when the heart stopped pumping. Forensic technicians used stippling patterns to determine if the body had been moved or repositioned. If there’d been stippling on the front of the body, she’d have known the girl lay face down for a time before being placed on her back. In this case, the stippling ran the back length of the girl’s body. This suggested the girl was positioned here at the time of death

  “How’s it going in there?” Brad asked. He dropped his voice a notch. “Got some mighty testy detectives out here pacing around.”

  “Why should I care? Do they have another party to go to?”

  He shook his head slowly with conviction. “If I ask them that now, I’ll be taking my life into my own hands.”

  Neither detective scared or intimidated her and she found their annoyance almost amusing, considering she was knee deep in death. She rolled her head from side to side, feeling a small pop in the stiff vertebrae. “She’s almost ready to move. Go ahead and send in the body bag.”

  “Jake Bishop also wants to see the cave and the scene before you move her.”

  “Tell him to suit up. I’ll give him the grand tour.”

  Georgia did her best to consider dead bodies as evidence to be studied. But when the victim was young, as this girl had been, it wasn’t difficult to not look beyond the ravages of death and see a sweet young girl brutally robbed of her life.

  A heaviness settled in her chest and, for a moment, she didn’t move as she sat quietly by the girl, her gloved hand resting on the lifeless arm. As she sat, she glanced over at the three waxy puddles that had illuminated the cave. Why the candles? Had the killer used it to light up his little cave of horrors? Tears burned in the back of her throat. “I swear, I’ll find out who did this.”

  “Talking to yourself?” Jake asked.

  “I talk to dead people,” she said. “Didn’t you know that?”

  “Can I come in?”

  “Make yourself at home.” She sat back on her haunches and moved back to make room for him.

  He’d put on a Tyvek suit, gloves, and booties. Moving with practiced care, he crawled into the cave and squatted in the few feet on the other side of the body. He studied the body, his scowl deepening with disgust. “Jesus, the smell in here. You okay?”

  “Never better.” She shoved back a stray lock of hair from her eyes with the back of her hand.

  He inspected the details of the body and then took in the candles and the necklace and pendant dangling from the rock. “How the hell did he find this place?”

  “I didn’t know caves like this existed in the area. Whoever was here knew the area well.”

  “Three kids on a science expedition, maybe?”

  She shook her head. “The kids parked and entered on the opposite side of the park. They were never supposed to be close to this section.”

  He looked at the thin line of bruises ringing the victim’s neck as well as the collection of other marks. “He didn’t strangle her the first time he laid hands on her.”

  “A choking game?”

  “Maybe.”

  He raised the vi
ctim’s bagged hand. “Are there signs she tried to get away?”

  “That’s what it looks like. The other shoe is out there somewhere.”

  “I’ll call in the scent dogs and see if they can find it.”

  For a moment, both sat in silence, each lost in their own thoughts.

  “Her face is turned to the side,” Jake said. “The killer or killers didn’t want her looking at him.”

  “Is that some kind of dominance thing?”

  “That and anger.”

  “We’ve got a real gem of a killer this time.”

  “You need anything from me?” Jake asked.

  What could he do for her now? Nothing. But it was nice he asked. “Have Brad send in the body bag.”

  “Consider it done.” He winked at her and then slowly retraced his path out of the cave.

  “I’ve got the bag,” Brad shouted.

  She blinked and turned, breaking her long stare. “Great, hand it in.”

  * * *

  Jake stripped off his Tyvek suit, gloves, and booties the instant he left the cave. The smell would cling to him and be in his airways for days.

  “She hates tight spaces,” Rick said.

  Hell, Jake was in that damn tomb less than ten minutes and wouldn’t forget it for a long time. He knew this was a hard scene and the tight proximity to the body was clearly taking its toll. “Why?”

  Rick slid his hands into his pockets. “I’ll deny it, if you ever tell her I told you.”

  That tweaked a small smile. “Your baby sister scare you?”

  Rick chuckled. “Damn right. And if you had any sense you would fear her, too.”

  Jake had witnessed her temper in full force when a young uniformed cop had trampled her crime scene and another time when she was singing and a guy from the audience at Rudy’s got too familiar with another female singer. Georgia Morgan, defender of the defenseless, whether they be dead or alive.

  “I’ll never tell,” Jake said.

  Rick shook his head. “You heard the story about Dad finding Georgia at a homicide scene?”

  “Yeah. Hell, it was all over the Internet when Annie’s case was reopened.” He pictured the infant lying in her crib, crying with panic and fear. Just feet away, the cops found the walls splattered with blood, but there was no sign of Georgia’s birth mother, Annie Rivers Dawson. Every cop in the city had been put on alert, until a body later identified as Annie’s was found in a remote section of woods off I-40.