Twin Offerings

by Ruth Parker

  “A hiker found them,” Stella said.

  “Whose land are we on?” Fletcher asked.

  “It’s county land, but a nonprofit group has a 99-year lease on it. County leases land to nature groups, that way the groups are responsible for the upkeep. Helps cut the budget a little bit.”

  “So this is, what, a nature preserve?”

  “Bald eagle sanctuary,” Stella said. “People in the area know this is where the eagles nest. A guy was out here hoping to take some pictures.”

  “You check his camera for pictures of the bodies?” Fletcher asked.

  “Bet your ass I did,” Stella said. “Checked his phone too.”

  “Good,” Fletcher said. The last thing they needed was the hiker sending pictures of the scene to everyone on his friends list. “For now, just get out your fine-tooth comb. Tag and bag anything, no matter how insignificant it seems. Tag a smear of bird shit on a log if it looks out of place. If you need me, let me know.”

  Fletcher took a deep breath and crouched down, taking the girl’s chin in his hand. She was cold. He tried to turn the girl’s head, but she was stiff with rigor mortis. That meant she’d been dead less than 48 hours. Rigor mortis started within a few hours—the killer must be close if he got the girls out here and posed them before they stiffened.

  He brushed the thick, curly hair away from her face. Rigor affected facial skin the worst; the girl’s face was a mask of agony, her eyes wide, her mouth open in a tooth-baring grimace. The skin was tight, almost plasticky. No bruises, no cuts, no marks on the neck, no red dots on the skin common with strangulation or suffocation. He peered inside the girl’s mouth. Nice white teeth. One filling in a back molar. Her tongue looked odd, and it took Fletcher a moment to realize why. It was dry. The surface was dull—no shiny glimmer of saliva. The taste buds looked pointier, rougher. He put a finger inside the girl’s mouth and fished out a long, thin white piece of something.

  Coconut.

  It’s coconut, he thought, and it was too much to bear. He squeezed his eyes shut. His jaws felt hot and watery, his stomach clenching like an angry fist. He breathed in slowly, waiting until the waves of nausea passed. It always passed, but it never got any easier.

  Tag a smear of bird shit, he’d told the Sheriff, so he wiped his finger on the inside of an evidence bag and marked it. The worst of the nausea having passed, he was able to examine the girl’s eyes. The rigor mortis prevented him from lifting the eyelids all the way up, but he was able to see there was no petechiae—tiny red dots from broken capillaries—on the eyes, which sometimes showed up from strangulation, even if the marks couldn’t be seen on the face or neck. Her ears were pierced, but she didn’t wear earrings. No makeup. Eyebrows thick and dark, not plucked. The rigor mortis affected the erector pilae (goosebump muscles) and every fine hair on her face was sticking straight up.

  He combed his fingers through the girl’s hair. It was hard to do because the thick, dark curls stuck to the latex gloves. The coroner would have a literal fine-tooth comb, but he wanted to feel the hair, if even through the gloves.

  His fingers passed over something sharp. He felt around, trying to find it again. It was a bur, small round seed pod covered in thin spikes, the kind that got stuck to your socks if you went out playing in someone’s overgrown backyard. He put that in an evidence bag. He wasn’t sure what plant it was from, but someone in the lab would know.

  He peered into the girl’s ears, her nostrils, but there was nothing. He ran his fingers around the collar of the dress and fished out a tag. It was the price tag, still attached to the fabric with a thin plastic tie. According to the tag, the dress was bought at a store called Delila’s. He took a picture of the tag front and back with his phone, keeping it attached to the dress.

  The girl’s arms were free of any bruises. No marks around the wrists where ropes or handcuffs would have held her. The skin on her arms was bumpy, those erector pilae muscles stiff with rigor. It was as if she was cold.

  He slipped off one white glove and saw her fingernails were painted a dusky orange color. No chips or peeling on the nail polish, so it must have been done recently—which meant that the killer had a bottle of orange nail polish in his medicine cabinet. Not a good lead, but when they found the killer and there was a bottle of nail polish in his house, it would be a little something extra to help hang him.

  There was a downy coating of soft dark hairs on the girl’s legs, sticking straight up like there was static electricity in the air. He didn’t want to, but he had to look. He lifted up the skirt of the dress and looked between the girl’s legs. She was wearing regular girl’s underwear. He briefly looked for signs of sexual assault, but there was nothing obvious. He’d let the coroner give a more thorough examination, but he didn’t think that she’d been sexually assaulted.

  Fletcher stood up and turned his attention to the rest of the scene. A plain white handkerchief was spread over the stump of the tree. There were a few dark amber spots on the edge, likely sap. He lifted up the edges, looking for embroidery or other markings. The killer’s monogrammed initials would be nice, he thought. As far as he could tell, it was a regular old handkerchief. There were crisp, starched creases in it, like it just came out of the package. Or the killer compulsively starched and ironed his handkerchiefs, which wasn’t out of the question. If the killer was this meticulous about posing the bodies, he could be meticulous about everything.

  He picked up the teapot. On the bottom was an embossed maker’s stamp: Whitmoore Co., Ltd. Hopefully it wasn’t a cheapo tea set cranked out by the tens of thousands in a factory in China. The cups, saucers, and teapot all had the same floral design, an olive green rose vine with dusky peach-colored roses. The color of the roses matched the color of the girls’ nail polish.

  Fletcher didn’t dare let himself hope the tea set was a rare, easily traceable specialty item.

  The teapot was empty, but there was a ring of dried brown liquid at the bottom, as if the girls had been drinking tea, but it was so good they’d finished it down to the dregs. Same with the cups; there was a brown stain at the bottom of each one. He’d leave those for the crime scene techs to bag and process.

  Time to examine the second girl. He crouched in front of her and tweezed the wet leaf from her face.

  The girls were identical twins—not even death could alter that stark similarity between them.

  Inside the girl’s mouth he could see a filling in a molar—a nice white resin filling like her sister’s. These girls had been well-taken care of. Until, of course, they weren’t.

  One of her shoes was missing. A scavenging animal had taken a bite out of her foot; her two baby toes were nothing but ragged stumps.

  On her shoulder he saw a fly. He waved his hand to shoo it away, but it didn’t budge. He peered closer and saw that the fly had buried its back-end into the girl’s skin. Its bloated abdomen pulsated rhythmically as it laid its eggs. He wanted to pull it out, squish the foul creature between his fingers—but he left it alone. The larvae would help the coroner determine an exact time of death.

  “Get anything good?” Stella asked. He walked over to where Fletcher was crouched in front of the second dead girl.

  “They’re twins,” he said.

  “Yeah, figured that. Two twin sisters were reported missing last week. They fit this description.”

  “Do you know who they are?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I just got off the phone with missing persons. Girls are most likely Rebecca and Rachel Clark. Taken while they were walking home from school five days ago.”

  Five days. That was a long time.

  “Where are they from?”

  “A suburb near the coast called Bailey, ever hear of it?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Me neither. They’re sending us all their files on the abduction.”

  “There’s a price tag on the dress,” Fletcher said. “We can check the store’s receipts and surveillance video. Also, the teapot has a maker’
s mark instead of a shiny gold sticker that says Made in China. That might be useful.”

  “Anything else?” Stella asked. He seemed hopeful.

  “Probably not,” he said. “But I’m bagging everything.”

  “Alright,” the sheriff said. “They found the tree. He dragged it about a quarter mile away.” As if on cue, Fletcher heard the low stuttering of someone pulling the cord on a chainsaw. “The techs say they can cut off the stump of the tree and match it to a specific saw.”

  “Saw, not an axe?” Fletcher asked.

  “Cut was clean,” he said. “They say that saw teeth have their own patterns and leave their own marks behind, like fingerprints, and if we find a wood saw in some asshole’s tool shed, we can match them.”

  “Let’s just hope we get more on this asshole than a saw,” Fletcher said.

  Stella took a long moment to reply. His eyes were glassy with unshed tears and he looked at the ground as he spoke. “That’s why we called you.”

  Two

  Everyone had mud on their shoes in Oregon. That was what the suspect’s defense boiled down to. He was pretty smart, considering what an idiot he was.

  Laurel Gates was in the lab, going over the mud sample for what seemed like the hundredth time. A man had broken into a remote farmhouse and stolen thousands of dollars’ worth of tools and machine equipment. Also, he’d drained a small silo of goat milk, letting it flood the barn. The milk alone represented tens of thousands of dollars for the family who, in addition to growing a few crops, also kept goats and sold soaps made from the milk at local markets. And just for fun, he’d kicked the family dog to death.

  Two days later, a pawnbroker reported a suspicious man who’d wanted to sell specialty milking equipment and a large tractor blade. When flipping through a mugshot book, the pawnbroker thought one of the guys looked familiar, but said he couldn’t testify to it in court. The man, William Perkins (known as ‘Perks’ to his like-minded associates), had a long history of meth use and breaking and entering. When interviewed by police, he had mud all over his shoes and a sizable quantity of meth stashed in a kitchen cabinet. But none of the stolen property was at his ramshackle house.

  They were holding him on the meth, but they had nothing on the burglary except the mud. Perkins was savvy from his many scrapes with the law; he demanded a lawyer, defiantly proclaiming that everyone had mud on their shoes in Oregon.

  The crime scene techs had taken soil samples from the barn as well as from outside Perkins’s house. The dirt from his shoes had roughly the same mineral content of the soil from the barn, which was promising. But when Laurel did further tests, she found that the soil from his shoes contained neither animal feces nor lactose from the goat’s milk.

  Sheriff Stella had called the lab yesterday, asking Laurel if she had anything they could hang their hats on. He’d been disappointed, letting her know that they had twenty-four more hours before they had to let him go. It wasn’t her job to prove that a certain person was guilty—she always had to remind herself of that. It was her job to perform the tests and interpret the science. But sometimes she got caught up in a case and couldn’t let it go. Horrible people got away with horrible things.

  She should know. She was one of them.

  Laurel took off her lab coat. She was tired. It was already two-thirty and she hadn’t eaten lunch yet; she couldn’t pull herself away until she found a way to link Perkins to the crime scene. She started to gather up the used glassware so it could be sterilized when she heard someone sneeze four times in quick succession down the hall. “Damned hay fever,” he muttered.

  “Damned hay fever,” Laurel repeated. “Pollen. Holy shit, the pollen.” She went back to her lab station, forgetting about her coat, forgetting about lunch. She flipped through her copy of the case file until she found what she was looking for. Alfalfa. The family grew alfalfa on their little farm. Alfalfa was a common allergen this time of year because of the pollen. The farm’s soil should be rich in pollen. If Perkins was in that barn, then the soil on his shoes should be rich in pollen too.

  Separating the pollen from the soil was going to be tedious, but there was no getting around that. She retrieved the sample from the storage locker and combed through it, isolating the rocks and heavy particulate. She transferred the larger pieces to a dish, weighed it, and then washed it in distilled water. This would separate the sticky pollen molecules from the dirt. Using a tiny rubber pipette, she siphoned off the water from the dish. When nothing but sludgy residue remained, she scraped it up and transferred it into a test tube. A spin in the centrifuge would further separate the minerals from the pollen.

  While she waited, she paced back and forth, impatient and eager to call Stella and tell him her findings. Assuming there were findings… but she just knew there would be.

  After the sediment separated, she removed it and put it in a dehydrator for a few minutes. Cops complained about how slow the labs were to get back with evidence, but they didn’t understand that the scientists were just as impatient. There was so much waiting. When it was done drying out, she poked a metal probe into the test tube to break up the crumbly sample into a fine brown powder. She added a few drops of sulfuric acid, then heated it to just below boiling temperature, monitoring it carefully, as just a few degrees above 100° C would denature the pollen proteins, making identification impossible.

  She stuck it in the centrifuge again and decanted the liquid. Almost done. She rinsed the particulates and added glycerin to make a suspension and then viewed the suspension under the microscope. She counted the visible grains of pollen, then did the math, calculating the percentage of pollen in the dirt sample. Over 43% of the sample was composed of pollen.

  Hours had passed. It was time for her to go home for the night. But there was no way she could do that. She couldn’t just go home, sit alone, eat a frozen dinner, and pretend to watch television. Not when she was this close. She didn’t like to get home so late—didn’t like the dark—but she couldn’t help it. It was hard for her to stop when she was in the middle of something, the end so close in sight. It would be worth it if she could nail Perkins, who thought he was going to get away with it.

  Processing the soil sample from the farm had been tedious, but it had gone smoothly. Now she had to do it all over again with the sample from Perkins’s muddy shoe. If she got a similarly high pollen count from his shoes, that should be enough for a jury. Juries loved sciencey shit like this.

  By the time she was done prepping the second sample, everyone else had gone for the night. She didn’t mind being the only person alone in the lab. One of the things she liked best about her job was that the lab was part of the municipal building complex and she was right next door to the Sheriff’s station. She stayed late lots of nights, preferring the bright white lab surroundings to her drafty old house. That house had too many bad memories. Windows were stuck shut, doors were hung off plumb, and cold night air snaked in. Half the electrical outlets didn’t work and the shower faucet was corroded with pipe scale and sprayed sharp streams of water everywhere. She hated the house. It had been the house she’d grown up in.

  The house where her sister had been kidnapped.

  The house where her father killed himself.

  The house where her mother drank herself to death.

  Her cell phone rang, startling her. She was jumpy by nature. She had good cause to be. She looked at the number and saw from the prefix it was someone in the Sheriff’s office. “Hello?”

  “Ms. Gates? This is Sheriff Stella, how are you this evening?”

  “Good, actually, I was going to tell you—I think I got something on Perkins, that farm burglary. I’m checking the pollen—”

  “I’ll be down there in five minutes,” he said, interrupting her. He hung up the phone. He must have been eager to get some hard evidence on the farm burglary. She was too. Anyone who could kick a dog to death needed to be off the streets. Preferably forever.

  Less than two minutes later, Sh
eriff Richard Stella barged in the lab, not bothering to wash his hands or put on the required lab coat, gloves, goggles, face mask and hairnet. He was covered in mud from the knees down and had smears of dirt on his jacket. There was a leaf stuck in his hair.

  “Stop,” she said, holding up a hand. “Sorry, but you could contaminate the samples I have here.”

  “This is important,” he said. “We need to talk. There’s been two murders. They’re bad.”

  “Okay,” she said. “But don’t come any closer. I have an open specimen. You can contaminate it.”

  “Now!” The sheriff was always yelling, but this was the first time Laurel had seen him this upset. They didn’t get many murders. There had been only nine in the entire county last year. When there was a murder, it was usually obvious who did it; the sheriffs just had to assemble enough evidence for the trial.

  She held the test tube up to the light. The dark sludge had separated from the acid bath. She used her pipette to siphon off the excess water into a beaker, a few drops at a time. “I can’t just stop,” she said. “I have to see this through.” Stella exhaled loudly and walked towards the sink on the other side of the lab. He started to wash his hands, soaping and resoaping many times.

  “You got something good on Perkins?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. She didn’t take her eyes off the test tube. It was crucial that she did not suck up any of the particulates into the pipette. Even discarding a few pollen particles could skew the results. “I’m testing the pollen in the soil. If Perkins has enough alfalfa pollen in the mud on his boots, I think we got him.”

  “That’s one good thing at least,” he said. He was still standing at the sink, the water still running. She couldn’t see his face, but his voice was low, flat. What was most unsettling was that Stella hadn’t used any profanity—he definitely wasn’t his normal self. The murders had shaken him deep down, not roiling his blood but instead chilling his soul. “How long until you’re finished here?”