Orange barrels and cones cut off access to parts of the two-lane road while Wallace Lake police officers detoured traffic through town. Sanders and I couldn’t get very close to the crime scene—all sorts of emergency vehicles were parked in a large bubble around the side of the river. We parked out by the barrels and hiked in. The beautiful fall weather had brought everyone out to the river and lake, a high volume of hikers, kayakers, canoeists, and those out for a scenic drive to see the leaves changing colors. The warm afternoon sun glistened off the water’s current and the canopy of trees that surrounded it. Stones of all shapes and sizes lined the river’s edge, a collection of muted colors against the bluish-gray water.
And then there was the crime scene—it seemed that most humans couldn’t help themselves from gawking at the sight of death. Officers had to be planted at various locations along the river to direct canoes and kayaks away from the scene. Crime scene investigators canvassed the water surrounding the land bars, inching their way downstream. They combed the area for anything out of place or any object that could be related to the crimes. There were boots in the water and divers scanning the bottom of the river. Initial photographs and videos had already been taken of the scene, and neon-yellow tented markers littered the area where the bodies had been outlined. At least this small police station was following all protocols, dotting their i’s and crossing their t’s.
I followed Sanders down the muddy embankment to the river’s stony edge as a rubber rescue raft pushed off the land bar to come for us. Our paper-like booties made it even harder to keep hold of our footing. Cool river water lapped against my covered boots and shins. The land bars were approximately fifty feet from the shoreline, but we’d been advised the water depth was well over four feet in some places.
Captain Tom Riley pointed the tip of his canoe near us and stepped out to secure it to the land. Since the bodies had all been found in his jurisdiction, Wallace Lake County, he’d been the one to call us in. “Glad you made it,” he said, giving Sanders and then me firm handshakes. Riley wore a sheriff’s hat with a large bill to keep the sun off his face.
“Glad to help.” I climbed into the boat.
“Any new developments since we last spoke?” Sanders asked.
Riley’s strong grip on the paddle told me he wasn’t a stranger to rowing. He guided us quickly through the water’s strong current. “We’ve been fighting the gawkers like crazy, but you know how that goes.”
Despite the fact that we were outdoors and odors could easily dissipate, the smell of death surrounded us. Many of the officers had white paste smeared under their noses to take the odor away. I immediately began breathing through my mouth—a lifesaving trick I’d learned early in the academy.
“Who found the bodies?” I asked.
“A local girl out kayaking the river this morning. Scared the bejesus out of the poor thing.”
“I bet. We’ll need to talk to her.”
The two large humps of land in the middle of the river were larger than I expected, one following the other. Both had enough space for minimal equipment and a few people. Sanders stayed in the canoe to get more details from Riley while I stepped out and squatted next to the body on land. Her wide back was a sickly white, and a shock of dark hair spilled over her ears and the sides of her face. I used the tip of my pen to get a closer look at her scalp. She’d recently dyed her hair much too dark for her skin tone. Her roots, more than an inch long, were a solid iron gray. She was flabby along the back and buttocks, her naked skin white and puckered from the elements. She’d been stabbed twice between her shoulder blades. There were two wounds lower on her back, within the liver and kidney area, and it looked as though the killer pulled down once the blade was inside the body, damaging internal organs. Most who killed with a knife stabbed quick and hard and then pulled the blade directly out of the victim. This difference and the damage that came with it could indicate the victim struggled; perhaps she tried to get away, and the killer wouldn’t let go of the knife.
The body couldn’t have been on the land bar for more than a couple of days, but the wildlife had already found her. Chunks of the woman’s flesh had been torn away, leaving behind masses that looked like raw crabmeat. The woman’s face had been partially planted into the sand, saving it from the hungry animals. Outside crime scenes could always be messy, but I despised the scavenging of animals on a body. While the animals were only doing what came naturally to them, it seemed like such a violation. Not only did the victim suffer a violent and painful end, but her body was also desecrated in death in a way that sometimes made it difficult for us to catch the killer. Not one iota of fairness in this scenario.
With my gloved fingers, I followed her pale thick arms down to the hands and fingers hardened with death. The nails had been polished a bright pink, but the polish had chipped away in the elements leaving only swatches of color on each nail. No jewelry. I turned over her left hand and found the tattoo centered at the bend of her wrist. The coloring was strong; the tattoo was relatively new and hadn’t had time to naturally fade. I made my way back up to the woman’s face and used the shaft of the pen to pull back more of her hair. Her face was pitted and bloated with death, one eye open just enough to gaze out at me with a glazed brown iris. I looked into her open eye and thought about how someone somewhere must have loved this woman. Addict or not, she was someone’s daughter, sister, cousin. She could be someone’s mother or wife.
“The second body is submerged over here.”
The sound of the woman’s voice surprised me.
“Over here,” she said.
I looked over my shoulder to see a tall woman behind me. She was on the other side of the land bar’s hump. I waved and made my way over to her.
“I’m Harper Bennett. Medical examiner for these parts.”
Dr. Bennett stood close to six feet and towered above my small frame. She was athletic, with the long, lean body of a beach volleyball player. She looked down at me through dark frames, her brown eyes warm and alert. “It’s good to meet you, Special Agent Hansen.”
I shook her hand. “Likewise.”
Bennett’s hand wrapped around mine. Once she let go, she tucked her dark hair behind an ear. Cut in a bob, thick, natural curls fell perfectly around her face.
“I figured you’d want to see the scene as police found it. I arrived not long before you, and I haven’t moved either body. The submerged body has a leg caught on a log. Otherwise, she probably would have been carried out into the lake by the river’s current. She’s been lodged here approximately three days.”
I squatted down at the edge of the land bar next to the woman whose body floated face up just beneath the water’s surface. She looked boneless and serene in the weightlessness of the water, and she reminded me of an old painting I’d seen in one of Rowan’s books. A woman had committed suicide and lay just under the water’s surface inside a creek: Ophelia. This particular woman looked equally ethereal. Only visible up to her breasts, the long bleached hair swam about her face in a sort of halo, and I could make out a slight grin on her lips.
“Strange,” I said. “The killer used two different methods to dump the bodies.”
“Yes,” Bennett said. “The other body was clearly placed on the land bar. There’s no evidence of water exposure. No footprints, but the rain in the last few days would have washed those away.”
I thumbed over to the body on the land bar. “It took some time to pose that body. This one, though,” I pointed to Ophelia, “is different. The killer might have been seen so the plans were thwarted—he had to dump that victim fast, probably over the side of a bridge or boat.”
“There is a bridge a few miles up the river,” Bennett offered.
Anyone who dumped a body had a lot to lose. And a lot to hide. “You mentioned the recent rain. The water level is higher than normal?”
Bennett nodded. “I kayak these waters regularly. I haven’t seen the levels this high in over a year.”
A kayaker. That’s what gave Bennett the strong, defined shoulders of a swimmer.
Bennett gave me a few moments to examine the body while it was still underneath the water. Then, she called for two techs as Sanders and Riley joined us. Bennett and the techs hoisted the submerged woman’s naked body up onto the land bar, placing her faceup. Any dead body was heavy, but a bloated waterlogged body was worse. Water poured from every orifice, and the putrid odor of decay smacked all of us in the face. Bennett and a tech struggled to dislodge the victim’s leg from the log. Once it came free and the woman was fully placed on the land bar, we all saw it—both her legs had been multiple meals for the local turtles, frogs, and fish.
“Jesus,” Sanders said, beside me.
“Not very pretty, is it?” Bennett said. She punched the pointed end of the thermometer through the body’s skin above the hip to get the liver’s temperature. It was a sight that always turned my stomach. It reminded me of a cook checking a turkey’s temperature before a Thanksgiving dinner. “This river is full of snapping turtles. They might be keeping their distance from us now, but the turtles are rabid feeders at night.”
“Must have been a smorgasbord for those critters,” Sanders said. His hands were restless, his fingers tapping against his thumb. He was jonesing for a cigarette, but he couldn’t smoke at the crime scene and risk contaminating it.
The victim’s skin looked rubbery, whale-white, and pruned from the water. It would be difficult at best to get any reliable prints from her bloated fingers.
Bennett examined the stab wound to the neck. “She bled out through the carotid artery. That’s about all I can tell you at this point. I’ll run toxicology today.”
“What about all these scrapes and bruises?” I pointed to the contusions on her knees and thighs.
“Most likely postmortem,” Bennett said. “Help me turn her.”
I held the dead woman’s shoulders and pulled her to me while Bennett pushed her from the back. “There are the same types of scrapes on her shoulder blades. I need to run tests, but I’d guess these are from the killer pulling or dragging the dead body across cement or blacktop.”
Sanders and I followed Bennett to the other body and watched while techs turned her over. The woman’s face had been preserved in the earth while the rest of her body had deteriorated considerably. Bennett examined the head and opened the woman’s mouth. “Meth teeth. She also has the pitting in her cheeks and jawline. No active sores, although some of her arm veins have been blown. Looks like she hasn’t used for a while.”
“Possibly new to recovery,” I said.
An officer in a wet suit and snorkel gear stood up a few feet from us in the shallow water. “Baggie!”
Water ran in rivulets down the officer’s black bodysuit, her strong leg muscles rippling against the fabric. Riley met her at the edge of the land bar, and she dropped an object into the bag. He sealed it as the snorkeler pulled off the hood and mask, shaking out a mop of short blond hair. She flashed a perfect white smile.
“Detective Alison Harvey. She’s lead on the case along with Sam Richardson.” Riley thumbed over to an older man scouring the shoreline with a trash pick. “Richardson’s a whiz on the computer. He’ll help locate anything you need in the databases or online.”
Harvey pumped my hand a little too hard and long, and I guessed this handsome woman to be in her late twenties. She spilled over with enthusiasm while rattling on about the Willow’s Ridge case. I tried to smile. It was always hard for me when people brought up what happened in Willow’s Ridge. The case had been very public with an onslaught of media once reporters smelled the possibilities it had for sales, but the case had been deeply personal for me. I didn’t like to be reminded of it.
Sanders chuckled. He loved that his lead agent had such a following, but I also sensed it was more than that. Comments and reactions from people like Harvey reinforced Sanders’s ideas that using my painful past to solve the crimes in Willow’s Ridge had been worth it.
It struck me then that Harper Bennett hadn’t said a word about Willow’s Ridge. Given her profession, she would have recognized my name. She might have even been involved in the autopsies and medical testing of victims who were eventually sent to the state crime labs for further investigation. Many Ohio medical examiners were called in to work the case. I admired Bennett for focusing on the case at hand and not bringing my grisly past into the present.
Working with others wasn’t my strongest asset, and I still mourned the death of the last partner I was placed with, Cole Ainsley, who was killed protecting me in Willow’s Ridge. No matter where this case led, I didn’t want to connect with anyone on this team the way I did with Ainsley. I didn’t have it in me to survive another partner’s death.
When Harvey finally took a breath, I was able to get a word in edgewise. “Any leads on the tattoo?”
“Nothing so far. We ran an image search through the databases for tats on inmates and victims. We’ve had a lot of hits featuring similar designs but nothing identical.”
All four of the victims had the identical tattoo in the same body location. My gut told me that if we could unlock the meaning of the tattoo, the rest of the case would fall into place.
Chapter Three
Day One: 6:00 p.m.
Ava Washington gave me a weak smile while her mother went to the kitchen for some iced tea. The teen looked tired. Her eyes were bloodshot and puffy from tears. Ava’s untouched dinner of salad and fruit sat on the kitchen table.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Ava. I know you’ve had a long day.”
“That’s okay.” She tucked her bare feet underneath her, all knees in her too-short shorts. Her long hair was tied in a knot at the top of her head with chunks of blond coming loose, and it made her look much younger than fifteen.
“How long have you been kayaking?”
She shrugged. “About a year.”
“You must like the water.” Beside me, Harvey cleared her throat. She wasn’t convinced Ava could offer us any information that wasn’t given to Captain Riley earlier in the day. She was anxious to move on, but I insisted on the meeting. In the process, I’d come up against Harvey’s impatience. Like a lot of rookies, Harvey thought she knew everything. Listening was not her best asset.
Ava nodded. “It always calms me down. Plus I need the workout for weightlifting.”
“Ah, you lift?” I asked.
Ava’s face lit up with a big smile. “I’m on the team at school. Coach Allard says I’ve got a good shot at the championship this year.”
Judging from Ava’s size, she’d be in the lightweight category. “That’s exciting. I guess it wasn’t too calming to see those two bodies today, though. Tell me how you found them.”
Ava took a deep breath and recounted for me the story she’d probably already told twenty people.
“Was there anything covering the body on top of the land bar?”
“You mean clothes?”
I nodded. “Or leaves and sticks. Anything that made it look like someone was trying to hide the body.”
“No. She was naked.”
“Anything around the bodies?”
Ava shook her head.
“What about along the shore? Did you hear anything unusual in the woods?”
“No, it was just me,” she said. “And them.”
Ava’s mother smiled and handed us all glasses of weak tea. She was dressed in clean professional clothing, but the edges were frayed from long-term use, similar to the furniture inside the trailer. She was a woman who didn’t have much money but took good care of what she had.
“You must have been terrified.”
Ava’s eyes grew big. “Especially when I thought I might know one of them.”
I set my glass down on a coaster. “Know them? What do you mean?”
Ava shrugged. “There can be a lot of drugs around here.”
“You think this is related to drug use?”
Ava nodded. “It’s the druggi
es that end up killed in the river.”
“Ava,” her mother cautioned.
A strange silence settled in the room as if someone had said too much or a secret might have been given away. Ava’s mother’s tone rang of We don’t talk about those things. The heightened level of drug use in the Wallace Lake area, however, was no hidden detail. In fact, most people familiar with the area probably would have guessed that these crimes were drug related.
“Why did you think you might have known one of them?”
“I was wrong,” Ava shook her head. “I thought it might be one of my friends’ mom. But it wasn’t.”
“The woman on the land bar?”
“No, the one in the water.”
Ava’s mother grabbed her hand. “Sadie’s mother? I told you to stay away from that girl!”
“Mom! Relax, okay?”
Ava’s mother ignored her and turned to me. “I’ve warned Ava a million times. But she won’t stay away from Sadie. I swear, that girl leads to nothing but trouble.”
“You don’t even know her!”
“Ladies, please.” I used my best calming voice. “Can we focus on what happened this morning?”
Both grumbled an apology, but I could tell this wasn’t the end of the argument between the mother and daughter.
“Ava, that woman was submerged in the water. How did you see her face?”
She stared at me incredulously. “I didn’t.”
“Then how did you know it could be Sadie’s mom?”
“I saw her hand and part of her arm. Sadie’s mom has long nails and she paints them wild colors. The dead woman’s nails were bitten down below her fingertips.”
Forsaken Trust Page 3