by Emery Hayes
“It’s a possibility.”
“Slim,” he agreed. “But you know those polar swimmers? The ones who dive into icy waters, swim a mile, then break for shore? They wear next to nothing.”
“And survive the experience.”
He pulled his phone out and started a search. “Sixteen minutes,” he said. “That’s how long a human can swim in water at freezing temperatures before they give in to exhaustion. Did anyone take water temperature last night?”
“I’m sure Arthur did.” Nicole used her radio, clipped at her shoulder, to call in for the stat. While they waited for dispatch to contact the crime lab and a tech to come up with the answer, she had another question for Lars. “So he could have made it, then? I figure it’s an eighth of a mile from the skiff to shore. That wouldn’t take sixteen minutes, would it?”
“How fit is Monte?”
“He runs the trail at Latham. I’ve seen him there several times since I started back running.”
“Doable for sure,” Lars said, “unless he was being shot at, or pursued by a vessel.”
“Adelai heard shots,” Nicole revealed. “And Tandy saw a boat searching the water as it headed toward shore.”
“Damn. Well, that trims Monte’s odds for making it alive.”
Nicole nodded. She expected another body to wash up, probably sometime today.
“Adelai said she neither heard nor saw anything else,” she said.
“Do you believe her?”
“She knows more. Maybe not about Monte, but something.”
The radio crackled to life, and Nicole paused long enough to get her answer—thirty-one degrees.
“So he had a little under sixteen minutes before his body began to shut down,” Lars said. “The average man can swim an eighth of a mile in nine minutes. Let’s say Monte made it to shore, then what did he do?”
“Whatever it was, he had to do it quickly. Hypothermia was already at work in his body and it was cold that night. Twenty-seven degrees. Monte told me that himself.”
“So, running and the charge of warmth it gave the body, maybe he had twenty minutes, give or take, to make something happen for himself.”
“Maybe he didn’t have to go far for that,” she said. “Remember those life packs BP placed along the shore after recovering the bodies of the women and children in January?”
Lars’s face brightened. “Yeah. And he would know exactly where to find them.”
“We need to check with BP. Get the coordinates for each. See if they’ve been disturbed,” she said. Not just along the shore, but into the woods and north to the border. “One missing wouldn’t be definitive that Monte had made it to shore, that he was the one who’d made use of it, but it would give us another direction to explore.”
She shifted her gaze, seeking and finding Green several yards away, crouched with a handful of other agents beside a rotted tree that had fallen at the point where shore became woods. He lifted his hand and called over one of Nicole’s forensics techs. She and Lars followed as well.
“You have an alternate light source?” Green asked the tech. “Could be nothing. Could be the break we’re looking for.” He rose as he watched Nicole approach the group.
“Sheriff.” He nodded in greeting and included Lars in the gesture. “Thanks for coming out.”
The sarcasm was like a slap in the face. Nicole felt her skin pucker in response. Lars rolled his shoulders and his lips flattened; he would have spoken, but Nicole beat him to it.
“We’re sorry for your loss,” she said. “Everyone here knows how hard it is. For some of us, it’s a weight that makes us stumble.” Even a good leader took a knee, however briefly, while leading the fight, and she allowed that to temper her tone. She watched Green take a deep breath as her words hit home. “We’ve been on the job since before sunrise,” she continued, “chasing leads. I’m doling out overtime like its confetti, running thin around the edges, and in some quadrants the time between calls and response has doubled.” She had moved men around the board so that those areas that were lacking patrol were sparsely populated and the least troublesome. She had put in calls and received promises that as soon as the need here at the scene lessened, she would have interagency support to fill her gaps. “All to have more officers here, where they’re needed.”
It took a moment, but he nodded. “I know that,” he said. “I do, and I appreciate it. I apologize.”
“Accepted,” she said. “Now, why the ALS?”
“Possible blood. There’s a trail up from the water. Not heavy, but enough. It’s worth bagging some of these rocks, taking a piece of this bark. If it is blood and it’s human, I can see a man staggering up the beach, sitting down on the log for a moment to get his bearings.”
Lars nodded. “We’re exploring the possibility,” he began. “We figure Monte could survive a swim to shore but would quickly yield to hypothermia if help wasn’t pretty much immediate.”
“The life packs,” Nicole said, and Green was nodding.
“We thought of that too, not an hour ago, and we’re checking on it. We placed seven around the lake, then some deeper into the woods but further apart. One every half mile all the way up to the border.” He turned north and contemplated the distance and the possibilities. “There’s no way of knowing if Monte used any of them. It could be a wild-goose chase.” Nicole heard the first threads of defeat enter Green’s voice. Finding Baker dead was beginning its whittling of morale. He turned back to Nicole and connected with her gaze. “Two of the packs have been used. Your guys are dusting for prints and brushing for epithelial cells. I have one of our agents leading one of your techs north, to the first three beyond the lake. I cleared it with your head of forensics, Sleeping Bear. If Monte touched any of them and didn’t have reason to wipe his prints, we’ll know.”
“Because he wouldn’t have gloves.” Those would have been the first thing he’d shed, before the parka, in order to make the swim.
Green pushed a hand through his hair and then anchored both on his hips. “We need fresh eyes and ears.”
“Have you called in the feds?”
His gaze became heavy. “I like cleaning up my own messes. Bad enough I have my boss and his boss calling in for updates, poking and prodding me as if I need motivation to get to the bottom of all this. Those same fingers will starting pointing soon, and someone will need to take the rap.”
Green was fighting to keep his job.
“It doesn’t look good,” Nicole agreed.
“It’ll look better if I can solve this on my own. With your help, of course. I asked Highway Patrol to increase its visibility, not just in and around Blue Mesa but further afield. Jax Town and Shelby too. Those are your highest call areas, right?”
Nicole nodded. She looked beyond Green to the shoreline and the scattering of officers and agents. “We have to reopen the lake today,” she said. “We don’t get a lot of activity this time of year, but a few complaints have come in. I can maybe push it out until noon before the mayor is on my ass.”
“And here?” he asked.
“This is new and will take hours to process, so closed to any and all civilian activity. But the boats aren’t coming back.” Not today and not at all unless they uncovered evidence to indicate it was worth the time and effort. “It’s a mess out there. The lake bottom is filled with sheared trees and other detritus, and deputies have spent just as much time untangling their lines as searching.”
“Understood.”
“We have a press conference scheduled for noon,” she told him. “The sheriff’s department will make it official, claiming the lead in the investigation and making the shift in focus to recovery.”
“They’ll ask why,” Green said.
“They will.” Nicole held his gaze. “We’ll make a statement about internal issues and volley any questions to your agency.”
“So I should prepare myself,” Green said.
“Yes, be ready.”
“And the rest of us
?” He looked out over his men. “We’re already down to a skeleton crew. Surely we can stay?”
But Nicole shook her head. “It’s our investigation, Green. Take your men and go home. By noon.”
“You know I can’t do that,” he said. “It would be career suicide.”
“I’m not asking,” she said. “We’ll keep you informed, and we’ll need some cooperation in terms of personnel files and interviews if necessary.”
Green snorted. “Interviews? That’s not going to happen.”
She’d expected pushback. So maybe she would ask the feds, if they came, to take care of the interviews. A middle, distant party carrying a bigger club was always the better choice in a matter such as this.
“It’ll happen,” Lars said, then changed the course of the discussion, his abrupt tone and manner making it clear he understood that their requests would be met. “I hear the dogs didn’t work.”
Border Patrol had the best-trained dogs in the region. Nicole had borrowed them herself on a few occasions, mostly missing-persons cases.
Green shook his head, and a quizzical expression screwed up his face. “I don’t get it. I had scent dogs out here for live and cadaver. They sniffed off Monte’s jacket, scampered up shore and into the woods, and came to a dead stop. I had an agent bring a scarf from Monte’s desk. I saw the man wearing it myself a few days ago. They sniffed, ran into the woods, and began whining and prancing around. We took them north and south, different entries, but they got nothing off that. I had the handlers take them into the woods and backtrack to the last viable scenting, and they were stumped. Confused. It’s rare something like that happens.”
“So that’s a dead end?” Lars pressed.
“The deadest I’ve ever seen.” Green shook his head in disgust. “We’ve had eighty-seven men and women out here since four yesterday morning, and nothing gives. I mean, we literally have nothing.”
But Nicole disagreed. “We have a lot of leads and more than one way in.” She was hopeful.
“I want Monte back here, alive,” he said. “I want that more than anything. And if I can keep my job too, all the better.”
Corruption in the ranks never went over well, and Nicole had never known Green to become too involved in any particular case. He was strictly sidelines, managing people and paper. But in cases like this, when there were internal problems, the blame always pointed up. Maybe Green had been too distant. Maybe he hadn’t kept his fingers on the pulse of his team. She hadn’t heard that, or even the shadow of a bad comment, from Monte or any of the other BP agents. But he seemed to be a boss none of them knew too well.
“How do checks and balances work in the BP?” Nicole asked.
“It’s gradient, like it is in most agencies,” Green said. “Agents report to supervisors, who report to shift commanders, who report to satellite chiefs—someone like myself.”
“And who do you report to?” Lars asked.
“Augustus Woods. He’s the director of the northwest region.”
“And have you reported?”
“Morning, noon, and night,” he assured them. “But he’ll come, if not today, tomorrow,” he said. “And I hope to have this wrapped up by then.”
They all hoped for that, and more. Whether Monte was good or bad, she wanted him back among the living too.
17
The sun was well into the sky, but it was lukewarm at best. Nicole left Lars and Green talking logistics and turned toward shore. The breeze pulled a few curls from her hairline, and she pushed them back as she walked. There were fewer men on the water and far more beside it today than yesterday; there were more clues to uncover on land than at the bottom of the lake.
She had an ME to talk to and needed an update from her forensics team. She walked toward MacAulay and could hear him talking into his recorder. He turned his digital notes in to the forensics clerk for transcription, which freed up his time for autopsy and running tests.
She was careful to stop outside the halo and waited for a break in his dictation to speak.
“First impressions indicate Agent Melody Baker suffered from postmortem abrasions within the parameters of a drowning victim in open water …”
He finished with the note and placed the mike down atop a slip of glassine.
“You look a lot better,” she said.
“Feel tons better.” He looked up and smiled, and it reached his eyes. “You got some sleep,” he said, and his smile deepened and became intimate. It surprised Nicole, because they kept a professional distance from each other during working hours and this was the first time he’d made even a gentle volley over that line.
“I did.” And damn if her voice wasn’t a throaty whisper. MacAulay noticed. He rocked back onto his heels and his gaze became thoughtful.
“It’s getting harder to pretend,” he said, “and I’m not sorry about that.”
Two solid days together. Every meal, long talks, longer walks. They had gotten layers deeper into what was undeniably a long-term, committed relationship. And in a decidedly professional moment, Nicole felt herself sink a little deeper into the personal warmth MacAulay extended.
“Yes,” she agreed, but then gave herself a mental shake and changed the course of the conversation. She nodded toward the body of Agent Baker. “You have a preliminary cause of death?”
“Drowning.”
“So she was alive going in,” she said.
“Yes, but not necessarily conscious.” He reached forward, his hands covered in latex, and turned the victim’s head. “See that?” He pushed back a heavy lock of red hair, exposing the victim’s temple. Bruising and swelling from the eyebrow to the cheekbone. “Definitely occurred prior to submersion.”
“How do you know?”
“This contusion”—he held up the agent’s arm—“happened after drowning. See how the edges are swollen around the wound, pulling open the skin? That’s bloating. It happens to the body after drowning.” He indicated the head injury. “Not so here. This wound had at least a minute or two to swell up on its own before the water could do its damage.”
“Any idea what caused the blow?”
“I’ll make impressions, use photo comparison, but my first thought? The grip of a gun.” He ran his finger through the air above the affected skin. “See how the eruption is at the center, with bruising developing around it in a spiral fashion? That’s standard results from such an injury.”
“Can you tell me what kind of gun from the injury?”
“I will after I take impressions, but first off, the material was wood. You see that, if the grip of the gun was metal or plastic, the edges would be serrated.” And there was no such pattern here, just a torn flap of skin. “And the bone beneath?” he continued. “I pressed my finger to it—it’s in pieces. Not a break but a complete shattering.”
“And wood would do that?” she asked. Handguns with metal grips made up the majority of gun purchases.
“A hard wood. Walnut is my bet.”
“So someone carrying a piece with a wooden grip.” That narrowed the search. Unless, of course, the agent’s gun had been taken from her and used to impart the injury. Agents and officers alike were allowed to choose between department issue and preference, so long as their firearm fit reasonable parameters. She would follow through with Green on that.
“Definitely,” MacAulay said. He shifted, leaving the victim’s head and turning toward her feet. She was missing both shoes and a sock. A tattoo was on display on her right ankle.
Nicole couldn’t step closer for a better look without breaking through the halo.
“Snap a picture of that and text it to me, please.”
“Will do. You’ll find it interesting and one of a kind,” he promised.
It looked common enough to Nicole from where she stood. A braided leather chain, somewhat fraying, with a charm dangling from it.
“Why do you think so?” she asked.
MacAulay had his cell phone out and was lining up a shot. He
took several, from different angles and distances, then opened up his contacts and sent some to her.
“You’ll see,” he said. “And just so you know, I wouldn’t be opposed if you wanted to get a similar tat, only with my name written across your heart.”
That piqued her interest. She felt her eyebrows rise in question, but he made her wait it out. She pulled her cell from her pocket just as it dinged.
“How old is the tattoo, would you say?”
“I’ll have to examine a sample under a microscope to give you a better idea,” he said. Nicole knew ink deposits in the skin were a great help in determining the age of tattoos, so long as they were less than a year old.
“Best guess?” she prodded, as she opened her messages and tapped a photo.
“Two or three months,” he said.
The charm was indeed a heart. It was outlined in red ink, and the name written in a fancy script inside the shape was Monte.
“Monte.” She spoke the word in a hushed voice. She had no doubt that Monte and Agent Baker had tried to keep their relationship a secret, but as she’d just found with MacAulay, as the heart became deeper entwined with another, it was harder to keep that under cover. There had already been whispers of involvement in the BP office. And now they knew Green’s suspicions were valid.
“This opens other possibilities,” she said. A lover’s quarrel or suicide pact among them.
She turned and radioed Lars. He was still talking to Green, observing the collection of blood evidence.
“Tell Green I want a list of all handguns licensed to both agents. I want to know department issue and private stock.”
“Will do.”
She watched across the distance as Lars disengaged from Green and sought privacy by placing several yards between them. “Sounds like you have a theory,” he said.
But she shook her head. “Pieces that might fit together,” she said. “Process of elimination and fumbling in the dark.” That about summed it up. “I want you to see something. Come down here when you’re finished. And let Ty know I want to talk to him sometime today.”
When she turned back to MacAulay, he was pulling debris from the agent’s hair with a pair of long tweezers.