Too Close to Home

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Too Close to Home Page 19

by Maureen Tan


  A few minutes of searching, and Chad called from a dozen yards away.

  “How about here?”

  Here turned out to be a near-perpendicular drop of about forty feet down an irregular rock face with no jutting ledges or branches or tangles of bush. But heaped up against the base of the wall was a ten-foot-tall pile of rocky debris.

  “Looks good,” I said, “except for the riprap at the bottom.”

  Chad dug a boot heel into the soil near the edge, creating a mini-avalanche of dirt, plants and pebbles.

  “Thick enough here that the rock’s not exposed. So we won’t have to worry about our ropes fraying. We can keep looking, Brooke, but I’m not sure we’re going to find much better.”

  I had to agree.

  Rapping is deceptively simple. Deceptively being the key word. That’s what Chad and I’d learned during our earliest climbing forays back in high school. And that was now very much on my mind as we prepared for the climb down into the ravine. Chad, I noticed, was also checking every element of the system twice. It was a good idea in any event. A great idea given how much stress we’d both been under lately. Exhausted, anxious minds tended to make simple—and deadly—mistakes.

  We’d climbed together so often that we worked efficiently, each of us concentrating on our specific tasks. Because he was stronger, Chad secured the two-bolt anchor to the trunk of a healthy tree that grew well back from the drop-off. Then he passed our rope through the rappel point he’d created.

  While he did that, I strapped on my helmet and buckled on my climbing harness. At the front of my harness was a strong nylon belay loop. Using a locking carabiner, I clipped the small hole of a figure-eight device onto the loop. Then I threaded the rope that Chad handed me through and around the larger hole on the device. Finally, I used an autoblock to back up the rappel I’d created. If for any reason I lost my grip on the rope, the autoblock would keep me from sliding downward, out of control.

  I checked my rigging one more time, backed up to the very edge of the precipice, then grinned at Chad. Who always managed to look his most worried at this point in the process.

  You know you’re a cop if…you’re compulsive about over-protecting the ones you love. And because the unbidden quip hurt rather than amused, I awarded myself no points. Instead, I touched a couple of fingers to my helmet and flipped him a quick salute.

  “See ya,” I said, my voice cheerful.

  Then I pushed off.

  Into midair and falling.

  Into a moment of absolute exhilaration.

  I felt my harness catch my weight and leaned back into it, keeping my torso upright and my legs perpendicular to the wall. As if I were in an easy chair and my legs were resting on an ottoman. But I kept my knees slightly bent and my feet apart as I touched my boots to the vertical rock face.

  With one hand on the autoblock so that it would slide and the other on the rope below to provide a bit of extra braking, I pushed away from the wall again and slid downward. Several repetitions later and my feet touched the pile of rubble. After that, I used the support of my rope and harness to offset the unpredictable movement of sliding rock beneath my feet.

  And then I was down.

  Chad lowered the awkward metal detector down on a separate length of rope. Then, several uneventful minutes later, he was in the ravine beside me, stripping off his helmet and harness.

  For almost an hour, we concentrated on the area directly below the cottonwood tree and the pair of ledges that the state’s crime-scene technicians had processed. Using binoculars, Chad and I took turns examining the ravine wall, looking for anything that might have snagged on roots or rocks or nearby branches.

  When that perspective produced nothing, we moved outward from the base of the bluff in a semicircle, toward the stream at the center of the ravine. Much of that time I spent half-bent over or kneeling, looking for bits of out-of-the-ordinary debris—smooth bits of bone, ragged scraps of clothing or any suggestion of a man-made object—among the vegetation and rocks.

  For a time, Chad joined me in that kind of search. Then he used the metal detector, watching a small screen mounted near the handle as he slowly swept the instrument back and forth, holding it just inches above the relatively smooth surfaces along the stream bed and between rockfalls and rotted trunks.

  Our search yielded an inch-long piece of bone that, to our untrained eyes, could have been human but might as easily have been animal. And a badly corroded horseshoe—big enough, I guessed, for a draft horse—that we both judged interesting but irrelevant.

  After taking a break, we began working our way downstream, in the direction of the footbridge. We’d decided to search for several hundred feet along both sides of the stream, then double back to take one last look at the terrain. After that, we’d climb back up our ropes. A process I never particularly looked forward to. Jugging was considerably more work than rapping. And a lot less fun.

  The flip of a coin had given me the federal side of the ravine.

  I took off my boots and socks, rolled up my jeans, and waded into the rocky stream, walking carefully so I wouldn’t slip on the slick rocks, but still enjoying the rush of cool water over my feet. Five strides in, and the water was just below my calves. Another few strides and I was back in shallow water, then a couple more long steps and I was high and dry on a pebble-strewn shore.

  On my side of the stream, the distance between the water and the wall of the ravine was little more than twenty feet. And, looking downstream, I could see that it remained that way for quite a distance. So I went to stand at a rough midpoint between stream and bluff. Once there, I turned slowly in place, stopping to visually examine the ground ten feet behind me, ten feet to each side and, finally, ten feet in front of me. After that, I detoured from my spot to check behind anything within the makeshift grid that had obstructed my view. Then I returned to my starting point and walked forward twenty feet.

  I repeated that process again.

  And again.

  I’d searched forward for more than one hundred feet when I stopped to rest. I lifted the ball cap that I’d traded for my safety helmet, ran my fingers through my damp curls and took a drink from my canteen.

  I turned in Chad’s direction, caught his eye.

  “Anything?” I yelled, noticing a slight echo.

  “Nothing,” he hollered back. And that word, too, bounced off the rock walls, repeating itself.

  I waved to acknowledge news that was not surprising, then put my cap back on my head and refocused on my search pattern. I’d already run my eyes over the entire section, but there was one spot that needed a closer look before I moved on to the next grid. A logjam created by previous years’ flooding had isolated one of the curves in the stream from the flow of fresh water, creating a stagnant pool.

  I had turned my attention to the side of the logjam away from the pond when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Chad stop. Abruptly, he bent forward. Then he dropped to one knee. And shouted my name.

  Without a second thought, I jogged in his direction, paralleling a stubby section of tree trunk, then crossing the slight mound of a nearby sandbar. The soles of my boots scrunched against the pebbly, uneven surface.

  That’s when the ground beneath my right foot gave way. When I felt as much as heard a wet, hollow sound, like rotted sticks breaking.

  My foot encountered an uneven surface about a dozen inches down.

  Surprised, struggling to remain upright, I cried out once. Loudly.

  I stood teetering for a moment, managed to find my balance. Then I looked down to see what I’d stumbled into.

  My right foot was surrounded by a jagged cage of bones.

  Then the smell hit me.

  I gagged, yanked my foot away from the dark sludge oozing up over the toe of my boot. Pulled away a couple of broken ribs, one of them tangled in a piece of rotting fabric. With a row of buttons still attached.

  I don’t know how long I stood there, just staring. Noticing that black
ened flesh still clung to the torso. That splintered bits of bone showed white at the ends of the ribs that I’d shattered. How everything else was blackened and decaying.

  Just like Missy would be.

  I shut my eyes.

  A mistake.

  That made it even easier to recall her bloodied face and single, staring blue eye. Made it even easier to remember the way the ends of her bullet-shattered ribs had ground together when I’d unbuckled her seat belt and pushed her down in the well in front of her seat. Covered her with a blanket. So that no one would see her as I drove…

  I pushed those thoughts away, opened my eyes. But my head was already throbbing and my face seemed to be on fire. And no matter how shallowly I breathed, I couldn’t avoid the clinging, putrid smell.

  Bile rose in my throat and I gagged again.

  I didn’t want to contaminate the crime scene.

  I turned, staggered back to the logjam, managed to make it to the far end of the stumpy log. Stood there, staring at a beetle crawling along the rough bark, holding my breath, pressing my lips shut, willing myself not to vomit.

  And then my best friend was there behind me, his hands cool against my neck and shoulders, his voice soothing.

  “No shame in being sick,” he said. “Sooner or later, every cop sees something that makes him puke. Lucky if it only happens once in your career. Don’t fight it. Just get it over with.”

  He supported me as I retched violently, painfully onto the ground.

  We worked around natural obstacles, pushing the sturdy wire stems of tiny orange flags into the ground, making the body a bull’s-eye at the center of an irregular circle.

  When we were finished, I stood looking back at the body from the downstream side. Realized that, from this angle, I might have recognized a human form beneath a crusty layer of earth. Or noticed the triangle of tattered fabric that the sand hadn’t completely covered and recognized it as the corner of a man’s trousers. Unfortunately, what I now saw most clearly was the terrible damage my misplaced footstep had caused.

  I sighed.

  “Sure messed up that crime scene,” I said.

  Chad put his hand on my shoulder, gave it a little squeeze before releasing it.

  “You found the crime scene, rookie,” he said, smiling. “Don’t be greedy.”

  Minutes later, we crossed the stream to deal with what Chad had found, the discovery that had prompted him to call out my name so urgently. The bits of spine he’d discovered near the mouth of a fox’s den prompted us to search for a few minutes longer. It took a much larger circle of flags to mark the scattered remains of a body that hadn’t been buried beneath a layer of sand. That’d had no protection from the teeth of small carnivores.

  “Two,” I said, thinking out loud.

  “Three if you count the first victim,” Chad corrected. “We should go back, call in. We’ve got a hell of a lot more here than a simple murder.”

  I nodded, agreeing with him. But then I said: “Let’s walk for another hundred feet, see what’s there.”

  “Greedy,” Chad repeated, then softened that judgment with his smile. “Which side of the stream do you want?”

  I lifted my chin in the direction of the opposite ravine wall.

  “I’ll go back there,” I said, mostly because I wanted an excuse to wash my boots and the cuffs of my jeans in the stream again. And then I had another, unrelated thought. “The Feds are going to be involved in this one, aren’t they?”

  Chad nodded, sighing heavily.

  Because of Hardin County’s odd mix of jurisdictions, it wasn’t at all unusual for FBI field agents to work with deputies investigating crimes that took place in the forest. I’d never heard Chad complain about it, so didn’t understand his obvious lack of enthusiasm.

  “I thought you liked working with those guys.”

  “Those guys, yes,” he said. “But we both have the same gut feeling about what we’re going to find out here, don’t we? If we’re right, this will be a headline-getter—one of those cases that’s too high-profile to be left to mere field agents. And it’s been my experience that those big-city bureaucrats don’t play well with others.”

  Twenty feet was all it took for me to confirm our gut feelings. Twenty feet and a sun-bleached skull hanging almost upside down in a fallen tree. Impaled on a jutting branch a few feet from the ground. A veil of browning leaves and other debris from the flooding that had put it there framed the jawless skull.

  The branch entered through the right eye socket and exited through a slightly smaller man-made hole. The opposite route, I thought, than the bullet had taken. Strands of dried grass and tattered bits of fabric hung from the other eye socket. As I watched, a tiny yellow finch darted into that opening, intent on feeding a demanding chorus of nestlings inside the dome.

  No shouting was needed over this one.

  I simply planted a flag, crossed the stream and caught up with Chad.

  It was difficult to know when the huge section of ravine wall had collapsed, but the tumble of jagged rock—easily double Chad’s height at its peak—cut the width of the ravine by more than a third. From the base of that rock pile, Chad spotted what looked like little more than a heap of dirty rags.

  I was lighter and more sure-footed than he was so, despite his objections, I climbed up solo to take a closer look. Stretched as far as I could to shove my fingers into a narrow gap between rocks, found a narrow ledge where I could step up with my right boot, then levered myself upward. Found a place to wedge my left boot, stretched to find the next handhold, and moved upward again. Until I was just able to look across the top of the rock mound.

  I looked into a face long dead. One that still sported a fringe of curly, close-cropped beard and a parchment face with a third eye in the center of the forehead.

  “Got another one,” I called down to Chad, amazed at how quickly the macabre had become almost commonplace. “If the bullet hadn’t killed him, the fall certainly would have.”

  Once back on the ground, I joined Chad in tying bright loops of crime-scene tape around a few large rocks. A reminder that another victim had been discovered here. As we worked, we did a head count. Literally.

  “There was a head on the one back by the cave,” Chad observed. “You found a skull in the tree.”

  “And the bearded guy up there.”

  “The one by the sandbar? Do you think the body’s intact?”

  Briefly, I thought about the shape and length of the mound on either side of the exposed rib cage.

  “Yeah, I suspect it is.”

  “Four victims for sure, then,” Chad murmured, tying off a final knot in the ribbon of plastic. “Five counting the Jane Doe on the ledge.”

  As our eyes met, I nodded, agreeing.

  “All within a few hundred yards of each other,” I said.

  If I hadn’t been looking right at him just then, I doubt I would have seen the flash of emotion, quickly hidden. But in that moment, I saw a reflection of my own feelings. Unexpected feelings that had nothing to do with love or lust.

  You know you’re a cop if…discovering a killing field excites you.

  Chapter 16

  An old skeleton didn’t get much attention.

  Four more victims found in the same area of the forest did. Especially when their remains were discovered in multiple jurisdictions. Most especially when two turned up on federal land.

  Within a few hours of Chad’s call to dispatch, representatives from all of those jurisdictions held a joint press conference. Me, still in blue jeans and a grubby pink shirt, representing the Maryville PD. Chad’s politically savvy boss speaking for Hardin County but having Chad—in his jeans and grubby orange shirt—stand by his side. Joining us was a middle-aged man in a city suit and a Harvard haircut who looked more like a Beltway politician than the FBI agent he was. When he’d arrived at Camp Cadiz from Chicago, he’d taken just enough time to be briefed by a field agent—and to learn that two more bodies had just been discover
ed—before organizing a press conference.

  Guarded barricades had been set up to limit access to Camp Cadiz and the forest beyond. One such barricade and several uniformed county deputies confined the press—its cars and satellite trucks and camera operators and reporters—to a corner of the gravel lot. As we approached the press area, reporters with microphones in their hands and camera operators hanging over their shoulders swarmed like locusts. They pressed themselves against the wooden barricade, leaning hungrily forward, shouting questions.

  A tall man near the front of the crowd craned his head to look at the laminated ID hanging around the FBI agent’s neck.

  “Agent…Franklin! What’s the body count so far?”

  Agent Franklin, with an air of long experience, didn’t answer. Instead, he planted himself about six feet from the reporters on the police side of the barricade. Then he gestured for the county sheriff—a beefy middle-aged man with a comb-over hairdo—to stand beside him. Once Chad and I joined the lineup, Agent Franklin lifted a hand. His frown and the force of his personality quieted the babble of voices.

  Only then did he speak.

  “This investigation is in its earliest stages so it would be premature for me to comment on specifics. Except to say that, at this point, we have recovered a total of seven bodies in a very limited area where federal, Hardin County, and—”

  Here he hesitated.

  “Maryville,” I murmured.

  “—Maryville jurisdictions intersect. The state of Illinois is also providing invaluable technical assistance in this endeavor. So this will be a cooperative, multi-agency investigation.”

  That sounded good. But cooperative, I’d quickly realized, didn’t leave me with much. Small-town cops were rarely viewed as equal partners. And a rookie female cop from a one-person department was doubly cursed. Even my expertise in search and rescue was trumped by the arrival of a large, well-equipped and tightly organized state-police team. Bottom line, I had no leverage. Because I’d insisted, I was still at the scene, still formally “in the loop.” But I didn’t delude myself. I wasn’t needed for what Agent Franklin referred to as a “full-fledged investigation.” And if I spoke, the odds were against anyone listening.

 

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