All That I Dread

by Linda J White

  Nate shifted in his seat. “Cadaver scent can last for years. My guess is, they cleaned the place good. But I got a little dog I don’t mind trying on it.”

  A little dog. Sprite. Thank goodness he wasn’t talking about Luke. Because I wanted nothing to do with it.

  Still, in my mind I was already deciding how I would investigate that year-old crime scene.

  “Tell you what,” Nate said. “Let’s revisit this in the light of day. I think I can help you, at least to clear your mind about whether evidence got missed.”

  “Thanks, man.” Scott started to get out of the Tahoe, but it was clear he was still unsteady on his feet.

  Nate turned around and looked at me. I knew what he wanted. I held out my hand for his keys. “I’ll follow.”

  I watched as Nate guided Cooper over to a black Nissan Rogue. I saw Cooper turn toward Nate, even push him a little, as if he were protesting Nate driving his car. But when he pushed panic instead of unlock on his key fob and then couldn’t stop the horn, he gave in.

  Nate helped him into the passenger seat, waited until he had his seatbelt buckled, and then walked around the car to the driver’s door and started the engine. As I tracked along behind them, I kept wondering why he had gotten involved. What was Cooper to him? The guy had been aloof at best from the get-go. He was a sloppy drunk. And Nate could have gotten into a mess if he hadn’t been able to stop that fight.

  Was the Rogue I followed Cooper’s personal car? Nate could get in trouble for driving a government vehicle.

  I couldn’t stand obnoxious drunks. In fact, Cooper fell into most of my can’t-stand categories. Arrogant. Egotistical. Dismissive. Even if he did love his daughter.

  Cooper’s townhouse was about thirty minutes away. It had a first-floor garage, but Nate parked out front. So maybe the Bureau car was locked up in the garage. Which would make sense with all the firepower they carry in those things.

  I debated whether I should follow them inside but decided to wait and enjoy the quiet night. Listening to Scott Cooper had triggered something in me. My mind would not settle down.

  “You sure went out of your way with him,” I said when Nate emerged and climbed into his car. I had vacated the driver’s seat when I saw him come out. “What made you do that?”

  Nate didn’t answer until he’d started the car. Then he turned and looked at me, the streetlight catching in his blue eyes. “I been there, where he is now. Got help when I didn’t want it. Got put on the right path and found a life I didn’t know existed. Least I can do is pass that on.” He pulled away from the curb.

  “You didn’t jump at the chance to help me.” I meant it as a tease but there was truth in that statement, and he answered it seriously.

  “You being a woman complicates things.”

  Oh, really? I wanted to say, but for once, I kept my mouth shut.

  When I got home that night, I couldn’t relax. Couldn’t let go of Cooper’s story. Couldn’t let go of Nate’s answer to my questions.

  I had no idea what to do with Nate and his crazy ideas.

  I knew how to tackle Cooper’s worries though.

  With my stomach tied in knots, I pulled out my old whiteboard and markers. I drew a vertical line down the middle and began listing the facts of the two cases. When I had exhausted what I knew, I went online to discover what I could about the first case, the young woman found near Warrenton, from news reports and public records. I tried matching it up with what I knew about the young woman Luke had found.

  Then I took it a step further, printing out pictures and portions of maps, taping them up, each on its own side, one under Victim A, the other, Victim B.

  In other words, I created a murder board. Two hours into my analysis, I could understand Scott’s concern. Could a serial killer be working the area?

  12

  Scott Cooper swigged down two more Advil. Then he rested both hands on the edges of the water cooler and dropped his head, staring at the stainless steel as if it held the answers to his questions.

  “Tough night, Scott?”

  He turned and faced his coworker. “A little rough.” No point in denying it. He’d seen his face in the mirror that morning. Scott nodded toward the papers in D’Sean Phillips’s hand. “What are you working on?”

  Phillips slapped the papers against his left hand. “The Good Ol’ Boy bank robber. Plaid flannel shirt. John Deere hat. Mud on his boots. He’s hit four banks in three jurisdictions in three months.”

  “Anyone hurt?”

  “Nope. But he showed a gun on the last job.”

  Scott nodded. Part of him wished he had bank-robbery cases. Property crimes, essentially. Maybe then he could sleep at night. “Go get ‘em.”

  Truth was, he wouldn’t be happy chasing robbers. He’d specifically asked for violent crimes. He was on a mission, a mission he’d chosen when he was seventeen.

  Scott walked back to his desk tucked away in a corner of the bullpen of the FBI’s Northern Virginia Resident Agency. Out of the window he could see the Blue Ridge Mountains to the west, their soft folds and rounded tops a sharp contrast to the Rockies. He’d grown up in Denver hiking, fishing, and skiing in those rugged mountains with his Dad. All that had come to a sudden, screeching halt.

  Scott closed his eyes, willing the pounding in his head to go away. He’d let his coffee get cold. Somehow, he didn’t think it would go down well this morning.

  Forcing himself to focus, he opened the computer file tracking his caseload. He had thirty active cases, everything from a cold-case murder to a couple of trafficking cases to child porn and assault on a federal officer. The latter involved a guy who’d coldcocked a park ranger when she tried to give him a ticket.

  He could hear his boss’s raised voice across the room. Couldn’t quite see who was in his office. The pressure had ratcheted up and Supervisory Special Agent Tony Alenzo’s temper was short. If people only knew.

  Scott wrote notes on three of his cases, identifying some leads to check out and questions to ask. It’d be a good day to make the rounds, get out of the office. Before that, though, he couldn’t resist checking on something.

  Glancing up, he saw his boss was still occupied. He refocused on his computer. He had several databases available to him, including ViCAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. He entered a search for missing small, blonde women in a four-state area: DC, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia. He saved the results as a pdf and sent it to his cell phone.

  Across the room, he saw another agent leave Alenzo’s office. He logged out of the secure database, locked the computer, and moved quickly toward the elevators.

  “Back in a couple of hours, boss,” he said as he passed Alenzo’s office door. He didn’t wait for a response.

  He’d mentally created a circuit to follow this morning, working on all three cases. The first was the cold case. Loudoun County police had requested FBI assistance on the twenty-year-old murder of a young man.

  The day had started out sunny, the temperature a perfect seventy degrees. The drive through rolling hills and farmland was easy enough that Scott could let his mind drift. He was trying to remember what he’d told the dog guy last night—Nate. It wasn’t like him to confide in people. The alcohol had loosened his tongue. Plus there was something about the guy that made Scott feel like talking.

  He seemed to remember asking if the dog could help with that case near Warrenton. Why in the world had he asked that? He had access to the best databases in the world and the finest lab. How could a dog help?

  The murdered girl near Warrenton wasn’t his case. Wasn’t even an FBI case. The only reason he was interested in it was because it was similar, a bit similar to the Prince William Forest Park case.

  And a little bit like his sister’s.

  Scott shook his head to dislodge his thoughts. His boss had told him to leave it alone. He had a boatload of cases to work. His sister’s abduction and murder had taken place two-thousand miles away.

&nb
sp; In the words of his daughter’s favorite movie, he told himself, “Let it go, let it go…”

  If only he could.

  The Loudoun County detective working the cold case was retiring in a year or so, and the case of the murdered young man bugged him. The boy was seventeen, a star athlete, and a straight-A student at a local high school, not known to use drugs or drink excessively. He’d taken his date home, dropping her off at midnight. A newspaper deliveryman found the boy’s body in his car behind a shopping center at four in the morning. He’d been shot once in the head.

  Scott listened to the detective and looked over the case file. He outlined what the Bureau could do, made some suggestions on lines of investigation he’d pursue, and promised to follow up in a month. When he walked out, he carried the weight of the frustration he knew the detective felt.

  He saved the park ranger for last. Brenda Langley worked for the National Park Service. He’d arranged to meet her at an office in McLean. He was a little surprised that both Brenda’s supervisor and a Park Police investigator chose to sit in on the meeting.

  “I was making my rounds, you know, driving through the park, and I saw this guy walking into the woods,” Brenda said, tucking her short gray hair behind her ear. “I stopped, got out, and walked over to him. He had his back to me, but I could see he was dumping something. I said, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ and he turned around and hit me. Laid me right out.”

  Didn’t she know enough to stay out of reach? He cleared his throat. “Do you have a description of this guy?”

  “Nope. Never saw anything but the back of his head.”

  “Height? Weight?”

  “Average height, average weight. He had on a green Army-type jacket. Brown hair.”

  “How about his vehicle?”

  “There wasn’t any. Not that I saw.”

  “You think he walked into the park?”

  “No idea.”

  Scott made a couple of notes. “So what happened then?”

  “I woke up. Called for help on my radio.”

  “And …”

  “And help came. Transported me to the hospital. I had a concussion.”

  Scott nodded. Something about this woman annoyed him. “Could the other rangers tell what the guy had been doing?”

  “They didn’t find a thing.” Brenda pressed her lips into a straight line. “I insisted the FBI be brought in. I want this guy arrested.”

  “I’ll write it up,” Scott said. “This happened where, on the Parkway?”

  “Prince William Forest Park,” Brenda said.

  That piqued his interest.

  “I immediately asked for a transfer.”

  “Can you show me where, exactly, this happened?” Scott asked.

  The Park Police investigator produced a map, and she pointed out where the assault had taken place. It was nowhere near where Faith had been found.

  Scott took the map, noted the date and time of the assault, and promised he’d look into it. The Park Police investigator offered to walk him to his car.

  “I wouldn’t invest a lot in this,” he said.

  Scott turned, raising his eyebrows.

  “It’s the third incident she’s reported in six months. We think she’s bucking for early retirement.”

  Scott nodded. “Okay, then. Thanks.”

  As he drove back to the office, frustration gripped him. So his boss thought it was perfectly fine to spend time on the phantom assault of Brenda Langley, but not follow up on a possible link between two murders? Whatever happened to agents using their own brains to follow leads?

  Impulsively, he pulled off of Interstate 66 and into a gas station. He pulled out his phone and scrolled through his contacts. He kept the dog man’s contact info, didn’t he? Nate something? He searched for “Nate,” found the entry, and punched the number.

  13

  “What was I thinking?” I said to myself the next morning.

  Luke looked at me. His ears twitched.

  Thanks to my decision to create a murder board, I’d gotten a lousy night’s sleep. And now every time I sat down to work on my cases—the cases that were putting a roof over my head—all I could think about was two murdered girls.

  Maybe I should take my laptop and go work somewhere else. But no—I’d have to put Luke in his crate and, well, I didn’t want to.

  So when Nate called late that afternoon and asked me if I wanted to come with him and Cooper to check out the site where Victim A had been found, I knew the answer. No, absolutely not.

  What came out of my mouth was, “Sure. Where and when?”

  I wanted to see Sprite work, I told myself as I drove to the site on Saturday morning. After all, the body was long gone.

  Luke lay in the crate in the back of my Jeep. I wasn’t going to use him. I just didn’t want him stuck at home. He’d be fine on this cool spring day, especially if I left the lift gate open.

  Victim A was found on private property off a two-lane road near Warrenton in the foothills of the Blue Ridge. The local detective working the case met us there. He’d gotten permission from the landowner for us to go on the property.

  When Nate saw I’d brought Luke, he said, “We gotta walk in a good ways. Better bring him with us.”

  I didn’t want my dog getting another snootful of cadaver scent, even if it was a year old. I also didn’t want to leave him well out of my sight in an unlocked car for an extended period of time. So I let him out and leashed him up.

  I hung back a bit from the three men, feeling like an intruder. I noticed we were following the same kind of red paint marks on the trees that I’d seen when we’d gone back to the Victim B site. I also noticed it was easier for me to think of them as Victim A and Victim B rather than Julie and Faith. We walked fifteen minutes into the woods. I actually timed it.

  When we stopped, I saw immediately why Scott Cooper had been nagged by the similarities in the cases. Although some of the underbrush had grown up, this site was in a little clearing in the woods, just as with Faith. Deep in the woods, just as with Faith.

  I could see Scott showing Nate some eight-by-ten glossies—crime-scene photos. I told Luke to stay. I quietly walked up behind them and looked over Nate’s shoulder. The young woman lay on her back, her sightless eyes staring upward, her arms stretched out, as if she were making a snow angel.

  I turned away from the death stare.

  “Y’all back up and let Sprite here have some room to work,” Nate said.

  I was happy to oblige. We moved about fifty feet from the body site.

  “Nice dog,” the detective said, nodding toward Luke. He was smart enough not to try to pet him. “Does he do this too?”

  “Just live searches,” I replied.

  Scott looked at me, frowning slightly, before saying, “But he’s the one that found the other body, right?”

  “That was a fluke,” I said quickly.

  Beyond us, little Sprite worked hard, her stub tail going a mile a minute. Nate kept her in close, leashed up, asking her to “search it out” while pointing to the ground near his feet. This was a different kind of working than what I did with Luke, who ranged freely, often out of sight, while he was seeking human scent. I watched, fascinated by what they were doing, wanting to observe, but not see.

  The body had been intact when they removed her, right? No chance of a body part emerging from the leaves?

  Luke sat at my side, his eyes fixed on Sprite. I could feel him brimming with energy. His tail swept the ground. He wanted to work. It had been a mistake to bring him. What was I thinking?

  Sprite slowed down, her nose plastered to the ground. Luke stood up. We both knew what Sprite was doing. She’d found the exact place the body had been laid, and she was sniffing every piece of that scent, her little nose twitching. Luke whined.

  Suddenly, Sprite gave her indication. She sat and looked up at Nate. “Good girl, good girl!” he said, turning her away from that spot. He pulled a tug out of his pocket and wrestled
with her for a minute. Then he moved further away, to the very edge of the clearing. “Search, search it out!” Search for more.

  Luke nudged my hand, as if to say, “When do I get to play?” He could be quite insistent. To my right, Scott was asking the detective about Victim A—did she have a boyfriend, what about her relationship with her parents, any history of drug or alcohol abuse, depression, or suicidal thinking?

  Quietly, I turned and moved away from them. When I glanced back, Cooper was watching me leave.

  I focused on the towering oaks, poplars, and maples around me to settle my stomach. So much beauty. I gave Luke a little leash. We were well away from the crime scene. No harm in letting him sniff.

  Behind me, I could hear Nate’s soft voice, “Search it out!” He was so patient with his dog and with the search itself. He’d told me once that searching for human remains was different, slower and more delicate, than live searches. “But the older I get,” he’d said, grinning, “the more I like a search objective that don’t run away.”

  I guess that was supposed to make me feel better about the idea of finding dead bodies.

  Ahead of me was a big, fallen tree. Maybe if I sat down for a bit, my head would clear. I checked the log for bugs, then sat. Luke kept sniffing around in the leaves, moving to the end of his six-foot leash. Back at the crime scene, I saw Sprite stop again, this time at the base of a large tree. Nate looked up at Scott. Sprite sat.

  “Good dog, good dog!” I saw Nate reward her. Then he pulled a small can of spray paint out of his pack and marked the tree with a small blue dot.

  What did that mean? The dog had smelled cadaver scent, obviously, but I was trying to imagine what would have happened to create that. Did the killer prop the body there before laying her on the ground?

  Then I saw Sprite alert near a fallen log. I stood up so I could see better. She pawed at the ground, at a little pile of leaves, then sat and looked at Nate.

  Curious, I moved closer.

  Nate moved one leaf, then turned away and rewarded Sprite. He gestured toward Scott, and both he and the detective moved quickly. I couldn’t help but follow.