ONCE LOST

by Blake Pierce

  She breathed a sigh of relief when Mike responded immediately.

  Will do.

  Riley told herself that she’d done all she could do for Bill right now, and it was up to him to make the most of her help. If anybody could help Bill deal with the things that were tormenting him, Riley was sure that Mike could.

  She climbed the steps into the cabin, where Jenn Roston was already seated and working on her laptop computer. Jenn glanced up and nodded as Riley sat down across the table from her.

  Riley nodded back.

  Then Riley looked out the window during takeoff and as the plane climbed to cruising altitude. She didn’t like the chilly silence between her and Jenn. She wondered if maybe Jenn didn’t like it either. These flights were normally a good time to talk over details of a case. But there was really nothing to say about this one yet. The body had just been found that morning, after all.

  Riley took a magazine out of her bag and tried to read, but she couldn’t focus her attention on the words. Having Jenn sit across from her quietly like that was too distracting. Instead, Riley just sat there pretending to read.

  The story of my life these days, she thought.

  Pretending and lying were becoming all too routine.

  Finally Jenn looked up from her computer.

  “Agent Paige, I meant what I said at the meeting with Meredith,” she said.

  “Pardon?” Riley asked, looking up from her magazine.

  “About being honored to work with you. It’s been a dream of mine. I’ve followed your work ever since I started at the academy.”

  For a moment, Riley didn’t know what to say. Jenn had said much the same thing to her before. But again, Riley couldn’t tell from Jenn’s expression whether she was sincere.

  “I’ve heard great things about you,” Riley said.

  As noncommittal as it sounded, at least it was true. Under different circumstances, Riley would have been thrilled at the chance to work with a smart new agent.

  Riley added with a weak smile, “But I wouldn’t get my expectations up if I were you—not for this case.”

  “Right,” Jenn said. “It’s probably not even a case for the BAU. We’re liable to fly back to Quantico tonight. Well, there will be others.”

  Jenn turned her attention back to her computer. Riley wondered whether she was working on the Shane Hatcher files. And of course, she worried anew that she shouldn’t have given Jenn that thumb drive.

  But as she sat there thinking about it, she realized something. If Jenn had really meant to double-cross her by asking for that information, wouldn’t she have used it against her already?

  She remembered what Jenn had said to her yesterday.

  “I’m pretty sure we want exactly the same thing—to put an end to Shane Hatcher’s criminal career.”

  If that was true, Jenn really was Riley’s ally.

  But how could Riley be sure? She sat there considering whether she should broach the subject.

  She hadn’t told Jenn about the threat she had received from Hatcher.

  Was there really any reason not to?

  Might Jenn actually be able to help her in some way? Maybe, but Riley still didn’t feel ready to take that step.

  Meanwhile, it seemed downright weird that her new partner still called her Agent Paige while insisting that Riley call her by her first name.

  “Jenn,” she said.

  Jenn looked up from her computer.

  “I think you should call me Riley,” Riley said.

  Jenn smiled a little and turned her attention back to her computer.

  Riley set her magazine aside and stared out the window at the clouds below. The sun was shining brightly, but Riley didn’t find it cheerful.

  She felt terribly alone. She missed having Bill around to trust and confide in.

  And she missed Lucy so much that she ached inside.

  *

  When the plane taxied into the Des Moines International Airport, Riley was able to check her cell phone. She was pleased to see that she’d gotten a message from Mike Nevins.

  Bill’s here with me right now.

  It was one less thing to worry about.

  A police car was waiting outside the plane. Two cops from Angier introduced themselves at the base of the boarding steps. Darryl Laird was a gangly young man in his twenties, and Howard Doty was a much shorter man in his forties.

  Both had stunned expressions on their faces.

  “We’re sure glad you’re here,” Doty told Riley and Jenn as the two cops escorted them to the car.

  Laird said, “This is whole thing is just …”

  The younger man shook his head without finishing his thought.

  These poor guys, Riley thought.

  They were just regular small-town cops. Murders were surely few and far between in a small Iowa town. Maybe the older cop had handled one or two homicides at one time or other, but Riley guessed that the younger one hadn’t been through anything like this before.

  As Doty started to drive, Riley asked the two cops to tell her and Jenn whatever they could about what had happened.

  Doty said, “The girl’s name was Katy Philbin, seventeen years old. A student at Wilson High. Her parents own the local pharmacy. Nice girl, everybody liked her. Old George Tully came across her body just this morning when he and his boys were getting ready to do the spring planting. Tully’s got a farm just a short way out of Angier.”

  Jenn asked, “Any idea how long she’d been buried there?”

  “You’ll have to ask Chief Sinard about that. Or the medical examiner.”

  Riley thought back to what little Meredith had been able to tell them about the situation.

  “What about the other girl?” she asked. “The one who went missing earlier?”

  “Holly Struthers is her name,” Laird said. “She was … uh, I guess she is a student at our other high school, Lincoln. She’s been missing for about a week. The whole town had been hoping she’d just turn up sooner or later. But now … well, I guess we’ve got to keep on hoping.”

  “And praying,” Doty added.

  Riley felt an odd chill when he said that. She couldn’t begin to guess how often she’d heard people say that they were praying that a missing person would turn up safe and sound. She never had the impression that prayer helped one way or the other.

  Does it even make people feel better? she wondered.

  She couldn’t imagine why or how.

  It was a bright, clear afternoon when the car left Des Moines and headed out onto a wide highway. Soon Doty exited onto a two-lane road that stretched over the slightly rolling countryside.

  Riley felt a strange, gnawing feeling in her stomach. It took her a few moments to realize that her feeling had nothing to do with the case—at least not directly.

  She often felt this way whenever she had a job to do in the Midwest. She didn’t normally suffer from a fear of open spaces—agoraphobia, she thought it was called. But vast plains and prairies stirred up a unique kind of anxiety in her.

  Riley didn’t know which was worse—the sheer flat plains she’d seen in states like Nebraska, stretching out as far as the eye could see, or monotonous rolling prairie like this, the same farmhouses, towns, and fields seeming to appear over and over again. Either way, she found it unsettling, even a little nauseating.

  Despite the Midwest’s reputation as a land of wholesome, all-American values, it somehow didn’t surprise her that people committed murder here. As far as she was concerned, the countryside alone would be enough to drive a person crazy.

  Partly to get her mind off the landscape, Riley took out her cell phone to text her whole family as a group—April, Jilly, Liam, and Gabriela.

  Got here safely.

  She thought for a moment, then added …

  Miss you all already. But I’ll probably be back before U know it.

  *

  After about an hour on the two-lane highway, Doty turned the car off onto a gravel road.
/>
  As he kept on driving, he said, “We’re coming up on George Tully’s land now.”

  Riley looked around. The landscape looked exactly the same—huge stretches of unplanted fields interrupted by gullies, fences, and lines of trees. She did notice a single large house in the midst of it all, standing next to a ramshackle barn. She figured that must be where Tully lived with his family.

  It was an odd-looking house that appeared to have been added onto and cobbled together over the years, probably for quite a few generations.

  Soon a medical examiner’s vehicle came into sight, parked on the shoulder of the road. Several other cars were parked nearby. Doty parked right behind the examiner’s van, and Riley and Jenn followed him and his younger partner out onto a recently tilled field.

  Riley saw three men standing over a dug up spot. She couldn’t see what had been found there, but she did glimpse a bit of brightly colored clothing fluttering in the spring breeze.

  That’s where she was buried, she realized.

  And at that moment, Riley was hit by a strange gut feeling.

  Gone was any sense that she and Jenn would have nothing to do here.

  They had work to do—a girl was dead and they wouldn’t stop until the killer was found.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Two people were standing by the freshly revealed body. Riley headed straight toward one of them, a brawny man about her own age.

  “Chief Joseph Sinard, I assume,” she said, offering her hand.

  He nodded and shook her hand.

  “Folks around here just call me Joe,”

  Sinard indicated an obese, bored-looking man in his fifties who was standing beside him, “This is Barry Teague, the county medical examiner. You two are the FBI folks we’ve been expecting, I guess.”

  Riley and Jenn produced their badges and introduced themselves.

  “Here’s our victim,” Sinard said.

  He pointed down into the shallow hole, where a young woman lay carelessly splayed, wearing a bright orange sundress. The dress was hitched up over her thighs, and Riley could see that her underwear had been removed. She wasn’t wearing any shoes. Her face was unnaturally pale, and her open mouth still had dirt in it. Her eyes were wide open. The soiled body was dull in color, no longer the shade of any living human being.

  Riley shuddered a little. She seldom felt any emotion when seeing a dead body—she’d seen far too many of them over the years. But this girl reminded her too much of April.

  Riley turned toward the medical examiner.

  “Have you come to any conclusions, Mr. Teague?”

  Barry Teague crouched down next to the hole, and Riley crouched next to him.

  “It’s bad—real bad,” he said in a voice that expressed no emotion at all.

  He pointed to the girl’s thighs.

  “See those bruises?” he asked. “Looks to me like she was raped.”

  Riley didn’t say so, but she felt sure that he was correct. Judging from the smell, she also guessed that the girl had died the night before last, and that she’d been buried here for most of that time.

  She asked the ME, “What do you think was the cause of death?”

  Teague let out an impatient-sounding growl.

  “Don’t know,” he said. “Maybe if you federal folks let me haul the body out of here and do my job, I might be able to tell you.”

  Riley bristled inside. The man’s resentment of the FBI’s presence was palpable. Were she and Jenn Roston going to face a lot of local resistance?

  She reminded herself that it had been Chief Sinard who called in the request. At least she could count on Sinard’s cooperation.

  She told the ME, “You can take her away now.”

  She got to her feet and looked around. She saw an elderly man some fifty feet away, leaning against a tractor and staring straight toward the body.

  “Who’s that?” she asked Chief Sinard.

  “George Tully,” Sinard said.

  Riley remembered that George Tully was the owner of this land.

  She and Jenn walked over to him and introduced themselves. Tully seemed barely to notice their presence. He kept staring toward the body as Teague’s team carefully got ready to move it.

  Riley said to him, “Mr. Tully, I understand that you found the girl.”

  He nodded dully, still not taking his eyes off the body.

  Riley said, “I know this is hard. But could you please tell me what happened?”

  Tully spoke in a vague, distant-sounding voice.

  “Not much to tell. Me and the boys came out this morning early for planting. I noticed something odd about the soil there. The look of it bothered me so I started to dig … and then there she was.”

  Riley sensed that Tully wasn’t going to be able to tell her much.

  Jenn said, “Do you have any idea when the body might have been buried here?”

  Tully shook his head mutely.

  Riley looked around for a moment. The field seemed to have been recently tilled.

  “When did you till this field?” she asked.

  “Day before last. No, the day before that. We were just getting started seeding it today.”

  Riley turned this over in her mind. It seemed consistent with her guess that the girl had been killed and buried the night before last.

  Tully squinted as he continued to stare ahead.

  “Chief Sinard told me her name,” he said. “Katy—her last name was Philbin, I think. Odd, I didn’t recognize that name. I didn’t recognize her either. Time was …”

  He paused for a moment.

  “Time was when I knew pretty much all the families in town, and their kids too. Times have changed.”

  There was a numb, aching sadness in his voice.

  Riley could feel his pain now. She felt sure he’d lived on this land all his life, and so had his parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, and he’d hoped to pass the farm down to his own children and grandchildren.

  He’d never imagined something like this could possibly happen here.

  She also realized something else—that Tully had been standing in exactly this same spot for hours, staring with horrified disbelief at the poor girl’s body. He’d found the body in the early morning, reported it, and then hadn’t been able to make himself move from this spot. Now that the body was being taken away, maybe he’d leave soon.

  But Riley knew that the horror wouldn’t leave him.

  His words echoed through her head …

  “Times have changed.”

  He must have felt as though the world had gone mad.

  And maybe it has, Riley thought.

  “We’re terribly sorry this happened,” Riley told him.

  Then she and Jenn headed back toward the excavated spot.

  Teague’s team now had the covered body up on a gurney. They were awkwardly moving it over the tilled soil toward the medical examiner’s vehicle.

  Teague approached Riley and Jenn. He spoke in that seemingly perpetual monotone of his.

  “In answer to your question, how’d she die … I got a better look, and she’d been bludgeoned, hit more than once. So that’s it.”

  Without another word he turned and walked away to join his team.

  Jenn let out a scoff of annoyance.

  “Well, it sounds like the examination is done as far as he’s concerned,” she said. “He’s a real sweetheart.”

  Riley shook her head in dismayed agreement.

  Then she walked toward Chief Sinard and asked, “Was anything else found with the body? A handbag? Cell phone?”

  “No,” Sinard said. “Whoever did it must have kept those.”

  “Agent Roston and I need to meet with the girl’s family as soon as possible.”

  Chief Sinard frowned a little.

  “That’s going to be pretty rough,” he said. “Her dad, Drew, was just out here a little while ago to identify the body. He was in pretty bad shape when he left.”

  “I und
erstand,” Riley said. “But it’s really necessary.”

  Chief Sinard nodded, took a key out of his pocket, and pointed to a nearby car.

  “I figure you two are going to need your own transportation,” he said. “You can use my car as long as you’re here. I’ll drive on ahead in a police vehicle and show you where the Philbins live.”

  Riley let Jenn take the keys and drive. Soon they were following Sinard’s police car toward the town of Angier.

  Riley asked her new partner, “What are your thoughts at this point?”

  Jenn drove in silence for a moment as she seemed to mull the question over.

  Then she said, “We know that the victim was seventeen years old—within the age range of about half of the victims of this kind of crime. It’s still an unusual case. Most victims of serial sexual predators are prostitutes. This one may fall into the ten percent who are victims of acquaintances of one kind or another.”

  Jenn paused again.

  Then she added, “More than half of these kinds of murders are by strangulation. But blunt force trauma is the second most frequent cause of death. So in that sense this murder may not be atypical. Still, we’ve got a lot to learn. The most important question is whether we’re dealing with a serial killer.”

  Riley nodded grimly in agreement. Jenn wasn’t saying anything she didn’t already know, but whatever her misgivings might be about her new partner, at least she was well informed. And they were both facing the possibility of a terrible answer to that last question, both hoping the answer was “no.”

  In a matter of minutes they were following Sinard into Angier and driving down Main Street. Riley saw nothing to distinguish it from other Main Streets she’d seen throughout the Midwest—bland and characterless rows of shops, some of them old and some of them new. She detected no hint of charm or quaintness. Riley had much the same feeling about the town as she’d had during the drive across the rolling prairie—a sense of something dark lurking behind the veneer of Midwestern wholesomeness.

  She almost gave voice to her thoughts. But she quickly reminded herself that it wasn’t Bill who was at her side, but a young woman she barely knew and still didn’t know if she could trust.