Joey reached home all out of breath. “Gran, Gran!” he yelled, racing into the kitchen. No Gran. That was what he called his grandfather, Elmer Templeton, who, four years earlier, had come to live with Joey and his older brother, Mike. It happened after the boys’ parents had been caught in a deluge and had driven onto an unmarked railroad crossing as a freight train sped through, killing them both instantly.
A truck door slammed. Joey bounded off the porch and ran pell-mell around to the side yard. At the turn of the hedgerow, there he was—the kindest man in the universe—Gran, shuffling slowly on stiff legs toward the boy.
Joey grabbed Elmer’s leathery hand, nearly toppling the old man. He drew his grandfather’s hand close to his cheek, smelling the nutty residue of the Corn Huskers that had spilled out of the large square bottle the night before. Elmer had rubbed the excess goo on Joey’s soft white hands.
“What’s with you, son?” The old man stooped down in his faded denim bib overalls. Clean shaven, Elmer had a thin build like Joey’s.
“Gran, all right, I know how you think I go around blabbing all the time. And I know Mike does,” Joey said. “But I saw this really strange man, I mean he was weird. What he was doing in a creepy old truck like that God only knows. He wasn’t from around here, no way.” Joey stopped to take a breath, his chest heaving. “He gave me a mean look, Gran, real mean, then smiled right after so I wouldn’t think anything was wrong about his creepy face. He didn’t fool me one bit. I’m not biking home that way anymore!”
“Slow down. What are you talking about?” Elmer cupped the boy’s shoulder. “Did someone bother you? Was the man minding his own business?” Joey’s grandfather was used to his grandson’s tendency to exaggerate, but the lad’s pained face seemed more serious than usual. Together they walked up the porch steps to sit on the glider. Elmer dearly wanted to see the boy overcome his fears, to get over the awful dread his life had been full of ever since that day on the railroad tracks when his parents had been crushed to death.
“You got to believe me, Gran. Honest, he was up to no good. He had an old truck, real rough, way badder than yours, parked all crooked by the woods, nowhere near anyplace. You know that long way I sometimes bike?” Joey crinkled his forehead, staring into Elmer’s watery eyes. “Where there aren’t any houses for a long ways? Old Shed Road?”
Elmer nodded. “I know it.”
“He was there covering something in the back of his truck. He didn’t want me to see. But I did see, Gran.”
“What’d you see?”
“It was…” Joey studied the porch floor as if spotting something creeping toward him. “Something he was trying to hide.” Joey looked up at the old man. “He didn’t want me to see it. That’s for sure. It ticked him off that I did.”
Elmer bobbed his head, assessing things. “I think what we need to do is go collect Mike and get something to eat at Shermie’s Diner.”
“The truck was parked real crooked,” Joey repeated himself, the flesh on his forehead bunched with worry. “And his clothes were real dirty, like he’d been digging or something in the woods. Now why would he be doing that? Why, Gran?” The boy shuddered, seeing the man’s hostile glare again in his mind’s eye. “Something was wrong, Gran, something really, really bad.”
CHAPTER SIX
“It’s a steep wood. Her body was nowhere near the road. I’d estimate a good quarter mile and maybe three hundred feet vertically below the highway grade. Victim placement was literally drowning in downed leaves, nearly impossible to discern much of anything around the grave site.” Bruce Howard’s end-of-day call reporting in to Prusik was strictly factual. “We’ve scooped thirty-seven bags of environmental sampling surrounding the grave site. That’s pretty much it. No forensics to speak of really.”
Prusik stood up from her desk, examining an eight-by-ten blowup of the victim in situ. Tentatively, the Jane Doe was believed to be nineteen-year-old Missy Hooper, the local who had gone missing about a month ago.
“So the locals didn’t corrupt things too much?” Prusik made an effort to match Howard’s level tone, although her mind raced. It was hard to remain patient when it appeared that no clues were to be forthcoming.
“It’s hard to tell, Christine. Like I said, difficult terrain. It’s easy to stumble on a damn root hidden beneath the leaves,” Howard said as if he had done just that. “I’m sure it wasn’t easy removing the body. Hard to imagine there wasn’t some contamination by the locals. Tough break, huh?”
She mulled over the crime scene conditions—the chaotic trampling by local enforcement, and now Howard and his team stumbling over hidden roots. All of which could only obfuscate matters further and make it even less likely that she might find another piece of the puzzle. All of which conspired against the remains of whatever cordiality she could muster with Howard over the phone.
“Can you at least confirm that the body is protected, Bruce?” Howard’s cell phone had an irritating echo, feeding back Prusik’s own voice each time she spoke. “You’ve been to the coroner’s office?”
“I wouldn’t exactly describe it as a coroner’s office, not in any normal—”
“Yes, I get it. But is she properly bagged and in a cooler?”
“Look here, Christine, I’ve got a field unit on site. My orders are to secure the crime scene and collect evidence,” he responded crisply. “I assumed you’d be inspecting the body, personally. After all, that is your expertise.”
Christine’s jaw dropped at her subordinate’s reply. She forced herself to take a breath. “You’re absolutely right, Special Agent. I will be. And I’m sure I needn’t remind you this operation does require teamwork—in the lab and in the field.” The snap in her voice doubled back through her phone with a metallic reverb. “What’s with your phone, Bruce? Did it fall in the creek?” She clicked off, not waiting for his response, and unbuttoned the top of her shirt collar.
Bruce Howard had transferred in from the Boston office only four months earlier. A front-office man, he was good with a handshake in a gathering of troopers, a real man’s man—something there was no shortage of at the bureau. She had already witnessed Howard’s natural inclination to go directly to Thorne instead of following the chain of command through her—very likely Howard was unaccustomed to reporting to a woman—and she had noticed that Thorne hadn’t made a point of discouraging that behavior.
Prusik took a breath, relaxed her fist, and considered whether or not she might have handled things differently on the phone. Howard’s team had not recovered any physical evidence unless inadvertently gathered inside one of the sampling bags. The intactness of the victim’s body was of paramount importance, and the concern she expressed with Howard was correct. She had been right to ask him about it. And the urgency in her voice had been appropriate, and the snap, too. This was their first assignment working together and already it was becoming a turf war, with Howard looking at his individual piece of the puzzle only and not seeing the larger whole. His ego and pride were unmistakable. Even with the poor quality of the cell reception, it was clear that Howard displayed not a single straw’s worth of team spirit, nor did he recognize the fact she was in charge, like it or not. But she couldn’t allow her frustration with him to cloud the larger issue: it was essential that they uncover more information about the killer. Soon. Immediately.
Her desk phone rang.
“Christine?”
“Well, who else?” She combed her fingers through her short hair. “Sorry, Brian, don’t mind me. What have you got?”
“I think you had better come down to the lab and see for yourself.”
She barely took the time to say “I’ll be right there” before racing out of her office.
Prusik took the elevator three floors down and passed her CASI identity card through the lab door’s magnetic reader. Eisen was stooped over a large stainless-steel examination table. He wore protective lenses over his eyeglasses.
“Christine.” Eisen gave her a big grin
, carefully showcasing a large curved piece of glass between his gloved forefinger and thumb. “We’ve recovered a partial thumbprint.”
“From?”
“Remember we did a drift analysis for Betsy Ryan to locate the crime scene?”
Since the actual location of Ryan’s murder was never discovered, Prusik had acquiesced to Eisen’s using a math whiz friend to see whether a time and movement study could establish the corpse’s origination point, factoring in the current and local weather conditions, to help target the crime scene. But nothing had been discovered.
“I thought that was a no-go,” she said.
“Max, my guy who’s good with numbers, hadn’t calculated the late ice melt along the lakeshore this year. An unusual surface current changed the calculation, too, resulting in a sweep zone along the beachhead more than a mile farther back from our first check. Not far from the shore we found it—a patch of disturbed sand and this piece of smashed glass jar with a partial print.”
“You’re not telling me everything, Brian.” She leaned closer, studying the fragment. “A partial print is forensically questionable evidence at best.”
“OK, yes, you’re correct. But what you should be asking is how I can connect the broken glass with the murder.” Eisen beamed. “The inner surface of the jar, where I lifted the partial, is coated with the vic’s DNA.” Eisen beamed.
Prusik looked puzzled. “Are you certain?”
“Yeah, I know you’re thinking: Why the glass? What’s it doing there?” he said. “I don’t think he used it as a weapon, though. No DNA was recovered from along its broken edge, so it doesn’t appear to have been used to cut or tear through her flesh.”
Eisen held up the evidence along its edges so Prusik could see more easily. “And, yes, I do mean a ‘he.’ The width of the print falls within the normal range of an adult male.”
“That’s a public beach, Brian,” she reminded him. “It could have been picked up by a passerby.”
He nodded, already expecting the challenge. “Yeah, true. But the print was preserved in some sort of secretion—presumably the victim’s—while it was still impressionable, meaning at or near the time of her death. And another thing, the partial was protected from the elements on the inside of the jar.” Eisen removed the protective lenses. “It was a very isolated spot, Christine. Low among the beach dunes, well out of sight of the waterfront or the park road. We never would have found it without refactoring the drift equation. An isolated place indeed,” Eisen underscored.
Christine’s heart started to gallop and her breathing became ragged. She sat down and gripped the chair arms. Another remote forest landscape came into her mind’s view—very isolated and very far from home—one filled with ear-deafening insects that were nowhere near Lake Michigan’s waterfront dunes. For a moment she thought she might pass out. Where was the damn antianxiety medicine when she needed it?
“Christine, is it something I said?” Eisen said half jokingly. “Are you OK?”
“I’m fine, Brian. Fine.” Prusik stood up too quickly, fighting dizziness and an irrational impulse to run out of the lab. “Great work. Anything come up on the prints?”
“We’re running the partial print through AFIS right now,” Eisen said, referring to the Automated Fingerprint Identification System.
Prusik’s pinkie pulsed with pain. She hadn’t realized she’d been clenching her right hand, squeezing her small finger tightly the whole time. “Good work, Brian, really. Excellent. Please let me know what you find.” She strode through the laboratory door, glancing backward, seeing Eisen still standing where she’d left him, looking her way, perplexed, until the door clicked shut.
Christine returned to her office, picked up her purse and car keys, and took the elevator down to the parking garage en route to her athletic club and the calming waters of the pool. The other lanes would be quiet now. Only the drone of her own flutter kick would fill her ears and her rhythmic taking in of a lungful of air with each spiraling pull of her strong arms.
“Crosshaven Sheriff’s Department.” Mary Carter, the police dispatch operator, spoke in a calm voice. A natural at police work, Mary had been on the force for ten years. She wore a wide bullet belt and a leather gun holster that chafed every time she rocked forward in her chair, which was frequently, as she rarely left the sheriff’s office on street duty.
“Your daughter’s late coming home, Karen? I understand. Julie’s fourteen, right? And she has frizzy blonde hair.” The dispatcher typed the entries onto a missing persons screen, reading a list of questions off the computer monitor to Karen Heath, the missing girl’s mother. Mary’s police-issue black polymer eyeglasses were designed to take abuse in the field. Mary mainly needed them for reading crime thrillers. The most active duty they saw was slipping off her desk when she wiped the bridge of her nose with a Wet-Nap towelette. She loved the lemony scent of the foil-wrapped wipes, which usually made an appearance right after she’d polished off two glazed crullers from Libby’s Kitchen.
“Where’d you say Julie was earlier?” Mary typed in Daisy Rhinelander, 6 Old Shed Road, phone number 426-9807.
“Has she any notable identifying features or disfigurements?”
Small scar on right elbow from falling out of tree, Mary recorded, after winnowing out that information from a response that included Karen’s frustration with the pace of the phone call and her complaint that Mary stop delaying and call Sheriff McFaron immediately.
The dispatcher patiently stayed on the line. “I’m sorry, Karen, I didn’t get that.” She adjusted her headset. “How long has Julie been missing? Several hours, I see. You’ve checked with Mrs. Rhinelander twice. Your daughter left there at approximately three p.m.”
Mary knew that unless exigent circumstances existed, a missing person report usually couldn’t be filed with the state police network until twenty-four hours had passed, but she had Karen stay on the line while she contacted the sheriff by radio.
“Sheriff, Mary here. Over.”
“What’s doing?” Sheriff Joe McFaron said into the mike, stretching the coil its full length out the window of his 1996 Ford Bronco truck—the model four-wheeler that he favored. At that moment he was standing next to a culvert at the Beecham farm several miles south of town, eyeing Mr. Beecham, pale and sitting on the ground next to his tractor. The farmer appeared to have suffered a mild heart attack. McFaron was waiting for the ambulance to arrive.
“I’ve got Karen Heath on the line. She’s pretty worried, wants you to send out a missing child APB. Her girl’s been gone three, maybe four hours, she says. Evidently, there’s no sign of her whereabouts. Over.”
The sheriff shoved back the brim of his trooper-style hat and rubbed a palm across his brow. He knew Karen Heath could be a bundle of nerves. Even in high school, he’d never forgotten how she’d fainted when Henry Small, a lineman on his high school varsity team, had gotten his leg caught between two tackling players. The hollow crunching sound of Small’s leg bone had dropped Karen Heath straightaway on the sidelines.
“Put through a radio call to the Staties,” he said. “I should be back to the office within the hour. Did you say it was Julie or Maddy Heath missing?”
“Julie.”
“If she turns up, you’ll have to call the state boys back quick or they’ll have a conniption over my jumping the gun on this. Between you and me, Karen Heath’s always been a borderline nervous wreck, God bless her soul. Over.”
Mary issued the bulletin to the state police district office ten miles north of Crosshaven and then leaned back, chewing thoughtfully on a fresh hot cider doughnut. It was small enough to pop into her mouth whole, and just the thing to fill the lonely silences between dispatch radio calls.
Mary released the mute button and told Karen Heath that she’d notified the sheriff and put out a bulletin, then said, “Karen, if Julie turns up, I’d appreciate a call back. Anything we hear, I’ll be in touch right away.”
Karen Heath didn’t reply. Mary
thought it must have finally struck home: filing a missing persons report on her child.
“Karen, you still there?” Mary’s voice was softer this time, less businesslike.
“I hear you.”
“We’ll be in touch, Karen. You try to get yourself some rest.” Mary hung up the phone and shook her head. Julie was a nice young girl, responsible. She’d know better than to get herself in trouble. It’s probably nothing, Mary thought, reaching for another doughnut. Then she changed her mind and closed the box up tight.
The boys and Elmer took seats at a table away from all the smoke that roosted over a huddle of men on stools facing the open griddle. Shermie Dutcher, the owner of the diner, looked up from the grill, mumbled something to Karla—the only waitress in the place—and then went back to cooking, his skinny arms flailing away.
Karla placed three paper napkins tightly rolled around dinnerware in front of Elmer and the boys.
“Hey, Karla,” Elmer said. “How are you today?”
“Fine,” she said. “What’s wrong with junior here? Seen a ghost?”
Mike snorted. “Kind of.”
Joey glared at his older brother. “I didn’t see a ghost, but I did see something.”
Sixteen-year-old Mike clamped his strong hand down on his brother’s arm. “Button it, Joey.” His dark eyes drilled into the eleven-year-old’s. He’d warned Joey plenty of times about jumping to conclusions about people and spreading rumors.
Seeing the younger boy’s wounded face, Elmer said, “OK, OK, Mike. Let Joey be. He and I have got some serious fishing to do tomorrow morning early. Right, Joey?”
“Fishing” was their code for sitting and talking a spell. Joey desperately needed the old man for that. He depended on his grandfather, the only living person on the planet who would let him ramble on and listen to it all. Mike wouldn’t.
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