“What, get rid of a perfectly good car?” Dr. Henegar’s stocky hulk emerged from the gloom. Only his heavy eyebrows and beard were visible. “I don’t like it when the coroner part of my job involves young girls.”
The sheriff grunted and directed the doctor’s flashlight down. “The spot’s over here. And let’s not go assuming it’s a done deal already. The girl’s only been reported missing.”
Henegar placed his doctor’s bag on the curb. McFaron trained his Maglite on the blood spatter.
“Joey Templeton said there was a man standing by a truck parked near the pole.” McFaron shone the light quickly on the tire smudge. “Evidently, this guy was stuffing something in the back bed. The boy also claims he saw red polka dots on the man’s clothing and face.”
“Just missing, huh?” Henegar said, shaking his head and ducking closer to inspect the blood. “Sounds more like a done deal to me.”
“Hey, you’re the doc,” McFaron said. “Let me be the cop.”
Henegar reached into his medical bag. “Shine your light over here, will you, Joe?” He took out a plastic container, which held a blood recovery kit like the kind used by paramedics for insurance applicants. He swabbed a few blood spots onto two circled areas of absorbent material for DNA and blood-typing.
“This ought to do the trick. Her family doctor should have Julie Heath’s blood type on file. If not, siblings’ and parents’ blood can determine consanguinity.” Henegar grunted as he stood.
“Hold on a minute,” McFaron said. “There’s no need for you to go calling Dr. Simington just yet. First off, what does this look like to you?” The sheriff flashed the light over the evidence.
“Blood—what else?”
“Obviously, Doc. I mean the way it’s sprayed, like a squirt mark. No scrapes, no scuffs, no smudges, not even a single footprint or sign of any scuffle. Just this jet of blood.” McFaron stepped closer to Henegar. “To be honest, I’m not sure what we’ve got here.”
“Maybe she bit the attacker on the wrist, cutting an artery?” Henegar said. “Deep-red spatter usually indicates arterial blood.”
“Do you really think a kid’s bite is likely to yield that much blood?”
Henegar threw up his hands. “You asked. I answered. Look, I’ve collected a decent enough sample. We’ll know something more definitive after the crime lab analysis. I assume you’ve photographed it already?”
“I have,” McFaron said. Then he cautioned, “This stays between you and me till further orders.”
“If it’s confirmed human,” Henegar said, giving the sheriff a sober look, “you know I’ll need to get the girl’s blood type, Joe, or they’ll take away my coroner’s license.”
“No one’s quarreling with your statutory duties. I’m only asking that you check with me first before contacting anyone.” So far, there were more questions than answers, and the sheriff didn’t want to heap any unnecessary anguish on the Heath family.
“And, just so you know,” Henegar reminded the sheriff, “if the girl doesn’t turn up for some reason, I’ll probably need to take blood samples from the whole Heath family for DNA matches to compare against this sample, too.”
McFaron faced the doctor. “How long before you’ll know the results?”
“You want to drive it up? It’ll save a day,” the doctor said. “Blood-typing results should be back in less than twenty-four hours. The DNA analysis will take longer, a week maybe.”
“I’ll drive it up,” McFaron said.
Henegar handed him the sample in its double-secure plastic case. McFaron’s cell phoned trilled in his pocket. It was Mary, wanting to know when he’d be going over to the Heaths’. He said right away.
“Any other thoughts?” McFaron asked. Doc Henegar stood with his bag, ready to leave.
“Only ones you don’t need to hear if you’re going to see the Heaths right now.” Henegar lowered himself into the front seat of his decrepit vehicle. The starter wheezed like a croupy baby.
The sheriff walked over. “Appreciate your coming so quick, Doc.” The dim glow of the dash illuminated Henegar’s bearded face.
“Don’t bother giving my best to Karen and Bob. My heart and prayers go out to them tonight.” He saluted McFaron and drove off.
McFaron watched the taillights of the doctor’s car disappear around the bend. “Oh, Lordy,” he said aloud, and then he unfurled a roll of police tape, twisting it several times around two orange traffic cones marking off the site.
Although Julie had been missing only four hours, the discovery of blood gave McFaron the ammunition he needed to request that the state police send all available personnel, including off-duty troopers, ASAP to commence a dusk-to-dawn search of the wooded areas between the school and the Heath girl’s home. They’d gather at the state police post for a briefing in one hour. Driving to the Heaths’, the sheriff mulled over what he might tell them. He would reiterate the obvious: that everything possible was being done to find Julie, that she might have gotten lost in the woods taking a shortcut home. Kids frequently got into trouble doing the silliest things.
And it was all nothing but lies. In his gut, he knew Julie had been harmed, or worse.
Acknowledgment of what was sure to be a fact strengthened his resolve. He had never been a quitter, although some had accused him of it. Twelve years ago he’d left law school after the first year and run for sheriff of his hometown county, frustrated at how easily defendants got off on technicalities and at the lack of quality law enforcement in his rural jurisdiction. It had been disgust that had pushed McFaron out of the classroom, and a desire to do good; quitting had nothing to do with it. As it turned out, though, resolving disputes between feuding landowners, keeping perennially drunken drivers off the streets, and intervening in petty domestic quarrels formed the bulk of his police work.
He slowed the Bronco at the turn to the Heaths’ driveway. Heat built along the ridge of his spine. It always had during big moments, all the way back to when winning football games had been his most important goal. Don’t fail the fans. They’re depending on you. Don’t fail Julie or the Heaths. But tonight he had no magical play in his repertoire to keep from coming up empty. He drove in and parked.
Above the Heaths’ front door a cluster of PAR38 outdoor lights blazed. McFaron checked himself in his rearview mirror, steadying his gaze, making sure he only conveyed concern and gave away nothing that might fuel an outburst from Karen Heath. Keep it simple. The girl had gone missing, nothing else. He would assure them, but most of all he would listen. That much he owed the Heaths.
McFaron gently shut the door of the Bronco and took in a long slug of night air, unsure what he’d say first. The only thing he was certain about was that he wouldn’t breathe a word about the blood. Not until it was identified.
Bob Heath cleared his throat, surprising him. The man had silently slipped out the front door and stood waiting for the sheriff.
“Hey, Bob.” McFaron tipped the brim of his trooper hat.
“Any word?” Heath stopped short, sensing no good news. His hands stayed jammed in the front pockets of his pants. “Thing is, Sheriff…it’s Karen…” He spoke in a strangled voice, as if even talking was too much of an effort.
“I’m afraid not, Bob. We got an APB out. State troopers and I are starting a sweep of the area as soon as I leave here. She’ll turn up.”
Heath’s brow creased. “What’s that supposed to mean—she’ll turn up?”
“In all likelihood she’s lost somewhere. We’ll find her, Bob.”
Heath shook his head, gazing downward.
“Bob, listen to me.” McFaron spoke in a softer voice. “She probably cut through the woods coming home from Daisy’s. Maybe she fell, twisted her ankle. Believe me, we’ll find her. It’s where I’m headed right now.” The sheriff refrained from mentioning Methuselah, Clyde Harmstead’s bloodhound, whom they’d use if Julie didn’t surface by the next morning.
“Karen’s given a good description to Mary
.” McFaron stopped short of assuring Bob that he’d bring her home alive. “I won’t rest till she comes home or we find her. You know I won’t.”
“I want to join the search party.”
The sheriff gently rested his hand on the father’s broad shoulder. “As hard as it is, Bob, I’m asking you to stay home and take care of Karen and Maddy. They need you here with them.”
Heath shook his head; his lower lip pushed out. McFaron was thankful for having to deal only with Bob. Facing down Karen would have been harder with the blood evidence looming.
“I need to be going now. I’m on it full time, Bob. I’ll call as soon as I hear anything.”
McFaron got in his truck, waiting for Heath to go inside. Standing by a window next to the front door was the Heaths’ younger daughter, Maddy. Her face was plastered against the glass, staring at the sheriff. It was easy to see she’d been crying.
McFaron backed out of the drive. A mile farther down the road he veered onto the state highway, taking it north to Monroeville to the regional crime lab. He called his office on his cell. Mary was still there. McFaron told her he was headed straight for the lab, and then the briefing, and wouldn’t get to the Templetons’ till morning with the truck identification book. Mary said she’d notify Mr. Templeton and that she’d stay as late as he needed her to. Tonight he didn’t discourage her from the overtime.
The STATE POLICE POST sign appeared a quarter mile before the exit. McFaron took the turn and parked near the crime lab annex, which was a one-story gray building attached to the police barracks. The lab was well equipped for blood-typing, fingerprinting, and preparing samples to be sent to the main lab in Indianapolis for DNA testing, and McFaron had been there plenty of times before. Always with fingerprints though. Never with blood.
Missy Hooper, the girl who’d gone missing from Paragon Amusement Park, flashed through McFaron’s mind. Her decomposing body had just been found less than forty-five miles from here. It felt like a bad sign—and the blood sample riding on the seat beside him didn’t seem to promise anything good, either.
CHAPTER TEN
The ceiling lights in the narrow fuselage flickered as the Saab 340 turboprop commuter plane banked aloft, leaving behind the small Indiana airfield but not Prusik’s unsettled nerves. She checked her digital watch—7:30 p.m.—and adjusted the collar of the navy-blue polyester suit she preferred to wear to crime scenes and postmortems. She had spent a long day leaning over a decomposed body in a stuffy back room of a Blackie, Indiana, general medical practitioner’s office, blowflies constantly strafing her face mask in the makeshift morgue. Zippered in with the body as maggots, the pesky flies had emerged undaunted by an overnight stay in the cooler. The decaying flesh couldn’t disguise the ruthlessness of the young girl’s end.
Afterglow from the sunset came flooding through the porthole windows, coloring the cabin orange pink. In an hour a driver would pick her up at Chicago O’Hare and deliver her downtown to headquarters to face a barrage of questions from Brian Eisen and the rest of her team. Roger Thorne was impatient to see progress. Already stacked up on her new wireless PDA were three incoming messages from him since noon, wanting an update. Although she knew keeping him informed was part of her job heading up an investigation on a high-profile case, she was in no mood to talk to Thorne about Washington’s expectations. She needed clear air to think.
The fiery sky faded into a hazy charcoal gloom. The dead girl had a name: Missy Hooper. Dental records would confirm what the girl’s distraught parents already had. She’d been reported missing on July 4, close to a month ago, having last been seen by a friend, who’d dropped her at a local amusement park in Paragon, Indiana. From there, she’d placed a cell phone call to Glenna Posner, her best friend, a waitress who was supposed to meet her at the park but who’d canceled at the last minute. Posner’s feelings of guilt were so profound she had little to offer except one important piece of information: there was no boyfriend in Missy’s life, nor anyone Missy’d had a crush on, even from a distance. Whoever she’d left with, therefore, was most likely someone she’d just met. Interviews of park employees by Indiana state police officers had turned up nothing out of the ordinary. The Hooper family had recently moved from Weaversville, a city one hundred miles farther south, to Paragon, one town over from Blackie, where Mr. Hooper worked as a coal separator in a strip mine.
During the postmortem exam, Prusik had had to endure the plaintive wails of a distraught child in the doctor’s outer office. Between swatting flies and having to listen to the sobbing girl, whose mother kept calling her a crybaby for not cooperating, Prusik had nearly dropped the forceps more than once to rush out, dressed in mask and stained gown, and demand that the mother leave the office. But each time she had bitten her lip as she delicately lifted the dead girl’s fingers, carefully scraping and bagging the grit from under each grimy nail before taking a miserably gooey set of fingerprint impressions.
A sweltering heat wave had accelerated decomposition and jellified the flesh. Prusik had confirmed the estimated time of death: approximately twenty-four days ago. Larva hatchlings collected from the corpse were definitely second generation, meaning the body had been decomposing in humid heat since shortly after Missy Hooper’s visit to the amusement park. It disturbed Prusik to see so many larvae squirming beneath the tissue, giving a weird life to the face.
What disturbed her more, though, was the startling discovery she’d made near the end of the exam. Her mind had started reeling with the bizarre connections the discovery forced her to make and then just as quickly discard. She had recovered her composure enough to complete the exam, but it had cost her. One Xanax, to be precise.
As Prusik had finished her job, the drama in the outer office had continued unabated. A nurse, now the mother’s coconspirator, kept repeating that the booster shot wouldn’t hurt a bit, promising the girl a cherry sucker when it was all over. Prusik shook her head in disgust. She hated it when people lied, and she especially hated it when they lied to children.
Too much had gone wrong before she got to Blackie. Police had crudely raked aside all the leaves at the crime scene, looking for a weapon, when it was perfectly obvious the girl’s neck had been broken. She wondered how long the site had remained unprotected and not taped off. How many onlookers had wandered down to see where it had happened? Prusik didn’t believe the local police’s assurances that no one had. How many unauthorized pictures had been snapped of the slain girl and sold already to the highest-bidding tabloid? The snafus were driving her crazy.
From her limited perusal of the crime scene, she doubted Howard’s field unit would have much success documenting which way the victim had fled through the woods, which might have led to the location of vital evidence. Howard had done the best job possible with a contaminated site, she had no doubt about that; he was nothing if not thorough. The business with the feather bothered her—why had he doled the information out so stingily when it was such a significant finding?—but she realized that she had to stop feeling threatened by him. Howard had his own fears and insecurities, no doubt. Alienating him now would do her no good; she would only lose any insights he might be able to provide. The cases were spread over a wide geographic area. And if she wanted to succeed, she was going to need all the help she could get.
The plane bucked wildly, tossing Prusik’s briefcase onto the floor in the aisle. The seat belt light flashed on and the captain announced that they were in for a little turbulence. Her tongue was throbbing, and she tasted coppery blood. She’d accidentally bitten herself.
“Ma’am, are you OK?” A heavyset man in a business suit leaned across the aisle and handed her the briefcase.
“Fine,” she muttered in a funny voice, favoring her tongue.
It took hitting an air pocket to know she wasn’t fine at all. With her heart at a canter, the uncomfortable sinking feeling was taking hold again. She sucked for air, just as she had in the makeshift morgue with her arm buried up to the elbow in pulpy re
mains. When her hand had touched Missy Hooper’s torn windpipe, she had found something hard wedged tightly there. Pinching the object between a rubber-gloved finger and thumb had sent ten-year-old adrenaline shooting through Prusik’s veins.
Her eyes floated in and out of focus on the seat back in front of her. The past is never done with us, she thought. She had so successfully concealed it from everyone at the bureau all these years, but all it took was one little thing. One little thing? She interrupted herself. One little thing? This was not a little thing. She clenched her right fist, burying the pinkie nail into her heavily callused palm.
Furtively Prusik checked around the cabin. No passengers were looking. She flipped open the end clasps of her briefcase. Papers spilled from file folders onto her lap. A hard plastic vial rolled loose over the top, tumbling to her feet. Prusik quickly scooped it off the floor, ripping a jacket seam in the process.
She pressed her forehead against the small porthole glass. Blackness met her gaze. The vial in her hand had taken her straight back to the heat, the water, the terror.
Eleven years earlier, she’d been sitting cross-legged between the shelves in the graduate library stacks at the University of Chicago when she had come across a thin sleeve of hand-bound notes. They were research notes typed in the field by Marcel Beaumont, a graduate student in physical anthropology, her own department, in the early sixties.
Beaumont had done fieldwork two springs in a row in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. In May 1962, when he was scheduled to return home from Port Moresby, PNG’s capital, word had come back that the young researcher had vanished in the vast reaches of the Katori rain forest. One possible explanation for his disappearance Prusik had gleaned from the riveting final passages of his prior summer’s typed field notes. He had been in pursuit of an infamous highland clan known as the Ga-Bong Ga-Bong. Though forbidden by law, the Ga-Bong men continued the practice of cannibalism with depraved indifference. There appeared to be no social or kinship explanation for their behavior, nor could it be attributed to internecine fighting—the well-documented practice of ritual wars between tribal villages. Most ritual wars, as Prusik understood, were more a matter of economic shoring up, resetting the balance, a give-and-take between villages, not the wreaking of unholy violence as the Ga-Bongs did. Their attacks were haphazard, with no relationship to debts owed or reciprocal exchanges expected. No witnesses ever came forward, so feared were these nomadic kinsmen.
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