Silent Scream

by Karen Harper

  “It’s a joke among the crew,” Kris said, still frowning and obviously trying to change the subject, “that we’re not far from Mud Bay. We do get ‘boggy dirty’ on this dig. At least the Everglades runoff from Lake Okeechobee doesn’t flow through the bog. It’s more solid peat, not water.”

  “Sounds delightfully muddy anyway. Kris, it’s okay to ask about the woman in the freezer. Honestly, I’ve been through tough times before.”

  “I didn’t mean to hit you with all that right away. The bodies we deal with are hardly frozen in this South Florida climate but they are frozen in time.”

  “The TV stations and Naples Daily News picked up on the story fast, but I can see why, so I’m glad to ‘get out of Dodge’ today. Thanks for picking me up at my sister’s where—I hope—reporters won’t know to find me later. Nick won’t escape them at the office, though, especially if Dale Braun shows up there for work this morning.”

  “Yeah, to no doubt get arrested the moment he does—at least dragged in for questioning. And that poor couple who works for you—to have a picture of their new house and its address all over the news. They’ll get ghoulish gawkers, which is exactly why the Black Bog dig is top secret.”

  “Bronco and Nita have had it tough. They and another couple we know—a tech guy who also works for Nick, and the techie’s girlfriend—have been through a lot with us. But let’s talk about something cheery—like the bog bodies you’ve managed to hide from the world so far.”

  “Claire,” Kris said, turning her head briefly toward her, before looking back at the road, “that—excuse me for putting it this way—is deadly serious. You’ll see why this has to be classified information for now. Carefully read that part of the contract the Vances will offer you. You may even have to lie to people you know. We have to keep the lid on this. I’ve said it before, but our findings are important to archaeology and mankind. You’ll see why when Andrea and I show you around.”

  “I can’t wait, and, believe me, you can trust Nick and me. The others will just know I’m working on a project that’s private for now—even chatterbox Lexi.”

  “She’s a doll,” Kris said, as she made the westward turn onto an unpaved road which kicked up a trail of dust behind them. The month of May was early in the rainy season: the sky was a bit gray, and rain clouds threatened. Claire was grateful that Kris seemed so easy to work with. Even when her friend had some serious, almost stressed-out moments, they had always segued easily back into their longtime trust and friendship. Claire sat up straight and pulled her big purse with touch screen tablet and good old pen and paper notebook closer to her legs. She wanted to be prepared in case her iPad didn’t work out here. She had to really pay attention, take notes to go over later, since this was foreign territory in more ways than one. She’d taken things pretty easy with work since Trey’s birth and wondered if her concentration and stamina would hold up. She’d seldom been in on something as unusual or fascinating as this—lots of dead bodies with totally foreign lives and deaths. And she had the opportunity to psych them out, to bring them back to life in a way.

  “I saw that road sign we just passed said we’re heading toward Blackwater Bay,” she observed. “Is Black Bog along that bay?”

  “In the vicinity, but not on the water. You do know the difference between a bog, a fen and a swamp, don’t you?”

  “I have a feeling I’m going to have a lot to learn here. I know a swamp is standing water and various stages of plant growth. Tell me the rest.”

  “A fen—which there are so many of in the colder countries of Europe, but some here in the Southern US—is an open body of water on a bog’s surface. If there’s a fen in a dig, we drain it, as we have here, at least as best we could during the dry seasons, so pray there’s not much rain for a while,” she said, squinting at the gray sky. “If it rains, we cover what we have and come back another day.”

  “But this is obviously a bog, not a fen or swamp per se.”

  “Right. Bogs, which we are mostly dealing with, hold layers of dead plant material often called peat, including rotting sphagnum moss. Sphagnum releases tanning acids that preserve the corpses, almost as if they’ve been pickled—a gross picture, I admit. Some bogs are as thick as forty feet, but fortunately, Black Bog is only about twelve feet deep, and we’ve drained and excavated that down to about eight to ten feet. We have to be very careful resurrecting bodies and any artifacts, of course.”

  “Do the bodies damage easily once they’re out?”

  “No, they’re amazingly resilient. The bones are pretty soft because the acid in peat has leached out a lot of calcium phosphate, so the bodies are rubbery and look kind of deflated. But, Claire, you can see expressions, stubble, eyelashes!

  “It would make things so much easier,” Kris went on, “if we could use a GPS finder like we can use over digs on solid ground, but those things are heavier than a lawn mower and would sink. You’ll see our system of planks laid out in grids over our finds. You’ll have to learn, as we say, to ‘walk the plank’ to get a good look at the bodies in their graves before we disinter them. Enough said, because I’ll let Andrea give you the tour. Brad may be back later, but he had to oversee their art and antique store in Naples this morning. Art For Art’s Sake. Funny, huh? Their real antiques are top secret, but they sell other ones in stores on both Florida coasts.”

  “It all sounds totally intriguing. As Lexi likes to say, ‘Are we there yet?’”

  “Claire, our work in this place is going to blow your mind.”

  * * *

  “Nick, I swear to you, I had no idea there was a body in my mother’s freezer—especially not Cyndi’s! Yeah, we had a bad breakup, but I’ll always love her and never would have hurt her!” Dale Braun protested and threw himself into a chair in front of Nick’s desk.

  Nick had finally reached him by phone and told him to come up to the office the back way, using the janitor’s entrance and stairs. Bronco had met him and led him to Nick’s office because the police were waiting out by his secretary’s desk as well as at the front door of the building. They both knew they had little time before, at the least, he was taken downtown for questioning.

  Nick shoved away from leaning against his desk. He didn’t want to seem intimidating, but he wanted the truth from this man in a hurry.

  Nick had been pretty hard on Dale this morning, but he needed to get a feel for his employee’s emotions as well as the truth about this mess. He wasn’t putting this firm out on a limb only to have the branch cut off if this guy had murdered that poor girl.

  “Now I’ve got the law after me,” Dale said the obvious behind muffling hands over his mouth. “Damn, that’s a great way to say it, right? The law is after the lawyer, and, yes, I know why,” he went on as his hands flopped to grasp his knees. “Yeah, I broke up with her, not the other way around, so who knows what she told her friends or family.”

  “Exactly when was this? I’m sure the ME will soon rule on how long she’s been dead and what killed her, but give me the basic time frame and just hope it doesn’t sync with what the ME will find on time of death.”

  “Just over a week ago. Ten days, I guess. Yeah, before last weekend, shortly after my mother’s funeral.”

  “Not at your house or that one, I hope. Dale?” he prompted when the man hesitated. “Just answer questions, don’t fume and agonize or it will look like you’re making things up as you go.”

  “Yeah—at my house. But Nick, she’s the one who was angry, not me. Will the firm stand by me, defend me if it comes to that? I did not kill her and sure as hell didn’t stash her in my demented mother’s freezer just after she died.”

  “We’ll stand by you, but you’re going to have to cooperate with the police. I’ll be there with you for your statement. You know the drill. Just stick to the facts, offer nothing extra and, as my forensic psych wife would counsel, look the detective in the eye and don’t f
idget all over the place. Dale,” he said, leaning down to grip the man’s shoulder, “we not only defend strangers but our own here. The firm is like a family too.”

  “Thank God,” he said and exhaled hard. He seemed to deflate with relief.

  “I’ll need your complete statement, of course, but you’re going to have to go with Detective Jensen before he knocks my office door down. I’m sure he wanted to question you before you lawyered up, but this is our territory.”

  “Your sticking by me will carry weight, yours and this firm’s reputation,” he said in a raspy voice, but he shook his head as if trying to convince himself. Nick didn’t like how strung out Dale looked, with bloodshot eyes and dark circles under them when he had supposedly been away to relax and hadn’t been hit with all this until about an hour ago, though of course—hopefully—it was a shock. So why hadn’t the guy been sleeping and decompressing this weekend? Had his decision to break up with Cyndi done that to him or was he tormented by something more recent?

  “I’ll invite the detective in,” Nick said, heading for the door. “He’ll probably insist on our going to the station. But he can’t arrest and hold you for anything—can he?” he asked, turning back. “Like your fingerprints on that old freezer?”

  “Of course, I’ve been all over that house for years, even recently before the sale to Bronco and Nita was finalized. Nick, my mother had stage four dementia, so who knew what she would have said if she was alive. She still thought my German great-uncle was alive and living in his big manor at the rear of the estate. She’d get everything confused.

  “Anyway,” he plunged on, “I’m sure I left DNA if—if they find that was the—the crime scene. Not just where she was hidden but where she was murdered as well. I just hope to hell she wasn’t put in there alive. I mean, you said it looked like she was screaming.”

  A whole string of questions popped into Nick’s head such as who else had keys to the place, but he’d save that all until later. Right now they had to cooperate with the police—and eventually, he feared, with the prosecuting attorneys of Collier County.

  “Nick, if I touched that freezer, it was long ago,” Dale repeated, circling back to that, maybe overexplaining. “I was hoping Bronco and his wife would get it out of there—just because it’s so heavy, I mean. Obviously, I would not have stashed my ex-girlfriend—”

  “Your former fiancée. Keep everything straight.”

  “Right. I would never have put her body there, then sold the house. Damn, my head hurts with all this,” he said, gripping his skull in his hands again. “Too much so soon after learning she’s dead. I did love her...but it just wasn’t going to work out.”

  Why not? Nick wanted to demand, but that too would come later. He wished he didn’t empathize with Dale so much but he understood emotional devastation. Fear. The powerful way a woman could change everything in life, one way or the other. He hesitated with his hand on the doorknob, because he sensed something else was coming.

  “I just wanted to get away this weekend, get over her. Nick, she was just too grasping, self-centered, wanted too many big things too fast. She knew my family had money, though I told her my great-uncle didn’t leave me much except that deserted old mansion that’s in ruins. I plan to tear down what little of it’s left, but demolition costs big bucks. Listen, I thought Cyndi went to Georgia to stay with her brother’s family for a while—that is, I assumed—”

  “Assume nothing. You’re rambling. Sit up straight. Don’t put your hands over your mouth and mumble. I’m opening this door to let the detective in, and we’ll face him together. And you know damn well not to offer so much—blurt things out like this, no matter how devastated or emotional you are. Self-preservation time, Dale. Answer questions, tell the truth, but no more than that.”

  He came back to his desk, squeezed Dale’s shoulder, went over and opened the door.

  * * *

  Claire was really glad to have Kris here as friend and support. One look at the setup at Black Bog made her realize she should assume nothing and take in everything. Her senses went on alert. She felt the quickening breeze brush her skin. She heard the screech of a gull overhead and the distant roar of an alligator—or was that thunder? Darn, she hadn’t thought of gators or being near a bog if there was a lightning storm. She gripped her purse as she got out of the Jeep.

  The first surprise was how finished, even formal, everything looked. She’d almost imagined tents, but after all, Kris had said the Vances lived here, and they were obviously wealthy.

  On one side of the gated entry road stood a small guard house, where a guy in khaki shorts waved at Kris and opened the gate. The entire acreage was fenced with a see-through wire barrier. To the left on the narrow entry lane, an elevated new-looking one-story house with a wooden deck all around it and a large, screened-in porch in back dominated the area. Two vehicles, one a small truck, the other a black BMW, similar to Nick’s, were parked under the first floor which was elevated in typical South Florida storm-surge style. But a storm would be a catastrophe for a bog this close to the water.

  “That’s where the Vances live now,” Kris told her, pointing to the house. “It’s so shady in here the house only gets sun for a couple of hours around noon. You should have seen their other place, really gorgeous. Had a pool, right on the beach, you know, one of those places on Gordon Drive in Port Royal. It just shows you how dedicated they are to this project that they have that place up for sale. They are funding this Black Bog effort and that takes big bucks.”

  The other main edifice was really a collection of buildings. Elevated walkways connected them, one of which reminded her of a long dock, reaching out into what looked like swampland guarded by twisted ficus trees with overhanging branches. That sprawling building had several air conditioners humming.

  “The forest primeval, right?” Kris said as she led Claire toward the large spread-out wooden building. “That’s the path to Black Bog, but we’ll talk to Andrea first, and she’ll give you the tour if you’re still interested in the assignment.”

  “So the Vances actually live here all the time?”

  “They do now—total dedication to this project. There is a staff restroom and shower over there,” she said pointing at a small building on the edge of the sprawl.

  They stopped at a door under an overhang of roof that had printed letters A VANCE on it. Claire saw there was a slot for a pass card. Kris knocked.

  “I saw on the cameras you’re here, Kris,” came a sharp voice through the door. “In more ways than one, bring her in!”

  4

  First with preliminary questions in his office, then at the police station, Nick sat with Dale, who had finally pulled himself together to face the barrage of questions from Ken Jensen. Dale left with the knowledge he’d be interrogated again soon. Nick drove him back to the office rather than taking him home where, no doubt, gawkers at the least and the press at the most awaited.

  Nick told Dale to just lock himself in his office for a while to defuse. The younger secretaries and paralegals always fussed over him and eyed him, but today were standing clear.

  Nick knew he had work waiting, and he wasn’t expecting any word from Claire until at least the afternoon. What a day so far!

  His tech genius Hector—called Heck—Munez was camped out on a chair by Nick’s secretary’s desk. “More chaos than usual,” Nick told Heck, who followed him in. Nick dropped his briefcase and closed the door behind them. Heck kept the firm up on various online activity, so this visit wasn’t really unusual.

  “If it’s good news, let’s hear it,” Nick said. “Bad—save it.”

  “The firm gonna defend him?”

  “If it comes to that, absolutely. He would not have left Cynthia Lindley’s body on his mother’s property to be found. We don’t hire idiots in this firm and that includes you, so what have you got?”

  “Facial recognitio
n technology.”

  Nick sank into the chair behind his desk and put his feet up, tilting back. He closed his eyes for a moment and pinched his nose with thumb and finger. “That’s a good one. What about it? Claire is with a friend right now from her college days—they’re just hanging out for a while,” he added, wishing he didn’t have to hold things back from people he trusted. “Anyway, this woman has what is commonly called ‘face blindness,’ which I guess isn’t common, though some famous people have it. Her facial recognition is nil—nada.”

  “Heard of it. I’ll look it up. Maybe this technology could help someone like her someday. See, I got a chance to moonlight, make some extra money with a company that’s into—way into—producing facial recognition software and then selling it. I could work on the production part. It’s big business and getting bigger. For example, companies like high-end stores use face prints to ID their top customers when they walk in so the staff can greet them and serve them better. The thing is, I could work for this company in a consulting capacity to produce even better technology.”

  When it rained, it poured, Nick thought. Claire and now Heck, both eager to branch out, but he could see why. Amazing possibilities abounded lately.

  “I’d like to take this side gig, boss. But the thing is, they’re gonna need legal help on all this too, ’cause, of course, there will be pushback on it, privacy violation and all that. But I need your permission and your advice.”

  “How are the faces recognized?”

  Heck sat even farther forward. “Boss, I swear, it’s the wave of the future. So a scanner picks up a face it’s programmed to recognize, and immediately the owner of the scanner gets data on his screen or phone as to who the person is, their preferences, maybe their financial past, stuff like that.”