by Kate Flora
Freed from the distraction of worry about my dad, I could bring all of my attention to the messy situation here, to a challenge that felt like trying to juggle slippery rocks. I stared out into the slushy clearing and then on into the woods. Black tree trunks, small evergreens trying to gain a foothold where the clearing would give them some light. Those hateful patches of lingering snow. And well beyond the open space, the black shape of a rock. It was pretty funny looking rock, though, with something white on top that seemed out of place. A mitten? Maybe Heidi had had white mittens and dropped one?
My well-honed ability to sense bad things clicked in. Without thinking, I started walking toward the rock.
“Hey!” Flynn said. “Where do you think you’re going?”
God. He was such a cop.
“I think I see something.” I didn’t give him a chance to stop me, just kept heading toward that dark lump. My heart was pounding and my stomach twisted with anticipation. The closer I got, the less it looked like a rock and more like something I truly didn’t want to see.
The thud of heavy feet said that Flynn was right behind me. I braced myself, expecting a restraining hand, maybe one that wasn’t very gentle, but he surprised me. “What do you see?” he asked quietly, coming up beside me.
I paused and pointed. “Over there. That dark lump. The thing that doesn’t quite look like a stump or a rock. With that white thing on top that looks like a mitten.”
He squinted into the dark woods. “Yeah. I see what you mean. I’ll check it out. You stay here.”
I’ve been headstrong since I could walk, and despite my misadventures, I still was. With the perversity of someone who has seen far too many bad things and lacks the common sense to stay away, I followed him. The determined and resolute little girl I’d been had grown up into a determined and resolute adult. This was my find, even if I did not want to discover what I feared lay ahead. It wasn’t voyeurism, it was experience. Cops keep things close, and whatever this was, Gareth and I needed to know.
I arrived a little behind Flynn, who moved with surprising speed. As I came up beside him, I saw blood on a ground that had been churned into a mess of snow, leaves, and sticks by the struggle that had taken place here. Too big to be Heidi. Too big, too male. But the man I’d first mistaken for a rock was very definitely dead. That white thing I’d taken for a mitten? It was his hand.
I’d been expecting to find Heidi. Expecting and dreading. That’s what I’d braced for. But the shock of finding any body reverberated through me. I was having trouble catching my breath.
“Recognize him?” Flynn asked. His grip on my arm was firm and paternal, with that good cop’s innate instinct for when people need support.
I couldn’t see much and I didn’t want to go closer. Even though the side of his head was bloody, I could at least tell that the dead man had short, light brown, close-cropped hair. Definitely not one of the students, though it could have been someone on the faculty. The blood-streaked face under the damaged head looked late twenties to early thirties. A big man, muscular, not heavy. He wore khakis and highly polished black shoes, and a dark green jacket open over a blood-spattered white shirt. A few feet away, a pair of glasses that had been lost in the struggle leaned against a rotting birch log.
I turned away, pressing my hands against my stomach, feeling strange and lightheaded. “I don’t know him,” I said. “I’ve never seen him before.”
I waved a hand vaguely at Gareth, waiting impatiently with the security man who’d driven him while the rest of us had gone off on our separate quests. “Maybe Gareth does. Or Chief Greenberg.”
“Come away now,” Flynn said. He put a firm arm around my shoulders, turned me around, and steered me back toward Gareth. “This not a good sight for an expectant mother.”
He sure had that right. I didn’t think it was a good sight for anyone. Not even for Flynn, and he seemed tough as nails. I decided not to act macho, and accepted the comfort of that strong arm. Maybe pregnancy was making me soft.
I didn’t know if babies reacted to maternal shock, but MOC had suddenly moved the evening acrobatic act up several hours. Probably mommies-to-be should be looking at kittens and lambs and baby ducks, inhaling a world of cute and warm and fuzzy. Not this. “Sorry, baby,” I murmured, giving the little creature a reassuring pat. The acrobatics quieted.
Heidi’s jacket here, signs of a struggle, a dead man, and those ominous tracks. I am tired of questions, I thought wearily, even as I wondered what it all meant.
As he led me back toward Gareth, firmly in the grip of an arm that felt like a warm log, I wondered who that poor murdered man might be. I never had seen him before, but I had a wild card idea, based on things we had heard in our interviews. An idea I definitely didn’t want to have about something I wouldn’t have seen if I weren’t so stubborn. It was a long shot, but if my wild card idea was right, Heidi’s situation might have just gotten far, far worse.
Nineteen
Flynn handed me over to Gareth like I was a poor little woman in need of care and protection. Never mind that the poor little woman had found the body and it wasn’t her first. He couldn’t help it. They spend their lives serving and protecting and that is difficult to turn off. Right now, I didn’t mind. He was right, standing in the cold and damp looking at a man who’d had the side of his head smashed wasn’t good for MOC or for me.
“What is it?” Gareth asked.
“Body,” Flynn said. A man of few words, he was already walking away, talking into his phone, no doubt contacting Miller and then making the calls that would summon the necessary crime scene personnel.
“Oh my God, Thea, how awful!” Gareth said, substituting his arm for Flynn’s. He’d gone pale and could barely get out the essential question, “Is it Heidi?”
“No. It’s a male,” I said.
“What is going on here?”
There was so much despair in his voice I wished I could reassure him that everything would be fine. But obviously, very little was fine and things were growing less fine all the time. It took all my will power to keep from climbing in my car and getting out of Dodge. An escape made rather difficult by the way Chief Greenberg’s car was snuggled up to my bumper and the proximity of my car to the one Gareth had arrived in. A literal example of no wiggle room.
I couldn’t answer Gareth’s question because I didn’t know what was going on. How could I? I knew so little about the players in this situation, players Heidi’s parents could have helped us learn about. Now there would be a million new things to deal with.
Gareth was my client and we would have to work together to manage this mess, but given how shattered he looked, my immediate job was to calm him down and help him through this. We consultants also have to serve and protect. I forced the image of headlines about a body on campus, angry and concerned parents demanding answers, and a mass exodus of students from my mind. At this point, they would likely wait until the end of the school year, and that gave us time to change their minds.
“I don’t know what is going on here, Gareth. This situation leaps from crazy to crazier. But this isn’t about your students and it’s not about flaws in your campus community. It’s about one girl who got pregnant before she came to Simmons, who is traumatized and emotionally unstable and making impulsive decisions. It’s about the person who made her pregnant. About people who are trying to protect their secrets.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” he said impatiently. “But someone is dead, Thea. Who is it, and why here?”
He hesitated, grabbing a breath like a swimmer about to plunge deeply into an icy pool, and asked the question he didn’t want to ask. “Did you recognize him? Just tell me. Is it Jaden? Is it Ronnie?”
His arm dropped, and he buried his face in his hands.
In that “oh, hell!” moment, I understood I hadn’t given him adequate information. I’d known the body wasn’t a student and without sharing that information had moved on to thinking about other matters. All I’d s
aid was the victim was male and dead, so of course that’s where his thoughts went. I wasn’t doing a very good job of serving and protecting. Maybe because I was feeling pretty scattered myself. Guess I wasn’t so rock-steady as I like to pretend.
Not here for myself. “It’s not a student, Gareth. It’s someone older. A man in his late twenties, maybe early thirties.”
“Who then? Who is it?” he asked. There had been pain in his voice when he first called me about Heidi. Now he sounded ravaged. “So it’s not The General?” And remembering our other missing man, “Or Ted Basham?”
“It isn’t either of them. Too young. It’s someone I’ve never seen before.” Not that a dead stranger on campus was much help in the relief department. If he in fact was a stranger.
“This is beyond comprehension, Thea. And if that is Heidi’s coat, what does it mean that it’s here amidst a chaos of footsteps and a dead body? Where is Heidi? Was she even here and if so, why? Was she meeting someone? Do you suppose she saw something? Saw this happen? Do you suppose the killer has her?”
I saw a shudder go through his body. “That poor child. I’m supposed to keep her safe.”
Hard to do when “that poor child” had chosen to run away, yet the responsibility still fell on him. It was an awful dilemma. How was he to reassure his community? Keep Heidi safe when he didn’t know where she was and the other adults who ought to be responsible had just taken a powder?
Why was her jacket here, if that was her jacket? Had she been here with the man who lay over there, dead? Was he someone she trusted or someone trying to abduct her? Where was she now? Had she slipped out of her jacket in a struggle and run away? Or had someone taken her, perhaps the same someone who had killed that man? Miller the pathfinder thought he’d seen two sets of footprints leading away.
My stomach twisted as I imagined that poor, vulnerable girl in the clutches of a murderer, while another possibility I didn’t want to consider surfaced like a message in a Magic 8 Ball—what if Heidi had done this? Confronted the man who’d made her pregnant and struck out at him, then fled in panic when she saw what she had done?
Andre’s voice in my head reminded me to slow down and not let my assumptions get ahead of the facts. Unfortunately, we had no facts.
Sorting this scene out would fall to Miller and Flynn.
Meanwhile, my mind was racing, trying to form a strategy to protect the school’s reputation. A way to find Heidi. To find out who was responsible for her pregnancy, the question that lay at the heart of all of this.
The situation was overwhelming. We just didn’t know enough. We needed to talk to Heidi’s friends and ask them more questions. Do an internet search to test my suspicions about the identity of the dead man. Assuming they could be found, we, or Miller and Flynn, needed to ask General Norris, Mrs. Norris, and Ted Basham some hard questions. And I wanted to sit with Miller and Flynn again and test my ideas about the victim. Victims. By my count, we now had three—the dead man lying over there, Heidi Basham, and the tiny baby girl who’d been born into this horrible situation.
To answer my questions, I needed Miller and Flynn, but they would be tied up with this crime scene for hours. I also didn’t want to forget about a piece of information one of the security guards had mentioned that might get lost in the midst of this—the find that had delayed Chief Greenberg’s arrival. What had campus security found in one of the greenhouses that might relate to Heidi’s disappearance?
It was like trying to think my way out of a tornado. Gareth and I were both good at managing difficult campus situations, but this went so far beyond the normal I wasn’t sure what to do. I wanted to throw myself on the ground and beat my fists in frustration, like a toddler having a meltdown. I’d just found a man with his head bashed in. I was cold and in shock and utterly miserable. Wasn’t I entitled to a meltdown?
Nope.
There wasn’t time for misery or self-pity. Things had gotten seriously worse in terms of our campus crisis. What really gave me chills, though, was that Heidi was still missing, and might well be in the hands of someone who didn’t have her best interests at heart.
I needed to help protect the school. I also wanted to find Heidi and protect her. That was my “Thea the Human Tow Truck,” quality, the me that needed to protect the helpless and vulnerable. Which presented a dilemma if her interests and the school’s diverged. Another part of me—Thea the I Don’t Wanna—longed to declare this situation beyond EDGE’s capabilities, and drive away, leaving it to someone else to sort out. I sure hoped my car was drivable. I was so done with dead bodies.
I looked around. Flynn was still over by the body, talking on his phone, and I could see Chief Greenberg, Sergeant Miller, and the security guard coming back toward us. Greenberg veered off and headed toward Flynn. Miller and the guard came to us.
“Gareth, the snow was so patchy those prints were hard to follow, but it looks like they may have gone right to the fence at the edge of the river. Whoever it was, they’re long gone. We will have someone out with a dog, to see if we can learn more. We can use Heidi’s coat as a scent object.”
Then Miller focused on me. “Brian says you spotted the body?” he said.
I nodded.
“How in the heck did you do that?”
I repressed my initial, flippant, “Just luck, I suppose.” There wasn’t anything lucky about this. Besides, he couldn’t know my history with dead bodies. I decided to deal straight. “I saw something white on a rock. I thought it might be a mitten, something Heidi had lost. A clue to a different trail, so I decided to check it out.” I kept my eyes on the ground. “It was the man’s hand. The dead man.”
Saying that made me feel sick and MOC did a little flip in sympathy. I put my hand over what is currently—and repulsively—called a “baby bump” and turned away, watching Greenberg and Flynn’s interaction. Greenberg appearing to try and muscle his way in, Flynn resisting. Then Greenberg headed back toward us, his body language saying he’d been dismissed.
“You’re going to be around, right?” Miller said, staring at me. “We may want to speak with you again later. For now,” he surveyed the line of cars, and frowned at the way Greenberg’s was right on my bumper. “For now, we should get the unessential vehicles out of here to make way for the crime scene van. Chief Greenberg will stay with us. The rest of you can go.”
Happy to be dismissed, I looked at Greenberg. “Maybe you could back your car up a little?”
I got a frown and a grunt, like moving was a massive inconvenience and my question was impertinent. “Oh, and before I forget, Chief Greenberg,” I said, “was there anything to that student’s find in the greenhouse that might be a clue to Heidi’s disappearance?”
He frowned. “They found something they thought might be her purse. There was a purse, but there was nothing useful in it. No wallet, papers, ID, so who knows?”
Without more, he stomped away to move his vehicle.
A question to ask Bella. She would know what Heidi’s purse looked like.
I took the risk of irritating him further by asking, “Where is that purse now?”
He threw up his hands. “I think someone took it to the office.” He strode away, a very physical version of “we are done here.”
Fine with me. I was done, too. With Greenberg.
Gareth conferred briefly with Miller, then said, “Meet back in my office, Thea?” And the party broke up. Party was never a more misused word.
On our way back to the cars, the security officer named Amad, who’d started this by finding Heidi’s coat, came up beside me, and said, in a low voice, “Can you tell Mr. Wilson that there is maybe another set of tracks leading out of the picnic grove.”
I would have said, “You should tell the police,” but it was clear, from the anxious look he cast back toward Miller and Flynn, that doing that was outside his comfort zone, despite the nature of his job. “I’ll tell him,” I said. “When the police searched the area, I expect they’ll find those
tracks anyway.”
“They are leading maybe back toward the buildings?” He hesitated. “I will tell Chief Greenberg as well, but he doesn’t always listen to me.”
I was not surprised.
I wanted to grab his arm, make him show me where they were, and follow them. I wanted desperately to find Heidi, even more so after Nina Smirnoff’s cryptic remarks and what had just transpired. Anxiety gripped my stomach like the squeeze of a giant’s hand. But while they’d been nice enough to work with, Miller and Flynn were now managing a crime scene. Bad enough I was the one who’d found the body; I knew from experience that any attempt to do further investigation on what was now their turf would not get a friendly response.
I also didn’t have a lot of confidence in Greenberg’s willingness to listen to Amad. Talking to Gareth was all I could do. “The police will probably find the footprints” I said again, because he still seemed so anxious.
He shrugged dismissively.
Between his thatch of curly dark hair and his dark beard, his face was hard to read. Was that skepticism or just dislike of the police? “Why wouldn’t they find them?” Ah. Thea, the woman who is not a cop, acting like one.
“They are very hard to see, with the leaves and the sticks and all those patches of snow. Unless there is someone looking who knows what to look for.”
“And that would be you?”
I thought that was a smile behind the beard. “I have tracked many people, Miss Thea. Many people.”
How often people we might discount can surprise us. “But they will bring a dog,” I said. “So the dog will find them.”
Another shrug. “Yes, the dog will find those tracks if they let the dog find those tracks. Dogs, they are only as good as the people who handle them. I have seen much of this as well.”
“You were a translator in Iraq,” I said, thinking I meant far more than translator.