Little Girl Blue, a Seth and Ava Mystery

by Claudia Hall Christian

  Ava nodded. There was a moment of silence as people digested this information.

  “She’s referring to the Sand Creek Massacre,” Seth said. “This burial site is a little more than nine miles from Chivington.”

  “Do we think this site is connected to the Sand Creek Massacre?” Leslie asked.

  “No,” Bob said. “The Sand Creek Massacre was November 20, 1864. The town of Chivington was built in 1887, when the Missouri Railroad moved into Colorado.”

  “When were the Colorado Railroad Wars?” Seth asked.

  “1879,” Bob said. “I looked up all of this. The Sand Creek Massacre was in 1864. The Railroad Wars — which impacted mostly areas west of this site, Pueblo, Denver, and the like — were in 1879. The Missouri Pacific Railroad entered Colorado in 1887.”

  “And Missouri Pacific built these towns?” Ava asked.

  “Or they were built for the Missouri Pacific,” Bob said. “They built towns all along the rail line after Lake Sheridan. The towns are alphabetical — Arden, Branden, Chivington, Diston, Eads, Fergus, Galatea, Haswell, Inman, Joliet, and Kilburn.”

  “My, you are thorough,” Dr. Quincy said.

  Everyone laughed.

  “You didn’t learn this in high school?” Ava asked Nelson.

  “Probably,” Nelson said with a grin. “I was a little preoccupied with the whole ‘I’m gay’ thing. I could have learned a thousand things. Not much stuck.”

  “Good to know,” Ava said.

  “Moving on,” Nelson said. “These railroad towns are mostly ghost towns, now. Chivington has a few disintegrating buildings, a few farms, and some businesses to support the highway. The ancient prairie has taken over most of what was the town. I think there are like 600 people in Eads, Colorado, the county-seat.”

  “So, this child was buried, if you can call it that, in a ghost town on the eastern edge of Colorado,” Dr. Quincy said.

  “My question is: ‘Why was she buried there?’” Nelson said. “Why there? When we look at the land, there’s clearly something else going on here.”

  “Should we look at that?” Ava asked. “I mean, we’re working on a small grant. We have limited time to work this grant in the middle of our other work.”

  “Whenever we have these conversations, I think about the thousands of families who are waiting for their loved one to come home,” Seth said. “I know that I say it all the time, but that’s really what gets me. What if there are people buried there? What if this murder was a way of pointing a finger at whatever happened here — and we miss it because of some budgetary concern?”

  “There’s a logistical issue here,” Bob said. He looked around the room. “What do we want to do if we find other remains?”

  “We do our job,” Ava said with a nod.

  “Exactly,” Fran said at the same time that Leslie said, “That’s right.”

  “I’m just saying that, when we’re out there, we should check this out,” Nelson said. “It could easily be something historic . . .”

  “Or a body dump,” Ava said with a nod. “Then we agree to check it out?”

  She looked from face to face. Everyone nodded, “Yes.”

  “What if we run out of money?” Ava asked.

  “We work for free,” Fran said.

  “Wouldn’t be the first time,” Nelson said.

  “Or you find more money,” Fran said.

  Ava grinned at her team, and they smiled back at her. She glanced at Dr. Quincy, whose eyes were on Ava.

  “I wonder if you would like to go next, Dr. Quincy,” Ava said. “Share what you know about this case?”

  “I should say right off the bat that I used to know her mother,” Dr. Quincy said.

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  Five

  “The victim’s mother?” Leslie asked.

  Dr. Quincy nodded.

  “I babysat her when I was in high school,” Dr. Quincy said. “The mother, that is. The mother got pregnant with her when she was young. She said that she was raped. Said it was a prominent white man. But no one paid any attention to her.”

  Dr. Quincy nodded as if that was just how it was.

  “I tried to help her, but she just wasn’t the same after the assault,” Dr. Quincy said. “I was . . . in my residency on the East Coast. There was little I could do — little anyone could do. The mother got involved with heroin and died before her baby turned two. The girl went to live with her grandmother.”

  “I’ve noticed that you don’t use her name,” Dr. Quincy said.

  “We try to keep the names of victims out of the picture,” Ava said. “It helps us stay more objective.”

  “We’re all a little soft hearted, Dr. Quincy,” Leslie said. “Breaks our hearts to see what happens to people.”

  “When it’s over, we do a little ceremony to send the victim peace,” Ava added.

  Dr. Quincy nodded in understanding.

  “Did you know the girl?” Fran asked.

  “No,” Dr. Quincy said. “My life took a whole other turn. I married my husband. We moved to Washington. I worked at the FBI. I can’t say that I ever gave the girl or her mother another thought. But I can say that I rarely thought about Denver or the people I grew up around.”

  Dr. Qunicy nodded.

  “And when the girl died?” Seth asked, gently.

  “Oh,” Dr. Quincy said. “I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I didn’t know that she’d died until years after she was found. I was in a lecture at a conference when the lecturer mentioned this victim and this crime. I was . . . stunned.”

  Her eyes vague, Dr. Quincy gave a slight nod.

  “It was the first I’d heard about it,” Dr. Quincy said. “She’d been dead nearly five years.”

  “What was the lecture on?” Bob asked, kindly.

  “Body dumping,” Dr. Qunicy said. She nodded to Nelson. “So, I agree. We look into every unexplained death that we find. Period.”

  Everyone gave her an empathetic nod.

  “I know who you are,” Dr. Quincy nodded to Leslie.

  Leslie’s hand came to her chest.

  “I knew your parents at Harvard,” Dr. Quincy said. “I was at the MIT party when your mother met your father.”

  Leslie blushed. Her parents were nuclear physicists who worked and lived in Los Alamos.

  “I’ve even met your husband, Dr. Mc Clintock,” Dr. Quincy said. “He’s a brilliant mind. Works at NRAL?”

  “Fluid dynamics in solar acquisition,” Leslie said, with a nod.

  “You know what he said to me?” Dr. Quincy asked.

  Looking like she’d rather disappear altogether, Leslie shook her head.

  “He said you were the most brilliant person he’d ever met,” Dr. Quincy said with a smile. “PhD at eighteen in theoretical physics. MD at twenty. Residency and Fellowship in forensic science. You’re like a unicorn — a genuine out-of-the-box thinker.”

  “I work for Ava,” Leslie said, softly. “I’m a lab tech.”

  Dr. Quincy gave her a warm smile.

  “I’m not surprised you ended up here,” Dr. Quincy said.

  “You’re not?” Leslie asked with a snort. “You could tell my parents.”

  “Oh?” Dr. Quincy asked. “Your mother does nothing but brag about you. Three beautiful children. Full time in this lab that keeps getting in the newspaper. Working on big, important cases with the Ava O’Malley.”

  Dr. Quincy smiled.

  “I’ll look forward to watching you shine,” Dr. Quincy said.

  Leslie cleared her throat and nodded.

  “I do have one question,” Leslie said. She looked down the table at Seth. “How did you and Mitch end up working this case in the boonies?”

  “Denver PD had a contract with the CBI,” Seth said of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. “It wasn’t unlike the grant we’re working on.”

  “Did you do a lot of them?” Leslie asked.

  “Twenty? Thirty?” Seth asked. “
Maybe more. I have four others that we weren’t able to close.”

  “Why couldn’t you close them?” Leslie asked.

  “It’s hard to work somewhere you don’t live,” Seth said. “You’re always behind. You don’t know the players — who to trust, who to ignore. You don’t know the way things work in that town. In this case, we had some evidence, but no way to interpret it. Mitch always felt like there was a big ‘Why?’ as to why she was buried there. We hoped that, someday, we’d be able to figure it out.”

  Seth shrugged.

  “I’m sure we’ll run into the same kind of thing on these cases,” Seth said.

  Leslie gave him a slight smile and said, “Thanks.”

  Seth nodded.

  “What’s your specialty, Ava?” Dr. Quincy asked.

  “I put everything together,” Ava said.

  “She knows how to get the best out of brilliant thinkers,” Bob said.

  “She puts things together,” Nelson said.

  “Mostly, I order the supplies and sit in meetings,” Ava said. “Write grant requests.”

  Dr. Quincy nodded.

  “I’m excited,” Dr. Quincy said. “I think we can do some great work! What’s our first step?”

  “I need to go to the site,” Ava said. “This thing that Nelson found — is it real? Is it something we need to know about?”

  “I need to take samples from the physical evidence we have,” Fran said. “And spend some time with O’Malley’s case file.”

  “I’ll help Fran,” Leslie said.

  “I’ll go with Ava,” Nelson said. “I brought my gear in case we left from here.”

  “I’d like to see the site,” Bob said. “O’Malley?”

  “I can’t go,” Seth said. “I need to rest and get ready for my next torture — I mean, therapy session. But . . .”

  He said the “but” so brightly that everyone turned to look at him.

  “I took the liberty of purchasing us a vehicle,” Seth said.

  “A vehicle?” Ava asked.

  “You know, like the van those kids had in Scooby Doo?” Seth grinned.

  “The Mystery Mobile?” Leslie and Nelson said at nearly the same time.

  Seth was financially well off due to a combination of luck, great investments, and a near constant desire to write and perform music that people actually liked. Because he’d been a drug addict, he had limited access to his wealth. He would have had to do some maneuvering to purchase the vehicle.

  At the news of the vehicle, Ava flushed. It would help them greatly to have their own vehicle — even for just this grant. Seth grinned in response to her flush.

  “Well, this is an SUV,” Seth said. “It’s black right now, but we can paint it anything you want. It should be here . . .”

  The doorbell rang.

  “They’re dropping it off from the dealer,” Seth said with a nod.

  Ava went to open the door. On the other side, she found a young man. He held out the keys and asked her to sign. He gestured to a large, American-made, hybrid SUV. Without saying a word, he gave her a nod and walked off down the street.

  “Cool!” Nelson said. “Are you ready?”

  “Let me get my stuff,” Ava said.

  “Drop us off downtown?” Leslie asked.

  “Yay!” Fran said.

  “Of course,” Ava said.

  Ava went back into the den and kissed Seth.

  “Thanks,” Ava said. “But I can’t pay for it out of the grant.”

  “That’s okay,” Seth said. “My salary will pay for most of it.”

  Shaking her head at him, Ava packed up her things.

  “I’ll be in touch,” Ava said.

  “Take lots of pictures,” Seth said. “Video, too.”

  “Got it,” Nelson said from the front hall.

  “Thanks,” Seth said.

  “Thanks for the cool ride,” Nelson said.

  Maresol ran after Ava to give her travel mugs of coffee, a thermal bag with their lunch, and a container of cookies. With a nod, Ava and her team left the house.

  For a moment, Seth, Dr. Quincy, and Maresol sat in silence.

  “How bad is it, Joan?” Seth asked.

  “Are you in terrible pain?” Maresol asked.

  Dr. Quincy gave them a flat, unemotional look.

  “David called this morning,” Maresol said.

  Dr. Quincy closed her eyes.

  “I should have known that David Quincy couldn’t keep his mouth shut,” Joan Quincy said.

  “He’s worried about you,” Seth said. “He doesn’t understand why you are doing this. I’m not sure I do, either.”

  “I don’t want that man to watch me wither away,” Joan said. “It’s too much of a burden for him. For our children.”

  “Who said you’d wither away?” Maresol asked.

  Joan looked at Maresol and then at Seth.

  “What did you do?” Joan asked.

  “We have a hospital bed here,” Seth said, ignoring her question. “A room, really. It’s set up for sick people. We’ve already had a menagerie of friends and family stay there.”

  “It’s a beautiful room,” Maresol said. “I had it made when we remodeled. Seth spent a week there after returning from New York.”

  Joan gave them a rueful shake of her head.

  “To answer your question — we talked to a couple of cancer specialists,” Seth said. Joan opened her mouth to protest, but Seth held up his hand. “You and I have known each other for a long, long time. You can at least hear me out.”

  She gave him an acquiescing nod.

  “David forwarded your entire medical file to the doctors at University of Colorado,” Seth said. “They are pretty sure that your colon cancer is treatable.”

  “Easily treatable,” Maresol said. “That’s what they said.”

  “This thing killed my father and my mother,” Joan said. “I have always known that it will kill me. I’m not going the route they went down — medical procedure after surgery after medical procedure! Wasting away to nothing and dying in agony. No way.”

  “It doesn’t have to be like that,” Maresol said. “What you need is a place to heal. You can do that here.”

  “Stay here,” Seth said. “Rest. Let us — well, Maresol — take care of you. We have a great acupuncturist who’s coming this afternoon. Let him help you. See how you feel when you’ve had a chance to really rest.”

  “If you decided to continue as you are, we won’t force you into treatment,” Maresol said.

  “See how you feel when you’ve had a chance to work on this case, hang out with these brilliant kids, and eat some great food,” Seth said.

  Joan gave him a quick nod. A lanky young man, about Ava’s age, with long, shaggy hair, came into the house with a chocolate lab on a leash. He unhooked the dog, and the dog came to say “Hello” to Seth and Maresol.

  “This is Clara,” Seth said about the dog. He nodded to the young man. “This is Dale. He’s our handyman. He’ll help you to your room.”

  “‘My room’?” Joan asked. “How’d you know that I’d agree to this?”

  “Just a hunch,” Seth said.

  Dale held out an elbow. Dr. Quincy looked at his elbow and then looked up into his face. She sighed and took his help. She groaned slightly when she stood.

  “You are the most handsome handyman I’ve ever met,” Dr. Quincy said.

  Grinning, Dale blushed.

  “I live here, so if you need anything . . .”

  “After ten o’clock in the morning,” Maresol interjected.

  “Right,” Dale said. “Let me help. I like to help, and it’s what Seth pays me for.”

  He was so handsome and sincere that the wall of pride that had been holding up Dr. Joan Quincy crumbled. She staggered a bit. Dale caught her.

  “Are your bags in the car?” Dale asked as they walked toward the room.

  “At the hotel,” Dr. Quincy said.

  “Seth?” Dale yelled back to the di
ning room.

  “On it,” Maresol said.

  “Thanks,” Dr. Quincy said.

  Dale opened the downstairs room. Seth looked at Maresol. Unsure of what to say, she simply nodded. He grinned at her.

  “Come on, old man,” Maresol said.

  Not taking any chances, Maresol took the back of Seth’s wheelchair. She pushed him to the elevator, and they went to the third floor. She got him settled in his and Ava’s room at the front of the house. Clara jumped onto the bed to lie next to him.

  “Sleep,” Maresol said. “Those kids will be home soon enough.”

  She held out her hand. He took his meds and the glass of water. He was asleep before she left the room.

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  Six

  Heading east from Denver, they passed new housing developments with sparkling new gas stations, grocery stores, and other services. They continued on the I-70, passing large cattle ranches of dried sage brush. Tall cottonwood trees lined every water channel and surrounded ancient farmhouses. Even in early summer, it was dry, sandy, and hot. Ava, Nelson, and Bob chatted and listened to music.

  They drove for nearly three hours before turning south on to the US-287 at Kit Carson, Colorado. They turned onto the two-lane road that was CO-96. They drove until they reached Chivington, Colorado.

  Ava pulled over at what the onboard computer said was the center of town.

  “This is the center of town?” Bob asked.

  Ava pointed to the navigation on the new SUV. They craned their necks looking around at a whole lot of sage brush and sand. Two metal tracks indicated a still active railway on their left. There was a roofless, decaying cinderblock building on their right. One cinderblock wall was covered by the remnants of a painted call for political action. A wooden shed leaned to the side, waiting for a strong wind to knock it over.

  “This is it?” Ava asked.

  “Looks like hay farm to the south of us,” Nelson said, looking up from his phone. “You have to turn left up there.”