The Girl Buried in the Woods

by Robert Ellis

  As he followed the road that snaked up the steep hill to the picnic area, he was reminded of how remote the park felt. How eerie it all seemed at this time of night. No doubt about it, the oldest park in the city was big enough to get lost in and, he guessed, home to more than a few ghosts.

  Matt shrugged it off, accelerating up the hill. After a few moments, he began to notice flashing lights through the tree branches. Rounding the last bend, he spotted a police cruiser parked at the very top before a grassy field littered with picnic tables.

  He pulled in beside the cruiser but didn’t see anyone around. His partner, Denny Cabrera, wasn’t here yet. No one from the Forensic Science Division or the coroner’s office had shown up either. Just this one empty black-and-white, idling in the night with its headlights on and its LED light bars flashing.

  Something about it didn’t feel right.

  Matt flipped open the glove box, grabbed his flashlight, and climbed out of the car. Glancing at the picnic tables, he turned back to the police cruiser and gave it a long look. The windows were down, the air conditioner jacked up on high. He could hear the sound of a dispatcher on the car’s radio popping on and off at random intervals.

  Images surfaced. Memories of what he’d discovered at his father’s house just two weeks ago in Greenwich, Connecticut. The two police cruisers he’d seen idling by the entrance covered in snow on a stormy night. The four cops he’d found sitting inside their cars—all four ambushed—all four cops shot dead. It wasn’t possible, was it? Something so grim repeating itself so quickly. Maybe he was just feeling jumpy. Just feeling the rush of anticipation as he arrived at a new crime scene and began working a new case.

  Pretend you’re an archaeologist . . . let the lab do all the work . . . just lay back and everything will be all right . . .

  Matt walked around to the front of the cruiser and stepped onto the lawn. The headlights from the vehicle seemed to illuminate most of the meadow, dying out before they reached the trees. And that’s when he spotted them. That’s when he felt the edge take a step back. Two cops with flashlights were standing in the darkness just this side of a grove of pine trees. An old man who appeared upset was with them, dressed in street clothes and seated at a picnic table. All three were staring Matt’s way. As he started toward them, he raised his badge in the air.

  “Matt Jones,” he said in a loud voice. “Homicide.”

  Despite the distance, he caught the recognition on both cops’ faces, even the old man’s, and laughed a little when he realized that his days working undercover were over. Too many articles in the newspapers had been published over the past few months, too many stories on TV. Matt tried to ignore it as best he could and figured that people on the street probably knew more about his life than he did.

  The cops stepped away from the picnic table, the taller of the two introducing himself as Alvin Marcs, with his partner, Bill Guy.

  Matt glanced at the old man behind them. “Who’s he?”

  “Levi Harris,” Marcs said in a quieter voice. “He found the body.”

  Matt nodded. “Tell me what happened.”

  “It’s probably easier if I show you.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Show me.”

  Marcs lowered his flashlight to the grass and led the way to an opening in the grove of pine trees. Then he stopped and turned back to Matt.

  “Harris works nights, sleeps during the day,” he said in a voice that wouldn’t carry. “He’s from the neighborhood. He was walking his dog and thought maybe he might find some pine cones in here. Sounds like his dog went crazy.”

  “Where’s the dog now?” Matt said.

  “He took him home when he called nine-one-one.”

  Matt nodded again. “Let’s have a look.”

  Marcs gazed into the opening and seemed shaky. “There’s not a lot of room in there. You can lead the way. Once you get inside, it’s gonna be about four steps to your right.”

  Matt switched on his flashlight. Pointing it at the ground, he ducked through the opening in the branches, took a step to his right, and froze. He could see it. Not a body, but human hair, black hair, strewn through the soil. He took a moment to absorb the shock and pull himself together. Then he stepped closer and knelt down. He could see the deep claw marks etched into the dirt by the dog. They appeared frantic, and he could almost hear the dog sniffing and snorting and barking as it ripped away the soil and tried to dig out the body.

  “You see it?” Marcs asked in a low voice from behind him.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I see it.”

  Matt stood up to take in the entire space. The death chamber. Although he couldn’t make out the form of the body buried underneath, he could see a mound of dirt that looked fresh and packed down. From the sparse spread of pine needles, he guessed that the killer had been in too much of a hurry to think about details.

  His eyes flicked back to the hair strewn through the soil. The dog’s claw marks. It was a horrific image, one that he knew he’d never forget.

  Murder lite . . .

  His body shuddered, his gut on fire. Maybe he wasn’t ready to come back so soon. Maybe Dr. May had been right—too many monsters were still swimming in his head. And he’d stopped smoking two weeks ago, which Dr. May had said might make things worse. He’d given up cigarettes for good, he hoped, but at a time when he needed to be cool, calm, and what was the right word? Oh, yeah, collected. A time when he needed to come off like everything was cool, when nothing about anything was cool. Not even the January air.

  He noticed his hand quivering and lowered it to his side. Then the headlights from a car swept through the tree branches and filled the grove of pine trees, the death chamber, with an ephemeral light. Turning away from the grave, he stepped through the opening and switched off his flashlight. He saw his partner, Denny Cabrera, walking across the lawn between a row of tables. Although he couldn’t be certain, he thought he heard him say, “Hell of a time for a picnic.”

  THREE

  “You're sure it’s not just a toupee?”

  Matt felt his partner give him a nudge with his elbow but didn’t say anything. The remark had come from David Speeks, whom everyone in the department knew to be one of the best criminalists in the Forensic Science Division. He was a short, stocky man with graying hair and twenty-five years of experience. Now he was kneeling before the grave, eyeballing the hair and claw marks in the soil with what came off like ghoulish fascination.

  Cabrera cleared his throat. “That’s no hairpiece.”

  Speeks nodded, still staring at the horrific sight. “Nah, I don’t think so either,” he said in a voice so quiet he might have been speaking to himself. “I was just hoping we might’ve lucked out tonight.”

  Matt leaned closer. “It’s too tight in here, Speeks. I want to set up a tent on the lawn. After you guys make the excavation, we’ll see what we’ve got inside the tent.”

  “I hear you,” the criminalist said. “But it’s gonna take time, Jones. We’ll have to process what’s left of this crime scene before we start digging.”

  “Just do it right,” Matt said.

  Speeks nodded again. “Are the body guys here yet?”

  Cabrera checked his cell phone. “The crew from the coroner’s office are five minutes out.”

  “Tell them they’ve got time for a cup of coffee,” Speeks said. “While they’re at it they might as well order breakfast.”

  Speeks sniffed the soil, winced unpleasantly, then began to stand up. Matt could feel Cabrera’s eyes on him as they stepped through the opening in the trees onto the grass and switched off their flashlights. The sky had begun to brighten, sunrise an hour or so off.

  “Did you smell it, Matt? Did you see Speeks’s face?”

  Matt nodded as he met Cabrera’s eyes. The smell of death was beginning to work its way through the soil. It might have been faint, but it was there. In the murder chamber. The dead room.

  Over the next two hours, Matt and Cabrera worked on rampin
g up the crime scene. As they took Levi Harris’s statement and sent him home to rest, the park was shut down and the entrances sealed off by patrol units. In order to block the view from the news choppers, a tent big enough for a banquet was pitched over two of the picnic tables on the lawn. Fifteen cops in uniforms were recruited to help scour the immediate area and sift through trash cans. Once lights were set up and a handful of criminalists from forensics had a chance to comb through the immediate crime scene for physical evidence, Speeks began excavating the body.

  The entire process was recorded by the crime scene photographer in both video and still photographs. A variety of miniature-size trowels, rakes, and brushes were used, sweeping the soil away from the victim’s hair and moving it with a small bucket to a box and screen inside the tent for further examination. By 9:00 a.m., a face was beginning to emerge. Two hours later, the horror was truly realized, and it took Matt’s breath away.

  Speeks looked up at him aghast. “Oh my God,” he whispered. “Oh my God, Jones.”

  The photographer raised his camera and burst through a series of rapid-fire shots, the strobe light burning white hot. Matt felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end as he knelt down and watched Speeks brush the soil away in gentle but quick strokes.

  It was a girl.

  A young girl. Sixteen or seventeen years old. And she hadn’t been buried for very long. She was so well preserved that she might have been killed just a few hours ago. Still, from the wretched smell in the air, an odor that appeared to be in full bloom, Matt guessed that she’d been in the ground for a couple of days.

  But that didn’t account for the terror he’d heard in Speeks’s voice or seen in the criminalist’s experienced eyes. That’s not why the moment the girl’s face had been uncovered, there was a hush that rattled through the entire crime scene, or why everything seemed to go dark in the light of day.

  Matt could feel the anger rising out of his belly as he leaned in for a closer look.

  The girl had been beaten, and beaten badly.

  Death hadn’t been easy and hadn’t come quick. She had two black eyes and a ring of bruises around her neck. She seemed so gentle, so slight, so innocent.

  So wronged.

  Matt felt his partner give him another nudge with his elbow.

  “You’re shaking,” Cabrera said. “You okay, Matt?”

  He didn’t hesitate, and he didn’t need a moment to collect himself. He kept his eyes on the girl’s battered face and spoke like Dr. May and Lieutenant McKensie had made the wrong call.

  “Yeah, Denny,” he said, gritting his teeth. “Everything’s cool.”

  FOUR

  Matt tried to ignore the sound of the news choppers hovering overhead as he stood with Cabrera on a grassy bank by the grove of pine trees and gazed down the steep hill. It looked like there was a private road that picked up where Baker Street ended and ran along the train tracks until it reached a small factory surrounded by a gated ten-foot wall. On the other side of the factory he could see the railroad tracks leading into a substation, and the Los Angeles River, flowing south toward the city on a bed of broken concrete.

  Cabrera stepped closer, checked his back, and spoke in a low voice. “You sure everything’s cool, Matt. I thought you got tagged for medical leave. After what you went through, it wouldn’t mean anything if you weren’t ready. It’d just be a matter of, well, you know what I’m saying, you’re not ready.”

  Matt noted the security cameras mounted on the factory walls before he turned back and saw the worry on Cabrera’s face. They had become partners just three months ago, and Cabrera was almost as green as Matt had been. Off to a rough start, the size and weight of the murder case they’d carried on their shoulders brought them together the same way the war in Afghanistan had brought Matt’s unit together. Now he trusted Cabrera with his life.

  “It turns out I didn’t need to go on leave after all,” Matt said. “McKensie came out to my place, and we talked it over. I’m fine. I mean it, Denny. We’re in this together. Everything’s good.”

  He could see Cabrera trying to get a read on him. And while Matt hadn’t stuck to the script word for word, what he’d told his partner seemed like the truth now. Something about seeing the girl’s battered face in the dirt made it true. Her death, and the hunt for whoever did this, gave his life a new purpose, a weighty mission more important than himself or anything that had happened to him over the last month on the East Coast.

  Speeks stepped out of the pine trees and waved at them. “It’s a go,” he said.

  Cabrera led the way off the grassy bank over to the trees, and Matt peered through the opening in the branches. The crew from the coroner’s office had arrived more than three hours ago. The investigator, Ed Gainer, was someone Matt knew and trusted. Matt stepped aside to let the crime scene photographer pass, then stepped back. He could see Gainer and an assistant lifting the girl out of her shallow grave and setting her down in a body bag. After they got her zipped up, she was hoisted onto a gurney and pushed as quickly as possible across the lawn in full view of the news choppers. And then, just as quickly, into the privacy of the tent.

  Speeks unfolded a sheet of plastic, laid it over a picnic table, and taped it down as a man and woman from forensics closed the flaps on the tent and rolled in the work lights. Once the tent was illuminated, Matt gave the nod and watched as the girl’s body was removed from the bag and lowered onto the picnic table.

  A moment passed, and then another, with everyone staring at her—everyone taking it in. She seemed so young. So vulnerable. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a white blouse that remained dusted from the soil she’d been buried in. Her shoes were a popular sports brand, the same style and color Matt wore when he walked down to the bike path on the beach and went jogging. He took a deep breath and exhaled. Ignoring the pungent smell of death in the air, his eyes began eating up the images before him in big bites.

  She’d been violated. That much seemed clear.

  Her jeans were undone and unzipped, her blouse ripped open with her bra pushed up over her small breasts. But what bothered Matt most were the bruises on her arms. He counted seven. Based on the range of colors against her light-brown skin, he estimated that they varied in age from just before her death to a week or ten days ago.

  Matt turned to Speeks. “Let’s break out the UV lights.”

  Speeks lifted a pair of military-grade plastic hard cases onto the second picnic table and flipped open the latches. Inside were four UV LED forensic flashlights with safety glasses for the eight people in the tent. Speeks kept one flashlight for himself and passed the remaining three to Matt, Cabrera, and Gainer.

  Matt slipped on his safety glasses. “Kill the work lights,” he said.

  The tent went dark, and Matt switched on his UV light. When the other lights came up, the girl’s dead body began to glow in a mass of eerie purple light.

  Matt noticed that everyone seemed to take a step back. He thought that it might be the amount of semen reflecting back at them from the UV light. There was a lot of it, more like the discharge from an animal than a human being. Bright drip marks could be seen all over her zipper and panties, her jeans, and the bottom half of her blouse.

  He watched Gainer trying to avoid the dried stains with his gloved hands while emptying the girl’s pockets. Two one-dollar bills, a quarter, and a pocket rock for luck. No one said anything as Gainer dropped the items into an evidence bag, everyone’s eyes locked on that pocket rock. When the investigator finished, Matt followed Cabrera’s light as it panned up the girl’s body and stopped on the ring of bruises around her neck and those two black eyes.

  “There’s something wrong with her head,” Cabrera said in a quiet voice. “The angle’s off. It’s not set right.”

  Gainer, who was the only one there authorized to touch the body, gave the girl’s head a gentle lift. Matt leaned forward to get a better look at the back of her skull. It was battered and crushed in, and he felt himself gr
imace in the shadows cast by the purple flashlights.

  Gainer set the girl’s head down. “She’s got no ID,” he said. “Her neck’s broken. She’s been strangled, beaten, and she’s ice cold. Rigor mortis has come and gone. We need to get her downtown, guys.”

  Gainer turned to Matt and gave him a long look. Matt understood what the investigator had left unsaid. Matt guessed that everyone in the tent did. They had a major-league problem on their hands now. A girl had been dug out of the ground, and it had been a monster who put her there. A maniac. What seasoned homicide units call a full-blown motherfucker. But even worse, as they stood there with the corpse, the killer was free and clear and probably stalking his next victim. He was invisible. And if he could do this to an innocent teenage girl, then he could do it to any living thing, and do it again and again and again.

  The words murder lite flicked through Matt’s head and vanished. When he noticed the girl’s watch, he turned back to Gainer.

  “May I?” he asked.

  Gainer nodded.

  Matt checked his gloves, then carefully took hold of her cold, lifeless arm and turned it over for a look at her watch. The lens was shattered, the watch possibly broken in the struggle. While he couldn’t be certain before the autopsy, while it was only a decent guess—time, even life itself, appeared to have come to a final stop for this young girl at 4:30 p.m. on January 8. In Los Angeles in early January, that meant it would have been almost dark.

  Matt lowered her arm to the table, examining her rough hands and fingers. Her nails were cut short and appeared clean, but her fingertips were scratched like she tried to put up a fight.

  He turned back to the coroner’s investigator. “Would you mind pulling her jeans down, Ed. I want a look at her legs.”

  Matt could feel everyone in the room staring at him.

  Gainer gave him a troubled look. “Can it wait until the autopsy?”