I didn’t argue with him. “You have them looking for shoe prints, too, I bet. So they’re not wiping out evidence? Any tire prints.”
The sheriff frowned, but shouted to one of the techs. “Y’all are looking for shoe prints and tire marks, right?”
“Yeah,” one of the men called out. “Nothing yet.”
“Probably won’t find anything. The ground’s too hard and rocky,” I said. “Also, Hannah said you had rain last Thursday morning. It most likely would have destroyed any, assuming the body was buried out here before then.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Chief Barstow said.
I nodded at him, not believing he’d even considered the possibilities. “Doesn’t hurt to look, though.”
Barstow frowned. “You know, we’re not children. We’ve got experience with these types of crimes.”
“How many murders did you have last year?” I asked, turning to the sheriff.
He thought for a minute. “One guy killed his fifth wife, murder-suicide. He thought she was messing around. She wasn’t. Not much of an investigation. He chased her out into the front yard with the gun. The neighbors saw him do it. Nobody left to have a trial.”
I needed to be delicate, not to come on too strong, but I guessed they had no idea what to do with a murder case. Max was the only one with experience and he couldn’t do it all. If that was Delilah, any of the girls out there, I had to make sure it was done right. “As you can imagine, we have more than that in Dallas. I specialize in violent crimes, especially homicides,” I said. The sheriff appeared interested, while Barstow scowled. “I personally worked thirty-six homicides last year. I cleared all of them.”
Barstow eyed me, distrustful. I ignored him and concentrated on the sheriff. In his office, he’d wanted me gone. I knew that. He sounded angry at Max for even asking me to come. But in rural counties, budgets rarely covered more than the basic costs. Most sheriffs struggled to pay wages and finance expenses. Sheriffs like Virgil Holmes, with a vast county to patrol, had to work every angle to make ends meet. Investigating a murder case took time and resources, both of which he probably didn’t have. It would be hard for a man in his position to turn down an experienced detective offering to work a case for free.
“I’m volunteering to help.”
“Why do we want that? Not gonna happen, Detective. We don’t need outsiders coming in here and—” Gerard started. “The sheriff and me, we don’t—”
Sheriff Holmes cut him off. “Things have changed, Chief,” he said, giving Gerard a cautionary look. “We have a dead body. I’m looking at a full-fledged murder investigation here. That’s something we don’t have often in Smith County. “
“But Sheriff—” the chief tried to interrupt.
Then Sheriff Holmes said something I hadn’t expected. “And I’ve been thinking. Maybe the detective is right about those girls. Maybe they need some looking into.”
“What’s that got to do with her?” Gerard pressed, motioning toward me. “If that needs doing, I can do it. My men will—”
“This woman’s got more experience than either one of us. Look, it could turn out that those girls were taken. If it’s true, Detective Jefferies here was the only one who realized it,” the sheriff said, eyeing Gerard. “The rest of us didn’t put it together.”
“Damn it, Virgil,” the chief objected. “We don’t need any help. We got this covered.”
“Gerard, I got a dozen deputies and a handful of detectives to cover nearly a thousand square miles. This is my case, and I could use the help.” At that, the sheriff turned toward me. “Detective Jefferies, I’d appreciate your assistance.” He gave Gerard a cautionary look. “And I’m sure the chief is grateful as well.”
“Thank you, Sheriff,” I said.
Gerard Barstow cinched in his lower lip and didn’t answer.
The discussion ended, I turned my back on both men while I fought the impulse to run toward the rock pile, to throw off stone after stone until I knew who lay beneath it.
Twenty-Five
The day was beginning to feel like a marathon. An hour earlier I’d been hungry for lunch, but my appetite vanished once I heard about the body in the field. Still, my stomach hadn’t gotten the message, and it growled in emptiness. At twelve thirty, when the medical examiner arrived, I’d been up and working for more than six hours with no end in sight. Craig Wiley MD parked his green pickup about a hundred feet from the body. Impatient, I’d hung back like the others to wait for him, careful not to contaminate the scene. But the longer I cooled my heels, the more I worried that we’d found my sister.
An internist who’d practiced in Smith County for decades, Doc Wiley sauntered over to where I stood. He hovered close to sixty, and his silver hair had thinned, the hairline receding, since I’d last seen him. I didn’t remember glasses, but he wore round, brass-rimmed spectacles. A prominent potbelly strained his khaki pants and the buttons on his plaid shirt, and a patchwork of blotches from the sun speckled his exposed scalp and ears, his hands and cheeks. It appeared that he didn’t take his profession’s own advice to wear sunscreen.
My family didn’t believe in doctors. Not many in our community did. Add to that Mother’s talent for mixing herbal concoctions that she claimed could kill any infection, treat any malady, heal any wound, and our family never had much need for or confidence in Gentile doctors, as we called them.
I knew Doc Wiley because he’d once taken care of me. Hannah brought me to see him a month before she helped me escape Alber. I was bruised and bloody. I couldn’t go to Mother. She wouldn’t have understood. Doc Wiley put me back together.
“Good to see you, Doc,” I said. “Glad you’re here. We’ve got a situation.”
“So it seems. I was surprised to hear that you’d come back, Clara. Didn’t think you’d do that, under the circumstances,” he said, giving me a curious look.
“Max called me to consult on a case.”
“Ah. Well, that explains it, I guess. Then the rumors are right? You’re a cop now?”
“In Dallas.”
“Hot damn,” he said, slipping his thumbs behind the straps of his black suspenders. Those and a bow tie were the doc’s signature accessories. “The world is changing.”
“That it is. Certainly around here.” Under other circumstances, I wouldn’t have minded a chat, but all my attention was focused on the pile of rocks under Samuel’s Peak. “The body is over there,” I said, pointing at the place. “I’ll lead you and take photos with one of the CSI unit’s cameras, if that’s okay?”
“You bet,” he said. “Have at it.”
I put on shoe covers and pulled on a pair of latex gloves I’d commandeered from the CSI unit. Doc and the videographer did the same.
The others stood back, and the two of us recorded the scene as we walked toward the stone pile with Doc. When we got there, he waited while we took close-ups of the rocks in situ, as they stood.
The section of rock that commanded our attention measured about eighteen inches high and four feet wide, maybe seven feet long. As we got closer, an unmistakable, strong but not overpowering odor surrounded us. Decomp. The fact that it didn’t overwhelm us suggested either a fairly fresh kill or a body that had been dead for a long time. I thought again of Delilah. It took every ounce of control I had not to throw off all the rocks. I wanted to know. I needed to know. I swallowed and willed myself calm, but my drumming pulse gave me away.
After we had the overall photos, I scanned the rocks, looking for what Proctor described, the opening Bruno made, one the old man looked in and saw a face.
About a foot from one side, I found it, a place where a rock had rolled off. I peeked in and saw leathery skin, taut, slightly translucent.
“Doc, take a look,” I suggested as I snapped a couple of photos.
He rustled over and stooped down. “Well, I’ll be,” he said, peering between the rocks.
“Do you think it’s…” I started. My pulse picking up more steam
, I had a hard time spitting the question out. “Does it look—”
“Mummified,” Doc said.
Relief rushed through me, so much so that I had to fight the urge to smile. “It’s not Delilah then,” I murmured. Doc Wiley’s eyes scrunched nearly closed in a question. “One of my sisters. Half-sister. Sariah’s daughter. Delilah is… missing. I was afraid it was her.”
“That’s the case Max asked you to consult on?” Sadness distorted his old face, drawing down his eyes.
“Yeah.”
“How long has she been missing?”
“We think Thursday evening. About four days.”
“You’re right then,” Doc shook his head. “This isn’t her.”
I didn’t have to ask how he could be so sure. I knew.
Utah’s hot, arid summers were perfect for mummification; they efficiently sucked the moisture from a body before it had time to decompose. So were Dallas’s. I once worked a case with a mummified body found in an abandoned crack house. We didn’t know what we had at first, a homicide or natural causes. It turned out that the guy died of an overdose. The day I walked onto the scene, the body looked just the way the one beneath the rocks did—cured a dark golden brown, rubbery, like something on display in a museum.
Even in prime conditions, a human body took at least two weeks to dry out. Delilah hadn’t been missing long enough for her body to be in such an advanced stage of mummification.
My relief, however, faded quickly. The body wasn’t Delilah’s, but it was someone’s. Eliza’s? Jayme’s? And what did the discovery of a dead body mean for Delilah? Wherever she was, I felt even more certain that my sister was in danger.
“Let’s start here,” I said. I took off the first rock and exposed a swollen cheek, a side of a nose with a slight upturn. I snapped a photo. The videographer recorded the scene, and the doc took a closer look. He motioned for me to continue. I pulled off rocks two and three, and an eye emerged, the pupil sunken into a dark orb. It looked like a Halloween mask. Rocks four and five exposed the other eye. By rock nine, the corpse had a nose and a heart-shaped chin.
The body appeared to be either a female or a young boy with delicate features.
I chose the rocks above the eyes and uncovered a forehead. At that point, we could see dark brown hair. I paused long enough for the videographer to record the moment and I took a photograph before Doc Wiley moved in for another look.
As I removed each rock, I deposited it on a piece of cardboard placed to the side, where a technician numbered, bagged and logged it into evidence. Everything would be sent to the lab. Some of the rocks were relatively smooth, holding out the possibility that latent prints might be found.
Our work continued.
As I pulled more rocks away, we could gauge the length of the hair: at least three feet. Separating from the scalp in places, it fell like a long, dark brown wig.
We were most likely looking at a woman.
The head uncovered, I took the next five rocks off the neck and chest. Each one dug into my heart. A once-white cotton collar trimmed in eyelet had cured dark and stiff from the seepage of bodily fluids. The prairie dress remained light green in scattered places with small pink flowers printed in stripes, but the majority of it had turned a dirty brown.
Once we had her completely uncovered, I looked down at the figure of a young woman. I visualized Delilah in that rocky grave, Lily, my mother, myself. If I knew the girl in the grave, I didn’t recognize her. But for me, she represented every woman I’d ever known. I thought of bodies I’d seen in Dallas: men, women, children, some bludgeoned, others shot or stabbed. Each one a tragedy. Each one leaving a family in pain.
“From the clothes, she looks like a local,” Doc Wiley yelled out to Chief Barstow and the sheriff. “Can’t recognize her in this condition.”
“When’s the autopsy?” Gerard asked.
“Quick as we get her to my office,” the doc responded.
I hadn’t noticed, but a crowd had formed. A line of deputies roped them off near the road. Women, men, young and old, children, most probably from the trailer park, but my guess others had come from Alber proper. Some looked curious, others horrified.
“Get a body bag out of my truck, will ya?” Doc asked me.
As I walked toward the pickup, I noticed my mother in the crowd, along with Naomi and Sariah. Most of the women dabbed at tears. Mother had her strong face on, the one she used to keep the family in line. Naomi stared at me, her eyes blank, as if disbelieving. Sariah appeared stunned. Her face pale, she simply kept shaking her head, as if trying to wipe the scene away.
Next to Mother, one hand holding onto her skirt and the other covering her mouth, stood Lily.
Jim Daniels lingered a short distance away, on the edge of the cornfield he managed. A woman I recognized hovered beside him. His second wife, my half-sister Karyn, had her hands clasped, her lips fluttering as if in prayer. Daniels wrapped an arm around her shoulder. Stoic. The word described his pin-straight posture, his emotionless expression. I thought about him, how peculiar he was, distant. I recalled what I’d mentioned to Hannah just that morning, how odd it was that all three of the girls lived in houses that backed up to the cornfield.
Jim Daniels’ cornfield.
I ached to go to my family, to comfort them. I needed to ask again about Delilah. Dead bodies can convince people to open up. I wanted to talk to Daniels, figure out if he was a piece of this puzzle. But I couldn’t. Not yet. At that moment, someone else needed me more—the girl in the field. If there was evidence on her body, it might be the key to finding her killer. More than that, it might lead us to Delilah and the other girls. It had to be preserved.
I grabbed a black vinyl body bag out of Doc’s truck. Back at the rock pile, I unzipped it and laid it out next to the body.
“I’ll take the head,” Doc instructed. “Clara, get the feet.” Pointing at the videographer, he added, “Let’s let this strapping young man take the hips.”
Rigor mortis had long passed and the body hung limp, light and bone thin. As we carried it, the long skirt brushed to the side.
From the crowd, painful screams pierced the air. It broke my heart when a woman shouted, “It’s one of us! One of our girls!”
I kept my attention focused on the body, moving it carefully, slowly, trying to keep the corpse and clothing together, not wanting to let anything fall away. After we had the body removed, the crime scene unit would rake the area, searching for fibers and hair, anything that might be tied to the dead girl or her killer.
I thought of what I held in my hands, the end of a life.
Sobs and screams came from the growing crowd of townsfolk as we laid the body in the bag. I glanced over and saw Mother round up Naomi, Sariah, and two young girls I didn’t recognize, family of mine that I’d never met. Mother urged them away, taking them by the hands and leading them off. Jim Daniels and Karyn followed obediently behind. Her arms were around Lily, who wept, her shoulders hunched as if she’d pulled back into a shell.
I skimmed the crowd and saw others I knew, relatives, old friends. Off to the side, a group of men in work boots and carrying machetes clustered together, talking. I guessed they were the ones who’d been cutting the corn stalks.
“Max!” I called out. I walked toward him, where he stood with the sheriff. I noticed Gerard Barstow was gone.
“What, Clara?”
“Where’s the chief?”
Max huffed, as if in disgust. “He threw a fit. Took off. Told the sheriff that he wasn’t going to watch you run the show.”
“Figures,” I said. “Max, have the photographer take photos of the crowd. Send some of your men in to make a list of who’s there. Maybe someone has heard or seen something that can help. Okay?”
“I’ve already got them canvassing the neighborhood,” Max said. “But good idea about the crowd. Maybe the killer likes to watch.”
“Yeah. It happens,” I said.
Max raised his hand and shouted at
one of his men and waved him over. I turned back to the matter at hand and bent to take a closer look at the body. The weight of the rocks, I guessed, had broken her nose, smashing it flat and disfiguring her profile. I thought about the position we found her in, laid out so straight, her hands folded one over the other across her chest. She’d been arranged in her rocky grave as if staged in a coffin.
“Look at that,” Doc said, reclaiming my attention.
“At what?” I asked.
“Just above her hands.”
I leaned in for a closer look. The girl’s skin slacked then pinched in tight, leaving a series of indentations at the narrowing of her wrists. I scanned the body and saw similar marks above her thin, delicate feet.
“Rope marks? She was tied up, hands and legs.” I felt sickened even saying it. I thought of the terror she endured before her death. How could anyone do this? What if that same person had Delilah?
“I guess.” Doc moved in closer, then grabbed his battered leather medical bag. Out of it he pulled a wooden tongue depressor. He knelt down and pushed a bit at the fibrous tissue, carefully inspecting the indentation on the girl’s right wrist. “From the braided appearance, I’d say a heavy rope maybe, but most likely chains.”
“Whoever did this had her chained up. Chained to something?” I muttered, thinking it through. “Or to someone?”
“Guess so,” Doc said.
“I wonder who she is,” I said. The misshapen, dried-up face was unrecognizable, but her long dark brown hair matched Eliza Heaton’s description. Jayme Coombs had lighter hair, blond, so maybe not. But I wondered if the hair on the corpse could have been discolored from blood and fluid.
“I’ll pull DNA,” Doc said.
“That’ll take a while?”
“Maybe a week,” Doc answered. “I’ll put a rush on it.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“And I’ll do the usual, look for dental work, fillings and such,” Doc said. “Probably won’t find any…”
I finished his train of thought. “Because most of the families don’t see dentists.”
The Fallen Girls: An absolutely unputdownable and gripping crime thriller (Detective Clara Jefferies Book 1) Page 16
