The Girl in the Woods

by Chris Culver

  2

  I stopped and felt my feet sink into the muck as my radio spat static. My mouth was so dry I couldn’t spit, and my head felt light. Given the heat and humidity, sweat should have poured down my back and chest, but I had stopped sweating an hour ago. I was dehydrated and tired, but I had a job to do.

  I leaned against a tree to steady myself. The air smelled like mud, stagnant water, and animal shit. I was so deep in the woods I no longer knew where the highway was. Dark clouds covered the sun and sky, so little light penetrated the canopy of leaves and branches above me. We were under a tornado watch, but so far no storms had come our way. Even without severe weather, though, the area’s gloomy feel depressed my mood.

  “Dispatch, repeat,” I said into my radio. “I’m only getting static.”

  I waited for Trisha to repeat her message. Around me, an early summer breeze rustled the fallen leaves and weeds at my feet. I should have brought a machete to hack through the brush. It would have made the morning a lot easier.

  I drank the final gulp of water from my canteen and wiped grit from my forehead with my shirt sleeve before asking my dispatcher again to repeat her instructions. When that didn’t work, I took out my cell phone. My connection was weak but stable. Trisha answered on the second ring.

  “Hey,” I said. “It’s Joe. I’m somewhere in grid seven in a hollow in the woods. I didn’t hear your message.”

  “Hey, Joe. Sorry about that. The terrain makes it hard to communicate.”

  “Yeah,” I said, looking around to make sure no one could see me before adjusting the sports bra beneath my shirt. The salt-encrusted fabric chafed my back and sides, but it was the best outfit I owned for a long walk in the woods. “What’s going on?”

  “A volunteer found a body in grid thirteen.”

  Even though I had expected this call all morning, I still grimaced.

  “Paige or Jude? And please don’t tell me one killed the other.”

  “Neither,” said Trisha. “It’s a Jane Doe. She’s at a little campsite.”

  I blinked, hoping I had misunderstood.

  “You’re telling me our search for Paige and Jude turned up a different murder?”

  “We still don’t know whether someone murdered Paige and Jude, but this girl’s dead. Dave Skelton is on the scene now.”

  Complaining about a body on the ground wouldn’t get me anywhere, but I swore under my breath anyway. Our search had started that morning when a hunter found a car belonging to Paige Maxwell deep in the woods. She and her boyfriend, Jude Lewis, had gone missing four weeks ago. They were both in high school, and they were in love. When my station received reports that they were missing, I presumed the two of them had run off together to hook up without their parents stopping them, but after this much time without contact, I feared the worst.

  “Tell Dave I’m on my way,” I said. “And remind me where grid thirteen is again.”

  Trisha gave me directions and warned me that the National Weather Service said we had nasty weather coming in. I groaned and cleared my throat.

  “If you haven’t already, call the boss and let him know about the weather. We’ve got almost fifty volunteer searchers out here. If we get a severe storm with this many civilians out here, we’ll be in real trouble.”

  “Will do,” said Trisha. “Good luck, Joe.”

  I thanked her before hanging up. Already, mud and sweat caked my shirt and jeans, making them stiff and uncomfortable, while rainwater from crevices and nooks along the forest floor had long since soaked through my cheap hiking boots. Every muscle in my body ached, and every inch of my skin itched from mosquito bites. This wasn’t how I had envisioned spending my Sunday afternoon.

  I hurried to the staging area where I had parked and then drove to grid thirteen. As I neared the crime scene, I found a marked police SUV on the side of the tiny gravel road. Officer Dave Skelton and a civilian in jeans and a T-shirt leaned against the vehicle. I parked behind them and stepped out. Dark clouds loomed on the horizon to the west. Without shelter nearby, a severe storm would hurt.

  A mosquito buzzed past my ear, and I slapped it as it landed on my neck. The bug spray I had put on that morning should have lasted eight hours, but it had stopped working an hour ago. Thankfully, mud caked my arms. That would keep the insects from my skin.

  Skelton and the civilian nodded as I walked close. Skelton was in his late thirties and had black hair that had turned gray. He was a local product, and he knew St. Augustine County well because he had smoked weed in every hollow, hill, and valley when he was in high school.

  The guy with him was about fifty, and he wore an orange high-visibility vest. I shook his hand and looked to Skelton.

  “Got a moment?”

  Skelton nodded, and we walked to the back of my truck to talk in private. Officer Skelton wore a St. Augustine County Sheriff’s Department T-shirt and an orange high-visibility vest.

  “What do we have?” I asked.

  He took a notepad from the pocket of his jeans and flipped through a few pages before speaking.

  “Mr. Williams is the volunteer searcher assigned to this quadrant. He claims he followed the road and came to a campsite where he found the body. He shouted until another volunteer came with a radio. Nobody touched anything, and nobody walked around the scene until I got here.”

  “Good,” I said, nodding. “What have you done?”

  “I checked the victim to make sure she was dead. Then I backed off. I thought you’d want to have the first crack at her. Victim is twenty-five to thirty years old. She’s Hispanic, five-two to five-three, and maybe a hundred and twenty pounds. No ID or clothes on her. She has a single gunshot wound to the chest, but there’s little blood on the ground.”

  A hundred-and-twenty-pound human being carried a little over a gallon of blood in her body. If someone had shot her at the campsite, her blood would have pooled around her. This wasn’t the murder scene; it was a dumping site.

  “Any sign of sexual assault?” I asked.

  “I didn’t look that close, but considering she’s in the middle of nowhere and nude, I’d say it’s a strong possibility,” he said. He paused and lowered his voice. “If you’re not comfortable working the case, I can bring in Harry. He wouldn’t mind, considering everything you’ve gone through.”

  I didn’t roll my eyes, but I wanted to. Officer Skelton meant well, but the comment still pissed me off. I had grown up in the foster care system. Some houses were safe and stable, but some weren’t. When I was sixteen, my foster father—a man named Christopher Hughes—drugged and raped me. It was the most awful experience of my life, one I had wanted to keep private for the rest of my life.

  Unfortunately, a reporter from St. Louis told the world my story while I worked a high-profile murder case four weeks ago. Since then, people held doors for me and looked at me as if I were an invalid everywhere I went.

  I lowered my voice.

  “Thank you for your concern, but I don’t need the boss’s help to work a murder,” I said. “Okay?”

  Skelton straightened. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Good,” I said, looking around. “You know St. Augustine. Where are we?”

  Skelton blinked and looked around. “You go north about half a mile, you’ll run into the chicken processing plant. East of here, you’ve got the interstate and the Mississippi River. West of here, you’ve got farms to the county line.”

  “You know who owns this property?”

  “I’d guess Ross Kelly Farms, but I wouldn’t put my paycheck on that.”

  I groaned. St. Augustine had few major employers, but the few it had enjoyed considerable influence with the local powers that be. If we arrested somebody at Ross Kelly Farms, we’d have a county councilor or two knocking on our doors with complaints soon. I could deal with that, but it would waste time I’d rather not waste.

  I walked toward the campsite. Rustic benches surrounded a rock-enclosed fire pit, while cigarette butts littered the ground.
There were beer bottles everywhere I turned and tire tracks in the mud near the road. As Dave had said, the victim was nude, and she had a gunshot wound to her chest.

  “You see any clothes around here?”

  Skelton shook his head. “Nope.”

  I nodded as I walked closer to the victim. The gunshot wound was clean without powder marks or fouling, which meant the shooter had stood at least a few feet from her when he squeezed the trigger. Her brown eyes were open, and they stared at the canopy of leaves above us. In life, she would have been beautiful. In death, she was a statue.

  I hated this part of the job. This was someone’s daughter. She might have been someone’s mom. No matter what she did or who she was, she didn’t deserve to die like this. She deserved even less what would happen to her now.

  The moment a bullet pierced her chest and killed her, she had ceased to be a human being. She had become evidence, grist for the great machinery of the criminal justice system. The coroner would photograph her, cut her open, and remove her internal organs. He’d tease out every secret her corpse possessed and present his findings to a jury. Twelve strangers would study every inch of her body more intimately than any lover ever could, and only then, when the system had taken every shred of dignity she had, would the courts release her to her family for burial.

  To the system, she was an object to study. To me, she was more than that. She was something sacred, something worthy of protection. She was a person. From now until the day we put her killer in prison, I would become her voice. That was my calling; it was why I had become a police officer: I protected those who couldn’t protect themselves. For those whom I couldn’t protect, those like the young woman in front of me, I sought vengeance. I couldn’t bring her back from death, but I could even the scales.

  I walked closer to see her. A red hair tie held the victim’s brown hair behind her head. The ground surrounding her looked dry, but there were no signs of drag marks, which meant the shooter must have carried her. Neither the victim’s wrists nor legs had ligature marks, nor did her hands or forearms have defensive wounds.

  I took out my cell phone and took almost four dozen pictures of the body and surrounding area before walking back to Skelton’s SUV. Walter Williams—the man who had found the body—was inside, taking a nap. I doubted he had shot her, but we’d hold him until we eliminated him as a suspect. Skelton stood straighter as I approached.

  “What do you think?” he said.

  “She’s dead,” I said. “Other than that, we’ve got work ahead of us. We need additional manpower here right away to search the woods, so call Trisha and ask her for everybody we’ve got available. I also need someone to verify that Ross Kelly Farms owns the property. If they do, I need somebody to contact them. We’ll need their representative out here.

  “Second, Dr. Sheridan needs to pick up the body. I want him to ID the victim by the end of the day if possible.

  “Third, find out who camps out here. Are they hunters, are they college kids who come here to get drunk and have sex, or are they something else?

  “Fourth, we need at least two officers with forensic training to work the crime scene. We’ve got a lot of evidence to collect, and we need it done right.

  “Fifth, call Harry. The sheriff should be here.”

  Skelton scribbled on his notepad, so I let him catch up.

  “Anything else?”

  “Do you have any plaster of paris in your car?”

  He looked up and squinted. “No. Why?”

  “Trisha says we’ve got storms inbound, and I want to get these tire tracks and footprints cast before it rains.”

  Skelton looked toward the campsite and nodded.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll get on the radio and call this in.”

  “Thank you,” I said, walking toward my old Dodge Ram pickup. The door opened with a creak, and I softened my expression. “And thank you for your work before I got here. You preserved the evidence and kept things clean. I appreciate it.”

  His expression softened, and he nodded.

  “Thanks, Joe.”

  I smiled before sighing. “Okay. I’m off to the hardware store for supplies. I’ll get bottles of water, but do we need anything else?”

  He squinted. “Bug spray?”

  It was a fair idea, so I nodded. As I did that, thunder rumbled in the distance.

  “I’ll be back soon.”

  Skelton looked at the sky and nodded. “I’ll tell Harry to bring in the party tent.”

  I closed my door. A drop of rain hit the front windshield as I rolled my window down.

  “Please do,” I said. I paused and waited as thunder once more rumbled to the west. “And tell him to hurry or we won’t have a crime scene left.”

  3

  Even as they traveled over the keyboard, Aldon McKenzie’s fingers trembled. It was Sunday, and the building was empty save for the security guards and cleaning teams. Aldon’s colleagues were at home, playing with their kids or gardening or doing whatever the hell else they did on their days off. If he had been at home, he would’ve been reading a book with his autistic daughter.

  Daria loved fish. At times, she couldn’t focus on anything else. Many kids with autism developed nearly obsessive interests like that. Sometimes that led to trouble, but for Daria, it became her release. She couldn’t talk about herself or her day, but once she started talking about clownfish, she wouldn’t stop.

  Aldon loved hearing her little voice. She had spoken her first word at two years old. Table. It was an odd first word, but Aldon fell in love with her voice the instant he heard it. His entire world shifted when she spoke for the first time. At the time, he and his wife pretended Daria was a late bloomer. Now that she spoke, they had told themselves, she’d interact with her parents more. Maybe she’d smile like other kids her age.

  That didn’t happen.

  They took her to doctors and therapists. The professionals were kind and understanding, but Daria would need help the rest of her life. She’d never go to a typical school, and when she got old enough, she might have to move to a special facility with appropriate staff to care for her. Even the word facility broke Aldon’s heart. To him, Daria was perfect. She would always be his baby, and he’d never give up on her and dump her into a facility where they’d warehouse her until her death.

  And then, he and Jennifer took her to the zoo in St. Louis. Daria had been four, but she still liked riding in the stroller. They spent hours at the zoo, but she had hardly looked at the animals. Then they walked into an artificial cave near the end of the elephant exhibit.

  Both Alden and Jennifer had been ready to go home. Giggling, happy children had surrounded them all day, but Daria hadn’t even cracked a smile. It broke his heart all over again. Aldon wished his daughter could experience that same uncomplicated childish joy. She deserved it. He would have given anything to make her smile.

  And then she did.

  The cave at the end of the River’s Edge exhibit wasn’t large, but it had faux stalactites and stalagmites on the ceiling and floor, and there were signs pointing out the different features common to the limestone caves that dotted the Missouri countryside. The cave also held a thirty-three-thousand-gallon fish tank with gar, bluegill, and whiskered catfish. When Daria saw that water, she squealed and clawed at the restraints that held her upright in the stroller.

  Aldon and Jennifer thought something had scared her, so they ran her through the exhibit and out the other side. Even when they got back into the late afternoon sunlight, though, she didn’t stop fighting. Thinking she’d hurt herself, Aldon unhooked the stroller’s straps, and Daria vaulted out and ran back into the exhibit.

  When Aldon and Jennifer got to her, Daria had pressed her face to the glass and grinned.

  “Fish,” she said, looking to her mother and father and then back to the tank. She pointed at an ugly gar near the glass. “Fish.”

  It was the second word she had ever spoken. It was also the happiest she had
ever been. Jennifer cried. Aldon knelt beside his little girl and hugged her tight.

  They spent two hours staring at that fish tank. Other families passed through the exhibit, but nobody remarked on the cute, smiling little girl at the fish tank. It became the happiest day of Aldon’s life.

  Now, Daria spoke every day. Her vocabulary and memory astounded everyone around her. She knew the scientific names for hundreds of fish, and she remembered the exact outfit she wore when seeing an alligator gar for the first time at the zoo.

  Unfortunately, despite her progress, God hadn’t made Daria for this world. As long as Aldon and Jennifer lived, Daria would have everything she needed, but the two of them wouldn’t live forever. Aldon was thirty-eight; his wife was thirty-nine. With luck, they’d live another forty years, but they couldn’t provide Daria the help she needed forever.

  Between Aldon’s job as an accountant and Jennifer’s job as a second-grade teacher, the family enjoyed a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. They saved every spare penny they earned for their daughter and put it into a tax-deferred trust. In thirty years, Daria would have several million dollars to live on. That money would buy all the help she needed. She’d be happy and safe.

  Now, Mason Stewart had put that dream in jeopardy.

  Aldon’s throat felt tight as he typed in commands. Six weeks ago, he had found some disturbing discrepancies in his employer’s accounting books. Everybody made mistakes, and Aldon thought little of them. Then he looked closer and learned the discrepancies weren’t mistakes at all. Something bad was happening at Reid Chemical.

  His fingers trembled as he progressed through the guide his attorney had given him. The first step was to create a virtual private network. That would allow him to upload company files to an off-site cloud server without fear of the IT department being able to track him. He had done this weeks ago, and nobody had found out, but the process still made him nervous.

  Reid Chemical advertised itself as a boutique manufacturer of chemical compounds for the pharmaceutical industry. In actuality, the company made cough drops and children’s ibuprofen. In the past year, though, the company had branched out.