The Girl in the Woods

by Chris Culver

  Aldon was on step five of his attorney’s eight-step guide when he heard the elevator ding. Like many modern office buildings, Aldon’s floor held cubicles but few private offices. He rose out of his chair to peer over the cubicle walls. Three men walked toward him. Two of them carried firearms and wore the black outfits of security officers, but the third came from IT.

  “Shit.”

  Aldon didn’t know how the Reid family organized their business, and on a day-to-day basis, he didn’t care. He was just a CPA. He kept his head down, did his job, and drove home at the end of the day. It used to be a great job, but then Mason Stewart, the CEO, brought in new partners.

  Supposedly, Stewart’s new business partners operated an off-shore holdings company, but none of Aldon’s colleagues knew who they were. These new partners, though, brought a lot of cash with them. More than that, they brought guns and their own security personnel. Now, men with assault rifles prowled the halls like it was a military base.

  Aldon’s heart raced. He had a story prepared if they caught him, but now it sounded flimsy in his head. The progress meter on his computer said he was halfway through the upload. He needed to stall, but first, he needed to calm down. He closed his eyes and pictured Daria. This was for her.

  Once his breath came easily, he stood and forced a smile to his face.

  “Anthony, right?” he asked, stepping out of his cubicle and looking at the guy from IT. The security guards stopped near the elevator, but Anthony kept walking. Aldon swallowed hard and pointed to his cubicle with his thumb. “I’m trying to get a head start on a big project, and I’m short for time. You guys need something?”

  “Oh, don’t let us bother you,” said Anthony. “We’ll come back later.”

  “You’re not here for me?” asked Aldon. “I mean, you’re not here to fix my computer or anything?”

  Anthony furrowed his brow. “Something wrong with your system?”

  “No, it’s fine, but what’s with the security guards?”

  Anthony looked over his shoulder before darting his eyes to Aldon.

  “Mr. Stewart ordered it. My team is installing biometric fingerprint readers on each computer. It makes things more secure. I’m sure you’ll get an email about it.”

  Aldon’s shoulders and chest loosened. “That will be a big change. It’s past time.”

  “Way past time,” said Anthony, nodding and raising his eyebrows. “The world’s changing. Information security has to change with it. Since you’re up here, though, I’ll tell my team to work elsewhere so we won’t bother you. Good luck with your project.”

  “Thank you,” said Aldon, nodding and breathing easier. “You, too.”

  He watched Anthony go back to the elevator. Once the IT manager left, Aldon’s legs gave out, and he fell to his chair, panting. The upload finished a few minutes later without a hitch, allowing him to finish the remaining steps in Laura’s checklist. Then, he jogged to the stairwell and pulled out his cell phone to call his wife.

  “Hey, honey,” she said. “I’m making lunch for Daria. Will you be home soon?”

  “I’m leaving the office now,” he said.

  She paused before speaking. “Are you all right? You sound out of breath.”

  He thought about lying to her and pretending that everything would be okay. It wouldn’t be, though. Aldon had opened a Pandora’s box. Unlike his colleagues, Aldon knew Mason Stewart’s new partners. He also understood what they planned for Reid Chemical. If they found out what Aldon had discovered, they’d kill him and his entire family without hesitation.

  Thank God he had found a lawyer with guts. Once he and Laura Rojas, his attorney, had the information they needed, she would contact the US Attorney’s Office in St. Louis. She’d keep them safe. Considering the people they were up against, the government would probably put his family in witness protection. Witness protection would hurt Daria, but it beat the alternative of being dumped in a shallow grave in the middle of nowhere.

  He cleared his throat.

  “Nothing’s right,” he said. “I’ll pick up moving boxes on the way home.”

  “Why do you need boxes?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” said Aldon. “Think about what you’d want to take with you if we had to disappear for a while. I’ll be home as soon as I can. We have a lot to talk about.”

  4

  I bought two cases of water, fifty pounds of plaster of paris, and half a dozen tarps at our local hardware store before hurrying toward the highway, ever watchful of the darkening sky. As I drove, the clouds released a slow, soaking rain. Heavy rain would wash away the cigarette butts at the crime scene, but the bottles would still stay in place, and the footprints and tire tracks should survive for a while. As long as things didn’t get worse, I’d be okay.

  I made good time on the highway, but the moment I turned onto the dirt and gravel road that led to the crime scene, my tires slipped, and the rear end of my truck fishtailed as if I had hit an ice patch. The bags of plaster of paris slid off the seat and to the floor beside my feet.

  I spun the steering wheel toward the skid while pumping my brakes. My old truck groaned and came to a stop, three wheels on the road and another in a ditch beside it. Then, the skies opened up. Rain pounded against my roof and windows like tiny hammers.

  I sighed and got my truck back on the road and crept forward. The campsite was about half a mile from the highway, and with every foot I traveled, my hands grew tighter on the steering wheel. It wouldn’t take long in this weather for even the deepest tire tracks to lose their shape. We didn’t even know our victim’s name yet, and already we were losing the evidence that could put her murderer in prison.

  This sucked.

  After five minutes of driving—and getting almost nowhere—a shape came into view on the road. I tapped my brake pedal to slow down. It was the coroner’s minivan. I parked behind him and grabbed a poncho I kept in my glove box.

  St. Augustine wasn’t big enough to have its own dedicated coroner, so we shared one with four neighboring counties. As I walked toward Dr. Sheridan’s van, his back wheels spun, shooting up a rooster tail of mud and gravel right toward me. I turned and covered my face as the spray hit me. A rock slammed into my forearm, making me gasp. I kicked his bumper.

  “Lay off!” I shouted. The wheels stopped spinning, and the driver’s door opened. Sheridan stuck his head out. I spit mud out of my mouth, raked dirt off my poncho, and then checked out my forearm. I wasn’t bleeding, but pain radiated up my arm and into my elbow. If that rock had hit me in the face, it would have broken my teeth.

  “You all right?”

  “No,” I said. “Did you not see me?”

  “No. Sorry,” he said. “The storm snuck up on me, and the van got stuck in the mud. I was trying to free it.”

  “Well, it’s stuck even tighter now,” I said, rubbing my now throbbing arm. I didn’t bother hiding the annoyance in my voice. “When you spun your wheels, you dug yourself into a hole. We’ll carry the victim out on a back brace. When the rain lets up, we’ll get a winch in here to pull your van out. If you’ve got a rain jacket, grab it because we’re walking to the crime scene.”

  He shook his head. “I’ve already got a body from Jefferson County in the back. If I leave, I’ll break the chain of custody.”

  I crossed my arms and raised my eyebrows.

  “Did you come out here alone, Doc?”

  He looked to his right. “Well, no, I’ve got my assistant—”

  “He can stay in the van, and you can come to the scene with me,” I said, interrupting him. “The chain of custody on your body will be intact. That satisfy you?”

  Sheridan thought for a moment.

  “Is the body protected in any way?”

  “No.”

  He nodded and unhooked his seatbelt before looking at his assistant.

  “Sam, we’ve got ponchos in the back. Detective Court and I will carry the victim out by hand, so I need you to get the back brace
while I get my gear. You might be stuck here for a while, but I’ll try to send somebody to relieve you.”

  Sam, Sheridan’s assistant, unlatched his belt and climbed into the rear of the van while I waited. Within moments, I had the back brace tucked under my arm while Dr. Sheridan carried a fishing tackle box full of medical supplies. We were only a couple hundred yards from the campsite, so the walk didn’t take long. Sheridan kept looking up at the sky. The clouds had a green, ominous tint, but I had other things to worry about.

  At the campsite, five uniformed officers were busy pitching a party tent over the victim’s body, while two others collected cigarette butts and bits of paper before they washed away. The rain had already erased the footprints and tire tracks. I couldn’t worry about the evidence we had lost, though; I had to focus on preserving what we still had.

  “Sampson, Greg,” I called. “You can’t use plastic bags for those cigarette butts. You’ve got to use paper. If you put wet paper in plastic bags, the evidence will mold and rot. We won’t be able to use it. Paper breathes.”

  Officer Sampson looked up and furrowed his brow. “We’ve already bagged a lot of stuff.”

  “Redo it,” I said. I looked to Dr. Sheridan. “The body’s yours. Good luck.”

  Sheridan nodded and knelt over the body while the team and I put up the tent. It took fifteen minutes, but we eventually got a roof over our heads and vinyl walls around us. That kept the rain away, but it didn’t stop water from flowing down the hill.

  Dave Skelton stood near the tent’s entrance, looking at the sky.

  “Hey, Skelton,” I said, looking up, “find a shovel and build a swale outside the tent. We need to divert this water.”

  Skelton didn’t look at me. Instead, he shook his head.

  “Sky’s green, and there’s a wall cloud to the west,” he said. “We should head back to town. The crime scene can wait.”

  The team looked up at me. St. Augustine was smack dab in the middle of tornado alley, so we took the weather this time of year seriously. Skelton was right, but we couldn’t abandon the scene yet.

  “We’re under a tornado watch at the moment. If that becomes a warning, we’ll seek shelter. In the meantime, keep working.”

  Skelton hesitated before nodding. For about twenty minutes, I settled into the routine of collecting evidence. Then, one by one, every person in the tent froze. My heart thudded against my chest, and my hands trembled as a deep rolling noise reverberated through the woods. It sounded like a waterfall.

  “Skelton, find out what that is. Might be a low-flying plane.”

  Skelton walked out of the tent and swore.

  “Not a plane. We’ve got a funnel.”

  “Everybody up!” I shouted, stepping across the tent toward the body. Dr. Sheridan was kneeling near her head, but he shot to his feet. “Dr. Sheridan, help me with the girl. Skelton, open the back of your SUV. Everybody else, get to safety now.”

  At once, the men and women inside the tent sprang into frenetic motion. We didn’t have time to do this right, so I grabbed the victim’s feet, and Dr. Sheridan grabbed her arms. Our uniformed officers gathered every evidence bag they could carry. The rain thundered down on the tent, and the wind howled around us.

  As dangerous as tornadoes were in open fields, they were far more deadly in the woods. Every tree, rock, stick, and piece of debris around us could turn into a projectile at any moment. Not only that, we wouldn’t be able to see the actual tornado coming through the woods, so we wouldn’t know where to run.

  Rigor had set in, so the victim’s body stayed stiff as we picked her up, making her corpse more like a heavy stack of lumber than a giant water balloon. The fatigue I had experienced earlier disappeared as hail pounded against the tent and crashed against the cars outside. Powerful winds buffeted the tent, threatening to rip it out of the ground. We needed to move.

  As Sheridan and I shuffled out of the tent with the victim, the roar of the storm magnified, and small bits of debris lifted from the ground, forming an opaque cloud around us. Grit hit me in the face, arms, and legs, abrading my skin. The wind pushed my clothes tight against my body. I squeezed my eyes to a slit and hurried to Dave Skelton’s marked SUV. Around me, taillights disappeared as the rest of the team hurried away.

  I should have listened to Dave Skelton earlier. I should have focused on the living instead of the dead. Sheridan and I slid the victim into the back of Skelton’s vehicle, but since her body was stiff, her legs wouldn’t bend.

  “Head on the ground and feet on the backseat,” said Sheridan, lowering the victim’s head to the floorboards. I lifted her legs so they rested between the headrests on the backseat. We wedged her in there pretty well. The position wasn’t dignified, but it was our best option given the circumstances. Once we had her secured, Sheridan ran to the passenger seat and slammed the door shut.

  I sat in the backseat when I remembered something: Sam, Sheridan’s assistant, was still in the coroner’s van up the road, and he wasn’t going anywhere.

  I slammed my door shut, hit the SUV’s side, and sprinted up the road. Sheridan must have guessed what was going on because Dave Skelton’s vehicle shot past me a second later.

  The coroner’s van—and my pickup—were a couple hundred yards from the campsite, so it only took a few seconds to get there. As I pulled open the minivan’s door, a deafening crack echoed around me, even above the sound of the storm. I looked to find an old poplar falling to the ground, its trunk having snapped in the wind. Sam, Dr. Sheridan’s assistant, had the wide eyes of an animal caught in a snare.

  “My truck. Move. Now.”

  Sam and I ran to my truck. I couldn’t find my keys in my pocket, so I reached into the glove box for my spare as the coroner’s technician climbed inside. As I turned my key, a heavy tree branch slammed into the hood, rocking the entire vehicle. Hail the size of lemons and baseballs slammed into my roof and front window, creating a deafening cacophony. My old truck coughed and sputtered to life.

  “Hold on, buddy,” I said, putting my right arm behind the seat beside me and peering over my shoulder as I accelerated backwards, being careful to keep two wheels on the grass beside the gravel road for traction. Even as I drove, the sky grew darker, and the debris hitting the truck grew heavier and heavier. The tornado was moving faster than we were on these mud roads.

  My heart thudded against my chest, and my skin felt clammy. Time slowed as dirt and gravel pelted my car. I didn’t know whether I was breathing or not.

  “Almost there,” I said, more to myself than anyone else. The moment the words left my lips, something slammed into my windshield.

  “Shit,” said Sam, his hands over his ears. “Go, go, go, go.”

  I didn’t know what Sam saw, and I didn’t dare turn my head to look. Instead, I pressed on the accelerator hard.

  Please don’t get stuck. Please don’t get stuck.

  My tires spun in the soft ground, but then they found purchase, and we rocketed toward the highway. Something heavy slammed into my door, knocking the car to the right. Sam swore and put his hands on the dashboard, bracing himself for an impact. I tightened the muscles of my legs and back, expecting something to slam into us.

  Come on, baby. Keep going.

  As if hearing my private thoughts, my truck’s engine roared even louder than the storm as we shot backwards. Within seconds, we hit the tree line. Once my tires reached asphalt, I threw the car in first gear and punched the gas to the floorboard. The sound from the storm was deafening. Impenetrable, dark clouds surrounded us. The hail had cracked my front windshield. My windshield wipers didn’t work, but the other windows were still intact.

  A towering black form hovered over the woods we had exited. Branches, bits of aluminum siding, and other debris pelted the countryside. I squeezed the steering wheel and held my breath as I sped up.

  “There’s a bathtub in the road,” said Sam.

  His voice was so nonplussed, I didn’t process what he’d said until
I saw it myself. An enameled cast-iron bathtub sat in the middle of the road as if God himself had dropped it. My tires squealed as I spun the wheel to avoid it. Then they squealed again as I whipped the truck around a tree branch as thick around as my waist. Grit hit the sides and windows, making it sound as if I had driven through a cloud of insects at high speed. My broken front window creaked with the force of the gale.

  Don’t break. Don’t break. Don’t break.

  I kept saying it repeatedly so it became my mantra, a prayer to a God who, at the moment, seemed really pissed off at us. If that window broke, we were as good as dead. Glass shards would impale us at sixty miles an hour and tear us to ribbons.

  Time had no meaning in that black cloud, but then I saw a light ahead. The tornado was moving perpendicular to the highway, leaving us behind. The sky grew brighter. A few moments later, I looked in my rearview mirror. The storm didn’t have a tight funnel; instead, it had a V-shape that reached from the sky to the ground.

  I drove for another mile before turning into the parking lot of a McDonald’s. A crowd of people had formed in the parking lot to watch the tornado tear through the countryside, but my team must have kept driving. The moment I parked, Sam opened his door and vomited outside.

  “Easy, buddy,” I said. “That was scary.”

  “We drove through a tornado,” he said. He spit and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “That was fucking terrifying.”

  I tilted my head to the side and took a deep breath. “We got lucky. I don’t think we got caught in the vortex. That was probably the forward downdraft.”

  He looked at me as if I had opened a can of rotten tuna in front of him.

  “I don’t care if we were in the forward downdraft, the rear downdraft, the vortex, or anything else. We almost died.”

  I nodded and lowered my voice.

  “You didn’t die. You’re okay. Why don’t you get a cup of coffee?” I asked, reaching into my purse for a ten-dollar bill. “It’s on me.”