Stranded

by Alex Kava

  “Yes,” Gwen said, relieved that Maggie understood despite Gwen’s difficulty in explaining.

  “So is he making this all up?”

  Gwen let out a sigh and raked her fingers through her hair before she admitted, “That I don’t know. There were some things about him that were quite genuine. Things I don’t think he could have faked.

  “For example, he genuinely appears to be uncomfortable in his own skin. He has the mannerisms of a thirteen-year-old boy. Awkward. Almost gawky. Facial tics that I don’t think he’s aware of. He reminded me of a teenager who woke up one day to find that he had grown six inches in the last month but in his mind he still wasn’t that tall.”

  “Are you saying he has the maturity of a thirteen-year-old? Or just the physicality?”

  “That’s a good question. I’m not sure I have an answer.”

  “Well, he’s serving a twenty-five-year sentence for arson. From what I understand, he’s set more than thirty fires in the state of Virginia. It takes a certain maturity to get away with that many, even for a pyromaniac.”

  “Oh, that reminds me. He said people call him a pyromaniac, but he says he’s a powermaniac.” As soon as she repeated his line Gwen realized she had been fooled. Before Maggie could respond, she said, “He’s playing me, isn’t he?”

  “If he is, how did he know about the woman in the culvert? The first one in orange socks? He told them exactly where the body could be found.”

  “And he couldn’t have randomly chosen Iowa along with Interstate 29 as a lucky guess, could he? I did prompt him by telling him it was in the Midwest.” Now Gwen wished she hadn’t even given him that much.

  “No, I don’t think he could. That would be too big of a coincidence. Tully and I know how hard this has been to pinpoint and we had a map. That we found this killer’s dumping ground so quickly was dumb luck. It’s just started to leak out to the media so he couldn’t have heard about it on the news.”

  There was a pause. Gwen realized neither of them knew what to think. She took the opportunity to talk about personal things for a few minutes. Gwen wanted to know how Tully was doing. He hadn’t been feeling well when he left yesterday morning. And Maggie wanted to know how the contractors were progressing on her house. A good deal of her two-story Tudor had been damaged in the fire. There was no connection to Otis. He had already been in prison.

  Gwen tried to keep positive, constantly reminding Maggie that now she could rebuild her house exactly how she wanted it. But the contractors were already behind schedule and she knew it was driving Maggie crazy to not be able to check up on them. Gwen promised to do a drop-by.

  As they wound down their conversation, Maggie suddenly asked, “Are you doing okay?”

  “Yes, of course,” Gwen said too quickly and immediately wondered what tell she may have unconsciously given Maggie.

  “You seem … I don’t know, tired?”

  “Maybe a little.”

  Maggie was quiet and Gwen knew she owed her more than that.

  “I just had my yearly physical on Monday,” she added. “So I’m fine.” She hadn’t heard back on any of the lab results but they were always good. She took care of herself. She didn’t feel ill. Truth was, she didn’t want to admit to Maggie that being back out at Quantico and interviewing criminals—all of it was having an adverse effect on her. Silly, but she didn’t want to admit that perhaps she had lost her edge … or worse, her nerve.

  So she changed the subject. “Do you think Otis made that up about a body in the barn? Is there even a barn? When I talked to Tully this morning he said some of the buildings had already been bulldozed.”

  “I would have sooner believed it if the barn had been bulldozed. Then a body could have been buried where it once stood. But the barn’s still there,” Maggie said. “And I’m not sure how easy it would be to bury someone under its floor.”

  Then she added as an afterthought, “I guess we’ll see if Otis likes to serve up his facts mixed with a little fiction.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Ryder Creed had stopped at a Drury Inn just outside Kansas City. He and Grace had gotten a couple of hours of sleep. He didn’t need much. As Hannah had reminded him, he had slept through an entire day. But he wanted a shower and a hot breakfast and he was even able to add some scrambled eggs to Grace’s meal, too.

  Creed was particular about where he stopped and more so about where he stayed. He always used this hotel chain whenever he could because it treated pets as family and provided a large grassed area for his dogs, as well as a nice clean room that didn’t smell like an ashtray. He never understood interstate motels and hotels that put pet owners in smoking rooms, like the two were even related. Even after a long day’s work, his dogs never smelled as bad as a smoker’s room.

  His GPS had them arriving at the site in a few minutes. Creed had already begun observing and assessing the terrain, determining what he and Grace would deal with. Lots of foliage just starting to bloom, but this far north he knew it had still been chilly at night. The cold and snow of winter usually preserved much more than what they had to deal with in the South. A real winter with cold temperatures for weeks, if not months, of frozen earth slowed down decomposition.

  It was only March. In these parts that meant fewer insects, another slowdown. Most investigators would prefer those conditions. After all, they wanted to find as much of the remains intact as possible. But cold temperatures made it more challenging for an air-scent dog that depended on finding bodies by smelling all the by-products of the decaying process—the gases, liquids, and acids.

  Creed took in the blue sky, not a cloud as far as he could see. The weather forecast called for more of the same later today and tomorrow. It was a gorgeous spring day, already close to seventy degrees, with no wind.

  A perfect day for decay.

  He caught himself smiling at that and wondered when he had started measuring the success of each day by his ability to find dead people. Maybe he really did need Hannah to schedule a search and rescue for him. Or even a bomb or drug search assignment. At least there was a fifty-fifty chance there’d be living people at the end of the search.

  Grace had been watching all morning from the back of the Jeep. As soon as Creed turned into the long driveway she started getting excited.

  “Sit back down,” he told her. “You know the rules.”

  She wagged and squatted, pushing the envelope.

  “All the way down.”

  Finally, down went her butt. Her head stayed up, looking out at the surroundings. Halfway up the driveway a black-and-white sheriff’s department SUV blocked the gravel road. Creed still couldn’t see the farm buildings. Trees blocked his view. Before he stopped his Jeep a sheriff’s deputy was already walking down the middle of the road to head him off.

  “Be good,” Creed told Grace. He grabbed his ID from the console and opened the driver’s window.

  “You need to turn around,” the deputy said, stopping in front of the Jeep’s grill and motioning with one hand while keeping the other on his gun belt.

  It looked like he wasn’t going to bother coming to the window, so Creed held up his ID to the windshield.

  “My name’s Ryder Creed. I’m with CrimeScent K-9.”

  The deputy looked young and nervous. He also didn’t seem to expect anyone who wasn’t in official law enforcement gear. He pulled out his cell phone and was punching in a number, trying to do it while not taking his eyes or his attention away from Creed.

  He heard the deputy say, “Some guy with a dog,” not even bothering with Creed’s name or his business’s name. It didn’t matter. In seconds his face turned a bright red and he slipped the phone back into his uniform’s shirt pocket without saying anything.

  He pulled his wide-brimmed hat low over his brow before he yelled to Creed, “You’re good to go.” And he waved his thumb over his shoulder. Then he headed back to his SUV to move it so Creed could pass by.

  Creed shook his head. “Amateurs, Grace,�
�� he said to the dog, glancing back at her in the rearview mirror. She was wagging her tail again but still sitting, still obeying despite her excitement. “They’ve got us working with a bunch of amateurs, girl.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Maggie shook her head at Tully while he opened the last Hostess Honey Bun that he had taken from the hotel’s complimentary breakfast bar. She hoped it meant that his appetite had returned and he was feeling better.

  By the time they arrived at the farm, Sheriff Uniss and his men had set up a perimeter with security posts at three places where they believed the property might be vulnerable to intruders. And by intruders they knew he meant media.

  As far as the sheriff was concerned, this was a crime scene that still needed to be protected and processed. He knew Tully had called for a K-9 unit, but neither Maggie nor Tully had shared with him the killer’s map or their suspicions about this being his dumping ground. Assuming most of the excitement was over, the sheriff had left, grumbling that he had to go deal with the governor’s press secretary. For his sake, Maggie hoped they didn’t find anything … or anyone … else.

  Earlier when Maggie relayed Gwen’s prison visit she tried to ignore the pained look on Tully’s face. She knew he’d be remembering the last time Gwen had interviewed a convicted prisoner. He had been there. She went through the information quickly and prompted him to share what he had. Agent Alonzo was becoming their right-hand man despite being twelve hundred miles away. Now, as they walked along the grove of trees, out of earshot of the deputies, and toward the barn, Tully filled her in on what he knew.

  “The receipt was for a Walmart outside of Council Bluffs, Iowa, just off Interstate 29.”

  “Council Bluffs is next door to Omaha, right?” Maggie remembered from their own road trip yesterday morning. They had landed in Omaha and drove that same stretch of interstate highway.

  Tully was trying to decipher the notes he’d taken while talking to Agent Alonzo. The crosshatch marks didn’t even resemble words but rather looked like someone had tried to test whether a pen still had ink.

  “Alonzo said the Walmart does have security cameras in the parking lot. He’s checking but he said it’s doubtful they have anything. He said most of these places don’t store more than a week’s worth of footage. He’s got someone from the Omaha bureau checking on it. Sounds like a long shot that we’d even see this guy. He strikes me as someone who’d be conscious of where cameras would be and try to avoid them.”

  “Were the CSU techs able to pull any fingerprints off the receipt?”

  “No, and I doubt they will. My gut tells me that’s gonna be a dead end. We found the receipt because he wanted us to find it. Just like the driver’s license.”

  “Was there anything else in either bag?”

  Tully shrugged. “You mean other than a head in one and a decapitated body in the other?”

  “Anything under the fingernails?”

  Tully fished another scrap of paper out of his pocket and searched through more chicken scratches. “They did preliminary scrapings. Chunks of dirt.”

  “Chunks of dirt?”

  “Janet said it looked like—” Tully flipped the paper over, then frowned like the words left a bad taste in his mouth. “She said it looked like the woman had clawed at the mud.”

  They both were silent. Neither stopped walking. They were almost at the barn when Tully finally continued, “ME’s trying to schedule in the autopsy.”

  “So he brings us all the way here and we’re no closer to knowing who he is.”

  “Part of the game. It’s like I told you last night. He’s obsessed with you.” He pointed at the barn. “But maybe we get lucky and find something he doesn’t want us to find.”

  The outside of the barn was faded red and the front doors sagged on ancient hinges. “Doesn’t seem likely that he’d just leave a body in here.” But Tully had already started to open the rusted latch.

  “Otis P. Dodd told Gwen that his friend Jack buried one of his victims in the barn. A tattooed biker.”

  “He told him all this over a couple of drinks?”

  “I know it sounds strange. Only problem, Otis was correct about the woman’s body stuffed in a culvert, right down to the orange socks. Who knows how he called that one. Could have been dumb luck. Maybe he heard about it inside the prison. But my guess is Otis P. Dodd likes to make up stories to get attention.”

  “What about I-29 and Iowa?”

  “Gwen told him it was in the Midwest.”

  “A lucky guess?”

  “You don’t really believe a killer named Jack told Otis about all the people he murdered and where he dumped bodies?”

  Tully shrugged again and pulled open the barn doors.

  Truth was, Maggie wasn’t quite sure what she believed. It wasn’t unheard of that a killer would share his exploits. Others had, but usually anonymously. In fact, this killer was sort of doing it with Maggie by leaving her the map and then the receipt as well as the socks. But again, that was anonymously. But sharing with someone who could identify him? Why would he do that?

  They were in the doorway of the barn when Tully pointed at the Jeep coming in through the tree-lined driveway. “Looks like our K-9 team is here. Alonzo says this guy is one of the best dog trainers and trackers in the country. If there’s another body out here, he should be able to find it.”

  Tully turned to head back and meet the man, but Maggie paused. When she glanced inside the barn, she noticed something and felt an instant dread. A chill slid down her back. She took a few steps into the barn and, with her foot, she swept aside a patch of the straw scattered over the floor.

  That’s when she saw that the barn didn’t have a cement foundation or even wood floorboards. Beneath the straw was only dirt.

  CHAPTER 28

  Neither Maggie nor Tully had ever worked with a cadaver K-9 team. Maggie wasn’t sure what to expect, but she definitely hadn’t imagined a nationally known expert to look like the man who got out of the Jeep.

  First of all, he looked too young. Thirty, at the most. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and wore a white T-shirt that stretched over a lean and muscular torso with arms to match. His Levi’s telegraphed more of the same. Leather hiking boots and wraparound sunglasses finished off the outfit. Once outside the Jeep, he put on a light blue oxford shirt but kept the shirttails out and the buttons undone.

  No, this was definitely not what she had expected.

  He was rolling up the sleeves when he saw Maggie and Tully. He reached in the opened Jeep window and brought all of the windows down halfway. As they approached the vehicle Maggie could see the dog inside and it didn’t look anything like she had expected either—too small and too white.

  “I’m R. J. Tully and this is Agent Maggie O’Dell.”

  “Ryder Creed.”

  He pulled off his sunglasses to meet their eyes as he offered his hand, first to Maggie, then to Tully. She noticed a silver chain bracelet with a small engraved plate but couldn’t make out the words. A diver’s watch on the other wrist, no wedding band. She caught herself and wondered why she had checked.

  His eyes were deep blue, almost the same color as the sky, bright against tanned skin. A confident, self-assured smile started in his eyes and triggered the corner of his mouth, a subtle but genuine smile that belied his age. His short dark hair looked like he had towel-dried it that morning and not bothered to comb it. Nor had he bothered to shave. But on closer inspection, Maggie realized his bristled jaw had been trimmed, leaving sharp and precise lines that gave order to a face that perhaps fought a five o’clock shadow too early every day.

  “This is Grace,” Creed told them, pointing inside the Jeep but making no effort to free the dog.

  “You just have the one?” Tully asked and Maggie immediately heard his skepticism.

  “She’s probably my best air-scent dog.”

  “It’s just that there’s a lot of ground to cover.” Tully waved his hand to include the fields behind the tr
ees.

  “Working multiple dogs at the same time can present problems. Competition between the dogs. False alerts. Overlapping grids. Believe me, one dog will be more than efficient.” He said it matter of fact without sounding offended or defensive.

  “She seems kinda small.” Tully still wasn’t convinced. He leaned down to take a better look through the window.

  Creed already had the liftgate up and was sorting through his gear. Grace met him at the back but didn’t attempt to leave the vehicle, sitting, wagging, and watching her master instead of paying attention to Maggie or Tully. Maggie got a good look at the dog. She was a Jack Russell terrier, a surprising pick for a tracker.

  “I don’t think size matters,” she said to Tully as she watched Creed. “Harvey’s twice Grace’s size—maybe three times—and I doubt he’d focus long enough to find his favorite Frisbee if I hid it.”

  Creed didn’t look up as he transferred items from a duffel bag to a small backpack, but she saw his corner-of-the-mouth smile again and she liked that she was able to provoke it.

  “What kind of dog is Harvey?” he asked.

  “Labrador.”

  “You’re right. Size or breed isn’t as important as drive.”

  Tully was standing with his hands on his hips, watching the dog, watching Creed, and doing a poor job of hiding his disappointment. At one point when he caught Maggie’s eyes, he rolled his as if to say, “Not much of an expert.”

  The two men were almost the same height, but that’s where the comparison stopped. Tully was wiry and lanky, dressed in trousers and a button-down shirt, wrinkled but neatly tucked in. Today he wore wire-rimmed glasses, a staple on the road, because he didn’t like packing all “the stuff” that went with his contacts. Tully was a conscientious do-gooder, a corny but romantic everyman whose coffee stains and absentmindedness could easily be forgiven because when he told you he had your back, you could count on it. He did.