by Alex Kava
Grace had nudged her way to the open liftgate, still sitting, but now able to lean out. She was sniffing in Maggie’s direction.
“Are we allowed to pet her?” Maggie asked.
“Sure. She’s just not allowed to leave the Jeep until I tell her it’s okay.”
Maggie reached her hand in slowly for the dog to sniff. Then she scratched Grace’s neck, keeping her hand where the dog could still see it. She felt Creed watching her from the corner of his eye. Of course, he had to be protective of his dog.
Finally finished, he slipped on the backpack. To Maggie he said, “Would you mind taking Grace to stretch her legs while I check around?”
“Sure.”
And to Tully, “Can you fill me in while I take a look?”
Tully simply nodded.
Creed handed Maggie a small, soft, pink elephant. The dog toy was plastic, but squishy and squeaky, and as soon as it came out of Creed’s pocket Grace could barely contain herself. Her entire hindquarter wiggled, excited and impatient, but she still sat waiting for her master’s permission. She watched Creed but also watched as he handed off her toy to Maggie, eyes darting back and forth, wagging, listening, ears perched and haunches ready to run.
“Toss it around for her, but she might just want to carry it in her mouth. Tap your hand against the side of your leg like this”—and he demonstrated—“if she strays.” Then he looked into Maggie’s eyes and asked, “Is it okay if I call you Maggie?”
“Yes, of course.”
But immediately she realized he wasn’t asking for himself. He turned back to Grace and said, “Okay, Grace, go with Maggie.”
The dog leaped into Creed’s arms—obviously something they did without either of them thinking—and in one fluid motion he swung her to the ground. Immediately all her attention was focused on Maggie and the pink elephant.
She seemed so playful, so spirited, so ordinary. As Maggie led Grace to the soft grass closer to the house it was hard for her to imagine that this little energetic dog spent a good deal of her time hunting dead people.
CHAPTER 29
Creed tried to concentrate on what Agent Tully was telling him. As they walked, Creed kept Agent O’Dell and Grace in his line of vision. To Agent Tully it probably looked like he wanted to make sure Grace was okay. That was only half the truth. He couldn’t get Agent O’Dell—Maggie—off his mind.
God, she had gorgeous eyes, rich brown with flecks of caramel.
Hannah would be laughing at him about now, telling him, “Since when have you ever noticed a woman’s eyes, let alone what color they are?”
She was right. This was stupid.
Agent Tully pointed at the crater left by a backhoe and was telling Creed about the construction project that had uprooted a skull and other bones along with a garbage bag containing a body.
“Was it male or female?” Creed asked.
“That’s information we haven’t released yet,” Tully said.
Creed didn’t need to know. Grace didn’t care what gender the corpse was. They all smelled alike to her. But Creed wanted to know. The only reason he put himself through so many of these recoveries was in the hope of finding his sister, Brodie. Hannah had told him that when Agent Alonzo at Quantico called, he mentioned that the farmstead was behind an interstate rest area.
“Does it make a difference?”
Tully must have seen something in Creed’s face. Hannah had said that these two—O’Dell and Tully—were profilers and that Creed should “behave” himself. If they really did have antennae for someone’s psychological wellbeing they should have already sent him packing back to Florida.
“It doesn’t matter to Grace,” Creed confessed. “But it helps me to know as much about the situation as possible. For instance, if you suspect it’s a crime of passion the body might not be hidden or buried as deep.”
“That makes sense.”
“How many others do you think there are?” Now Creed just wanted to cut to the chase.
“We really don’t know. There might be a dozen or there might not be any more than what we’ve found.”
The details that helped Creed and Grace weren’t necessarily the same ones that law enforcement was interested in. And sometimes it was better to not know everything law enforcement suspected, or even what their expectations were.
Creed knew Hannah had also gone over with Agent Alonzo what Creed and Grace could offer, what they would do, and what that meant. She always spelled it out before she ever accepted an assignment so that there were no misperceptions, no misunderstandings, and so the client knew there were no guarantees. At least no family members were here. Creed hated when the officials allowed family to wait somewhere in clear sight.
“If you can’t tell me the gender, can you give me an idea of how old the remains were in the garbage bag?” Creed asked.
“About three weeks.”
“And the skull and bones? What kind of shape were they in?”
“There wasn’t any flesh. No residue of decomp. They definitely had been in the ground for a while. This property has been vacant for almost ten years. We don’t know if the killer has had access to it for that long, but we can’t discount it either.”
Creed pulled a GPS monitor out of his pack and turned it on. He started tapping into the gadget’s memory some baselines to define the search corridor. It was a large area, and overwhelming if the woods behind the property were to be a part of the grid.
“I imagine it must make a difference,” Agent Tully continued when Creed had no more questions, “whether a body’s been buried a couple months or a couple of years.”
“Grace has a remarkable ability to work through multiple targets, but yeah, it can be difficult if those targets are in different stages of decay. Cadaver scent is not one single scent. There’s a whole range of scents that the body gives off at different stages. And there are a variety of things—as you know—that affect decomp. For instance, how deep the body is buried. If it’s enclosed in a garbage bag or just underneath the dirt. The composition of the soil and what the air exchange might be. When we’re searching in water, it makes a difference how warm or cold the water is.”
Creed glanced at the agent and realized he may have given him too much information to decipher. He found that often law enforcement just wanted him to find the dead bodies. They didn’t care how it was done. As far as they were concerned it was magic. If he tried to explain the science of it, he usually lost them.
“Your dog can smell a body underwater?”
Creed smiled, pleased that Agent Tully appeared fascinated rather than lost.
“The scents can carry up to the surface,” he told him. “If you teach a dog to recognize certain scents, the dog doesn’t care whether it’s underground, under water, or up in a tree.”
Suddenly Creed heard Agent O’Dell calling to Grace. He turned to see the agent trying to get the dog to come back to her side. He also saw Grace, nose in the air, her ears pricked forward. She was circling and her tail stood straight up, wagging rapidly.
Grace had started without him.
CHAPTER 30
“Do you keep her off lead?” Maggie asked. “Doesn’t she need a collar or leash? Something for you to keep track of her?”
She hated that she sounded out of breath, that she felt like she had done something wrong. Maybe she shouldn’t have thrown the dog’s toy so far.
“She’s okay. We don’t use collars or leashes for free range. I don’t like to risk that she’ll get tangled up in the brush. Especially if we get separated.”
Maggie had picked up Grace’s pink elephant and didn’t realize until now that she was squeezing it in her fisted hand.
Creed didn’t seem angry or worried. He’d come over to Grace and without any urgency in his voice simply told her, “Show me.”
The dog had been straining, almost as if she had been on a leash, struggling to leave Maggie but knowing she wasn’t allowed. She kept circling farther and farther away unt
il Creed came over and gave her the command.
Maggie watched him tap coordinates into a handheld GPS. He kept an eye on Grace and followed her, but he wasn’t in a hurry. He walked as Grace trotted. Maggie and Tully stayed a couple of steps behind.
“Why does she keep circling?” Tully asked in almost a whisper, as if afraid to interrupt the process.
“She’s in the scent cone. Barriers can create secondary scent pools, even secondary scent cones. Like I told you before, there’re a number of reasons she might not be able to zero in on the primary scent yet.”
“Barriers?” Maggie said and just then noticed that despite Grace’s erratic circling, she was headed for the opened doorway of the barn.
“If there are other bones scattered or even …” Creed hesitated. “Is there any possibility of pieces buried in several spots?”
Maggie shot a look at Tully. Creed noticed.
“The body in the garbage bag was decapitated,” Tully told him. “The head was in a separate bag, but close by. Practically on top of the other bag.”
Maggie realized it was ridiculous for them to keep information from Creed. It would only impede the search. This wasn’t like holding back details to see if Grace was the real deal, like some initiation rite for her to prove something to them.
“We do have information that there could be a body buried in the barn.”
Grace was already at the doorway but she paused and looked back at Creed, waiting for his permission to enter.
“What’s the floor like in there?” he asked as he pulled a rod out of his backpack and started unfolding it until it became a spear with sharp prongs at one end.
“Hard dirt,” Maggie answered, and Tully raised an eyebrow, surprised that she knew. “I checked,” she said to Tully. “It looks like there’s old straw scattered and matted on top.”
“Any chance the place is booby trapped?”
“Holy crap,” Tully muttered. “We didn’t really think about that.”
Neither of them had considered it when they recklessly unlatched and swung open the doors earlier.
“If it’s any consolation,” Maggie said, “The house wasn’t.”
The three of them stood silently as Grace wagged and whined, excited and ready to enter.
Finally Creed said, “You two stay right here. I’ll make Grace sit outside until I’m sure it’s safe.”
“We’ll check it out with you,” Maggie said, looking at Tully. They had taken over this crime scene. It was theirs to protect.
“Maggie’s right. This site, including the barn, is our responsibility.” And Tully started leading the way.
“Actually it’ll be easier if I go in alone,” Creed said, walking along with the two of them.
They kept a slow steady pace and Maggie suddenly felt conscious of every step, of what could be underfoot.
“We train bomb dogs, too,” Creed continued, “for law enforcement, the military. Even Homeland Security. I have an idea of what to look for.”
“An idea doesn’t sound convincing,” Tully said.
Ten feet away from the open barn doors Creed stepped ahead, turned, and stood in front of them as if to make his case.
“It’s not going do much good if all three of us get blown up. Seriously, I’m not questioning your authority or jurisdiction. I’m just saying I have a better idea of what to look for if the place is rigged.”
Creed’s eyes went from Tully to Maggie, back to Tully. If he were being cocky this would be easier, but he was sincere. He made it sound like this was just another part of his job. But Maggie didn’t like it. She was more comfortable taking a risk than letting someone else do it. Most of all, she hated that she and Tully hadn’t thought about this killer ambushing them. After all, he’d left them a map. They had gone by the premise that he simply wanted to show off his talent and his dumping ground. But they knew plenty of killers who enjoyed setting up his pursuers, of besting them just to make them squirm, or worse—to watch them die.
She found herself looking around the property again, glancing back at the house, studying the windows and watching for movement. Beyond the grove of trees she couldn’t even see the deputies Sheriff Uniss had stationed. It would be easy for someone to hole up in one of the other buildings and keep an eye on them without ever being detected.
“Maybe we should call in experts to check all the buildings,” she said to Tully.
“That construction crew was ripping down and digging up stuff all last week,” Tully said, but now he was looking around, too. “Chances are pretty slim that he’d rig one structure and none of the others.”
“It’s probably fine,” Creed said. “I’m always overly cautious. But I need to protect my dogs from as many unforeseen hazards as possible. Sometimes farmers put down rat traps. So let me just do a check.”
Maggie could feel Tully’s eyes on her. She knew he’d made his decision to let Creed go ahead but he wouldn’t say so unless they were in agreement. Maggie was watching Creed, waiting for him to meet her eyes. When he did, he didn’t blink. There was an intensity, a maturity beyond his young age, but there was something else—a reckless disregard for his own safety. That realization jolted her. Usually in risky situations she was used to seeing the kick of adrenaline, sometimes a healthy dose of fear or passion. But in Ryder Creed’s eyes Maggie saw a hint of resolve, that if he happened to get blown up in the next few minutes, so be it.
She hated that the two men had put her in this position. She wanted to believe that Tully was right. If the killer had wanted to blow them up he’d already had a half dozen chances. Then she thought about him planting the orange socks. He wanted his handiwork to be found, not destroyed, not blown up.
Without taking her eyes away from him, she said to Creed, “If you see anything at all that doesn’t look right you back out immediately and we get the experts.”
“Absolutely,” he agreed.
He started to turn but stopped as if he’d forgotten something. He dug in his jeans pocket and handed his Jeep keys to Tully.
“Just in case,” he said with that subtle smile that hitched up the corner of his mouth and painfully reminded Maggie how right she was about what she had seen in his eyes. And it also surprised her how much she didn’t want something bad to happen to this man.
They watched him instruct a wiggling, excited Grace to sit outside the open doorway. Then he went inside holding the collapsible rod-turned-into-spear.
“We’ve got nothing that says this killer would set up booby traps, do we?” Tully asked, still needing reassurance.
“He strung up Zach Lester’s intestines in a tree. He left us a map.” Maggie was thinking her way through it. “But the orange socks,” she told him, “he put them on a victim who was already dead just for our benefit. If there’s another body inside, I’m hoping he wants us to find it and not join it.”
She stared at the barn’s doorway and only then did she realize that she had unsnapped her holster and her right hand was now inside her jacket, gripping her revolver.
CHAPTER 31
Noah’s mother had brought him a clean set of clothes. The detectives had confiscated his overnight bag with Ethan’s car and everything else that was inside. It had been towed in to their crime lab. He was told that they were going through it right now, examining every single thing for clues. Detective Lopez told Noah this in a tone that sounded like a threat. But Noah knew they wouldn’t find anything that would tell them what had happened. No one would believe what had happened. In the light of day, Noah wasn’t even sure he believed what had happened.
When he told them that Ethan was dead, his mother had gasped but Detective Lopez and his father looked at him like he was either lying or delirious. Now they talked around him like he wasn’t there. People came and went, in and out of the hospital room.
The doctor was the only one who had spoken to Noah without looking at him as though he were crazy. When he came to examine Noah he had been kind and gentle with him, and Noah
wanted to tell him about the voices in his head. Did the doctor have anything he could give him? Any medication that would help. Maybe Noah should have complained. Maybe then the doctor wouldn’t have dismissed him from the hospital.
Detective Lopez told Noah he was lucky. That for now he was sending him home with his parents instead of holding him in a jail cell. Noah wanted to tell the detective that he would be safer in a jail cell. That he didn’t want to go home with his parents. He needed to tell them that the madman had taken his driver’s license. That he knew his home address—his parents’ home address.
But how could Noah explain when he had promised the killer he wouldn’t tell anything about what had happened?
“What would they all think?” Noah could still hear the madman’s voice. “What would your parents say if they knew you begged me to kill your friend first?”
Noah glanced around the room, making sure no one else could hear the voice, too. That’s how convincing it was inside his head. But no one else seemed to notice. Not his father or Detective Lopez as they talked in hushed tones right outside the door. Not the nurse or his mother as they went over his dismissal papers.
Yet that voice sounded so real. And so did Ethan’s screams.
Don’t think about it. Stop thinking about any of it. Just stop it!
This time when he looked up, the others were all staring at him and Noah realized immediately that he had spoken some of the words out loud, again. He was still sitting on the corner of the bed but he turned his back to them and continued putting on his shirt as if he were okay, as if he hadn’t just shouted strange things.
He concentrated, instead, on how good the shirt smelled. Fresh out of his mother’s dryer, it felt soft against his battered skin. Next he tried to pull his socks on. His ankle wasn’t broken—thank goodness. The swelling had gone down but his entire foot was black and blue.
“Take off your shoes,” he heard the madman say. This time he kept his head down and fought the instinct, the urgency of his eyes wanting to dart around.
