A Killer Harvest

by Paul Cleave

  It was closed earlier. Wasn’t it?

  She puts her phone away and removes her gun from her holster and points it at the ground. She twists the handle on the back door. It opens. She steps outside. The back garden is as tidy as the front. Archer certainly looked after the place. She walks along the fence line, and there, right in the middle, are scuffmarks on the fence. The ferns next to it have some broken fronds. She climbs the fence the same way she suspects somebody else climbed it. There’s a blond woman looking at her from a bedroom. She frowns at Vega and opens the window. In the far distance the sky is turning black. There’s a storm coming.

  “Can I help you?” the woman says, looking nervous.

  Vega holds up her badge. “Has anybody come through here recently?”

  “No. Like who? When?”

  Vega looks down into the garden. She can see heavy footprints in the dirt and a few flattened vegetables. “Recently,” she says.

  “Wait there,” the woman says.

  Vega puts her gun into the holster. She stays up on the fence. The woman comes outside and approaches her. “You think somebody came through my yard?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “I’m not sure,” she says, but she has an idea. It’s the Good Samaritan. Only . . . why would he? “Have you been home all day?”

  “Yes,” the woman says. Then she frowns a little. “A few minutes ago Sandy started pointing out the window.”

  “Sandy?”

  “My daughter.”

  “Can I speak to her?”

  “She’s thirteen months old.” The woman looks into her garden. “My vegetables,” she says. “Some of them are ruined.”

  “Is there anybody else home who might have seen anything?”

  “No,” she says.

  Vega hands the woman her card. Whoever climbed the fence is long gone. “Call me if you notice anything,” she says.

  “Will do.”

  The woman slowly makes her way back to her house, shaking her head as she eyes her garden. Vega lowers herself down. She is at the back door when the woman calls out over the fence. “Are you still there?”

  Vega climbs it again.

  “This isn’t mine,” the woman says, holding up a cell phone. “It was lying on the ground by the gate.”

  Vega wants to tell her she shouldn’t have picked it up and gotten her fingerprints all over it, but it’s too late now. She reaches into her pocket, grabs a latex glove, and pulls it on. The woman reaches up and hands her the phone. It looks brand new. She thanks the neighbor, then goes back inside. She switches the phone on. It takes only a few seconds to see who it belongs to: Joshua Logan. What the hell was he doing here? She reads the messages. He was hiding in the pantry while texting his friend Olillia. He sent her photographs he took in the house. At one point his mom texted him and he lied to her. He must have come here to try to figure out if he recognized anybody. He was trying to help without his mom knowing, but he couldn’t have done it in a more stupid way. She isn’t sure how hard to come down on him. She drops the phone into an evidence bag and tucks it into her pocket and makes her way to the front door. She’s going to find him and ask him exactly what it is he thinks he’s up to.

  She is walking past the office when she is pushed hard up against the wall, and a moment later is thrown facedown onto the floor. The carpet absorbs some of the impact, but it still has her head buzzing. She can’t stop her gun being taken out of her holster. Can’t do anything but roll over and stare down the barrel as it’s pointed back at her.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  For the next few blocks, all Joshua can do is stare out the window looking for cops. He’s too winded to talk. He’s so nervous, he’s trying to recall if he’s ever heard of incidents in which sixteen-year-olds have had heart attacks. When he gets his breathing under control, he tells Olillia about what he saw in Vincent Archer’s house. He tells her it defied all his expectations, that he was expecting the rooms to be blacked out, that there would be a pit under the house where Vincent kept his victims, that the fridge would be full of fried fingers and hearts. He tells her how normal it was, and in a way that made it more frightening—how can you find monsters when they can live like anybody? Then he tells her about the one room that was different, with all the photographs pinned to the walls, how it made his skin feel cold seeing the pictures of his mom up there. He tells her about the dog food and no sign of a dog. He takes the bandage off his good hand but doesn’t reapply it to his bad hand, because he doesn’t want it to stick to the wound, and he doesn’t want to reapply the padding he took off earlier. He tells her more of the dream he had of Vincent and the missing girl. By the time he’s done she’s been driving for ten minutes and he doesn’t even know where they’re heading.

  “It has to all be connected somehow,” he says. “I just can’t place it.” He pauses and looks out the window. “Where are we going?”

  “I’m not sure,” she says. “I figured we’d drive back towards the library. Is that okay?”

  “I have another idea,” he says. “My dad used to bring work home with him, his personal case files and notes. Mum hasn’t touched his office yet, so they might still be there.”

  “You want to go and look?”

  “There’s nobody home. Mom’s visiting Uncle Ben at the hospital.”

  “Let me ask you something,” she says. “Are we looking for the guy who saved you yesterday, or are we trying to figure out what happened to Ruby Carter?”

  “I think both.”

  Joshua doesn’t know the way home by sight, so he gives Olillia his address, which she types into her phone. When they arrive he gets them a couple of drinks and he thinks about how his dad renovated this kitchen a few years ago, and how Vincent Archer’s kitchen looked renovated too. He grabs the first-aid box from the bathroom and applies some fresh padding to the back of his hand, and Olillia wraps the bandaging back around it. They head to his dad’s office, where they pause outside the door. It’s the one room he’s never seen. He was in here often in what he’s now starting to think of as his old life—the life when he was blind but at least nobody wanted him dead. Since coming home after losing his dad, he hasn’t been able to cross its threshold.

  “Are you okay?” Olillia says.

  “I’m fine,” he says, and he opens the door.

  The room is tidy. It’s on the south side of the house, so it’s cooler in here, never getting any sun. He puts his drink down on the desk and rubs at his arms to try to help with the chill. There are photographs on the walls of him, and his mom, there are photographs of them together with his dad. The desk is the shape of an L, and sits with the length of it under the window and the side against the wall. It faces into the backyard. There’s a jade plant on the corner of it, and golfing trophies sitting on top of the filing cabinet to the side. His dad tried to sneak away for a few hours every weekend to play. Joshua went with him a couple of times. He enjoyed the walk, and his dad would ask him to keep count even though he knew his dad was keeping count anyway, and sometimes he’d joke and ask Joshua if he’d seen where that shot went, and Joshua would always say it went so far he lost sight of it.

  There’s a cardboard box with Ruby Carter’s name on it on the floor next to the filing cabinet. There’s a couch on the wall opposite the window and desk, and sometimes he’d sit in here with his dad when his dad was working, as long as he stayed quiet, though sometimes his dad would talk to him about what it was like being a cop. His dad once told him the best thing a detective could do was stay in tune with his surroundings. “It’s not just sight, buddy,” his dad said once. “It’s all the senses, and even then sometimes it’s a sixth sense. That’s why I think you’d make a great detective, if you wanted to be.” His dad used to tell him he could be anything he wanted to be if he put his heart and soul into it. He never used to believe him, and of course his dad must have known it couldn’t possibly be true.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” Olillia asks
.

  He stares out the window. “I haven’t been in here since Dad died,” he says.

  She moves beside him and puts a hand on his shoulder.

  “It’s crazy,” he says, “but I still expect him to come home.”

  “That’s not crazy,” she says.

  “We should probably get started,” he says, “in case Mom comes back early.”

  He picks up the cardboard box and sits it on the desk. He removes the lid. On top is a map that covers the area where Ruby disappeared. He unfolds it and it becomes larger than the desk, so they lay it out on the floor. It covers ten square miles, most of it forest and farmland. It’s north but mostly west of the city by about forty-five minutes, so his dad had said. The forest is parallel with a stretch of the Waimakariri River, a river that runs a little short of a hundred miles, starting from the heart of Te Waipounamu, the South Island, and ending in the beaches just north of Christchurch.

  “Dad told me a little about the case,” he says. “And about Ruby.”

  “I remember a month after she went missing it was her birthday,” Olillia says. “It was in the news how her friends and family still held a party for her. They wanted to celebrate her life, but I bet without any kind of closure it would have felt so sad.”

  “I remember it,” he says. “My dad went along. He was nervous about it, because he thought he’d be a target for their grief since she hadn’t been found, but he said they were all welcoming and they shared stories with him of what she was like. He said it was sad, like you said, but there was laughter too. He thought some of them had accepted she was dead and had found closure, but others still had hope she had gotten lost but was managing to stay alive out there. I remember how hard he hugged me when he came home, and how he locked himself in his office all weekend working the case.”

  He pulls out an eight-by-ten glossy photograph of Ruby from the box. In it she’s wearing a jumpsuit and standing in front of a small plane. She’s smiling at the camera and has her hand outwards, her fingers forming a V.

  “She was a skydiving instructor,” he says. “Dad said she was a real adrenaline seeker. Whenever she had enough money, she’d travel to some faraway country and jump out of a plane or BASE jump off a cliff.”

  He sits the photograph on the desk so they can both take a good look at it. He wonders how long it was taken before she died. “It’s why she was single—she never wanted any long-term commitments, and she figured doing what she did, she might not be around long enough for one anyway. Her mom told Dad every time Ruby went away she’d expect a phone call from somebody they didn’t know saying there’d been an accident.”

  “Did your dad have any theories as to what happened to her?”

  “There was never proof one way or the other whether she got lost, or if there was an accident, or somebody killed her. There’s a lot of forest out there. He said they searched and scoured, and that if she’d been out there they would have found her. But if she’d been biking along the river and fallen in,” he says, looking at the map, “it’s possible both she and her bike were swept downstream. Nobody reported her missing for a day. He said her body could have floated a hundred miles, or she might have been swept under and snagged on some rocks. He said she might have floated downstream and managed to pull herself out only to get lost in a whole new part of the forest. It was impossible to prove foul play, and impossible to rule it out.”

  Olillia points to an X partway into the center of the map, around five miles from the river and a few miles from the motorway. The X is in his dad’s handwriting. “What’s that?” she asks.

  “It’s the inroad into the forest. It dead-ends a mile in,” he says. “Dad said visitors can park their cars there. It’s where her car was found. This map must be the range she would have biked,” he says. “But she would have stayed in the woods, or along the riverbank, and wouldn’t have gone into any of the farms.”

  “So there would have been other people out there on the day,” Olillia says. “Maybe one of them saw something?”

  “People saw her in the parking lot when she had first arrived, but that was it. Dad said she would go off track because they were too easy. He said she was somebody who always pushed themselves, and that pushing had turned her into an exceptional athlete. Supposedly she went out there at least once a week and would ride for three or four hours or more. She’d cover a thirty-mile loop—which I guess is the range of this map. That’s why it was so bizarre she disappeared. She knew this forest well.”

  Olillia smiles at him.

  “What?”

  “I said before to use your dad’s eyes because he was a detective. Now I bet you’re sounding like him too.”

  He smiles. He likes that she said that. It makes him feel closer to his dad.

  She pulls her phone out of her pocket. She swipes through the photographs he sent her earlier. “You said in your dream Vincent and Simon had fishing rods, right?” Then she stops on one of the photographs. “Look at this,” she says, and zooms in on the image.

  It’s the picture that was hanging on the wall in Vincent’s bedroom. It’s Simon and Vincent by the riverbank, each of them holding up a fish, and again seeing a picture of Simon Bower makes him feel ill. There are beer cans on the ground and fishing rods lying next to them. Vincent has his foot up on a cooler, displaying a heroic pose. The photograph is taken from a lower angle, suggesting the camera is resting near ground level.

  “Are you okay?” she asks.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.”

  “It must be tough seeing him,” she says, “the man that killed your dad.”

  He doesn’t say anything.

  “They must have been out there fishing,” she says, “and she ran into them, maybe somewhere between the river and the parking lot.”

  “Look at the cooler,” he says.

  “What about it?”

  “My granddad used to go fishing. He and his friends would go out there with a cooler full of beer and ice, and return with one full of fish and ice. See those beer cans on the ground? They probably did the same thing. Granddad loved his fishing, but he never would have lugged a heavy cooler through five miles of trees to get there. They’d have found somewhere more accessible so they could drive.”

  “So they parked somewhere else. Somewhere closer.”

  “Only there is nowhere else,” he says. “There are no other roads.”

  “Not main roads,” she says, “but places like this are normally full of tracks.”

  “How can we tell?”

  “Let’s use your dad’s computer.”

  They switch it on. Olillia sits in the chair while he stands next to her. She goes online and finds a satellite map. She finds the parking lot. She zooms in. He can see two cars there. The images are clear enough to tell what color they are, but that’s about all.

  “That’s now?” he asks.

  “No. It could be a few months old, or older, I don’t know. But they update it all the time.”

  “That’s amazing,” he says.

  They spend ten minutes slowly scrolling left and right, up and down, studying the forestry. The mountain bike and horse tracks are covered by the tops of the trees, though sometimes they can glimpse them. What becomes apparent is there are no tracks wide enough for a car.

  “She could have biked farther,” Olillia says. “Maybe these guys were miles outside of the search zone. Can you remember anything else from the dream?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “The dog,” Joshua says.

  “You remember a dog?”

  “No, but Vincent must own a dog, right? But as I said, there was no dog at the house.”

  “Maybe the dog belonged to Simon Bower, and that’s where it was kept.”

  “Or it’s kept somewhere else, like a cabin.”

  “You think they have a cabin they visit when they go fishing?”

  “It’s possible,” he says. “They drive there directly, hang out and
fish, maybe spend weekends and holidays there. They keep a dog there and leave enough food out for it when they’re not there.”

  “So they leave their dog there all alone? That’s cruel.”

  “They’re cruel men,” he says.

  “There are no cabins in the search zone, and anyway, wouldn’t your dad already have considered the cabin theory?”

  “I’ll check his notes.”

  He digs his hands into the cardboard box and pulls out more files. Olillia keeps searching the map. She zooms out. There are farmhouses across the motorway, but they both agree they seem unlikely candidates because his dad would have checked them out. Plus, there’s still the issue of there being a track to get to the river. Olillia scrolls beyond the range of the circle. She goes farther west, away from the city. The river continues in a straight line to the west for several miles before angling to the north. There are no cabins. No buildings. No track. Just a whole lot of trees. She brings the map back to where they started, then goes east, towards the city. Five miles outside the search range is a building. It’s the first of three in the woods, each spaced half a mile apart, each overlooking the river. It’s impossible to tell if they’re cabins or houses from above, but Joshua figures there isn’t much of a difference. There is an access road from the motorway that enters the forest, then branches out in three directions, one left, one right, one straight ahead, one for each of the cabins.

  “Zoom in on that one,” he says, and points to the westernmost one of the three. She zooms in. “There,” he says, pointing at something next to it, a blue rectangular shape. The dream is coming back to him now, it’s light on details, but there is one thing he’s starting to remember.

  “What is that?” she asks.

  “I think it’s a boat parked up on a trailer.”

  “You can see that?”

  He shakes his head. “I can remember it.”

  “You remember it?”

  “From the dream,” he says. “Ruby Carter didn’t bike any farther than normal. She had fallen off her bike and had come to them for help. They didn’t help her. They put her in the boat and they hurt her.”