If She Hid

by Blake Pierce

  She breathed in deeply, doing her best to re-orient herself.

  “Agent Wise?” Barnes was looking at her, concern on his face.

  “I’m good,” she said, starting for the door before she was fully confident that she could move.

  “Agent Wise, if you—”

  “Let’s go already,” she snapped at him, pushing through the door and into the throng of reporters waiting for them outside.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  When Barnes turned down the dirt road that Kate now knew was dubbed by the locals as Blood Gulch Road, she had a good idea of where they were headed. She recalled Barnes telling them that there was nothing but woods and a few fields on each side of the road. One of those fields was a particularly large one, called Jones Field.

  They arrived at Jones Field by turning down what appeared to be an old logging road of sorts about two miles after they passed the area where Todd Ramsey had found Mercy Fuller’s credit card. The road was quite bumpy, but Barnes took it with the ease of a seasoned pro. He stuck mainly to the sides, skipping the vast majority of the dips and holes. It took three minutes of this driving to reach the edge of the field. Several state police cars were scattered here and there at the edge of the road and at the opening to the large field.

  The field itself was mostly bare, covered in weeds and wildflowers. A few stubborn trees broke the plainness, looking sorely out of place in the middle of the field. From the few police cars to the other side of the field, Kate estimated there was about a quarter of a mile or so of open space. Slightly to the right of center, about two hundred feet away, several state policemen with the canine unit were huddled in a semicircle. Kate, DeMarco, and Foster hurried out to meet with them, wading through the tall grass to get there.

  When she joined the group in the field, she saw that whoever had pushed the state PD to get out here with the canine unit had also sent someone with forensics. He was holding a plastic evidence bag in his hands. Inside was a thin Under Armour windbreaker, light blue in color. A smattering of blood adorned one of the sleeves.

  “What is that?” she asked. She flashed her badge as if it were an afterthought.

  The guy from forensics—Brent Halloway, according to the lanyard he wore—gave Kate’s badge a once-over before responding. She noted that he also wore a digital SLR camera around his neck.

  “A windbreaker, size small,” Halloway said. “From the looks of it, it hasn’t been out here long. The blood on the sleeve is dry, but relatively fresh.”

  “Were there pictures taken before it was bagged?” Kate asked.

  “Certainly,” Halloway said. He handed the bag to the cop closest to him and then took the camera off of his neck. He started rolling back through several pictures until he came to one of the windbreaker as it had been found. As Kate looked at it, Halloway walked her and DeMarco through several of the details.

  “There’s also blood on the bottom of it, but not a lot. Also, if you noticed the way most of the fabric on the sleeves is sort of wrinkled and bunched up, it leads me to believe that the victim wasn’t actually wearing it. She may have had it tied around her waist like kids do sometimes.”

  She looked to Barnes, showing him the picture. “I don’t suppose you knew the Fuller family well enough to know if this would have belonged to Mercy, do you?”

  “Sorry, no,” he said. “But that does look like a color a girl would wear, doesn’t it?”

  Kate nodded and then lowered her head as she spoke to DeMarco. She spoke quietly, wanting to keep things between them just for the moment. “Do me a favor. Call Anne Pettus and ask if she can confirm if Mercy owned a light blue Under Armour windbreaker.”

  DeMarco nodded and then walked away from the little group, wandering several yards further to the right into the overgrown weeds.

  Kate handed the phone back to Halloway and took several steps away from the area the clothing had been discovered. She looked out into the field and saw several areas where the grass and weeds appeared to have been recently passed through.

  “Looks like some messed up maze, doesn’t it?” Barnes asked from behind her.

  “It does,” she said. She counted at least fifteen different trampled areas, none of which were pressed down hard enough to have been done so with any real force.

  “Most of it is likely just deer,” Barnes said. “Hell, we’ve even had black bears spotted around Deton recently.”

  “One of them had to have been made by whoever owned that windbreaker,” Kate said. “And whoever was with them. I’m going to see if I can find any footprints of any kind along the ground in those areas. Think you can get some more eyes on this for me?”

  “I’m on it,” Barnes said, stepping away.

  No sooner had he left her did DeMarco step up beside her, taking his place. “I spoke with Anne. She said she’s almost positive Mercy had a light blue jacket or windbreaker of some kind. She’s looking through pictures on her phone to try to find one where Mercy is wearing it.”

  “That would certainly be helpful.”

  “Anything useful out here?” DeMarco asked. But the way she was looking out to the wide open field and the several faint depressions in the tall grass told Kate that she already knew the answer.

  “It’s a needle in a haystack scenario right now,” Kate answered. “I think if we—”

  The sound of an incoming text on DeMarco’s phone cut her off. DeMarco took her phone out quickly. As she looked at it, she said: “It’s Anne.”

  She held her phone out in front of them and opened up the text. There were no words, just two pictures. One showed only Anne and Mercy. Another showed the two girls with several other young girls. In both of them, Mercy was wearing a light blue Under Armour zip-up windbreaker. It was identical to the one in Brent Halloway’s bag.

  “Well, I suppose the good news is that we can now rule Mercy Fuller out as the murderer of her parents,” Kate said.

  “And the bad,” DeMarco added, “is that we have no idea where Mercy is. We don’t even know if she’s alive or dead.”

  Kate realized that this case had now become what she had dreaded from the start. They were not only on the lookout for killer…but they needed to find a fifteen-year-old girl before her abductor took things too far and killed her as well. And if history had taught her anything about these cases, it was that Mercy’s chances of being found alive became smaller with each minute that passed.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  By one o’clock that afternoon, the town of Deton, Virginia, was overcrowded with police cars. There were more from the state sent in to assist with what was now officially being referred to as a murder and abduction case. There were plenty of officers coming in from Richmond, and Barnes had essentially committed every Deton officer to the case.

  While Jones Field and all of Blood Gulch Road was being combed over by a total of fifteen officers, Kate and DeMarco were at the Deton police station. They were sitting in the conference room again, this time with Barnes, Foster, and now Brent Halloway. Barnes was currently putting the finishing touches on the last piece of tape to keep a huge area map of Deton and most of the surrounding area, including Deerfield, up on the wall. While he’d done this, Foster had brought it an old whiteboard. It was clear that the station was not used to handling cases like this but Kate admired the grit and determination of the small-town police in making sure they remained as thorough as possible despite their lack of resources.

  “Agent Wise, this is your show,” Barnes said, stepping aside from the map.

  “I appreciate that,” she said. “But can you stay right up there and draw us a line that runs from the Fuller residence to Jones Field?”

  Barnes grabbed a Sharpie from the table and leaned in toward the map. He drew a circle and tapped it. “This is the Fuller residence, give or take a mile or so,” he said. He scanned the map again and drew another circle within five seconds. “And here’s Jones Field.”

  He drew a line connecting the two. It covered a pr
etty good chunk of ground, a fact Kate knew would make their search even harder.

  “How much real estate is that?” DeMarco asked.

  “I’d guess about twelve miles between the house and the field. But if you’re talking an entire area, covering all the ground between the two, I don’t know. The back roads are pretty straight and all snake back around to the same points, but that’s a lot of forest.”

  “Agents,” Officer Foster said, “can I ask what the assumption is, based on the discovery of Mercy Fuller’s bloodstained windbreaker?”

  “Well, as I told Agent DeMarco out at Jones Field,” Kate said, “this basically tells us that Mercy Fuller did not kill her parents and skip town. She’s now officially the epicenter of this case, and it needs to be quick, Not only because we have no idea who has her or where she is, but because she’s apparently been wounded and is bleeding.”

  “I hate to be the grim one here,” Barnes said, “but I feel like the discovery of blood on clothes means she’s likely already dead.”

  “That’s a reasonable assumption,” Kate said. “But it doesn’t quite fit. She was abducted for some reason—whether sexual, domination fantasy, some grief with the family, whatever it may be. If she was indeed dead, I feel like we would have also found her body with the windbreaker. A dead abductee doesn’t serve much of a purpose.”

  “So you think she’s alive?” Foster asked.

  “I have no idea. But I do think she was very much alive when that windbreaker was dropped. I also dare to think she might have dropped it on purpose. Mr. Halloway here says that the sleeves were crumpled in a way that indicates they might have been tied together around her waist. I think Mercy Fuller might have left it behind on purpose, without her abductor realizing, hoping to leave a useable clue behind.”

  “So where do we go from here?” Barnes asked.

  “I think we can likely limit the search to the area along that line you just drew. If the abductor went through Jones Field, they likely did it to avoid main roads. He’s a local. He knows the area.”

  Barnes nodded, but he didn’t look so certain. He looked back to the map, his shoulders hunched and his eyes distant.

  “Sheriff, you can say whatever it is that’s on your mind,” Kate said.

  “The blood…and then the field and all of these damned woods. What if we’re using all of this manpower to look for a girl that’s already dead?”

  “Even if that is the case,” DeMarco said, clearly a little irritated at the defeatist attitude, “that mean there’s a girl’s body out there somewhere and she would deserve to be found and properly taken care of.”

  “And we can’t afford to think like that,” Kate said, getting to her feet. “Unless we find a corpse, we work as if Mercy Fuller is still alive.”

  As she said this, a thought occurred to her. Some old memory from her past came bubbling to the surface. The memory was hazy, but she could remember the case it was pulled from.

  “Excuse me a second, would you?”

  With that, she got up and left the room. As she closed the door, she focused on the memory, making sure it didn’t slip away. She grinned half-heartedly, wondering if her fear of not being able to hold onto distant memories was related to the fact that she was fifty-six years old or if her mind was simply crammed full of similar memories from her illustrious career.

  She took out her cell phone and pulled up a number she had not even thought about in nearly a year. She looked at the name before calling, that same thin smile on her face.

  Jimmy Parker. She had, of course, spoken to Parker for a bit when she had been asked to return to the bureau on something of a part-time basis. Between Parker and the partner she’d had for the last eight years of her career, a younger guy named Logan Nash, she had plenty of invaluable resources to pull from. But in that moment, she thought of Jimmy Parker. He’d been with her during this memory in her head and, besides that, the man was the sort of older man—in his sixties now—who seemed to enjoy doling out insights.

  She sent the call, fully expecting him to ignore it. However, she also knew that if he saw her name on the display (assuming he still had her number saved) he’d likely jump at the opportunity to speak with her.

  When the call was answered on the second ring, she was delighted. Not only because he had taken the call, but to be able to hear his voice again.

  “My caller ID reads Kate Wise,” Parker said. “But that can’t be right. Kate Wise was re-recruited to the bureau and is out catching bad guys.”

  “Hi to you, too, Jimmy.”

  “Kate. How are you? To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “Well, I hate to be hasty, but you weren’t too far off from the truth. I am out trying to catch a bad guy and this moment popped up in my head. Back in the early nineties, I think it was. You and I were out west somewhere…in Kansas, I think. A missing persons case involving two men. But the details just won’t come to me.”

  “That would be the Tremblay case. I don’t recall the name of the town but it was one of those rustic farming communities. Two brothers got into a squabble and one killed the other. The one that survived ran off, taking his brother’s kid with him.”

  “Yeah. That’s the one. It popped up in my head as we were going over this current missing persons case and I can’t really figure out why.”

  “What are the details?”

  She quickly went through the higher-level details of the Fuller case, giving him a brief summation in about twenty seconds. When she was done, Parker chuckled. “Man, I can’t believe you forgot about that case.”

  “Why? What am I missing?”

  “Well, you’re the one that sort of broke it, if I remember correctly. Can you remember who we chased after for several days before we realized it was the brother that did it?”

  “The brother’s wife. There were clues and leads everywhere that told us it was her. But in the end it was the brother. It took us…”

  “I take it the pause means you’re making some sort of connection?” Parker asked.

  “But with this case, the parents are both dead.”

  “Does that really matter? You’ve been digging into the daughter’s life, looking for ways to understand her. But what if you checked out the parents instead?”

  “That’s just it. We have, for the most part. No local family, no arrest records, no…”

  She stopped here. She saw where he was trying to lead her. And while she had vaguely gone there herself, the immediacy of finding Mercy Fuller had torn her away from it. Now, though, able to talk it out with an old partner, it started to make more sense.

  “What if the parents were somehow involved in the whole thing?” she asked almost to herself.

  “I wouldn’t go there right away either,” Parker said. “Based on what you’ve told me, it would be far from the natural inclination, but you know as well as I do that the people you have no reason to suspect are sometimes the most interesting ones.”

  “Thanks for this, Parker.”

  “No need to thank me. You would have figured it out for yourself before too long. Besides…you have a family and a life outside of all of this. I retired and returned home to pretty much nothing. All this time to myself…I tend to dive back into case notes and old memories of the job far too often.”

  “You can always come pay me a visit in Richmond.”

  “I might just do that one day.”

  Kate wrapped the call and walked back into the conference room. She sat back down among a conversation about the possible routes the abductor could have taken through the woods and where those routes would come out. Barnes and Foster bickered about it a bit before leaving the floor open.

  “Sheriff Barnes, has anyone looked into Wendy or Alvin Fuller?” she asked. “Maybe about their histories and who they may have known that could be responsible?”

  It was Foster who answered. He replied quickly, both eager to help and seemingly offended that she thought they’d miss something so clear. It was a
pparent in his tone and the gaze he cast her way when he spoke.

  “It was the first thing we looked into. It was rather easy, though. Both of Alvin’s parents are dead. Wendy’s mother is still alive but she lives in Connecticut somewhere. We asked friends of the family and even sent someone down to Charlotte County to speak to Alvin’s two brothers.”

  “Anything on the brothers?” DeMarco asked.

  “The older one did some small time for drugs a few years ago. Nothing serious.”

  “Can we get whatever files you have on the Fullers, their friends, and relatives?” Kate asked.

  Foster gave a nod and stood up from the table. Kate then looked over to Halloway, who was scrolling through pictures of Jones Field on his phone. “Halloway, do you think you could get us whatever the state PD has on the murder scene?”

  Without looking up from his phone, he slid the photo gallery away and pulled up his email. “I’ll shoot an email right now. I suspect we’ll have it within ten or fifteen minutes.”

  “With all due respect,” Barnes said, showing perhaps his first signs of doubt, “Wendy and Alvin Fuller are dead. What can you possibly hope to find by looking into their pasts?”

  “I don’t know just yet,” she said. She then added what Parker had told her on the phone, that almost cheesy saying that, in the moment, seemed to be pointing her in the right direction. “But when it comes to cracking a case where there are no direct witnesses, the people you have no reason to suspect are sometimes the most interesting ones.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Kate and DeMarco were given the conference room to use as a makeshift office. For the remainder of the afternoon, they set up at the table, sending off for file requests from the Deton PD, the state police, and the bureau. Duran worked diligently behind the scenes to acquire an intern agent to fetch whatever they needed right away, sending the information to Deton either via email or direct calls.