The Ophelia Killer

by Valerie Geary

  THE OPHELIA KILLER

  Brett Buchanan Mystery Series

  A Prequel

  By Valerie Geary

  BROKEN BRANCH BOOKS

  Portland, OR

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  THE OPHELIA KILLER

  Copyright © 2021 by Valerie Geary

  Broken Branch Books

  Portland, OR

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review. For more information, address: info@valeriegeary.com.

  First edition August 2021

  ISBN 9781954815032

  www.valeriegeary.com

  Books by Valerie Geary

  Crooked River

  Everything We Lost

  Brett Buchanan Mystery Series:

  On A Dark Tide (Book 1)

  The Ophelia Killer (A Prequel)

  Author’s Note

  The Ophelia Killer takes place four years prior to On A Dark Tide. Though this book is chronologically a prequel, I wrote it in such a way that it can be read at any point in your discovery of the Brett Buchanan Mystery Series. Whether you have already been introduced to the series or are finding it for the first time, The Ophelia Killer is a complete narrative.

  Whenever you’re ready to dive into the rest of the series, On A Dark Tide is available through most major retailers or sign up for my newsletter to receive $2 off the e-book or audiobook when you buy direct from my online store. Become a VIP Reader today!

  Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoy this one!

  CONTENTS

  Books by Valerie Geary

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Bonus Material

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  THE OPHELIA KILLER

  By Valerie Geary

  To everyone who has ever

  loved a very good dog.

  Chapter 1

  In his six years working as a reporter for the Statesman Journal, Jimmy Eagan has never been the first person to arrive at a scene. Usually, by the time he shows up, it’s already too late. The tape is stretched, the cops are swarming, and the bodies are bagged. Today, the location that the dispatcher broadcasts over the scanner is an easy, ten minute drive from his apartment.

  As he parks beside a cut-grass field baked yellow in the summer heat, a jolt of adrenaline floods through him at the thought of what kind of story he’ll be able to write with such unrestricted access. He grabs his press badge and camera and skids down the slight embankment into the field, moving toward a distant clump of spindly trees where he knows the dead girl waits.

  The Marion County dispatcher didn’t give many details. Someone reported finding a body in a patch of woods near Crocker Creek, and the closest Salem police officer was asked to respond. It was this lack of information, paired with the fact that it’s nearing the end of August, that sent Jimmy racing from his apartment at seven o’clock in the morning before he even had his first cup of coffee.

  Now he walks carefully, double-checking where he puts his feet, hoping he’s wrong about this one. Maybe the body isn’t another young woman, but a farmer out for a walk who collapsed in the heat. Or a drifter who stepped into the trees to take a piss, and fate handed him a heart attack instead. Or ancient bones from an ancient death, the earth giving them up now because of last spring’s heavy rainfall and the shifting of time and tectonic plates. But then Jimmy reaches the edge of the trees and the trickle of water that defines Crocker Creek. It’s here on the muddy banks where he finds the flowers.

  Dried out husks of weeds, a mix of cow parsnips, aster, yarrow, and grass stalks pulled from the field nearby, ripped up by the roots and bound with a pale blue ribbon. It’s the same robin’s egg shade of blue as the ribbon found wrapped around the stems of another wildflower bouquet discovered near another dead girl last August, one year almost to the day.

  Sirens scream closer. A few seconds later, a patrol car screeches to a stop on the road. An officer hops out and hurries down the embankment and through the field toward Jimmy with one hand on his gun. His uniform is starched-stiff and shiny. His hair buzzed close to his scalp, looking like he’s arrived straight from his academy graduation. He doesn’t watch where he puts his feet, and before Jimmy can warn him, he slams his heavy-duty boot down on the bouquet, grinding the dried flowers into the mud.

  The first cop to arrive on the scene, and this apple fritter, whose entire job is to preserve the evidence, is stepping on it instead. Obviously not the top of his class.

  “You might want to watch where you put your feet.” Jimmy points to the mess of wildflowers under his boot.

  The hulking bull of a man, with dumb blinking cow eyes to match, lifts his foot and peers at the discarded bouquet. Maybe he really is as new as he looks. Maybe this is his first time responding to a report of a dead body. So maybe Jimmy shouldn’t be too hard on him because everybody makes mistakes, and this one is an easy one to make considering they’re standing near a field of plants identical to the ones in the bouquet. But then, the cop puts his foot back down in the exact same spot.

  The bouquet sinks deeper into the mud.

  “Are you the one who found the body?” His eyes roam over Jimmy’s outfit. Slacks and loafers, the button-up checkered shirt with one-too-many pens sticking from the pocket. Not the best clothes for cutting through fields and exploring tangled woods in the dead heat of summer, but it was what he was wearing when the call came over the scanner, and he didn’t have a chance to change before he left.

  “I’m a reporter with the Statesman Journal.” Jimmy flashes his press badge, then crouches and aims his camera at the bouquet and the standard-issue boot squashing it flat.

  The click sounds as loud as a gunshot in the empty field.

  “No pictures, buddy. I don’t care who you work for.” The cop lurches toward Jimmy and waves his hands in the air, like he’s shooing away a stray cat.

  He’s about a foot taller than Jimmy and twice as thick through the chest and could probably lift Jimmy right off his feet and carry him out of here without any problem if he wasn’t too lazy to try. Jimmy straightens and jabs his finger at the name tag stitched onto the man’s uniform. Clodfelter. How appropriate.

  “Mind if I call you Clod?” he asks.

  “Name’s Fred,” the cop says, his mouth twisting and color rising in his cheeks. “But you can call me Officer.”

  “Sure thing, Officer. Now, you might want to bag up that evidence before your boss gets here and realizes you stepped all over it.” Jimmy lifts the camera again, taking another picture, this time without Clodfelter’s boot in the way.

  Clodfelter sputters and reaches to grab Jimmy’s elbow, but Jimmy pulls away from him. “I wouldn’t, if I were you. Freedom of the press and all that.”

  He waves his badge as he follows the creek into the trees.

  Clodfelter seem
s torn about whether to chase after Jimmy or take care of the bouquet. Ultimately he decides on neither. He walks back across the field to where his police cruiser is parked at an angle on the gravel shoulder. There he rummages in the trunk for a few minutes before pulling out a spool of yellow tape and fumbling to loop it through two crooked fence posts edging the road.

  Jimmy stops paying attention to the officer then. Clodfelter’s got a checklist in his head of what needs to get done, and he’s going to do it in that order whether or not it makes sense. This is Jimmy’s chance to see the crime scene before anyone else, before more experienced officers show up and drag him back to the road. This is his chance to finally start putting the pieces together.

  The dispatcher didn’t give exact details of where to find the body, only that it was somewhere inside a cluster of trees near Crocker Creek. If she’s anything like the others, Jimmy knows he’ll find her close to the water.

  A few steps later, he sees her exactly where he thought she’d be. Posed on her back at the edge of the creek. Like the others, she’s naked. One arm folds across her chest, her fingers still clenched around the shape of flower stems. The other arm floats weightless in the water, which explains how the bouquet ended up separated from the body this time. Leaves and flowers similar to the ones found in the bouquet tangle in her long, blond hair spread like a fan around the crown of her head. Bruises darken her throat. Scratches cover her arms and legs.

  Jimmy raises his face to the canopy and whispers an apology. Then he lifts his camera and begins to capture as many details as he can.

  Every shadow and scuff, every fallen petal and bent stem. Every bruise, every scratch, every missing piece. Her wide, unseeing eyes. Her mottled flesh and the marks around her neck. Her pale skin streaked in mud. The maggots that wriggle in open wounds. The flies that give off an angry buzz as Jimmy bends close to her partially open mouth. If he were to jam a stick between her teeth and pry open her stiff jaw, he’s pretty sure he would find her tongue cut out. But he doesn’t touch her. He takes more pictures and swallows down rising nausea from the cloying stench of bog water and rot.

  A branch snaps. Clodfelter appears in the woods behind him.

  “You’re not supposed to touch anything.” He’s trying to sound tough, but his trembling voice gives him away.

  Clodfelter stands with a roll of yellow tape in one hand and a single high-top sneaker with orange laces in the other. He stares at the body. All the color drains from his cheeks, leaving his skin as pale as the burned-out August sky.

  “You’re not supposed to touch anything either.” Jimmy gestures to the shoe.

  The officer looks at it like he doesn’t know how it got there. He drops it onto the ground and backs away. The sneaker looks too big to belong to the dead girl, but that’s not the point. The point is that it’s here, and so is she, and now Clodfelter’s had his paws all over another piece of evidence. What’s the purpose of calling the police if they’re going to be this bad at their job?

  “First time you’ve seen a dead body?” Jimmy asks.

  Clodfelter turns, takes three steps to the side, and vomits into a patch of ferns.

  Chapter 2

  Within the hour, the fields and woods surrounding Crocker Creek are crawling with uniformed officers. Officer Clodfelter leans against the trunk of his car, his head hanging between his knees. Jimmy waits beside him, watching the methodical way the other men work over the field, wishing he could be out there with them, one more pair of eyes searching for some clue to point them in the right direction. He doesn’t want this girl to end up like the others. Shoved into a box, forgotten.

  An unmarked car pulls up behind the other cruisers parked along the side of the road, and a man dressed in a brown suit and red tie climbs out. About damn time, Jimmy thinks. The detective doesn’t seem to be in a hurry, though. He takes a second to adjust his belt as he watches the activity through mirrored sunglasses. Then he pulls a cigarette and lighter from his pocket and lights up, inhaling deeply with the first hit.

  Detective Michael Rausch is a man teetering between young and old, short and tall, solid and soft. Even his hair can’t seem to decide. He’s bald across the dome of his scalp, but thick, curly brown hair continues to grow along the sides and back. Jimmy has crossed paths with Rausch several times over the past six years. You work the same beat long enough and show up to enough crime scenes, and the department becomes like a second family. And Michael Rausch is like the obnoxious, drunk uncle you leave the room to avoid. The amount of respect Jimmy has for the man couldn’t even fill a shot glass, but victims don’t get to pick who investigates their cases. There’s a rotation, and, today, Michael Rausch is on deck.

  He finishes his cigarette, drops the butt in the gravel, and walks over to where Jimmy and Clodfelter are standing.

  “Helluva first day, Freddie boy.” He slaps Clodfelter on the shoulder then turns his gaze onto Jimmy. “Don’t tell me you’re the one who called it in?”

  Jimmy shakes his head. “Heard it over the scanner. I got here at the same time as Officer Clodfelter.”

  “No, you were here before me,” Clodfelter says, his voice still thin and trembling.

  Rausch’s bushy eyebrows dart up, and he shakes his head. “If anyone else asks, Freddie boy, you were here first.”

  “But—” Clodfelter starts to protest.

  Rausch ignores him and turns his attention to Jimmy instead.

  “Walk with me.” He claps his hand on Jimmy’s shoulder and steers him toward the ditch. “I don’t like reporters very much. But keep your enemies closer, I suppose, so why don’t you start by talking me through everything you did when you got here. Everything you saw. Everything you touched. Everything you took pictures of.”

  He points at the camera Jimmy is still carrying in one hand.

  Jimmy tells him everything, including how Clodfelter trampled the evidence. Even though he doesn’t like Rausch, Rausch is all the hope this dead girl has. Rausch is the one who will decide how this case is handled, whether it’s given priority or shuffled to the bottom of an ever-growing stack. He is the person who will determine if this girl will get the justice she deserves, or if, like the first three, she’ll be ignored, her life reduced to two pitiful lines in a half-hearted press release:

  An unidentified woman was found strangled and dumped near Crocker Creek. If you have any information regarding this event, please contact Salem Police.

  “I didn’t get close enough to see,” Jimmy says. “But once the coroner gets here, have him take a look inside her mouth. I have a feeling her tongue will be cut out like the others.”

  “What others?”

  Jimmy remembers the first dead girl like it was yesterday. The summer of 1976 saw more rainfall than usual, turning the August days muggy and his skin slick with sweat. He’d been working the crime beat for the Statesman Journal for nearly three years at that point, and though he’d seen plenty of dead bodies in that short time, he’d never seen one that made him feel quite like this. Crushed and, at the same time, angry as hell.

  He wanted to punch someone. He wanted to cry. He wanted to find the man who’d hurt this girl and tear him apart. He wanted to cover her nakedness and carry her off to some quiet place, far away from the black-booted asshats stomping through the trees where she’d been found.

  The officers searching for evidence made jokes as they worked over the scene. They called her names. They treated her like a doll, a meat sack, a nothing. Jimmy knew part of their disconnection was protection against the horror of it. He could have respected that if they had worked half as hard at finding her killer as they had at cracking jokes.

  The detective assigned to the first dead girl in 1976 was not the same detective assigned to the second dead girl in 1977 or the third one a year later. A different detective for every case and no wonder Rausch has no idea what Jimmy’s talking about.

  “Three girls in the past three years. All found in the m
iddle of August. All found naked and arranged near the water, holding flowers. All three of them had their tongues cut out.” Jimmy points toward the stand of trees where officers weave like shadow creatures through the trunks. “I think she might be the fourth.”

  They’re halfway across the field when Rausch stops walking. Setting his hands on his hips and widening his stance, he turns to face Jimmy. “News to me. I haven’t heard a damn thing about these other three. Why do you suppose that is?”

  * * *

  The first dead girl was never identified. She had a name, of course she did, but no one ever found out what it was. Her fingerprints weren’t on file. By the time her body was found, decomposition, hastened by that summer’s unusual amounts of rain, had turned her nearly unrecognizable. The list of missing girls in Oregon was long but proved useless. None of the girls on the list had two gold-capped molars on the left side of her lower jaw.

  The second dead girl ended up as nameless and forgotten as the first, except it took a little longer to get there. Lucky her, she was found before decomposition had a chance to destroy her features. When the cops took a picture of her face around to local bars, one man said he knew her, said she was a hooker who gave five-dollar blow jobs. He said the woman called herself Dotty but that she hadn’t given him a last name. And why would she? And who cares? After a half-hearted effort by the cops to uncover more information about Dotty, if that was even her real name, and getting no help from the other women like Dotty who might have known something, they shoved the file in a box and shoved that box in the back of the evidence room and never thought about her again.

  The third dead girl was another sex worker, known to the police only as Maria. She’d been stopped several times in the months before her death, warned about soliciting, then sent on her way again. Jimmy remembers how the detective handling the case didn’t even try to find out her last name, or where she came from, or if she had a family who might be wondering where their daughter had gone. When Jimmy asked, the detective shrugged his shoulders and asked, “What did she expect would happen?”