The Girl in the Moss (Angie Pallorino Book 3)

by Loreth Anne White

  Inside her car, engine running, heater on full blast to clear the fogged windows, Angie rummaged quickly in the glove compartment. Relief sliced through her as she found her engagement ring where she’d secreted it. Angie stared at the ring, thinking of Maddocks, of their last phone call. Anxiety twisted in her stomach.

  She fastened the chain and ring around her neck and hesitated, her hand wrapped around the ring. She wanted to call him. Yet she didn’t want to call him.

  Reaching forward, she put her Mini Cooper in gear. She’d wait until he returned from his trip. It would give them both a bit of a breather. It would give her time to decide what to do about the bodyguard job offer. Because she really couldn’t even begin to consider taking the old judge’s money.

  For one, it would not be legal, and she could jeopardize any chance of ever being able to open her own PI firm. For another, Angie had pride—she was a good investigator, not hired entertainment. For another, taking money from an old woman going senile was a kind of abuse.

  But as Angie drove through the gates of the Monaghan residence, she cast a fast glance at the leather-sided file box on the passenger seat.

  Maybe she’d take a quick look at the files when she got home. If anything, it would keep her mind off her own problems on a Saturday night alone in her apartment.

  CHAPTER 12

  The makeshift whiteboard Angie had glued to a wall in her apartment to investigate her own cold case was still in place, her computer and printer still neatly positioned to the side of it. And as she laid out the contents of Justice Jilly Monaghan’s box on her dining room table, the act of embarking on a fresh investigation felt comforting and familiar. An escape.

  In the box was the initial coroner’s report into the investigation of Jasmine Gulati’s disappearance twenty-four years ago. Also in the box was the Port Ferris police report complete with witness interviews and a SAR manager’s report on the search for Jasmine’s body.

  Angie set these reports to one side and took out a pile of photos. She sorted through them, spreading them out on the table. Several were close-ups of Jasmine Gulati, clearly a striking young woman. With a surname like Gulati, Angie surmised that Jasmine’s father—the judge’s son-in-law—had been of South Asian heritage.

  Among the photos were several group shots of the nine women on the river. One had been taken outside a wood-sided building, where the women stood laughing beneath a sign that read HOOK AND GAFFE PUB. One the back of this photo was an inscription that read: Day One. Port Ferris. The Gathering.

  The trip participants were listed as Rachel Hart, Eden Hart, Trish Shattuck, Willow McDonnell, Jasmine Gulati, Irene Mallard, Donna Gill, Kathi Daly, Hannah Vogel.

  Angie flipped the photo around again and studied the faces, wondering if the teenager pictured with the group was Eden Hart and if Eden was Rachel Hart’s daughter. A few more photos included the male guides, Garrison Tollet and Jessie Carmanagh.

  The last photo in the bunch showed Jasmine with two women of similar age. This one had not been taken on the river trip. It had been shot on a sunny beach, and all wore bikinis. The two young women with Jasmine were not among those pictured on the Nahamish River trip, either. Angie flipped the photo over. On the back was written: The three amigas—Jasmine Gulati, Mia Smith, Sophie Sinovich—Hornby Island, Summer 1993.

  Angie glanced at her watch, surprised at the time. And relieved. This case was providing a desperately needed distraction for her. She was pleasantly famished. She set the photos down and went into her kitchen, where she put some Italian leftovers from Mario’s in the microwave.

  While her food warmed, she opened a bottle of merlot that Maddocks had left in her apartment. She turned up the gas fire, and when her food was ready, she took her meal and wine along with the SAR and coroner’s reports and settled on her sofa. She read the reports as she forked pasta into her mouth and sipped the wine. Wind whistled around her balcony balustrade outside, and foghorns sounded out at sea, but inside she finally felt warm.

  According to statements made to the Port Ferris RCMP, the group of nine women and their two guides had brought their boats ashore near a campsite above Plunge Falls on what was to be their second-to-last night on the river. It was the same camp where she and Maddocks had overnighted before portaging around the falls to fish downstream in the Nahamish Flats, where Budge Hargreaves had called them from the bank.

  According to the statements, Jasmine Gulati had told the group she’d seen a hatch and fish rising in the eddy of a small bay just downriver from the camp. She said she was going to try a few last casts before nightfall. Jasmine then left the campsite with her fishing gear. Tollet and Carmanagh built a fire. The other women settled in with drinks, and the two guides then left to gather more firewood for the night.

  A short while later, Garrison Tollet had been collecting wood above a talus scree when he saw a woman he believed was Jasmine thrashing about in the river and then going over the falls.

  Jessie Carmanagh had been lower down on the slope. His view of the river obscured by trees, he’d had no visual of the falls. Garrison Tollet had screamed for Jessie Carmanagh to radio for help. Jessie Carmanagh ran back to camp for his radio while Garrison Tollet clambered down the scree and descended a treacherous cliff alongside the falls to see if he could find Gulati at the bottom of the waterfall.

  Carmanagh radioed for help from the camp. By the time RCMP and search and rescue volunteers had arrived, it was dark. A night search using hunting spotlights was conducted along the banks below the falls. The search intensified at first light. SAR dog teams were brought in to assist. Gulati’s fishing vest and a small silver box containing her flies were found downstream of the plunge pools at the base of the falls. But nothing else.

  Eventually what had been a search and rescue mission shifted into a search and recovery effort. Nothing more of Gulati was ever found.

  When the winter had come and gone, and the snows had finally melted and the river was low again the following year, another recovery mission was attempted. It yielded nothing. Efforts were called off. The coroner’s service ruled that Jasmine Gulati was likely deceased from accidental drowning.

  The coroner’s report noted that over a period of fifteen years prior to Jasmine Gulati’s accident, there had been five deaths at Plunge Falls. Two were classified as accidents, three as possible suicides. It appeared Plunge Falls had been something of a go-to for killing oneself. In three of those cases, the bodies were never found. The water pressure below the falls was described as intense, and there were underwater caverns at the base of the falls that divers were unable to safely access.

  Jasmine Gulati’s fly rod had been located on an extremely slippery section of the rocky bank where she said she’d been going to fish. There were marks in the slimy moss near the water’s edge where her wading boots appeared to have slipped.

  Angie reached for her glass of wine and sipped. This was clearly believed to have been a simple but unfortunate accident where Gulati had fallen into the river. She’d been wearing waders, which would have quickly filled with water. The river was also extremely cold—fed by the glacial waters of Carmanagh Lake—and the currents swift in sections. Even a good swimmer would have been dragged over the falls in those circumstances.

  Jasmine’s body had probably been trapped by water pressure deep below the falls or hooked and held beneath rocks in icy temperatures for years. So why had she popped out and ended up buried beneath a shallow layer of soil almost two hundred meters away from the riverbank?

  Angie set down her wine and reached for the current pathologist findings on the remains from the shallow grave.

  Everything from the grave site had been first carefully documented in situ, and then the remains had been excavated and taken to a morgue. The body was skeletonized, so the autopsy was more of an anthropological exam with both the pathologist and anthropologist present.

  Clothing and other items found with the remains had been documented, including the ring and
the cuff bracelet, which had been photographed before being cleaned up and photographed again afterward.

  The ring was described as white gold with a princess-cut diamond set among a halo of smaller diamonds. Angie peered more closely at the image of the cleaned ring. The design was definitely that of a classic engagement piece, although it might have been nothing of the sort. It had, however, been found on the left ring finger of the skeleton. Angie reflexively fingered her own engagement ring on the chain around her neck.

  The silver cuff bore an Egyptian insignia, which fitted with Jilly Monaghan’s claim she’d bought the bracelet for her granddaughter in Egypt.

  The only clothing found on the body that had not biodegraded in what appeared to be highly acidic soil was a pair of chest-high booted neoprene waders. The brand was Kinabulu. It was noted in the report that Kinabulu was a sponsor of the trip and that the outdoor clothing company had provided all the participants and guides with complimentary gear, including wool hats, waders, fleece vests, and jackets.

  Angie turned the page and read further. According to the report, the waders were made of neoprene—or polychloroprene—a synthetic rubber produced through the polymerization of chloroprene. The material exhibited good chemical stability and maintained flexibility over a wide temperature range. The waders were five millimeters in thickness, and the attached boots were a composition of rubber and Gore-Tex. The report noted that both neoprene and Gore-Tex were nonbiodegradable.

  Angie studied the image of the rubber boot soles. Good, deep tread. But they had not stopped Jasmine from slipping off the slick rocks along the water’s edge.

  She turned to the image of the skeleton laid out on the examination table in an anatomical position. All bones were accounted for. Nonhuman bones that had been found with the body, including those of small rodents, had been segregated. Skeletal abnormalities listed included a spiral fracture of the left arm, typical of wrenching force. There was no sign of healing, which indicated the fracture had occurred perimortem—at or around the time of death. This could have happened when Jasmine Gulati went over the falls.

  Radiographs also showed shallow depressions on the dorsal surface of the pubic bones near the symphyseal border. Angie leaned forward with interest as she read the anthropologist’s description:

  While the presence of these dorsal pits is strongly suggestive of a full-term pregnancy, the number and size of pits is only weakly correlated with pregnancies. Current research has shown these pits do occur in males and in females known to have never given birth.

  Angie chewed the inside of her cheek, thinking. Justice Monaghan had said she was Jasmine’s only remaining next of kin. If Jasmine had had a child, where was it? Angie reached for her notepad and jotted a note down:

  Had Jasmine given birth? If so, what happened to the baby?

  She returned her attention to the report. The anthropologist had documented another skeletal anomaly—scarring at the left shoulder joint that was reportedly consistent with a chronic dislocation of the shoulder. Angie frowned. A dislocated shoulder that had not been properly slotted back into place would have been extremely painful, surely? Or at the least, it would have been uncomfortable. It seemed strange that someone of Jasmine Gulati’s socioeconomic demographic would not have received immediate and effective medical treatment.

  Angie wrote in her notebook:

  Had Jasmine ever dislocated a shoulder for which she was not properly treated? Possibly as a child?

  She turned the page and studied the images of the fractured skull.

  The blunt-force trauma was clearly evident—a hole the size of a golf ball with concentric and starburst cracks radiating out from it. According to the report, although the outer table of the skull was broken, a portion of the inner table was bent inward in a greenstick effect. Angie had seen something similar in a homicide case where the victim had been struck and killed with a hammer.

  According to the anthropologist, this skull trauma was perimortem and a possible cause of death. Unless the victim drowned first, thought Angie. Or simultaneously, as might happen if the decedent was thrust headfirst over a waterfall and the force of the water had smashed her skull into a sharp rock.

  She reached for her glass, leaned back, and sipped absently as she ran a hypothetical scenario through her mind: Jasmine casting her line as she stands in her waders too close against the water’s edge. Jasmine overreaching perhaps, the imbalance causing her boots to slip on those rocks. She drops her rod, her boots scraping through the slimy moss as she goes down. Once she falls into the river, her waders fill quickly with cold water and drag her down, where the current snatches her and carries her faster and faster toward the booming falls. She perhaps goes over headfirst, smashing her skull into rocks on the way down, her body twisting through rocks and her arm wrenching. She’s then submerged by the sheer volume of water powering over the falls, possibly trapping her in an underwater cavity for years until water volume and pressure and currents suddenly change enough to release her back to the river and she washes into the flat delta area.

  But again, how had her body ended up two hundred meters from the shore?

  Flipping through the rest of the coroner’s preliminary report, Angie found the answer. There had been two significant flooding events over the past quarter century that had caused the Nahamish to break its banks in the flat delta area below the falls. The water had spread over a distance of more than two hundred meters through the forest along the south shore. That could explain it. A flooding event could have switched up currents and flow pressure enough to release Jasmine Gulati’s remains from where she’d been trapped underwater. The flood surge could have floated her into the trees. When the water receded, she’d have been deposited there, possibly in a layer of muck over which moss and other vegetation had grown over the years.

  Angie picked up a photo of Jasmine, the diamond cluster clearly visible on her left hand. Had no one on the river trip asked her about it? What about those two friends in bikinis? If so, what had she told them? Angie reached for the photo of Jasmine with Mia Smith and Sophie Sinovich on Hornby Island. She studied it closely. Jasmine was not wearing the ring in this photo, which had been taken the previous summer. How recently had she acquired it?

  Angie finished the last of her wine and got up from the sofa, chastising herself. Because here she was already trying to answer Justice Monaghan’s questions. But she could not take this case.

  Not legally, not if she ever wanted to reach her big dream of getting a full license and opening her own boutique investigations agency.

  She rinsed her glass, set it in the rack to dry, and then went back to the table and picked up the retainer check. Twenty-five thousand dollars, nonrefundable, simply for agreeing to investigate. On top of that, the judge was offering three hundred dollars per hour plus expenses and a bonus bigger than the advance upon satisfactory completion. It was ridiculous. Just for finding out where that ring came from? Whether a man gave it to her? What Jasmine Gulati’s life was like in the months prior to her death? Simply because a retired justice who was going senile had a feeling something was wrong?

  She flicked the check back onto the table. Justice Monaghan was in denial. Angie had seen this kind of behavior among relatives of crime victims. They wanted to do something, to feel they were taking control. They wanted to apportion blame. They wanted revenge. If they were wealthy, they always thought they could throw money at the problem.

  Her cell rang, and Angie started. She grabbed it off the table and felt a clutch in her chest as she saw it was Maddocks calling. She hesitated, thinking of their last stilted conversation, then engaged the call.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “You all right?” His voice was cool, distant, as if he was making an obligatory call to check in on her mental well-being.

  Angie inhaled. “Yeah, I’m fine, thanks. You all done with Flint? You guys have a good evening?”

  “Yeah. Was good. Caught up on some iMIT stuff. How’d it
go with your appointment—that woman with the PI job you mentioned?”

  He was fishing. “I don’t think it’s anything that will pan out,” Angie said, purposefully remaining vague. She wasn’t ready for a lecture over having brought Jilly Monaghan’s box of files and photos home.

  “You busy now?”

  “Now? Why?”

  “I thought it might be too late to come over and see you, but then I drove past, saw your lights on.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Outside. In my car.”

  She hurried to the window, moved the blinds aside. She couldn’t make out his vehicle in the parking lot below. It was dark. Rain smeared the lights. Black water glinted in the adjacent Gorge.

  “Can I come up?” he said.

  Her stomach fisted with sudden tension, and her heart started to beat fast. She shot a glance at the files and photos littering her tables. She didn’t want him to see them—didn’t want to have to explain, hear his questions, listen to his admonishments, which she knew would come, albeit cloaked in well-meaning advice. She checked her watch. It was late—11:45 p.m. She’d lost track of time. Blissfully so. In immersing herself in the Jasmine Gulati files, she’d had some respite from her own screwed-up life. It struck her suddenly—a bolt from the blue—an idea.

  She knew how she could do it, how to take the Gulati case legally. But she needed to get up early, and in order to swing it she needed to be in top form.

  “Maybe it’s not a good idea, Maddocks. I … it is late. And—”

  “And I’m on a plane tomorrow morning.”

  “I know. I—” She dragged her hand over her hair, conflict ratcheting tighter inside her chest. “I’ll see you when you get back.” By then she might have her plan in action. She’d be on a really solid footing. She’d be able to think forward, think about planning her life with him.