“Breathe,” I tell myself. “Just breathe.” I feel as though I’m driving directly into a mouth of madness where everything feels so out of control.
Davis drew a map to the location where Emma Parks emerged from the forest and flagged down the motorist. In order to build a formal profile, I need to set the scene visually in my mind. Most of all, though, I want the time alone. Solitude is how I collect my strength and think through the inner workings of a crime. Thankfully, Davis stayed behind at the station to work with a media consultant on a statement he’ll be reading at a six o’clock press conference.
Willow’s Ridge is the quintessential small Midwestern town of maybe 5,000. It grew around the limestone quarry with caves that honeycomb the soft stone. The town map shows the almost seventy square miles of wooded forest that make up the limestone quarry along the western edge of the town. A residential area borders a portion of the quarry. It’s the flux of the limestone, the unsteadiness of the rock that keeps people from building too close. Many come to Willow’s Ridge for its small-town charm and to see the fall colors in the forested quarry. You can always find photographers hiking the trails to capture the old wood-covered bridges, and children collecting small pieces of limestone in their pockets even though signs clearly state: Do Not Take the Rocks. It’s the charm and isolation of Willow’s Ridge that draws so many visitors in and drives so many of its local teenagers out because of the complete lack of nightlife. With one road through town and few stoplights along its famous brick-lined Main Street, fast food chains and huge grocery stores have been zoned outside of the town limits.
Tourists, however, are nowhere in sight now that the town is coated with the hardness of winter. Despite its small population, Willow’s Ridge has a lot of money; some members of its community easily clear $500,000 a year. A high-tech heart hospital and research center was built a few years ago outside of Willow’s Ridge and quickly gained the reputation of the best in the Midwest. It is money that generally insulates Willow’s Ridge from the harsh crimes that occur in the bigger cities of Ohio. That is, until recently.
Yellow crime-scene tape cordons off the entire section of State Route 55. An officer sits parked on the shoulder beside the location where it’s been estimated that Emma Parks emerged from the forest. I kill the engine behind the cruiser. With a quick glance in the rearview mirror, I re-knot my hair in a messy bun and pull on my Russian cap. Cold seeps in through the edges of the car door and wind gusts gently rock the car back and forth. I brace myself for the assault of frigid weather.
The officer rolls down his window. The stubble of no shave in the last twenty-four hours pocks his face and his lips are windburned. I show my badge and then hold my arms tight around my body for some attempt at warmth.
“I need to walk the crime scene. How much longer will you be here?”
“Until Davis releases me.” His face cringes against the blast of cold. “Won’t be much longer. The scene has already been processed.”
I slip under the yellow tape. I look back over my shoulder at the officer for a few seconds and then step forward into my past. There is hardly any shoulder to the highway, and I walk into the wall of winter-bare trees sooner than I expect.
“I’m okay.” These words are meant to convince myself, but my voice breaks. The tall trees answer with creaks and moans from the bone-chilling wind.
Shafts of sunlight flicker in and out of the clouds as if attempting to generate warmth. I wrap the scarf over my face, leaving only my watery eyes exposed. Everything around me looks suspended, like an iced-over winter scene from a calendar. I follow the ditch along the side to a clearing into the woods carved out of trees as tall and thick as God.
In the distance, plumes of smoke twist up and away from what must be chimneys. In the last twenty years or so, the land around the limestone ravine has become coveted, and a house overlooking the dense forest had become a status symbol in the Willow’s Ridge community. A neighborhood of huge homes has been built, each with five to ten acres of land. A creek snakes along the ravine at the base of the limestone cliffs and floods regularly, preventing further development in the area. Officers have interviewed all the people who own homes on the exclusive Willow’s Ridge Lane, but no one reported seeing or hearing anything. Judging from the dense woods and the space between the houses and the road, it would be difficult to hear much at those homes, not to mention that most residents would have been sound asleep at three a.m. Besides, these private types, I’ve learned, tend to mind their own business. They’d be the least likely to report activity to us even if they saw something out of the ordinary.
This clearing hardly leads to what I would call a path, but the brush is thinner and I’m able to maneuver better. The snow covering is scattered because of the naked, billowing branches. Farther inside the forest, the crime-scene team has roped an area off. Small branches have been snapped off recently; I examine the end of one in my gloved hand, the white of the exposed inner wood. There is a fallen tree that blocks the wooded path. Snow and foliage around the trunk have been moved. Blood covers the ground near the tree trunk, the place where he most likely cut Parks’s genitals. I drop to a squat for some quick photographs with my cell phone. The bloodstain is not as large as I expect, given exsanguination. Beside the bloody area, what looks like the slide of a boot marks the icy ground.
This was not a quick dump-and-drive crime scene. The killer or killers would have to be familiar with the tough terrain of the quarry. While it’s easy access from the highway, the killer had to carry or drag Parks deep into these woods. He planned it, scoping out the exact location to leave the body. Outdoor crime scenes are notoriously difficult to process and this killer had the snow and foliage to help cover up any evidence. I imagine the killer so pleased with his plan: Scream your head off, honey. You’re mine now. With a gloved hand, I trace the partial track. Parks had been found naked. This is the killer’s footprint. He’s never left anything close to a print before.
“What spooked you?” I ask out loud.
I push beyond the crime-scene tape a few yards deeper into the woods. There is a change in the landscape, denser pines with thicker underbrush so wiry it grabs at my ankles. And this is winter. I follow the thin trail of blood, an area already processed by the crime-scene team. Eventually I stumble upon a rocky cut in the land. My breath catches in my throat and my boot toes hang over the edge of the deep ravine. At least forty feet below rests a round pocket of water that runs so deep within the quarry it’s rumored to never have completely frozen. It’s a part of the chunky flow of icy water, through a ravine not much more than a deep creek, that shoots off from the quarry and snakes along the bottom of this cut in the land for miles.
When I look up, my father is there beside me, suddenly, the way he always appears these days. Dressed in his police chief regalia, he winks. “You caught a tough one, Lucy-girl.”
I smile up at this familiar ghost who haunts my life. “Could use your help here, Pop. Can we talk through it?”
His nod says that he’d have it no other way.
I take two steps back and analyze the scene once more. From my initial observations of the land, I assumed the water ran perpendicular to State Route 55. Instead it runs parallel to the road. “If the water surprised me, it also surprised Parks.”
My father nods and scans the terrain. This has always been his favorite part of a case, climbing inside the victim’s and killer’s heads to determine their every move. I’ve never met another cop better at it than my dad.
“She couldn’t have gotten around this quarry, especially with the darkness of night,” I say.
“Unless the killer only used this side of the ravine.”
“Risky move,” I say. Even though it had been the dead of the night, the drop site wasn’t a foolproof distance from the highway and the winter-stripped land made visibility a bit easier. If he wanted to be sure she couldn’t get away, he’d have put her on the other side of the ravine.
“He co
unted on the drugs to keep her from running.”
“You think he miscalculated the dosage? Seems out of character for our guy.”
My dad shrugs. “The frostbite on her hands and feet indicates that she’d been left in the freezing temperatures for some time.”
“Something scared him off before he could finish the job. He left her, certain that she would die out here in the cold or from her wounds.”
He nods. “We aren’t far from the highway, are we?”
Suddenly it’s clear: we’ve only found the body drop site, and he wanted her to be found. We still need to find the location where at least some of the mutilation took place and the killer cleaned the bodies. We’re missing at least half of this grand puzzle.
Together, we head back toward the highway. I need to see the forest from the other end. I need to examine other entrance points in the area, perhaps from the neighboring properties’ backyards. My father’s large body pulls through the snow beside me. In these quiet moments alone with him, I’m always tempted to ask questions about where he is now. But Dad’s adamant—his ghostly presence is only here to help me with cases. I reach out to take hold of his hand, but my fingers close on nothing but cold air. This, whatever it is, I remind myself, has to be enough.
There are literally hundreds of possible entrance and exit points to the limestone quarry, leaving thousands of potential drop sites. This begs the question, why this particular spot? Why would the killer leave his victims out in the open not more than three-fourths of a mile from major entrances to the quarry? An image of Vivian Hannerting flashes in my mind, a photograph of her positioned with a cross clenched in white-death hands, positioned not far from the main entrance to the limestone quarry park.
“We have ourselves a self-proclaimed prophet,” I say to my father. “A messenger of some kind.”
Chapter Three
Since Emma Parks didn’t own a car, she walked to and from her shifts at Wilson’s Photography Shop. Her mile-and-a-half path home created a prime opportunity for abduction. In a town where most people know everyone else, it seems highly unlikely that a passing motorist wouldn’t have seen a struggle and recognized Parks. That leaves only one other possibility: she went willingly with her killer.
Earlier, Davis’s team scoured the shop and neighboring stores for any witnesses. They talked to Parks’s coworkers and managers, but I want to follow up. Sometimes it’s amazing what people can remember when a state badge is flashed at them.
The heater blasts on high as I drive the surroundings of Wilson’s. Although the business is located on Main Street and next to a relatively active bank, it looks to be the only store open past six p.m. Main Street would be dark and deserted when Emma started her walk home. Especially in January, when the sky darkens shortly after five p.m.
“Same old story,” I say aloud and pull on my hat. We hear these comments from young people all the time: nothing will happen to me, crime doesn’t happen in my town, I can take care of myself. No one wants to believe that crime could actually happen to her. This is exactly what Parks told herself every night when she walked home from her job at the camera shop. Even though the previous murders in the area had been publicized, Parks would have reasoned that nothing could happen to her, that she was different from those victims.
Jasper Morgan, the manager who had been on duty with Parks last night, ignores my presence and works with the only customer in the small store. His monotonous drone about a camera’s features is enough to put anybody to sleep. The displays around me feature many framed photographs against the backdrop of black velvet. Portraits and landscapes are most prominent, a kid with an oversized yellow Lab and a newborn cradled in their mother’s arms. One framed print isn’t like all the other family or nature themes, but a black and white of a woman lying partially nude in a wooded area. A leafy branch covers her crotch and fresh-cut daisies cover her chest. Long dark hair is brushed over the model’s shoulder, and her eyes are shut as if she’s fallen into a deep sleep. There’s something odd about the angle of the camera, though, a fish-eye view that gives the model an ethereal look. This is a work of art rather than a family portrait.
Could it be Parks’s work? According to the file, she told friends and family members that she wanted to go to an art school to study photography. She’d even applied to the Art Institute a month ago and was waiting to hear whether she’d been accepted or not. Davis mentioned that Parks’s photography had been featured in a few local shows. There is no signature in the corner of this print.
“That’s one of my favorites. I could stare at it for hours and still not see everything in the photo.”
I turn to find a young woman standing behind me in a long white lab coat. Her name tag reads Kaitlin. Gothed out, she pulls with black-painted fingernails at her earlobe that holds a large ear stretcher. “It is amazing. Are you one of the lab techs?”
She nods. “Are you a cop?”
“The Ohio BCI.”
“Is that like the FBI?” She has a habit of biting on her lower lip ring, leaving the skin red and swollen.
“Sort of, but on a state level. I work for the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation.”
“That’s really cool,” she says, twisting the ends of her flared black skirt around her knees. She wears black tights and neon-green leg warmers, the only color on her dark outfit. “I love CSI and Criminal Minds.”
“Hollywood has a way of making everything look glamorous.”
Kaitlin flashes me a near-perfect white smile. Underneath all those piercings and black painted makeup, she’s quite attractive. Her blue eyes and high cheekbones are quite startling. And that body—curves, curves, curves everywhere.
Morgan, the manager, points to Kaitlin and slits his eyes at her. “Get back to work!”
She doesn’t answer but tucks a stringy lock of dyed-black hair behind her ear. I catch the tip of her head that tells me to follow her while she stocks the shelves.
“Did you work many shifts with Emma Parks?”
“Not many. We’re rarely busy and even less so at night. Only one cashier is scheduled after five.” She lines the film boxes up in neat rows as she talks. “Emma and I did go on a few photo shoots together.”
“Did she mention any customers that may have been bothering her? Anyone who came in regularly on her shifts?”
Before she can answer, Morgan ushers his only customer out of the store. Morgan’s a heavy man, and his polyester pants swish each time his thighs rub together. He turns to me with his pale, doughy face. “You have questions about Emma? Speak to me. I’m the manager.”
Kaitlin gives a dramatically loud sigh and when her eyes meet mine, I give her a quick wink. Jasper Morgan clearly imagines himself to be very important. I flip my badge at him. “When was the last time you worked with Emma?”
“Last night.” Morgan finger-combs his mouse-brown thinning hair. “I already talked to the detectives.”
“Just a few questions. You were the manager on duty last night. What time did Emma leave the store?”
Morgan fidgets with his belt, then hikes his worn pants up over his basketball belly. “The thing is,” he says, “we don’t always have a manager on duty. Most of our employees, like Emma, have been with us awhile and can act as managers.”
“Was there supposed to be a manager here?”
He pushes up his thick glasses on the bridge of his nose. “Like I told the other detective, it was a Tuesday night.”
“Tuesday? Is that significant?”
Morgan shakes his head. “Tuesday’s our dead night so I went home early. Emma had closed on her own a hundred times. She locked up and counted the till before she left.”
“Did she have a store key?”
“Emma had mine. She left it on the ridge above the door. I got it this morning. Nothing happened to her here, Agent. I promise you.”
“Since you weren’t here, there’s no way for you to know that for sure.”
Morgan shifts his weight.
His beady eyes dart from one corner of the sales floor to the other. “It was only an hour! I wasn’t feeling well.”
I jot down the timeline.
“It’s not a big deal,” Morgan reasons. “There were no customers during that time.” Morgan shrugs. “She closed down the till at seven fifty-eight p.m.” He leads me to the register and shows me the close-out tape with the stamped time.
“Mr. Morgan, can anyone vouch for your whereabouts last night from seven to midnight?”
“I told you, I felt sick! I went home.”
“Anyone there with you? A neighbor who might have seen you come in?”
“My girlfriend.” Morgan plants a fist on his meaty hip. “She cooked me chicken noodle soup and stayed with me all night.”
He gives me his address along with his girlfriend’s. I tell him I’ll be contacting her, but there is no nervous response. Judging from his direct answers, I’d say Morgan’s telling the truth.
He scans the floor and finds Kaitlin listening to us. “Get busy! I want to leave here at eight oh-two!”
Kaitlin mumbles back something like “Eat shit,” but Morgan either doesn’t hear it or pretends not to.
“I need a few minutes with Kaitlin. I just have a few questions for her.” Before Morgan can offer much of a refusal, Kaitlin is at my side and leads me to the break room away from his watchful eyes.
Kaitlin’s a nervous type with fingernails bitten down to the quick. Her skin’s near flawless—no zit or blemish to speak of—and she has a cute, tiny drop of a nose. Her torn, vintage clothing screams art chic; she can’t be older than nineteen or twenty. And there is something else: Kaitlin is a lesbian. Sitting across from her at a small table in the break room, I can’t help but read the strong vibes. I’ve been known to have an incredibly accurate gaydar and it’s spinning round and round like an antenna on overload.
She tells me the officers who questioned the other workers at Wilson’s didn’t interview her. No one came to her home, as far as she knows. If that’s true, this is the sort of sloppiness that could get Davis and his department crucified by the media.
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