The Girl in the Woods

by Gregg Olsen

  Kendall moved closer. “How long has she been dead?”

  “Hard to say. I’d start looking for someone who went missing Monday, maybe Tuesday. But that only presumes the victim was killed right away. Anyway, that’s a start.”

  “All right,” Kendall said. “Cause? Any ideas?”

  Birdy scanned the small foot and shook her head.

  “At first I thought it might have been a mauling, but when I cleaned the stump I could see that the foot had been severed neatly. The tissue around the bone is a mess between the bugs and the dirt, but there is a single cut between the joints with damned near butcher quality.”

  “Homicide?”

  “I think so. You’ll know for sure when you find the rest of her.” Birdy motioned for the detective to come closer, and Kendall somewhat reluctantly did so.

  “Look here,” she said. “This is kind of interesting.”

  Kendall strained to see. She looked back up at Birdy. “I’m missing something,” she said.

  “Here,” Birdy said, pointing her gloved fingertip on the side of the foot. “See those?” She indicated three indentations in an arc. They were slight and a maggot had settled into one of them, making it difficult to see. She flicked it off with a scalpel.

  “Yes. What is it?”

  Birdy twisted the light on its stand to redirect its beam. The maggots who’d been chilled to stillness were now happily awake and they moved like a wave.

  “Bite marks,” she said.

  Kendall’s eyes widened a little. “Bear?”

  “Not sure. Maybe. Maybe human. I’ll try to do an impression here. I think we’ll lose it if we transport to Olympia and have it done at the state lab.”

  Human?

  Kendall took in the idea of a human predator. It was her job to catch men and women who do evil to each other, but a human bite mark? She’d investigated gunshot, stabbing, and strangulation cases. She’d never had a case in which someone had actually bitten another person. And while Birdy hadn’t suggested cannibalism, the idea of it lingered.

  “All right,” Kendall said, pulling back from the autopsy table. Birdy shut off the water. The stench from the decomposing foot and the writhing of the maggots had intensified under her lamp. Birdy clicked off the light and turned to the detective. Her expressive dark brown eyes looked upward as she pondered something.

  “Kendall,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about those feet washing up on the beaches up north.”

  The detective nodded. “That crossed my mind too.”

  “Do you know anything about those cases?” Birdy asked.

  “Not much,” Kendall said. “Just what I’ve read in the reports. Some have been found with shoes on. A few haven’t. And, all have been found on the shores—mostly in the Strait. I think the first one was found up north on the shores of Jedediah Island. Was it ten years ago?”

  “No. Not quite,” Birdy said. Kendall was right, however, about the location. It had been on the shores of Jedediah Island, a six-hundred-acre island off the coast of British Columbia.

  “A beachcomber from Washington found what she thought was just a running shoe—until she looked inside and noticed that it wasn’t empty,” Birdy said, mixing the plaster for the impression of the bite marks before transport to the crime lab.

  Over the few years that followed, more feet washed ashore on both Canadian and American coasts.

  “There were some differences, of course. Our foot wasn’t wearing a shoe,” Kendall said, recalling one of the more intriguing aspects of the unsolved cases.

  “Right,” Birdy said. “Most of the dozen or so found were wearing running shoes. The first foot was wearing a shoe popular in India, sold in the aughts.”

  “I hate that I’m about to use the word ‘floated’ in this context,” Kendall said with an annoyed grimace. “But was the idea floated that some of the victims might have been killed in the tsunami?”

  The horrific Japanese tsunami had been a source of all sorts of mini mysteries as pieces of debris related to the catastrophe had found their way to Washington and Oregon. Some things were expected—pieces of boats, docks, and even car parts. Other items were either strange or heartbreaking. Part of a McDonald’s golden arch, a mannequin fully dressed for an evening out, and a child’s playhouse complete with toys had drifted thousands of miles to land on the craggy beaches of the Pacific Northwest.

  “They could have been,” Birdy said. “Bodies sometimes break apart at the joints when they’ve decomposed. But as I recall, it was determined that one or two were locals—not tsunami victims. I’m pretty sure one was a suicide.”

  As Birdy checked the foot against notes she made, the two talked and pieced together the bits of the “foot” stories they’d heard or read about. None of the feet found involved Kitsap County residents or were discovered there, so neither Birdy nor Kendall had worked directly on any of the cases. And yet, there was such mystery, such macabre lore, attached to the severed feet that everyone had an idea or theory.

  Gang violence?

  Pirates?

  Slaves murdered at sea?

  Every ugly scenario one could conjure was a possibility.

  “There hasn’t been much to go on,” Birdy said. “But there were lots of feet. A dozen in total. Only two were a pair belonging to the same person. Others came from different people. Mostly men, but some women too.”

  She logged more information on the paperwork that would accompany the foot to Olympia.

  Kendall, having grown up along the Washington coast, knew that finding a dead body along the shoreline was not an uncommon occurrence though it didn’t happen every day. Or every week. The mysterious feet, however, still made beachcombing in the Pacific Northwest a little uncomfortable for the squeamish.

  “Okay, but why was it so hard to ID who these feet belonged to?” Kendall asked. “Is that going to be a problem with our foot?”

  “No. I mean, not for the same reason,” Birdy said. “The ones found in the Pacific or on the Strait were compromised.” She set down her pen and met Kendall’s gaze. “More like transformed.

  “It was difficult for the examiners to identify feet because they had been transformed into a waxy residue, somewhat like soap,” she said. “The buildup was caused by a lack of oxygen in the sea water and the growth of anaerobic bacteria that converted the fat into adipocere.”

  As Kendall took it all in, a story came to mind.

  “Like that famous case from your old stomping grounds,” she said. “The one everyone calls the Lady of the Lake.”

  That Kendall had recalled a fascinating case made Birdy smile. It was one of the most baffling and interesting in the annals of Northwest crime. She stopped what she was doing.

  “The Lady of the Lake,” Birdy repeated. “Yes, that’s the one.”

  The Lady of the Lake was so named for a crime that had occurred in Lake Crescent, a deep chasm of water not far from where she grew up on the Makah Reservation, though decades before Birdy was born.

  It started when a pair of men found a body while out fishing in the summer of 1940.

  It was a woman, face down, floating on the surface.

  “The woman had been hog-tied and weighted down in the icy waters where anaerobic bacteria did a number on her, turning her into a creamy, putty-colored substance that resembled soap,” Birdy said.

  “That’s disgusting,” Kendall said.

  “Disgusting is also fascinating, Kendall.”

  “I guess you’ve got that right.”

  “The discovery was a sensation,” Birdy said. “I remember studying about it in school. Picnickers and curiosity seekers swarmed the banks of Lake Crescent to see just where the Lady of the Lake had been found.”

  “Right, but more to the point, however, was just how did she get there . . . and, of course, who in the world was she? That’s the stuff of a classic murder mystery, don’t you think?”

  “Of course,” Kendall said. “I’m grabbing at a memory now, but I can�
��t recall how they figured it out.”

  Birdy smiled. “I remember it. In fact, I wrote a paper on it in college.”

  “Why doesn’t that surprise me in the least?” Kendall asked.

  Birdy ignored the tease. She never forgot anything. Every case she ever studied, especially the big ones, was burned onto her brain.

  “A medical student in Port Angeles examined the corpse for the police and reported that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to identify the vic. Even though she’d been preserved by the cold, deep water, she was missing her face and fingertips. A dental plate removed from her mouth was the sole clue—and eventually led to her killer.”

  “Her husband, right?” Kendall asked.

  Birdy recalled more details. “Yes, the victim was identified as Hallie Illingworth, a waitress from Port Angeles, married to a truck driver named Monty. No one had seen her since just before the Christmas holidays a few years before.”

  Kendall watched as Birdy moved around the autopsy table.

  “People were suspicious of her husband, a brute who’d beaten her black and blue, but the idea that she might have run off with another man seemed plausible,” she said.

  “He was convicted, right?”

  “Yes, he eventually served nine years in prison for the crime,” Birdy said.

  Kendall let out a sigh. “And we think they get off too easy today. Illingworth was the worst kind of killer. He basically beat her, strangled her, hog-tied her, and tossed her into the lake to conceal his crime.”

  “And he almost got away with it,” Birdy said.

  “Sometimes they do,” Kendall said, thinking of the case that had been the source of so much contention in the department, the case that brought Birdy to the crime scene the previous day. Kendall lingered a bit more, before saying good-bye.

  The list of what Birdy knew for sure about the foot was devastatingly brief. The victim from Banner Forest was likely female because there were traces of pink polish on two of the toenails. But really, Birdy knew, that was kind of an assumption that didn’t necessarily mean much. The foot might have belonged to a boy playing around with polish or one who simply wore nail polish for his own fashion sense. That was fine. Jumping to conclusions was not a course of action she wanted to follow anyway. The size of the foot indicated a younger person or a female. The stump was so damaged that Birdy feared no matter what equipment they had in the lab in Olympia, there was no real hope they’d be able to determine exactly how the foot had been severed from the rest of the body.

  Next, she looked at the leafy humus that the crime scene tech Sarah Dorman had collected to see what if anything had been left behind. She ran the forest soil under a field of UV lights to see what, if any, biologicals were present, though she knew that test would yield very little that was helpful.

  Soil might look dead, but it was full of living things.

  As she expected, it glowed like a photograph of the Milky Way.

  Under a scope, she searched for any overt particles that might be out of place given the context of the foot’s discovery in the middle of Banner Forest.

  Nothing.

  The sword fern that Sarah had dug up and brought to the lab had just begun to sprout new fronds with its fuzzy crown unfurling slightly. The budding fronds were like a perfect bird’s nest with a clutch of soft brown eggs.

  Birdy looked for hair, for fibers, for anything that might not belong in the dirt and on the fern.

  Again nothing.

  The foot was put back into the cooler and her assistant would see that it was properly transported to Olympia. She’d wondered about those feet on the shore years ago. She had to admit that she considered only for a split second that the foot found by the school kids might be related to something like that.

  And yet, a foot in the forest was far, far different. It had been exposed to air and all the handiwork of the larvae. The feet on the coast were distorted, but preserved.

  Birdy looked at the fern. She did not consider it of any evidentiary value, and she didn’t want it to die. She went over to her sink and filled a bright orange Home Depot bucket with water and stuffed the plant into it.

  She went to the locker room to shower and dress. Her scrubs were deposited neatly into a basket next to the door. The water doused her body and she let it run over her face, closing her eyes and wondering about the foot from Banner Forest. She sensed it had belonged to a girl, a young woman. It had danced. It had run. It had tapped to the music. And someone for some sick reason had sought to take it from the body and carry it to the woods for a cruel and unceremonious disposal.

  Who do you belong to? Where is the rest of you?

  Those questions and more came to her as the water, nearly scalding, splashed down over her shoulder-length black hair. The questions above all others were the ones she would always ask whenever a patient showed up on her autopsy table.

  Who did this to you? I need you to tell me. What is your story?

  Over and over she’d ask as she thought about the violence that men reserve for female victims: What mistake did he make? What evidence did he leave behind?

  She turned the faucet to the off position and reached blindly from the shower around the corner for a towel. She was going to miss many things when she went to the new building in Bremerton, but the grime of that old shower was not among them.

  CHAPTER 6

  The place on Olalla Valley Road was notorious among those who lived in the area or passed by it on a regular basis. It wasn’t the site of a colossal accident, though it always brought that kind of rubbernecking. So much so, in fact, that a driver had once been so distracted she ran off the road and sunk her SUV deep into a cattail-ringed ditch.

  It was the house and the yard. Or rather what its owner had done to them that caused all the distraction and disdain.

  If a home could be a train wreck, this was a Burlington Northern catastrophe.

  The place had started its days as a charming little farmhouse when it was built in 1914. Old postcards from the time prove that in glorious, rich sepia tones. The original couple who built it—James and Delia Christensen—had farmed strawberries and then later chickens on twenty-five acres that stretched from the road to a small spring-fed lake in the back of the property. It had once been idyllic, a place of pastoral beauty.

  That was a long time ago. Owners had come and gone. With each one, an addition, a change, a pockmark was deposited unceremoniously on what had been so lovely and serene.

  In the early 1990s, Tess Moreau, the great granddaughter of the original owners, had settled into the old farmhouse. The acreage around the place shrunk as parcels were sold off. The accumulation of things collected over the years began to constrict and overtake the yard. In time, it appeared that the only parts of the earth near the house that felt the rays of the sun were a pathway from the mailbox on Olalla Valley Road to the front door. Everywhere and anywhere were piles of trash, garbage, and debris.

  Outsiders who passed by mocked Tess and wondered how anyone could live in such a state of filthy confusion, but those who knew her held a more sympathetic view. Tess had lost her husband and a daughter in a car accident when she was only twenty. She raised another daughter, Darby, by herself on her income as a records keeper at the women’s prison in Purdy, about seven miles away. At work, no one knew what her situation was like, because she never invited anyone over. She always looked tidy. She followed the rules of her job with the kind of precision that indicated an understanding of doing things the proper way. Her desk was devoid of personal effects outside of two photographs, both of her daughter. Those portraits were put away each night.

  And yet, all of that was a kind of mask for what was going on at home.

  Tess started collecting things in the early years of her broken heart and it simply couldn’t be stopped. People tried to help her, of course. A social worker from the county offices in Bremerton made a note of Tess and her state of mind in a court-ordered home visit:

 
Ms. Moreau is a kind woman. While her

  propensity to hoarding is most certainly

  debilitating, it is not creating an entirely unsafe

  environment in her home. Her daughter is a

  student at South Kitsap High School this year.

  Tess hoards because she has a compulsion to

  hang on to everything—no matter its value. She

  has suffered the greatest loss imaginable.

  Hoarding is a coping mechanism.

  After work earlier in the week on Monday, Tess Moreau looked around her house and knew that something wasn’t quite right. Everything seemed to be in its chaotic place. And yet something was missing. Darby’s book bag wasn’t hanging by the door.

  She called out to her daughter.

  “Honey, you home?”

  Tess knew every inch of that debris-blown home. She knew what had been moved, added, subtracted. She knew if someone had attempted to organize things for her. She didn’t understand why people did that, when she had no problem finding what she needed when she needed it.

  She followed the path she’d left between the stacks of papers, toys, kitchenware, and assorted collectibles to Darby’s bedroom and twisted the doorknob.

  It didn’t take Tess more than an instant to confirm that Darby wasn’t at home. The sixteen-year-old kept her room spotless. Operating room clean. There wasn’t a paper not in its place. Clothes were put away. The bed was made.

  “Darby!” she called out once more.

  All mothers have a sixth sense about their children. Despite her problems, Tess Moreau was no different. She might have lived in squalor of her own doing, but she’d been imprinted with her daughter and the love she felt for her from the moment Darby was born. Tess was certain something had to be wrong.

  Very, very wrong.

  As Monday evening turned into night, as night turned into early Tuesday, Tess sat amid the disarray of her life with her phone clenched in her hand. She knew the right thing to do. She expected that she needed to phone the sheriff. Tears rolled down her cheeks. By calling the authorities, she knew she was opening the door for them to assess her one more time. She knew that when Darby was found, she would lose her forever. The social worker had said as much.