by Mike Markel
“Follow me,” Robin said.
I lifted the tape so Robin could duck under it and lead me to the body, which was underneath a tent that had been set up earlier to protect the crime scene from shit falling onto it. The common-approach path had already been laid out with our new metal stepping-stone plates. We started using them a few months ago. Robin had put out the plates on a path she hoped didn’t have any forensic evidence. Everyone who entered the scene had to walk on the plates. It was a pain in the ass, but worth it: we didn’t waste as much time looking for a murderer wearing the shoes on Ryan’s feet.
The vic was fifteen yards in. A young girl. Black hair, pretty. Asian or something. The copper skin on her arms and face was a mottled gray, the arms covered with goose bumps. She was wearing just a t-shirt, jeans, and socks. Looking at her, I felt a shiver run through my body.
Robin bent down, still standing on a metal plate. “She had her shirt on when she was stabbed.” She pointed to the three identical slices through her shirt in an area maybe three inches square, stomach-high but a little to the left. “If you look close at the area, you can see the ridges on her skin through the cloth.”
“Yeah.” I crouched down to see it.
“The holes in the shirt don’t line up with the wounds. Same pattern, but they’re about an inch off.”
“As in the killer took her shirt off and then put it on again.”
Robin nodded, then stood up straight. It took me a little more effort to stand up. We walked back on the metal plates, out to the tape, and over to Ryan and Harold.
Ryan said, “For some reason the killer took the girl’s clothes off, dunked her, getting the slimy green stuff on her, then brought her back on shore, laid her down on the sand, and dressed her.”
Harold said, “I might be able to help you with the sequence when I put her on the table.”
“When did she die?”
“Rigor is just starting,” Harold bobbed up and down on his toes. “I’d say ten pm to two am.”
I looked at Ryan. “She didn’t have a coat or anything?”
He shook his head. “I’ll get some uniforms to do a grid search, but I didn’t see anything when I did a quick once-over in the area here.” He was pointing to the area inside the tape.
“You see it as a dump job?”
“Looks like it.” Robin blew on her hands. “No blood under her or in the area.”
“You got a purse or something?”
“Nothing yet. No ID. A twenty and three ones in cash folded in her pocket,” Robin said. “A bandanna in her back left pocket.”
“No keys, no phone?”
“Not that I’m seeing.” She pointed her chin toward the river. “Maybe they’re in there. Wanna roll up your pants?”
“Sounds like fun,” I said. “Lemme see what we’ve got first. Who discovered the body?”
“A jogger,” Ryan said, “about an hour ago. He saw her from the Greenpath.”
“The jogger legit?”
Ryan nodded. “He stuck around for me to get here. I interviewed him.” He patted his chest pocket, where he keeps his notebook. “I let him go a few minutes ago. He was all dressed up in spandex gear, complete with those shoes that look like feet. I got his contact information. He’s a lawyer downtown.”
“Okay.”
Ryan said, “Want to get the dive team to look for a phone?”
I shook my head. “There won’t be anything in the river. He killed her somewhere else, dropped her here. All he’s left here is the stuff he wanted us to find. If there’s a phone, it’s at his place or he tossed it somewhere else.”
“Any thoughts on why he wanted her to be found here?”
“No idea.” I shook my head. “There’s a bunch of other places he could’ve dumped her if he didn’t want us to find her. So he thought it through, at least a little bit.” I paused. “Why don’t we wait and see what Robin and Harold figure out. We’ll probably be able to ID her easily enough from a Missing Persons, and we’ll get her phone records. The only thing we lose from not having a phone is her speed dials and her pissed-off birds.”
I looked over at Harold, who was gazing across the river at nothing in particular. “You okay?”
He shook his head. “Hate it when I see a kid like this get killed. Young girl, I look at her and see my daughter.”
We stood there a moment, and I squeezed his arm gently through his puffy coat. “Okay, Harold, anything you need from us before we head back?”
“No, the scene is secure.” He gestured to the tent. There was one officer there, and two protecting the perimeter. “The wagon will be here in a couple of minutes. I’ll get together with Robin when we get the girl back to the station. We’ll talk to you later this morning.”
“Thanks, Harold.” I turned to Ryan. “Think it might be time to figure out who this girl was.”
He nodded. “See you back at headquarters.” He started walking toward his car.
I pulled my coat tighter against my body and walked back toward the tape. I ducked under it and followed the steel plates to the tent. I looked down at the girl’s body. “What happened to you?” I said softly.
“Did you say something to me, Detective?”
I looked up, startled, at the uniform on duty, a woman whose nametag said Brown.
“No, I just … No, I didn’t say anything.” I turned and headed back on the steel plates.
Chapter 2
“There’s a Walter Senden, age seventy-nine, wandered away from his nursing home, and an Amber Alert on a Dakota Wilbur, age seven.”
“That’s it?” I let Ryan do all the computer stuff. His fingers are three times faster than mine. Plus, he actually likes dredging stuff out of computers. But this time, Missing Persons wasn’t giving us anything useful.
We were sitting at our desks, set up head-to-head in the detectives’ bullpen. We’ve only got three sets of detectives—two on day shift, one on night. Any given moment, there’s likely to be only a couple of detectives in the bullpen. The other pair of day-shift detectives hadn’t yet checked in for their shifts, which start at eight.
I had my hands wrapped around a cup of coffee. I’d put on this new pair of flats today, not realizing I’d be spending some time out on the river, and I was having a little trouble shaking the chill. “You want to just wait till we get a preliminary from Harold and Robin, see if they’ve got anything else to go on?”
“Let me try the Campus Substation.” He picked up his phone. The Campus Substation was part of the Rawlings Police Department. Back when I was in college, they were more like mall rent-a-cops: fat old white guys with radios. They were there mostly to ticket cars, do traffic at football games, and sniff around for pot in the dorms. Today they had the same training and equipment as all the other officers, and they volunteered for the gig, usually for a year at a stretch.
Now they were more about terrorism. It was hard to imagine a terrorist hot to target Central Montana State University, but the school was working hard to attract science and engineering students from all over, and I was seeing more kids from the Middle East around town. I guess it wasn’t impossible.
More likely, trouble would come from a domestic idiot. Just last year, the state legislature got all patriotic about the Second Amendment and introduced a bill to let students carry concealed weapons on campus. For obvious reasons, cops everywhere consider that an Extremely Bad Idea. Usually our word doesn’t carry much weight, but when the presidents of all the schools in the state signed a letter objecting to the bill, the legislature backed down. It wasn’t that the letter changed any minds. It was more that since the legislature keeps cutting the money it gives the state schools, the legislators decided to do something the schools wanted that didn’t cost any money.
“We just brought in a homicide, female eighteen to twenty-five, non-white. You got any reports?” Ryan said to the officer at the Substation. “No? Okay, thanks.” Ryan shook his head as he hung up.
It was half an ho
ur later when a call was put through to us from the main switchboard. It was some guy named Al Gerson. I hit Speaker.
“Okay, Mr. Gerson, give us the name of the missing person.”
“She’s Maricel. Her name is Maricel Salizar.” He sounded way overcaffeinated.
I asked him to say it slow, spell the two names, which he did. “All right, can you tell me your relation to her?”
“Maricel is an exchange student, from the Philippines. She lives with my family here in Rawlings.” I looked over at Ryan, who was wearing a grim expression as he looked at a photo of the victim’s face. He nodded at me, like he thought she could be from the Philippines.
“Tell me about why you think she’s missing.”
“She didn’t come home last night—”
“Is that unusual, her not coming home?”
“Well, no, actually. She’s started to see a young man. It might be serious. But we have a very clear policy: she is to phone us—before ten o’clock—if she’s planning to stay out that night.”
“And you didn’t hear from her, is that correct?”
“That’s correct.”
“And you haven’t been able to contact her since last night?”
“We’ve tried her ten or fifteen times. All through the night.”
“And she hasn’t picked up?”
“Maricel always has her phone on. But it’s been off since before ten pm last night,” he said. “My wife and I are very concerned.”
“I understand that, Mr. Gerson. But in my experience, this kind of thing is usually just a misunderstanding.”
“We’re afraid that something bad’s happened to her.”
“Yes, of course, Mr. Gerson. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. My partner and I would like to sit down with you, see if we can get some more information about Maricel. Would that be all right?”
“Yes,” he said. “That would be … yes, please. Do you want me to come to police headquarters?”
“No, Mr. Gerson, we’re happy to stop by your place. Can you give us an address?”
“I’m on campus. You know the Administration Building?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s room 101.”
“Okay, Mr. Gerson, we’ll be there in ten, fifteen minutes.”
“Thank you very much. I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.”
“I’m Detective Seagate.”
“Thank you very much, Detective Seagate. I appreciate it.”
I hung up. Ryan was looking at his computer screen. “He’s the acting provost.”
“What’s a provost?” It was one of those words I’d heard for years but never knew what it meant.
“A provost is the boss on the academic side of a university. The president is largely about fundraising and being the public face. The provost works with the deans and the vice presidents. He’s the inside guy.”
“So Mr. Gerson’s probably not just a mister, right?”
“Dr. Gerson,” Ryan said. “Or Provost Gerson.”
“Got it,” I said. “Bring the photo.”
Ryan tapped his leather briefcase as we stood up and walked over to the coatrack.
On the five-minute drive over to campus, the steel-gray sky started to release a few flurries. I flicked the fan up another notch to get more heat into the big cruiser, but it was still pumping out mostly cold.
“You think Maricel’s our vic?” I turned the fan back down.
He took a manila envelope out of his briefcase and slid out the photo. He looked at it for a moment. “That’d be my guess.”
A year ago, when I first started working with Ryan, he’d have said something a little cheerier. But four or five murders into our partnership, Ryan was started to get a little … not exactly sure what to call it. Let’s say he was getting a little more realistic. He was still optimistic, but experience was coming up fast on the outside.
I pulled into one of the metered spots in front of the Administration Building and flipped down the visor with the Official Police Business tag on it. The building was big and ugly, three stories of blocky gray stone, built around 1930. It was the first and, for fifteen years, the only building on the Central Montana Junior College campus. I think I remember it was built with some federal money during the Depression to keep the quarries alive—and keep some of the homesteaders alive one atrocious winter after they’d been dining on roots-and-bark soup for a few weeks.
We found room 101 at the far end of the first floor. It was a suite of offices for the university president, the provost, and the attorney. A forty-something secretary in a sober beige pantsuit and white blouse greeted us with a smile that she kept under tight control, as if Gerson had told her to expect some cops.
“Detectives.” She stood and stepped out from behind her desk. I saw her looking at my shield, attached to the leather disc hanging on a chain around my neck. “Let me show you to Dr. Gerson’s office.” She led us across a thick forest-green carpet, past two other office women guarding a couple of interior offices, toward the back of the suite.
A tall, thin man in a navy blue suit, pale blue shirt, and green striped tie came out of the office and greeted us. “Al Gerson,” he said. He tried to smile but didn’t quite succeed. His right eye was twitching pretty good. He extended his hand. “It’s Detective Seagate, have I got that right?” We shook hands.
“That’s right,” I said. “Detective Karen Seagate. This is my partner, Detective Ryan Miner.” The two guys shook hands, briefly but with some muscle, the way ex-athletes do.
“I want to tell you how much I appreciate your willingness to come right over like this.”
I don’t think he knew what we really wanted to accomplish. “Not at all, Dr. Gerson. We take reports of missing persons very seriously.”
He gestured toward a couple of upholstered chairs in front of his desk. There was a coffee table between the two chairs and a matching love seat. After he closed his office door, we all sat down.
He was a good-looking guy, in his mid-forties, with sandy blond hair going gray at the sides. His eyebrows were pale, almost invisible, over dark brown eyes. He had the ruddy complexion of a guy who spent a lot of time outdoors. When he saw me and Ryan looking at him, the twitching became more frequent and more pronounced, and his hand came up and touched his cheek, like he was trying to make it calm down. It didn’t work.
“I’m sorry.” He flashed a quick smile. “As you might imagine, I’m very concerned about Maricel.”
I started to feel really bad for this guy. He was so jumpy I concluded maybe he did realize we were going to show him a photo.
“Yes,” I said. “We understand.” We would get to the photo, but if it was Maricel, we’d have a harder time getting a read on him after he saw it. “I called you Mister Gerson on the phone. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were the provost.”
He shook his head and waved away my apology. “Just the acting provost. Keeping the seat warm. A few weeks ago, I was head of Modern Foreign Languages. The provost had to resign for medical reasons, and I’m just pushing the papers around until a replacement is hired this summer.”
The words came out smooth. I got the feeling he was the kind of guy said self-deprecating things about himself—just to let you know he meant the opposite. I was fine with that.
“Well,” I said, “I doubt the administration would ask you to serve as provost if they didn’t think you’d do an excellent job.”
“I appreciate the compliment, Detective. But I believe I was chosen because I made it clear that I had no intention of applying for the position.”
“Oh,” I said, “why is that?”
“I love the classroom. This job is all about meetings.” His hand took in the office in a sweeping gesture. “It just doesn’t suit me. As department chair, I still get to teach a course or two. I’ve got fifteen faculty, all of them good people, all rowing in the same direction.”
I nodded. We were silent for a moment, ready to make the transition from
pleasantries to business. “Tell us about Maricel. You said she’s an exchange student from the Philippines?”
The twitching began again. “Yes, my wife and I, and our son, Mark, are hosting her.”
“How long has she been here?”
“This is her second semester. She got here in August.” He leaned forward, like he was going to say something he says a lot. “My wife and I feel strongly that we’re living in a multicultural world, and the more our kids understand about that, the better off they’ll be. That’s why we hosted a boy from Denmark, a girl from Saudi Arabia, another boy from South Korea, and Maricel, from the Philippines.” During this little speech, his twitching calmed right down.
“That’s really something,” I said. “Very generous of you.”
He smiled. “We get more out of it than they do, I can assure you.”
The conversation paused.
“Dr. Gerson,” I said, “I have to tell you the body of a young woman was recovered this morning.”
His shoulders sagged and his head tilted forward, his eyes closed.
“We have a photograph of her face. But before we show it to you, I want you to understand that there’s a very good chance it is not Maricel.”
“Let me see the photograph, please.” His voice was almost a whisper. He looked like he already knew it was.
Ryan reached into his briefcase and removed the envelope. He pulled out the photo and passed it across the coffee table to Gerson.
He looked at the photo for a second before crying out, a long, low moan of anguish that came from deep inside him. From outside the office I heard movement, and a secretary opened the door a crack to look in and see if there was something she needed to do. I turned my head and waved her off. The door closed quietly.
Al Gerson was holding his gut with both arms, as if the pain had a specific location. He began to sob, grabbing huge gulps of air, out of control. He shook his head, slowly, and big tears started flowing down his face. His mouth contorted in agony, he said, “It’s … it’s …” He couldn’t say Maricel’s name.
We sat there. I’d showed photos to a couple dozen people in my sixteen years on the force, but I’d never seen anyone more busted up than this guy. It was the better part of a minute before he could speak. Through his sobs, he said, “What happened to her?”
