by Rose Beecham
After identifying herself and Tulley, she sought out the most senior of the troopers, a rangy fortysomething who introduced himself as Henson.
“What have we got?” she asked.
“DOA. Hundred yards thataways.” He pointed down the riverbank.
“Smells real bad, ma’am.” Parker flashed a grin that probably worked on females who had never been to the big city. Even standing still, the guy had a swagger. “Got a clean bandanna in my truck if you need to cover your mouth.”
“What I need is for you to talk to Deputy Tulley, here.” Jude returned her attention to Trooper Henson and invited, “Lead the way.”
They followed a well-worn track through silver-green grasses and gnarled junipers to the banks of the Dolores. The once mighty River of Our Lady of Sorrows meandered north between walls of stratified sandstone, through the open spaces of Big Gypsum, into Slickrock Canyon and on to Paradox Valley. 160 million years of history were etched along its serpentine progress, from dinosaur tracks to the ruins of Anasazi Indian villages, to homesteader graves and the poisonous dust layer that was once Uravan, a uranium mining town bulldozed when its cancer epidemic made the news.
Jude had made it her business to get to know the area since moving out here, and spent most of her leisure time exploring on horseback. It was a world like none she’d ever known, a far cry from D.C. Lack of water kept rapacious developers away, which meant you could look out across a vast, natural landscape unsullied by human presence. Jude loved that. There was nothing like sitting on a horse high on a mesa, alone in this timeless splendor, feeling like a tiny speck on the ass of Mother Nature.
The track leveled out and she stopped and gazed toward the canyon mouth where a large cottonwood stood, impossibly alive and green in a barren sea of rock. From its branches, an owl stared at her, a rare sight in the garish brightness of day. The harbinger of death.
Jude shivered and continued along the riverbank, following the unmistakable hum of feasting insects. A few feet ahead, a squadron of flies hovered drunkenly around a vintage suiter split open to reveal what appeared to be female remains. The hair was long and the bloated facial features still vaguely identifiable. Jude pulled on some latex gloves and covered her nose and mouth with a handkerchief she’d pocketed for the occasion. The victim was young, maybe even a teen, fair haired and Caucasian, at least as far as she could tell.
Time since death was hard to guess. At a glance, Jude thought maybe a week, but submerged bodies decomposed more slowly than those left exposed, so it was more likely two or even three weeks. She did some math. The rains had struck six days earlier, so the body could not have been underwater any longer than that. Even with the August heat, the decomp rate seemed to be out of step with this time frame, which meant the killer must have hidden the body somewhere before he put it in the water. Poor planning, Jude thought.
Maybe it was a spur-of-the-moment killing and the perpetrator had to wait for an opportunity to travel to the dump site. He would probably have wanted to hide his victim some distance away from his home environment. Had he driven for a while, looking for a likely spot, or had he planned on the Dolores all along? He must have put the suiter into the river somewhere near Cahone, Jude calculated, for it to have drifted to its present location. There was no other direct access by road after that, until Slip Rock bridge.
She supposed it was equally possible that he’d dug a shallow grave right here in the muddy riverbed a week or so before the rains. The storm waters would have loosened the earth, and when the river started to flow again, the garment bag would have floated free. As a body dump strategy, it seemed like hard work and a high risk of disturbance, but maybe the killer had wanted this victim to be found. Either way, the body disposal seemed like the work of someone unpracticed.
Jude put a few paces between herself and the putrid discovery, and released the breath she was holding. Trooper Henson offered his Tic Tacs.
“Guess you’ll be wanting that hound down here,” he said.
“Not yet. We’ll have to wait till the forensic team is through.”
It was doubtful Smoke’m would have a role to play. Having been in the water, the bag wouldn’t hold the killer’s scent anymore. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to see if the sniffer hound turned up anything of interest in the general vicinity, and Tulley was desperate for an opportunity to flaunt his K-9 handler skills.
“I better call in.” Henson was clearly keen to go where the air smelled sweeter.
“Sure,” Jude waved him away. “I’ll finish up here.”
She photographed the scene and wandered along the bank a few yards toward the cottonwood. The owl kept tabs on her, its demeanor one of vague affront. She was probably disturbing some rodent it was stalking. Her eyes drifted east toward Disappointment Valley and the adobe badlands skirting McKenna’s Peak. The mountain rose silver and conical above the pomegranate landscape. Wild horses still roamed its slopes, the last survivors of human encroachment that had condemned their kind to near extinction.
The Old West no longer existed and its scars were plain to see. Yet, in the eerie majesty of this place, the untamed spirit of those times remained palpable. With an odd sense that prairie ghosts were watching, Jude returned to the body and lifted the canvas so she could see inside the suiter.
The dead girl was missing her legs below the knees. She was naked and heavily pregnant.
*
Unfortunately for Bobby Lee and his faithful lackey, Frank, the Huntsbergers were so dirt poor they had to apply for assistance to bury Darlene. The only reward offered up was a mute nod from Mrs. Huntsberger when Jude fed her the standard bullshit about how her baby hadn’t suffered and they would catch the scum who did it.
“They got the best tracker hound in the state,” Clem Huntsberger said, as if there were a trail leading directly to the killer just waiting to be sniffed out.
Mrs. Huntsberger glanced nervously across the office at Smoke’m. The dog promptly plodded over and placed his big wrinkled head in her lap. As he gazed up at her, tears welled in the bloodshot perimeters of his eyes and rolled like crystalline pearls down his jowls. Overwhelmed by this show of solidarity from one of God’s dumb creatures, Mrs. Huntsberger lifted her weathered hands to her face and began sobbing like she would never stop.
“I told you that hound was psychic,” Tulley said as the bereft couple’s pickup rattled off toward Highway 90 a half hour later.
“He’s empathetic,” Jude corrected. “That means he senses human emotions and reacts to them.”
“Yes, ma’am. He does that too.” Tulley reached down and caressed the hound’s ears, an intimacy greeted with groans that vibrated up through the animal’s throat folds.
“When you’re done typing the parents’ statements, keep on with those Samsonite dealers,” Jude said briskly.
“Man.” Tulley shook his head and peeled a fresh stick of gum, adding his last to the Wrigley’s stalagmite growing from his ashtray. “That’s another thousand phone calls. Shame her folks didn’t notice anything before she disappeared.”
“They’re just plain decent people. Not the suspicious type.” Jude wandered to the window and stared out at the Marlboro man. “Let’s face it, no one ’round here expects this kind of thing.”
Darlene had vanished two years earlier from the bus station at Cortez, aged sixteen. The Huntsbergers had reported her missing but the Cortez PD pegged her as a runaway. Her family had a run-down farm in Mancos, a two-bit settlement no young woman would elect to live in if she had a choice. There was only one witness statement worth a dime. A local drunk had seen a girl who fitted Darlene’s description getting into a white minivan. The police didn’t set much store by his recollections and instead formed an opinion based on a girlfriend’s statement that Darlene couldn’t wait to graduate from high school and “get a life fifty thousand miles away from this shitheap.”
It was the story of legions of girls like her. Darlene was not a troublemaker. She had average grades a
t school, helped her mom with the younger kids, and listened to Usher music. Her friends said she was shy and had never had a boyfriend. She made bead jewelry for a hobby and had a Princess Diaries poster on the wall of her tidy bedroom. Would she have gotten into a vehicle with a complete stranger? Everyone the police had questioned doubted it.
Jude was disturbed that they had treated the case like a routine missing person enquiry when the circumstances seemed so suspicious. She returned to her desk and sifted through her notes. How far would a killer drive to get rid of a body in these parts, given the price of gas? Her guess was Darlene Huntsberger had been murdered somewhere within a radius of a hundred miles, probably less. An accomplished killer who knew the area well might have tied concrete to her feet and dumped her in the McPhee Reservoir to get rid of the evidence. But this guy had zipped her into a garment bag to keep his trunk clean and had disposed of her body where it would probably be found. He had also had the courtesy to place her social security card inside the suiter’s ID compartment.
A thoughtful but amateurish sociopath who trawled for a random victim in a remote part of the state? Jude seriously doubted it. More likely, the killer knew Darlene. Which meant there was a motive. In her experience a motive meant a boyfriend or husband. It looked like their victim had picked the wrong guy to dump. Had she left Cortez with a man she’d met somehow? She didn’t have a computer, so it probably wasn’t an Internet romance. How would she have met the guy? In a small-town world like this, how could she have hidden a boyfriend from everyone who knew her?
Jude contemplated the manner of her death. Darlene was eight months pregnant. Her tongue had been severed, but not at the time she was killed. The autopsy suggested four or five months earlier. Her entire body was pockmarked with wounds described in an additional forensic odontologist’s report as “ovoid lacerations consisting of two facing symmetrical arches separated at their bases by open spaces. Along the periphery of the arches are a series of individual abrasions, contusions and lacerations reflecting the size, shape, arrangement, and distribution of the class characteristics of the contacting surfaces of human dentition.” In other words, someone bit the hell out of her.
Many of the bites involved flesh loss but, thanks to her immersion in the river, no saliva evidence remained. As far as the pathologist could determine, the bites were inflicted around the time of death, so it seemed probable that biter and killer were the same individual—a guy whose folks had not prioritized expensive dental work when he was a kid. According to Dr. Claudia Spelman, the odontologist, it was rare these days to see an “irregular mesiodistal width coupled with rare convex labial rotation in #7 causing it to overlap #8,” otherwise known as the kind of teeth that made kissing anyone except your mom unlikely.
Jude felt gloomy about that. If the killer had never had any dental work, there would be no record of the quirky fangs. Hopefully, this wasn’t the only time he’d bitten someone. It would be nice if they could solve this case the clean and simple way, sitting on their butts in air-conditioned comfort, getting a hit on one of the databases. But she had a feeling they would need to come up with some other data to narrow the suspect pool. The obvious starting pace was the killer’s M.O. Unusual, to say the least.
Darlene’s sternum was fractured in two. This had been caused by a large object that had also perforated her heart—a metal spike of the kind logging protesters rammed into trees to prevent felling. Carelessly, the killer had left it embedded in her chest. But this was not the cause of death. Darlene had been silenced permanently when her throat was slashed ear to ear. The stake was a postmortem touch.
Jude wondered where it was from. The nearest logging protests were in the Dolores River canyon, one of the wilderness tracts now being opened up to drilling by gas and oil companies.
“With that fancy luggage and all, maybe he’s white collar,” Tulley piped up. “Bank manager by day, cannibal killer by night.”
“We don’t know if he ate the flesh he removed.”
“Then why not just bite her?”
“Removing the flesh could be symbolic to him.”
“The stake through the heart is symbolic.” Tulley chomped hard on his gum. “The rest is real sick.” His mouth stilled suddenly and his Madeira brown eyes flashed with inspiration. “Know what I think? This creep could be a Russian.”
“What makes you say that?”
“They got themselves a big problem with cannibal killers over there. It’s real common.”
You couldn’t rule out anything in a homicide investigation, so Jude gave the idea some room before she shot it down. “Experts think the cannibalism in Russian homicides is circumstantial, rather than fetishistic. The victim is already dead. The killer is hungry. There’s a food shortage. So…”
“They’re starving in Africa, too, but they’re not eating their neighbors,” Tulley said.
With notable exceptions like Idi Amin Dada and Jean-Bedel Bokassa, but Jude kept that thought to herself. “Yeah well, the Africans aren’t drunk 24/7. Think about it. Russia has the highest alcoholism in the world. Alcohol loosens inhibitions. Societal mores that govern human conduct lose their power. The individual fails to suppress his most basic urges.” She slowed down. This was not Quantico.
“I’ve been reading up on profiling, now that we’re dealing with a psycho.” Tulley indicated a pile of newly purchased volumes chosen from the FBI recommended reading list, also compliments of the tobacco industry. “Seems like the more you find out, the more you know you don’t know, and you never will know. So you wonder what the point is. They’d never put a guy like me in charge of a big investigation, anyway.”
Having met Ma Tulley on the occasion of the Smoke’m presentation, and having endured her dissertation on the hazards of book learning, Jude could understand Tulley’s reservations. He had already amazed family and friends by overcoming the academic hurdles that stood between him and a sworn deputy’s badge. There was no reason why he couldn’t make it to detective. She suspected low self-esteem was what held him back.
“Anyone can fill their heads with facts and figures,” she said. “But you can’t learn gut instinct. The good news is, you were born with that.”
Tulley’s ears turned cranberry. Praise made him nervous. “Why’d you leave the FBI?” he blurted all of a sudden. In the twelve months they’d been working together, he had never asked that question directly.
“It’s a long story,” she said.
“Ain’t none of my business, right?”
“Right.”
“I heard some things, that’s all.”
“What things?”
“Just talk, same as always.”
“Talk, huh?” What was new? A female FBI agent from Washington D.C. is suddenly hired as a sheriff’s detective in Colorado and stationed far from the action in a newly formed remote substation with one deputy and a part-time secretary. The entire staff of the MCSO and the Cortez PD was mystified.
Every now and then, Tulley reported a new theory to her—she’d been sleeping with her FBI boss and had to go when the affair ended; she’d messed up a terrorist investigation so bad she’d resigned and the FBI had to cover it up; the job was too hard on females and she’d only graduated from the Academy because her daddy was “somebody.”
Jude let the gossip circulate unchallenged. Truth was stranger than fiction. For now, she was keeping the facts to herself.
Chapter Two
No one at the Montezuma County Sheriff’s Office or the Cortez PD enjoyed public humiliation. All too often when a big case landed in their laps, the media would sweep into town like a biblical plague and the accusations of incompetence would soon follow.
Who could forget the Fred Martinez murder? The Colorado public still thought the cops had dragged their feet making an arrest because the kid was gay and a Navajo. In fact, all they’d done was build a decent case without the resources available to big-city departments. They’d gotten a conviction, too. How come no one remembered
that?
These days, Sheriff Orwell Pratt made a point of sharing the burden and with it the blame if anything went sour. Which was why he hadn’t waited for Montrose to dump the Huntsberger case on his doorstep, with the accompanying bullshit about the resource burden of that goddamned film festival. Instead he’d offered to head up a three-county team as soon as the deceased was identified as a Montezuma girl. Since then, he’d held a press conference every morning. His strategy was simple: throw the TV people the same crap day after day and they’ll lose interest. So far it wasn’t working.
As Orwell glanced around the reporters gathering in the conference room, he was gripped by a fear that the case could become one of those that the public obsessed over. It bore the familiar hallmarks—a wholesome, pretty white girl, her unborn child, a respectable and outraged family, bizarre circumstances, the whiff of police incompetence. The media was always on the lookout for tabloid-type stories they could report over and over so they could avoid the real news, since that was a downer. That had to be why they were still camped out in Cortez, trying to turn this small tragedy into a big story. Orwell only prayed another bride would run away soon, or some cheerleader would vanish at a foreign resort, or there’d be a celebrity assassination at Telluride. Anything to take the heat off him.
This morning, the pathologist who’d performed Darlene Huntsberger’s autopsy was in town to reinspect the body dump site. She had agreed to say a few words to the media, a fact for which Orwell, and the entire law enforcement fraternity of Montezuma, was pathetically grateful.
Dr. Mercy Westmoreland was a regular guest on Court TV and commanded respect, even awe, from knucklehead reporters. Orwell thought her aloof bearing and serene oval face gave her a quiet dignity that announced her as the serious professional she was. The honey blond hair scraped into a no nonsense bun at her nape sent a signal that she had better things to do than check herself out in mirrors. This was a woman who spent most of her time up to her rubber-gloved elbows in human fluids. What she had to look at on a daily basis would make most grown men puke. The sheriff admired anyone with the cojones to do her job.
