The Harry Starke Series Books 4 -6: The Harry Starke Series Boxed Set 2 (The Harry Starke Novels - The Boxed Sets)

by Blair Howard

  I looked at my watch. “Thirty minutes at best. Can you hold everything for that long?”

  “You bet your ass I can. I will. See you in thirty. And… thanks, Harry.”

  Roberts Mill Road is a pig to drive fast, even in good weather. Still, I hauled the Maxima around one tight bend after another until finally I turned off onto Cooper and then onto Wicker and saw the flashing blue and red lights. I’d made it in twenty-nine minutes.

  Wicker Road was no more than a one-lane track that dead-ended at an iron gate, chained and padlocked, with notice proclaiming it to be a “Private Drive.” To what? I wondered. Beyond the gate the road became an unpaved, overgrown track that led into unadulterated forest.

  About a hundred yards from the turnoff for Cooper Drive, the road was cordoned off with yellow tape. Just beyond the tape lay an open area with room for two or three cars to park, which was occupied by a crime scene unit and two country cruisers. Doc Sheddon’s black SUV stood off the road in the grass with two more cruisers and a white Toyota SUV I knew belonged to Johnston. Kate must have been the last to arrive, because her Accord was parked closest to Cooper Drive. I parked behind it, then called Amanda. I told her what was happening, and that I doubted I’d make it back by eleven thirty. I also asked her to call my father and let him know we’d be there as soon as we could. Then I got out of the car and walked north on Wicker toward the lights.

  Kate was there, talking to Johnston, Hands, and two of his detectives. Oh hell, Heart and Sole.

  Heart? His name is Detective Anthony Hart. Sole? He looks like a damned fish, but his name is Alex McLeish. They’re two of Israel’s best, which isn’t saying much. We bump into each other once in a while and for the most part we get along, but friends we are not.

  The county Mounties I could tell were not pleased to see me. Me? I could not have cared less.

  “How you holding up, Wes?” I asked the chief. He wasn’t doing so well. I could see it immediately, when he just nodded and turned away.

  I turned to the others. “Kate, Hart, McLeish, Israel.”

  “Starke,” Hands said. He wasn’t pleased to see me. I could tell by the look on his face. I knew I had to do something, or the next words out of his mouth would be to try to kick me off the scene.

  “Israel, walk with me a little way, yeah? Indulge me.” I put my hand on his shoulder and steered him a few yards down the road, where we couldn’t be overheard, and then I turned to face him.

  “Now let me tell you how it’s gonna be,” I said quietly, my hand still on his shoulder.

  Hands was a most unlikely-looking sheriff: he was sixty-two, of average build, and balding; what little hair he had left was pure white. His long face, prominent cheekbones, and thick lips put me in mind of that ancient Egyptian pharaoh, Akhenaten. The white scar across the tip of his chin, the result of a collision during a high-speed chase, pulled at the corners of his mouth and imparted a permanent look of reproach. He’d been sheriff in Hamilton County for two terms and was up for reelection in November.

  “Chief Johnston,” I continued, “asked me to investigate his daughter’s disappearance, now death, and I intend to do just that. I don’t need your approval, Israel. I have a private investigator’s license that allows me to work anywhere in the state, which also means out here in the county. Now, if you have a problem with that, I can bring some pretty heavy pressure to bear, including the DA, two Federal judges, and the state’s commissioner of public safety. I’ll cooperate with you and your two… two…” I turned and looked at them, shook my head, and continued, “detectives as best I can, but I’m doing this my way. Capiche?”

  He took a half step backward, stuck his thumbs in his belt, and said, “I don’t like you, Starke. Never did. I know how much pull you have around here, but I don’t give a shit; you’re one arrogant son of a bitch. Now I’ll tell you how I see it. You go right ahead and investigate. So will my team. Out of respect for Chief Johnston, I’ll instruct them to cooperate with his department, but out here….” He waved his hand in a half circle. “This is my world, and I’m king, so I’ll be watching. You put one foot out of line and I’ll—”

  “You’ll nothing. You’re up for reelection next month. Need I say more?”

  “Screw you, Starke. One of these days you’ll go too far, and I’ll be waiting, you egotistical piece a’ shit.” With that he turned and walked to his cruiser, climbed in, backed all the way up the road onto Cooper, and then roared away in a cloud of dust.

  “What the hell did you say to him?” Kate asked when I rejoined the group, now less one.

  “I told him I’d cooperate with his team,” I said with a grim smile.

  “Oh, yeah. The hell you did.”

  “It’ll be fine, Kate. Don’t sweat the small stuff. That’s what they say, right? Now, Wes, where is she?”

  “This way.” He walked a few yards down the road, hands in his pockets, head down, and turned left into the trees and started down a steep slope into a gully just to the south of a small lake; we followed, me leading the group.

  We didn’t need to go far, not more than a couple dozen yards. The scene was cordoned off with yellow tape. Doc Sheddon, the Hamilton County medical examiner, was sitting on his big black case, still dressed head to toe in white Tyvek. He had his hands together, elbows resting on his knees, his chin resting on his knuckles. He looked up when he heard us coming, stood, and walked to where we waited outside the crime scene perimeter.

  “Hey, Harry. How’s it hanging?” He greeted me as usual, though he sounded bone weary. “Put on some covers and come take a look.”

  We helped ourselves to Tyvek coveralls from the box at the edge of the scene, all but the chief, who stood, hands in his pockets, staring off into the trees. He held the tape up, and we ducked under.

  “Stay in line and follow me,” Sheddon said, stepping out into the trees. “The techs still have a lot of ground to cover.”

  Doc Sheddon was a small man, overweight, almost totally bald, with a round face that usually sported a jovial expression. But not today. Eventually he stopped, stepped aside, and pointed. “There. She’s just there.”

  I took a few more steps forward, to get a better view, and immediately wished I hadn’t. Oh for Christ’s sake…. No.

  She—what was left of her—was lying facedown, legs spread slightly, arms by her sides. She was naked. She’d begun to decompose, but even I could tell she hadn’t been there for six days.

  “You know, Harry,” Sheddon said as he stood beside me, looking down at her. “Sometimes, like now, I wonder why I don’t just quit. I’ll never get used to it. I should, but I don’t. I see these kids as their parents never will, thank God…. Well, in this case, that’s not quite true. Wes has already seen her. It’s bad enough when the body is a stranger, but this…. I’ve known Emily since she was a baby, and it hurts, Harry. It does.”

  I listened to him, and I heard him, and I knew what he meant, but I couldn’t take it in. It was too horrible. I looked down at her and saw the little girl who’d played around my desk, the little girl who’d told me she would marry me when she grew up, and the tears came. I couldn’t help it. I felt Kate’s hand on my arm, pulling me away. I shrugged it off angrily, shook my head, wiped my eyes on the sleeve of my covers.

  I knelt down beside her and stroked her hair. It was… just a gesture. I couldn’t feel much through the latex, but….

  “I’ll find them, Emily,” I whispered. I felt rather than heard Sheddon turn toward me. “I swear it, and when I do….” And then I stood, turned away, and walked back up the slope to the taped perimeter, anger and grief eating at my gut.

  “I’ll get them, Wes,” I said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “I promise, and then you and me….”

  He nodded, his eyes watering. “I’m counting on it.” He turned and walked off through the trees, slowly, head down, hands in his pocket. He’d aged ten years in less than ten minutes.

  I watched him go, and waited for Doc, Kate, and th
e two county detectives to join me. Together we stripped off our covers and bagged and labeled them for processing. That done, I turned to Sheddon.

  “Who found her?”

  He jerked his in the direction of the road. “Over there. The woman with the dog. She said the dog stopped, wouldn’t move. It was staring down into the gully. She spotted something white and climbed down to take a look. Saw what it was and called 911.”

  “What time was that?”

  “I got the call about quarter to nine and came right on up. Hands and his crew were already here and had the scene taped off.”

  “Any idea how long she’s been here?”

  “Well, there’s dew on the grass, but the ground under the body is dry, so last night sometime. She must have lain like that, face down, somewhere else for… I dunno precisely, but lividity is complete, so thirty-six, maybe even forty-eight hours. Then she was dumped here. Strange, though, because whoever brought her here laid her out the same way, facedown. Weird.”

  “Not if she was stiff.”

  “Rigor, you mean? Yes, that would account for it.”

  “Any ideas on cause of death?”

  “Come on, Harry. You know better than that. You saw what I saw.”

  “When, Doc?” I asked.

  “The autopsy? Tomorrow morning, early. You’ll be there, of course.”

  “Oh yeah. I’ll be there. So will Kate.” I hadn’t bothered to ask her; I just assumed she would be. “How about you guys?”

  Hart looked quizzically at McLeish, who shook his head. “Me neither,” Hart said. “We’ll get the report from Doc, and then we’ll talk, all right?”

  “Yeah, we’ll talk,” I said. The hell we will.

  “You’ll need to get a recovery vehicle up to the school,” I told Hart. “Her car will have to be processed. Can you do that today?” I wrote the make, model, color, and tag number on the back of one of my cards and handed it to him. He looked at it, hesitated, seemed about to say something, but eventually nodded and stuck the card in the breast pocket of his jacket.

  “Today, Tony. It needs to be done today.”

  “I heard ya the first time, Harry. I’ll see to it, okay?”

  “I’ll check in with you later.”

  He walked away without answering.

  “Any thoughts on time of death?” I asked Sheddon.

  “Two, maybe three days at most, as I said. Putrification is still in the early stages. I’ll know better when… well, you know the procedure. Look, I’ve had enough for today. This is a tough one. I’ve told them to remove her. I’m going home, but I’ll go with her to the lab before I do, see her settled in, so to speak. It’s the least I can do for her. Tomorrow, Harry, Kate. Nine o’clock. Don’t be late. If you are, I’ll start without you.” And then he left. Hart and McLeish followed him.

  “Two to three days. What the hell is that?” I asked Kate. “She’s been missing for almost a week. Where the hell has she been?”

  She shook her head. “It makes no sense. Why would they keep her, and where? You kill someone, you get rid of the body, fast. You don’t keep it around. Unless….”

  I knew what she was thinking, and I didn’t like it. Necrophilia is a bitch.

  “We’ll know tomorrow, I guess. Not much we can do here. Let the techs have at it. Maybe they’ll find something. In the meantime, let’s go talk to the lady who found her. You want to talk to her, Kate?”

  She was maybe thirty years old, the outdoorsy type, a big woman, maybe 200 pounds, full-figured: she was wearing a white sleeveless crop top and cut-off jeans. Her face was already showing the effects of too much time in the sun. The dog, a small terrier, sat patiently at her feet.

  “Hello, Mrs….”

  “It’s miss. Kimberly, Kim, Watson. I live just over there.” She pointed toward Cooper Drive. We both looked around. I could see the roof of a small two-story house through the trees. “This is Merry, and you are?”

  “Lieutenant Catherine Gazzara, Chattanooga PD. And this is my associate, Harry Starke. I have a few questions, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  Watson nodded. “Of course.”

  Kate opened her notepad. “You found the body, correct?”

  Watson nodded again. Her face was pale beneath the tan.

  “And what time was that, can you remember?”

  “I’m not really sure. It must have been a little before eight, I think. I usually take Merry out around seven thirty in the mornings, so that I can get back in time to go to work. It’s the same every day, even on weekends. Habit, I suppose. I walk her the same route again after dinner.”

  “So you were out here last night, then. About what time would that have been?”

  “Well it was still light when I left home so, maybe seven, a quarter after. I like to get back by eight so I can watch the English comedy shows on TV.”

  “Did you see anything? People, parked cars, anything like that? Especially in the parking area.”

  “No, nothing like that. Just a couple of students from the college on bikes. They often go down to the lake to, well, you know. Can’t think why, though. The place is a mosquito trap.”

  “This is a pretty remote spot. No traffic at all, right?”

  “No. No through traffic. The track dead ends at that iron gate, and there’s no room to make a turn. The road is way too narrow. We get hikers, but not many, and I saw only the two girls on their bikes last night.”

  “Okay, so this morning you’re walking the dog, and you’re on your way back home. Tell me what happened, how you discovered the body.”

  All through the conversation I was watching the woman’s face, looking for the slightest hint that she might be lying, or at least not telling us everything. She seemed a little nervous, but that was about all, and that was to be expected considering her recent experience. No, she was telling it like was. I was sure of it.

  “Well, we were walking slowly. Merry, just like she always does, was sniffing at every blade of grass and rock—we do get other dogs down here, you know—and suddenly she just stopped. She tilted her head up and was sniffing and sniffing the air. I pulled her leash, but she wouldn’t move. She just stood there, her legs spread, looking away into the trees, and then she leaped forward. You can see she’s not a big dog, but she’s very strong and she dragged me off the road and down into the gully, and that’s when—when—I saw it. I called 911 right away, and they told me to stay here and wait until the police could get here, and… well, that’s what I did.”

  “Kim. This is important. How close to the body did you go, and did you touch anything?”

  “Oh no. Absolutely not. Nothing! Neither did Merry, because I picked her up and came back here. No, no, I didn’t touch anything. I was about six feet from her. I could tell she was dead. I’ve never seen anything like it before, but you can tell just by looking, can’t you?”

  We both nodded. She was right. You can tell. There’s nothing else that looks like a body two days dead. Unfortunately, the poor woman would remember it for the rest of her days.

  “Okay,” I said, nodding. “Let’s go back to last night.”

  “What about it?”

  “Well, there are no other houses on Wicker that I can see, not down there beyond the lake, and there are no lights, so it must get very dark. Your house is way back there. Would you have seen lights, vehicle lights?”

  “Well there is one more house, back in the trees, but I don’t think anyone’s been living there for a while. I didn’t see any car lights last night, but… well, Merry did get a bit excited, barked for a few minutes. She jumped up on the back of the couch and almost pulled down the drapes. Do you think…?”

  “What time was that, Kim?” I asked.

  “Ten. Maybe a little after. I didn’t take any notice. She gets that way about anything: stray cats, foxes, coyotes. I didn’t look at the time, but only because Call the Midwife had just come on.”

  I nodded. Kate made notes.

  “I need your full name, add
ress, and phone number please, Kim.” She noted it down, smiled and said, “Thank you. I know it’s been rough, but… well, that’s it for now.” Kate closed her iPad. “I’m sure we’ll need to talk to you again. If you remember anything that might help, or if you just need to talk, please give me a call. This has my cell number, so you can reach me anytime.”

  Kim took Kate’s card, smiled at her, and walked away, talking quietly to her dog. There was no telling what was going on inside her head, but I knew it wasn’t good.

  “Ideas?” I asked Kate as we watched her go.

  “Yeah, one. Whoever dumped her was familiar with the area, knew these woods. This is not the sort of place for a random drop off.”

  “I agree. That parking area is the only place on this track where a vehicle could park and not be seen, so whoever it was knew what they were doing. Except… she said there’s another house down there, right? If there is, the driveway is probably overgrown. Let’s go take a look at it.”

  The driveway was indeed overgrown. The vegetation was dense, and there was no sign that it had been accessed anytime in the last several weeks.

  “We need to get the techs to check it out,” Kate said. “You never know.”

  I nodded, looked at my watch. It was already eleven. “There’s nothing more we can do today, not with the techs still working. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, I’ll have word with them before I go. See you tomorrow.”

  -----

  I usually enjoy my Sunday afternoons, but not this one. I drove down the mountain a whole lot slower than I’d come up it. I picked Amanda up at her apartment, and from there we went to the country club to join my father and Rose for lunch and a couple of drinks the way we always did. It was usually a relaxing way to finish out the week. We arrived more than an hour late, and the place was bustling. Lunch was already well under way, and my father was getting antsy. You wouldn’t think it, with the kind of life he leads, but my father is a man dedicated to his routines; it took two large Bombay Sapphire gins and an extended explanation of why I was late to turn him back into his usual affable self.