“Thanks,” I said.
“For what?”
“Understanding.”
He paused. “Just outta curiosity, what changed your mind?”
I glanced at the rearview mirror. The golden leaves blew across the road.
“I realized it matters,” I said. “It matters to this one.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
When I pulled into the parking lot for the Icicle River trail, the sky was that tender baby pink, as if this day was born with its own life, full of promises.
Beside the trailhead, a dark blue van waited. The driver’s side door opened before I’d even cut The Ghost’s engine. A tall man got out. He had a white beard and walked across the gravel to stand beside my car.
“Raleigh Harmon?” he asked.
I nodded. His cheekbones protruded above the white beard like a man resigned to starving, suffering.
“I am Johann Engels. My daughter …”
His daughter. Annicka Engels.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said. “Thank you for meeting me here.”
He nodded and for one brief moment his haggard face looked almost relieved. Like this tragedy might change, even a little bit. I knew that feeling. It’d been seven years since my dad died and I still unconsciously held out for some kind of hope. Some other signs were recognizable. His eyes jumped, connected to a mind that probably couldn’t complete its thoughts. Curved posture, weighted with grief, bent forward like a wilting plant.
I handed him one of the cards that Peter had made when I tentatively accepted this position. Johann Engels read the information carefully while I opened The Ghost’s back end and took out my rock kit. I checked the contents, having thrown things inside this morning at 2:30 a.m., right after waking from the dream about my dad and the dying fish. I hoisted the pack to my shoulders, and considered which questions to ask first.
But Johann Engels was already walking down the trail beside the river.
It matters to this one.
I yanked the zipper on my fleece pullover and jogged after him. It seemed impossible that I’d run this same trail with Jack yesterday. The river was still white and gray with silt, but now dew dripped on my shoulders, falling from the red birch leaves.
Johann was moving fast. I picked up my pace. He wasn’t slowing, even after the first quarter mile of brush and loose rocks. After a half mile, I pulled up close behind him. “Mind if I ask you some questions?”
“Everything.” He didn’t slow down, didn’t turn around. He was a locomotive of agony. “Ask. Everything. Who—why—why my girl.”
The fractured sentences were another sign. He wasn’t sleeping. After my dad’s murder, my best night’s sleep was two hours, tops.
“I heard she went running.”
“Runner, a good runner.”
“Was this a regular route for her, this trail?”
His head sunk so low between his rounded shoulders that his nod was almost undetectable.
“And the dog, did it always go with her, or just this time?”
He had reached the rocks below the cave and turned to face me. The cave exhaled its foul odor, ruining the pink morning air.
“Day before her birthday,” he said.
I stared at his features. The man was in so much obvious pain, yet also numb. Not feeling the effects of this hurried walk, ignorant of the cold autumn air. He wasn’t feeling anything, really.
“How old?” I asked.
“Eighteen. Would’ve been.”
He turned and climbed the boulders like a goat.
I scrabbled up the rocks behind him, my heavy pack bouncing against my spine. I was eye level with his hiking boots. The soles been repaired—badly. Thick glue leaked from between the rubber and leather, like muddy tree sap. We bypassed the cave and turned, east, toward the rising sun. I considered my next question. Ten years in the Bureau had taught me many things, but among the saddest was that families were capable of doing the worst things to the people they supposedly loved. As much as I hated trick questions, I also didn’t know this man. Or the dynamics of the Engels family.
“When did you realize she was dead?”
He stopped. He turned to face me, one hiking boot dug into the steep hillside to anchor his position. Behind him, Ponderosa pines stretched out their drought-stricken limbs, looking like arms raised in some plea for rain.
“Gone with the archangel,” he said.
“Pardon?”
“Feast of St. Michael.”
I squinted into the rising sun. “Do you have a date?”
“Twenty-ninth. Sunday.”
“Twenty-ninth of September,” I clarified.
“Home. From Church.”
In the growing light, I could better see his weary blue eyes. The color was jewel-toned. He seemed to gaze at something—or nothing—under the pine trees.
“I drove,” he said. “From church. Busy. Hotel. We have a hotel. But holidays, church, we go. I saw her dog. By the door. Leash chewed.” His gaze shifted to me. His eyes were an ocean of blue misery. “Children?”
“Me?” I shook my head.
“You will know things. Parenting. You can’t always explain. I never liked it.” The skin quivered over his cheekbones. “That leash …”
He didn’t go on.
“You saw the dog, and its leash was chewed off,” I kept clarifying. “And that told you something was wrong?”
“You can’t understand. No children.”
“I might.”
“My wife, talking. On and on. Careless Annika. Leaving Kaffee outside. How could she?” He wiped a long hand over the white beard. “Kaffee is her dog.”
I nodded, encouraging him to keep going.
“All the way to the door, my wife complained. The dog. Dying of thirst. Hot weather. No rain.” He took a deep breath and the next words burst in a dry sob. “I knew, I knew.”
He started hiking again.
I lunged up the mountain, trying to put his words in order while also keeping up with him. Sweat rolled down my back. Suspicions pricked my brain. Either this man was totally innocent, or he was among the top-tier of liars. Still possible.
“You notified the police?” I asked.
“Right. Away.” His voice sounded different. “Too soon. They said.”
Bitterness, that’s what I heard. And yet, unless there were signs of foul play, nobody was officially missing—particularly a teenager—until twenty-four hours had passed. And one chewed-off dog leash didn’t necessarily qualify as foul play. I stared at his back.
We hiked the narrow trail. Once more I kept my right hand in touch with the granite wall and tried not to look down. According to Peter, this family had asked us to work the case. It was rare for the guilty to hire specialists, and Peter’s services weren’t cheap. But as we cut across the gray batholiths—molten granite cooled in place eons ago—I noticed Johann didn’t hesitate. He’d been here.
When—that Sunday of St. Michael the archangel?
I listened to the falling loess, all those dry grains skittering down the mountainside.
“After she was declared missing, what was the police response?”
“Too late. Futile. No answers.”
More bitterness.
The mountain opened its stony fist. I saw the tall grass where Madame had stood barking. Yellow crime ribbon circled the perimeter and the grass was trampled by the many people collecting her body and the evidence. But to the far right, there was now an army-green sleeping bag on the ground.
I slid the backpack off my shoulders. Nausea washed up my throat. I blamed drinking coffee on an empty stomach. But I knew the real cause. Her hand. I kept thinking about her hand. Was she buried alive, clawing her way out? Waving for help?
“What can I do?” her father said.
I wanted him to leave. But he’d already camped beside her open grave.
“Stand here, don’t move. I’m going to collect some samples. But I have more questions for you.”
I unzipped the pack. “When you saw the dog and the chewed-off leash, what time was it?”
“12:22.”
I looked at him. “You’re sure, exactly?”
“Checkout is 12:30.”
“Checkout?”
“Hotel. We run a hotel.”
“Right.” He told me that. They didn’t make it to church regularly because they ran a hotel. They went to church for holy days, like the Feast of St. Michael.
“Did you look at a clock?”
He tapped his wristwatch. The crystal was so scratched it looked fogged. He said it was his habit to check the time all morning long, to gauge how close they were to checkout.
“Okay,” I said. “12:22 you saw the dog.”
“Thirteen days, eighteen hours …” He looked at the clear morning sky. “…and twenty-four minutes ago.”
I removed the supplies from my pack. Soil collection bags, Nikon camera, GPS. Rock hammer, ruler, notebook. Garden spade. Not exactly high-tech equipment. And Johann Engels seemed to notice. He frowned, yet said nothing. I crossed under the police ribbon, and was tempted to explain it to him. Forensic geology sometimes used very simple procedures in the field. But since nobody had come up with a solid suspect in thirteen days, eighteen hours, and twenty-four minutes, my telling him that wasn’t going to make him feel better. Right now, it seemed highly possible that Annicka Engel’s murder was a random killing. An impulse murder. Killed, hurriedly buried. The kind of horrendous death that leaves behind traces of evidence, but most of it depended on the killer making mistakes, or already having his DNA in the criminal records system.
But I reminded myself that part wasn’t going to be my issue.
Collect evidence. Send it to Peter. Do what you can. And be done.
I laid on my stomach at the edge of her grave. Annicka Engels was buried in a shallow depression, probably due to geology. I lowered the ruler into the hole. The first seventeen inches of soil was mostly loess. Light enough that someone of average strength with a standard shovel could dig right through it. Beneath that, the stubborn granite stopped them. Only a jackhammer or dynamite would—
“You found her.”
I looked up.
Johann Engels stared at the ruler.
I lifted it from the grave and wrote the dimensions in my notebook. I wanted to clarify the facts—my dog found her—but that sounded so wrong. Like his daughter was nothing but discarded bones. I took a deep breath. It tasted of the soil. Did anyone tell him about her hand? Peter’s problem.
“Someone told you I found her?”
“Sheriff.”
A cold sensation climbed up my spine. “What else did they tell you?”
“The dog. Ran away. From you.”
His tone sounded afraid, yet still indignant. I gazed into the grave. The rising sun was casting my shadow into the opening. If not for Madame, his daughter might’ve stayed buried here for seasons. Years. Long enough for rain and snow to wash away every bit of evidence.
I laid on my stomach again and took several dozen photographs, zooming in on the grave’s walls. The camera highlighted the stratigraphy—the alternating bands of pale and dark soil—that looked like Mother Nature’s barcode. The dark bands, I presumed, were deposited by forces capable of carrying heavier material—snow and ice picking up metals and denser grains. The golden bands probably came from gentle rains of spring and summer winds. Altogether I counted eighteen layers of deposition—roughly, nine years—with two seasons when the pale soils left behind extremely narrow bands. Droughts, I suspected. Like the current drought. I set down the camera and closed my eyes. The barcode played on my eyelids.
“What’s wrong?” Johann asked.
“Nothing.”
Just like that leash told Johann something bad happened to his daughter, crime scenes had their own atmospheric delivery system. Things beyond the facts. Above the details. Things sensed, absorbed, perceived. I kept my eyes closed until the bar code disappeared and my mind could see this grave for the first time.
Now the banded soil layers looked ragged. Like rough-cut pages in a vintage book. I squinted. The layers bled into taupe wall, a flat, two-dimensional background.
With one dark vertical line.
I shifted my gaze and squinted again. The vertical line cut into another section of soil. And another. Like a string bookmark laid across the ragged edge of the pages. I picked up the ruler and measured the horizontal distance between the vertical marks. It was almost evenly made at ten inches. I wrote that in my notebook, and took a photo.
“Was your daughter tall?” I asked.
“You.”
I looked up. “Five-eight?”
He nodded.
The grave was just under five feet in length. So either her legs were folded, or broken. Were they broken before she was buried, to keep her from getting away, or after, so her body fit this hasty grave? Another wave of nausea swam up. I refocused on that vertical line. I was fairly certain the mark was made by a tool, something that scraped down the soil. At the grave’s northern end, the line was smudged. Probably where the police had removed her body, dragging it over the soil.
“Something?” Johann asked.
I laid the ruler between the gouges and took more photographs. The gouge could’ve come from the tool itself, a defect of some kind. Or a pebble that got lodged inside the tool. I prayed it was the tool itself. A pebble could disappear, never to be found. Never to be connected with this gruesome burial.
“We know.” He stepped back, standing beside the sleeping bag. “Her boyfriend. Did this.”
I kneeled at my pack and opened the collection bags. “Who is ‘we’?”
“My family.”
“The police claimed there are no suspects.”
“They don’t believe.”
Using the sterile garden spade, I took eight soil samples and placed each inside separate Ziploc baggies. I marked their location with a Sharpie and tried not to think about the expensive and amazing cotton mesh bags I used to have, courtesy of the federal government. Now, it was Ziploc.
I opened my notebook, bracing myself for these even more uncomfortable questions.
“Tell me what she was wearing.”
In a flat voice, he described her purple-and-gold shorts, her purple running shoes, and a purple T-shirt with a Husky dog’s face on it—the mascot for the University of Washington. “Scholarship,” he said. “Paid everything.”
I remembered Officer Wilcove saying she had a full athletic ride to UW. “She came home for the weekend?”
“Michaelmas.”
“Michael . . .?”
The family was Catholic, he explained, and celebrated all the German Catholic holidays. Michaelmas, the feast of St. Michael. It was why he and his wife went to church that morning instead of working at their hotel, and why Annicka came home from college, to celebrate with them.
“But she didn’t go to church that morning?” I clarified.
He reached down, tapping his shin bone. “Fracture.”
“Stress fracture?”
He nodded.
That cold sensation climbed my back again. “She went running with a stress fracture?”
He shrugged.
Something wasn’t adding up. Stress fractures were usually caused by too much running. When I got them, even walking hurt, never mind running. The remedy was rest. “Why would she run here if her legs hurt?”
“Sabbath.” He gave another sobbing burst of breath. “This trail. Every Sunday. Even just to walk.”
“But the stress fracture must’ve affected her college running.”
He blinked into the sun. It had crested over the mountains, turning silver granite to gold crowns. “She didn’t like it.”
“What?”
“College. Seattle. Big city.”
I was writing everything down in my notes, but glanced over them a second and third time. Annicka Engels got a full ride to a Pac-10 school
, but she didn’t like the place. She had stress fractures, but hiked this mountain. Maybe she didn’t like the team, or college competition. Maybe she didn’t have stress fractures but was only looking for an excuse to drop out of practices, come home on the weekends, but keep her scholarship funding. I glanced down the trail. Waking down this mountain with stress fractures would’ve felt like hot knives stabbing into the bone.
Asking these kinds of questions was only going to wound this man further. Especially as we stood here by her grave, the depression like an open hand, waiting for someone to drop answers into it.
I packed up my gear. Johann followed me down the mountain, leaving his sleeping bag behind. We moved in silence. I could hear the river, that white-noise wash like steady wind. When we reached the parking lot, I shook his hand. It felt as rough as a rusted spade. But his eyes held tender questions.
“Peter Rosser will be in touch,” I said. “Soon,” I added. “He’ll be in touch soon.”
That dry sob came back.
“God bless you,” he said.
CHAPTER NINE
From the trailhead I drove into the town of Leavenworth. The road was choked with traffic, and it wasn’t even nine o’clock. Oktoberfest traffic—deluxe motor coaches from Seattle, flocks of touring motorcycles, RVs from God knows where. I took the first available parking spot and followed the scent of warm bread down the crowded sidewalk. It led me to Kris Kringle’s Kreme Kastle.
Aka, a bakery.
Although its Kansas namesake was known for its prison, Leavenworth, Washington was renowned for tourism. The area was settled by German farmers in the early 1800s. But their local fortunes plunged when the trains stopped running through here. By the 1970s recession, it looked like the bitter end for these people. But the town fathers—German descendants, all—got the crazy idea to make the town into a perfect replica of Bavaria. The town’s surrounding mountains resembled the European Alps, and many of the small downtown businesses already looked like chalets. Soon plaster-and-lathe architecture stood on every block, and yodelers performed on every corner. These days, more than a million tourists came through town annually, eager to see “little Bavaria.” And Octoberfest was almost on a par with Christmas.
The Waves Break Gray (The Raleigh Harmon mysteries Book 6) Page 4
