The Girl Buried in the Woods

by Robert Ellis

  “Not very exciting, is it?”

  Matt turned. The comment had come from Sonny Daniels, who had walked over to the windows as well.

  “What do you guys do here?” Matt said.

  Daniels smiled. “Like the sign says, we’re all about waste management. The kind no one wants in their backyard. It comes in by rail. Our people inspect the integrity of the drums, the quality of the welding, and assign each drum an identification number. Then they’re loaded onto a smaller truck like that one and driven to a storage facility outside of Palmdale.”

  “Why the smaller truck?” Cabrera said. “Why not a big rig?”

  Ryan Moore, who had remained silent until now, stepped in beside Cabrera. “The storage facility is an abandoned gold mine that’s been capped, sealed, and inspected by the EPA. You can drive cars through those tunnels. But that truck’s as big as we can go. It’s not that bad really. Each truck has a thirty-drum capacity. Fifteen trips back and forth and we’re good.”

  “The way it smells,” Cabrera went on, “I wouldn’t want it in my backyard either.”

  Moore nodded. “Even if one of the drums failed, the mine has been completely modernized and the cap is five feet thick. There’s no way that it would ever have an impact on the environment.”

  “We’re up,” Grubb said. “This is video from three days ago.”

  Everybody stepped away from the windows. Matt moved in beside Grubb for a closer look. DMG Waste Management had ten camera positions. Of the ten, five cameras covered the interior of the facility, and the remaining five were housed outside. All ten shots were up, and all ten were synchronized with their time code running at the bottom of the screen.

  “This is two in the afternoon,” Grubb said. “I’ll speed it up by ten. If you see anything that stands out, we can go back over it in real time.”

  Matt traded looks with Cabrera and sighed under his breath. Like Daniels and Moore, Lane Grubb was trying to be helpful. But as Matt studied each camera, its position and angle, he knew that it was hopeless. The reach of the five cameras mounted on the perimeter wall covered the street on both sides of the factory but focused on the gate and property. Though the base of the steep hill filled the background in two shots, it looked like it was ten miles away and completely out of focus. And when day turned to night, the view across the street went completely black.

  Grubb must have noticed Matt’s disappointment.

  “What?” he said. “No good?”

  NINE

  And then there was nothing . . .

  Matt was beginning to get nervous, like just maybe they’d have to wait for another murder, another death of an innocent young woman, with the hope that the killer might make a mistake and leave something behind.

  Before that happened, before someone else died, he wanted to interview Sophia’s boyfriend. It may have been a long shot—the killing so brutal. Still, he wanted to meet the kid and hear what he had to say, just to make sure.

  Matt felt the rain on his face as he walked over to Cabrera’s SUV and watched him climb in.

  “You got the address?” Matt said.

  Cabrera nodded, rolling down his window. “What’s his name again?”

  “Trey Washington.”

  “I’ll see you there.”

  Matt stepped over to his car and got behind the wheel. Lighting up the engine, he rummaged through his glove box until he found a sheet of nicotine gum. There were eight pieces, wrapped in foil and plastic and glistening in the lights from the dash. A moment passed, and then another, before he sucked it up and tossed the pack of gum back into the glove box.

  Not this time. Not now. Or was it really just not yet?

  He switched on the wipers, pulled around the trees, and glided down the hill behind Cabrera. Within a few minutes, they made the turn onto Casanova Street and were cruising up the block. As they passed the Ramirezes’ home, Matt noticed that the lights were out and tried not to think about what was going on inside. The anguish and despair of an unimaginable loss. How did the girl’s father put it?

  She was so happy. So loving. So smart.

  The rain had started to pick up. Matt could see the billowing white clouds in the black sky, the sound of thunder moving closer. When Cabrera parked across the street from the kid’s home, he pulled in behind him and eyed the house carefully. He noted the lighted front window but didn’t see a car on the street or in the short driveway. Matt pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, speed-dialed his partner’s number, and heard Cabrera’s phone click.

  “What do you think?” Matt said.

  “Doesn’t look like anybody’s home.”

  “Let’s give it a try just in case.”

  A bolt of lightning snapped across the sky, the entire neighborhood bright like a battlefield under heavy fire. Matt counted a single beat before he heard the thunder cracking and knew from experience that the storm had reached them and was now directly overhead. He could feel his car shuddering from the sound, followed by a strong blast of wind. Shutting down the engine, he climbed out and jogged across the street with Cabrera behind him. He could see a set of steps ahead and took them two at a time until he was standing beneath a modest porch. Moving over to the front door, he gave it a hard knock and gazed through the window above the dead bolt.

  A moment passed, and then another with no response.

  Cabrera crossed the porch and peered around the corner. “The driveway’s empty,” he said. “And I don’t see anything behind the house. Nobody’s here, Matt. No one’s home.”

  Matt knocked on the door again, still looking through the window. The footprint of the house seemed remarkably similar to the Ramirezes’ home. The front door opened into a small living room. The kitchen would be to the left with the bedrooms in back. Matt eyed the modest furnishings. The TV was switched off. With the exception of a single lamp on the table by the door, the house was dark.

  He thought it over, trying to keep an open mind.

  Was Trey Washington hard to reach? Or was he trying to avoid them? Matt wasn’t sure anymore but acknowledged his growing frustration and dropped the idea.

  “Let’s get back to the station,” he said. “I’ll pick up some takeout on the way in. Chinese okay with you?”

  Cabrera broke a smile. “The Red Dragon?”

  Matt nodded. The Red Dragon was in Chinatown on Bamboo Lane and only a five-minute drive from where they were standing. Both Matt and Cabrera liked the food and were friends with Zhang Wei, who managed the restaurant for a pair of owners who lived in Beverly Hills and had bought the place for twice what it was worth from Wei’s grandfather.

  “I’ll call it in,” Cabrera said.

  “And I’ll get Benson back on the phone and see what he can send us.”

  Matt pulled out a business card, wrote the words Call me—it’s important below his name, and jammed it into the door. Then he ran across the street with his partner, flinching when another bolt of lightning exploded over their heads. Matt climbed into his car, made a U-turn, and sped off. Within fifteen minutes he’d spoken to Benson at Missing Persons and was walking out of the Red Dragon with their order and two extra-large cups of freshly brewed piping-hot coffee. That first sip of hot java was more than comforting and, after a day like this one, better than a shot of bourbon. Matt settled into the driver’s seat. That nervous feeling was back, and he tried to ignore it as best he could. On any other night the fourteen-mile drive from downtown LA to Hollywood would have used up the better part of an hour. But tonight the storm must have scared people off because he managed the ride in less than half an hour. Two minutes after exiting the freeway he pulled into the lot behind the station and killed the engine.

  The rain had become torrential, the sound of water beating against the roof of the car almost deafening. Matt slung his laptop case over his shoulder, grabbed the bags of food, and ran across the lot. Flinging the rear door open, he hurried past the holding cells, stepped onto the empty bureau floor, and found Cabrera in th
e conference room with his computer already powered up.

  “Benson sent over the files,” Cabrera said. “It might be worse than we thought.”

  Matt set the food down on the table, then grabbed a seat and rolled it next to his partner. Cabrera pointed to the screen as he reached inside a bag for the second cup of coffee. Popping the lid, he sipped through the steam and gave Matt a long look.

  “Take a deep breath,” he said. “The list of missing teenage girls over the past six months is well over a hundred, Matt. But look what happens when Benson narrows the search by type, age, and location. He’s using the Police Academy and Dodger Stadium as his center point, then extending the reach by five miles in every direction.”

  Matt studied the screen carefully. There were five girls between the ages of fifteen and eighteen who had gone missing over the last six months. Aside from Sophia Ramirez, there were two Latino girls, a black, a white, and an Asian. Although race didn’t appear to be in play, each girl was identical in every other way. They all looked young and innocent for their age. When Matt skimmed through Benson’s notes, he learned that in every case they came from a loving family. In each case the missing child was popular in school, didn’t use alcohol or drugs, and had no obvious reason to run away.

  Cabrera added another packet of sugar to his coffee. “There’s a rumor Mexican drug gangs are kidnapping teens out of LA and smuggling them across the border.”

  “Maybe so,” Matt said. “But our girl wasn’t kidnapped. She was raped and killed two blocks from her home.”

  Matt opened the boxes of Chinese food, made a small plate, and ate quickly. Over the next five hours he and Cabrera put together a murder book, wrote and completed their preliminary reports, and got started on an electronic version of the Chronological Record that they could access and amend from their laptops. Hard copies were printed and added to the murder book, along with color photographs of the five girls who remained missing. Matt printed a second copy of the photos, taping them side by side to the glass window between the conference room and the bureau floor. Below each photo he added a three-by-five card with their names, ages, and the dates each girl went missing.

  It was nearly midnight when he and Cabrera finally sat down at the conference table and gazed at the five photos. They were in trouble, that much was clear. Big trouble. And that nervous feeling in Matt’s gut had come back with a vengeance.

  He turned to his partner, who still appeared mesmerized by the photographs. “You see the problem, right?”

  Cabrera took a moment to think it over. “If you’re saying there’s a pattern, I don’t see it. It’s not as if these kids went missing a month apart. Our guy isn’t howling at a full moon.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about,” Matt said.

  “Okay. What are you talking about?”

  “Every one of them went missing, right? Never to be heard from again.”

  Cabrera nodded, his voice breaking. “Somehow we have to find them, Matt.”

  “And that’s the problem. The guy we’re looking for takes them, uses them, but doesn’t throw them out when he’s done.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Matt got out of the chair, grabbed the bags filled with what was left of the Chinese food, and tossed them in the trash.

  “He doesn’t throw them out when he’s finished, Denny. He doesn’t leave them by the side of a road or dump their bodies in an alley. They’re never seen or heard from again, right?”

  Cabrera nodded, glancing at the photos, then turning back. “This isn’t like most cases,” he said. “Other than the semen and what forensics might find on the body, there’s no trail of evidence for us to follow. No sightings, like you said, not much of anything. Is that what you mean?”

  Matt sat on the table beside his partner. “There’s nothing to see because the victims have been put in a place where no one can find them. You see what I mean? He buries them, Denny. He puts them in the ground.”

  TEN

  The idea that a killer could have been working the city completely undetected for months or even years because he buried his victims was more than grim.

  Matt unlocked his front door and switched on the lights.

  As he lowered his laptop onto the kitchen table and cracked open a beer, he felt his cell phone let out a single pulse. After swiping the glass face with his thumb, he read a text message that had been sent to both he and Cabrera from Ed Gainer, the investigator from the coroner’s office. Sophia Ramirez had been moved to the top of the list. Her autopsy was confirmed for 7:00 a.m. tomorrow morning. Art Madina, the best medical examiner in the county, had been assigned the case.

  Matt knew that moving Sophia to the top of the list hadn’t been easy. He also knew that Gainer and Madina pulled strings when they thought a case stood out. He thought about the way Gainer had placed the girl in the body bag. The care he’d taken. The expression on his face.

  Matt took another swig of beer and walked back into the living room. Switching off the lights, he opened the slider and sat down on the couch in the darkness. The view from his living room matched the view from the deck, and he could see everything across the basin from Venice Beach to the tall buildings downtown. The storm had lessened some. He found the sound of the steady rain soothing and watched with fascination as stray bolts of lightning opened up the sky over the city every few minutes or so.

  Calculating that he’d been up for almost twenty-four hours, Matt slipped out of his shoes and put his feet up on the coffee table. That odd feeling in his gut was back. He had always been able to trust his instincts. And he wondered why this nervous feeling seemed to be cutting in and out on him all day. He also wondered why he hadn’t felt any pain from the four gunshot wounds still healing in his chest and left shoulder. It all seemed to begin when he’d laid eyes on Sophia’s hair strewn through the soil under those pine trees.

  Was it the shock of seeing someone buried in a shallow grave? Was it the depravity of the crime?

  Or was it the big thing?

  That thing in his life—that thought, that fear—still following him everywhere he went. Still haunting him. Still chasing him through the day and catching up with him every night.

  A single question.

  Was his uncle, Dr. George Baylor, involved in the murder of Sophia Ramirez or not?

  At first glance, it didn’t seem to fit. But only at first glance.

  His uncle was clearly insane and had murdered scores of innocent people—innocent young women just like Sophia Ramirez. Celebrated for his skills as a plastic surgeon, the doctor-turned-serial-killer was more than capable of changing his motive, or the way he wanted things to look, in order to cover his tracks and satisfy his demented thirst for blood.

  Matt finished off the bottle and settled into the couch. He watched the Library Tower, the tallest building in LA that had since been renamed by a bank, take a direct hit from a bolt of lightning. The electrical charge struck the very top of the building and seemed to last for ten or fifteen seconds before it fizzed through the air and died out.

  A moment passed as the living room went dark again.

  Matt realized that he could see it in Cabrera’s eyes today. In every criminalist from the lab who worked the crime scene. From Gainer to Speeks to even the two first responders, Marcs and Guy. He could see it showing on their faces as they examined Sophia’s battered corpse in the tent. He could hear it in Howard Benson’s voice when he’d called Missing Persons.

  Could it be Dr. Baylor? Was it possible that the plastic surgeon had returned to LA and was killing again?

  Matt knew that as long as he was a homicide detective, as long as he was alive, this would be his fate, his curse. That until the doctor was found and either killed or locked up in an asylum, he would always be the first suspect. The madman who defied capture and always got away.

  His cell phone started vibrating. Though he didn’t recognize the caller ID, he switched on the phone and raised it to his ear.
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  “You awake, Jones?”

  Matt tried to place the husky voice, then realized in an instant that the caller was Wes Rogers, special agent in charge of the FBI’s field office in Philadelphia.

  “I’m awake,” Matt said. “What’s happened?”

  “The story’s gonna break in the morning.”

  Matt got to his feet and started pacing in the darkness. He already had a feel for the answer—it could only go one of two ways—but he asked Rogers the question just the same.

  “What story is that?” he said. “What’s gonna break in the morning?”

  ELEVEN

  How a double murder twenty-five hundred miles away could flood Matt’s body and mind with relief might be a question he should ask Dr. May someday. Still, that rush of good feeling couldn’t be denied.

  It was official. Dr. George Baylor was no longer a person of interest in the Sophia Ramirez murder case.

  According to Rogers and the FBI, Baylor murdered two people on the same day Sophia had been killed. The bodies were found in a cheap motel in Washington, Pennsylvania, about thirty miles south of Pittsburgh. And for Dr. Baylor, his latest two victims mirrored everything he stood for. He had killed a woman caked in greed, the CEO of a pharmaceutical company who had been in the news lately, along with her paid stooge, a man who claimed to be a clinical professor of family medicine in Baltimore and published bogus articles touting the company in a number of medical journals.

  Matt couldn’t believe the woman had been so stupid or even psychotic that she didn’t see Baylor in her rearview mirror.

  According to what Rogers said last night, and what CNN was broadcasting this morning, the pharmaceutical company specialized in a generic medication for children. The cost to manufacture the drug topped off at somewhere between $1 and $16 per dose, but she decided to raise the price to $600. So pleased with herself for pulling off what amounted to a nationwide swindle on children and their parents, she thought she deserved a gift and gave herself one. She increased her salary from $2.5 million a year to $20 million, and no one said or did anything to stop her.