Believe No One

BELIEVE NO ONE

A. D. GARRETT

Minotaur Books
New York

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Acknowledgements

A lot of people helped to make this book. In Oklahoma, Mike Nance, co-founder of the International Association of Cold Case Investigators (check out their Facebook page), was guide, facilitator, host, historian and wise counsellor. His gracious presence gave access to a host of professionals in Oklahoma law enforcement. Thanks is due to the many departments and agencies who gave a warm welcome, interrupting their frenetic daily schedules to explain procedures and protocols, tolerating often bizarre questions, answering them patiently and with great good humour. Particular thanks to District Attorneys Pamela Hammers and Brian Keuster, ADA Nullonney, Judge Tom Gillert, CSI Margaret Loveall, OSBI Special Agent Vicky Lyons, and Forensic Anthropologist Angela Berg. The detectives in the Homicide Department of Tulsa PD provided two important elements: context and character. The stories you told could make a book in themselves – would that there had been more time to sit and listen.

In St Louis, Bill Baker, Executive Director of the St Louis Major Case Squad, and Joe Burgoon, Godfather of Homicide, and now Investigator at St Louis County PD's Cold Case Unit, gave valuable insights into homicide investigation, as well as the work of NCMEC and Team Adam which have informed and enriched this novel. Their rambunctious tales were tempered by stories of dedication, quiet humility and deep compassion that will resonate in this and future novels. For information, Dominic's on the Hill is a real restaurant, and they really do serve the best Italian food in St Louis. Sincere thanks for advice given by St Louis Chief Medical Examiner, Dr Mary Case, in the USA, and Police Forensic Pathologist, Dr James Grieve, in the UK, which steered the storyline away from a couple of unlikely scenarios. Crush asphyxia was definitely the right way to go.

A Hawick Word Book,
by Douglas Scott, was extremely helpful in researching Borders Scottish. An illuminating email discussion (in multicoloured fonts) with Dr Caroline Logan on the psychopathology of serial killers was crucial in the creation of two very bad men; particularly useful was the exchange on haemochromatosis, which made sense of a number of disparate ideas.

‘Hard-bitten' is an expression often used to describe those tasked with bringing killers to justice. But it was a constant surprise and joy to meet men and women whose compassion for the victims and their families was profound and affecting.

Preface

If there's one thing an Oklahoma farmer values, it's water.

Lance Guffey's grandfather had lived through Black Sunday, 14 April 1935. It was the day Lance's father was born; it was also the day America came face to face with the great Dust Bowl. A hundred million acres of good topsoil stripped from farms in the West fell like volcano dust in towns and cities east of the Great Plains, clear to the Atlantic Ocean, a distance of 15,000 miles, blackening the skies over the nation's capital.

Oklahoma learned its lesson the hard way, but learned it well, creating more lakes, post-Dust Bowl, than any other state. In that one year alone, Lance's grandfather dug two ponds for irrigation and by the time Lance himself was ten years old, they had five, each one up to an acre across. His father told Lance that for weeks, digging those ponds, his skin was the same rust red as the clay, from his fingertips all the way up to his elbows, and the iron in the clay smelled of blood, so you carried the stink of death with you.

Just now the land smelled of sweet grass and sunshine; soon they would be taking the first cut of hay. They'd had some good spring rain, but nothing for two weeks past and with temperatures already in the eighties at the beginning of May, they would need every drop of water in those ponds. It was one of the smaller ponds he was headed to right now; a windstorm the night before had brought down an old cottonwood. It lay half across the shallow incline; his cattle used to get in there and wallow when it got real hot, and a cow could break a leg stumbling over branches hidden in the mud.

Lance Guffey looked at the big old tree. The storm had ripped it out of the soil; it lay crushed and splintered over a hundred feet of grazing, its shimmering leaves already losing their shine. The roots were upturned, ten feet off the ground, a wide, flat disk – blood red, like an afterbirth – leaving a hole in the ground twenty feet in diameter. He scratched his head and walked left and then right in a semicircle, decided which limbs he needed to trim first and how many sections he would have to cut the trunk into to make it manageable. Finally, he reached in the cab of his tractor for his chainsaw. Three hours later, his small herd of black Angus cattle looking on, he had the accessible sections sawn into logs and was ready to drag what remained onto dry land.

The woman had settled in the soft mud of the pond over winter. Wind-rock shifted the cottonwood in the October storm, sending drifts of fine silt and mud from the bank of the pond, protecting her from the attentions of predators, cocooning her in mud. Five months she had waited, which was not long in the great scheme of things, in the long years of for ever. Not long enough to ripen the first crop of wheat, nor even to carry a child to full term. The woman was a child herself when she bore a son; the boy with her at the end would have celebrated his tenth birthday in June, but he had seen too much and could not be allowed to live. He was gone, as she was gone, the woman hoping in her final moments of pain and fear and confusion that she was going to a gentler place than this earth had been for her.

The jangle of chains and grappling hooks disturbed the mud, stirring up thin threads of red clay that rose like dark plumes of fresh blood. The red wisps reached the barrier between water and air, and spread and billowed like smoke under glass. A grappling hook snagged in the elbow of a branch and the massive trunk of the cottonwood, and the submerged brush of twigs and arrow-shaped leaves raked deep in the mud, ploughing up what had been planted where it could not grow.

Lance Guffey smelled the sulphurous reek of rotting leaves and the blood-iron tang of the clay, and at last the smell of death rolled up and penetrated his farmer's sensibilities. He looked around him in alarm, counted his cows as he killed the engine and climbed down from the cab, anxious to know if one of his heifers had already run foul of the reaching, grabbing branches of the downed tree. But the herd was accounted for, every one; they watched him still, thoughtfully regurgitating and chewing the tough prairie grass, waiting till he was done so they could cool off in the pond.

He took a step closer, covering his mouth and nose with his shirt tail, and saw a glimpse of flesh, camouflaged in the tangle of branches. The body seemed clothed in leaves and waterweed, like a nymph in the old-time fairy tales he read to his daughters. Sunshine dazzled off the water that clung to the cottonwood's waxy leaves, half blinding him, but he saw enough to be certain this was no water nymph.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

E
INSTEIN

Aberdeen, Scotland

Nick Fennimore stared at the new mail in his inbox and his mouth dried. The subject line: ‘Is this your daughter?'

His hand jerked involuntarily. He slowed his breathing, forcing himself to look closely at the email, to think like a scientist and not a father. There was an attachment. He'd had messages like this before – usually from sick, sadistic men for whom causing others pain was a release. Those messages had been posted on the Facebook page he'd created in his daughter's name, but this was the first he'd had direct to his academic account. The sender was ‘anon67912' – a Hotmail account.

Fennimore ran the email and its attachment through his virus checker: no Trojans, spyware or viruses. He clicked to open the message envelope. There was no message – just the subject header and the attachment. He wiped cold sweat from his upper lip and double-clicked to view the attachment.

It was a girl. Just a girl. She was slim, serious-looking; she walked alongside a man. He seemed older – mid-thirties, at a guess. Suited, stocky. Dark hair, full lips, otherwise unexceptional. His eye was drawn again to the girl. Could this be Suzie?