Believe No One (7 page)

‘She was twenty-six years old,' Simms said. ‘Her daughter was just nine – and
no one
cares that she was murdered?'

‘Welcome to Cranksterville. They don't “do” quilting circles or clambakes. Their version of a yard sale is breaking into their neighbour's shitty dive and stealing whatever isn't nailed down.'

‘Thank you for that illuminating cultural précis, Detective Ellis,' Simms said, flaring a little.

He bowed his head in mock chivalry. ‘My pleasure, Princess Kate.'

She narrowed her eyes and saw the vaguest hint of humour in his face – nothing so extravagant as a smile, but something akin to sunshine behind a thin veil of cloud.

Dunlap spoke up: ‘They were found in water, and you know what water does to DNA evidence. Without it, on a case like this, we're not gonna find the killer. Sorry, Chief, this one doesn't look good for a conviction.'

Dunlap, the voice of reason and authority. He was right, of course; they had nothing else to go on. Even so, Simms couldn't bring herself to set it aside. She read the autopsy report and sifted through the crime-scene pictures and thought about Rachel, Fennimore's wife, found on the Essex Marshes, months after she and Fennimore's daughter vanished.

Most serial killers have very defined geographic areas of operation.

S
ERIAL
M
URDER:
M
ULTI
-D
ISCIPLINARY
P
ERSPECTIVES FOR
I
NVESTIGATORS
(FBI
PUBLICATION)

Williams County, Oklahoma

Lance Guffey met Deputy Hicks and Professor Fennimore on the porch of his family home.

‘Deputy Hicks.' He came down the steps with his hand outstretched.

Hicks introduced Fennimore as a forensic-science professor from the UK, and Guffey offered him a firm handshake and welcomed him to Oklahoma. He was six foot two and broad-shouldered, a thirty-something with a sun-lined face and calloused hands. He offered them refreshment, but Hicks said they should get to it. Guffey pulled an Oklahoma Farm Bureau baseball cap out of his pocket and fitted it to his scalp. His face was grim, and he said little as they drove to where he'd found the body, except to ask if they knew the name of the victim yet.

Hicks said, ‘No, sir. But I'm working on it.'

‘Well, the Good Lord doesn't need to be told,' Guffey said, ‘but it would make it easier for us to pray for her if we at least had a name.'

After ten minutes of bumping over cropped turf, Hicks's police SUV drew to a halt a short distance from the pond. Thirty yards wide at the nearest point, the pond stretched off for about a hundred yards to a slightly raised line of trees. The water reflected blue sky and a few high stratus clouds, the green and silver foliage of cottonwood trees around the rim of the pond adding contrast.

Fennimore gazed out across the water, smiling in wonder. ‘Back in the UK, we'd call your “pond” a good-sized lake.'

Guffey scratched his chin and tried not to look too proud. ‘You need to go a little further, Deputy,' he said. ‘Just head around to the left.'

Past a bend in the lake, the water line curved inward like a kidney bowl. The ground still bore the scars of the fallen tree. A great tree stump lay some yards from the water's edge, its red plate of roots upturned and drying in the hot May sun. Beside it, Guffey had created a neat stack of logs and a less tidy mound of branches and twigs, the leaves already dried and turning to dust.

Hicks killed the engine and they got out and walked the last few yards, down a mud-churned incline to the pond. A small herd of black Angus cows were wallowing knee-deep in the muddy water.

‘Reminds me of home,' Fennimore said, with a nod towards the beasts. ‘Except for the warmth and sunshine.'

Guffey looked at him in question.

‘I teach at a university in Aberdeen. It's on the north-east coast of Scotland,' he added, thinking there must be half a dozen Aberdeens in the United States.

‘Those guys knew how to breed good stock,' Guffey said appreciatively.

The animals chewed the cud, watching the humans, indifferent to their admiration.

The pond water had receded for lack of rain, and the water lapped against a three-foot strip of cracked mud, leaving cattails and other marginal plants high and dry. The collapsed the section of bank under which the body had rested during winter was clear to see, as was the cause – two small, shrubby-looking trees, which had fallen landward. Diagonally opposite that, the kidney-shaped curve of the pond was missing a large oval chunk of clay, like a bite out of the rim, where the big cottonwood tree had been torn out by the roots.

‘You found her in the mud under the collapsed bank?' Fennimore asked.

‘That's where she started,' Guffey said. ‘I didn't know she was there until I dragged her a ways.'

Fennimore tried to picture the scene. ‘So the cottonwood fell from right to left, some of it on dry land and some in the mud.'

Guffey nodded. ‘'Cept, this was mostly water here at the time. Level's gone down in the dry spell.'

‘Do you know when those smaller trees came down?'

‘Been puzzling on that,' Guffey said. ‘We had a storm October twenty-nine, last year – probably the same wind that shook the cottonwood loose. Soon as we got the storm warning we rounded up the cattle from here and put them on the pasture near the house, so I know those trees were standing then. That was real a bad storm,' he reflected. ‘Next morning, I drove over the farm to look for damage. Took me two days in all, fixing as I found, and I seem to remember seeing those two late on, so they must've come down between October twenty-ninth and November first.'

‘That narrows down the dates,' Fennimore said. ‘You didn't do anything about the damage?'

‘The pond was full at the time, so I couldn't see the mud-fall on the edge, and those trees weren't in anyone's way. Didn't seem much point messin' with 'em, when there was fences to mend.'

Fennimore nodded. He turned full circle, noting the line of trees that ran along a slight ridge about thirty yards from where they were standing, taking in the short turf they had just traversed, the SUV's tyre tracks showing plainly the path they had taken to get to the pond.

They had driven down farm tracks, through two gates – both chained and padlocked – to get there.

‘Whoever left the body in your pond could not have come via the farm, because you would have seen them, and even if you didn't, the locked gates would have stopped them.'

‘So, he carried her, or dragged her, up here,' Hicks said.

‘A body is heavy,' Fennimore said, doubtful.

Hicks raised her eyebrows.

‘I know,' he said. ‘Stating the bleeding obvious, but people often underestimate just how heavy and awkward dead weight really is. Even a fairly small female is about a hundred pounds, and – crucially – it's unevenly distributed weight – arms and legs flopping around …'

‘They could've used a fireman's carry,' Guffey suggested.

‘Maybe, but most people couldn't lift
or
drag a body for more than a few hundred yards, and I don't see a convenient roadway.' He squinted again at the line of trees on the ridge. ‘Unless there's one up there along the treeline.'

Something bright flashed in Guffey's eye. ‘Can't give you a road,' he said, ‘but maybe something as good.'

He led the way to the ridge. They found more cottonweed, red cedar and a type of birch with an exceptionally flaky bark, the outer surface shining silver and the curled inner cinnamon red, like pencil shavings. In the treeless fields, the mating call of cicadas was an annoying whine, but up in the line of trees it was almost deafening. Hanging onto a branch for support, Fennimore looked six feet down to a stony track, rocky at the bottom, with a thin trickle of water oozing over the stones.

‘Mud Creek,' Guffey said.

‘Wide enough to accommodate an SUV,' Fennimore said. ‘What about access?'

Guffey pointed downstream of the sluggish trickle towards a massive turkey oak. ‘Beyond that oak, there's a bridge runs over the creek. Part of Wilson's Road; it's nothing much, just a dusty back road, but it crosses the highway a couple of miles west of here.'

Now here was a possibility. ‘Who knows about this?' Fennimore asked.

‘Most folks. Kids hereabouts use it as a shortcut to bike into town.'

‘You said the pond was full after the storm last autumn. Was the creek, too?'

Guffey shook his head. ‘That creek hasn't been full in sixty years.'

Fennimore walked along the ridge, head down, looking for a place that showed no signs of disturbance. He found a convenient spot and scrambled down the slope.

‘Where're you going, Professor?' Hicks said.

‘Mr Guffey, would you mind coming down here?' Guffey obliged. ‘You're two or three inches taller than me,' Fennimore said. ‘Can you see over the ridge to the pond?'

‘No sir,' he said.

Fennimore headed downstream towards the massive oak and Hicks slid down the gulley after them. The bridge was just fifteen yards beyond the tree and, looking down from the road, he could see nothing of the pond.

‘A man driving aimlessly, looking for a place to dump a body might have left it under the bridge, or in the dry creek, where it would have been perfectly well hidden, but he didn't. He drove or carried or dragged the body fifty yards further.' He pointed back the way they had come. ‘You can't see the pond from here, but he knew there was water on the other side of the ridge.'

Hicks adjusted her hat. ‘Local knowledge.'

‘Or Google Earth,' Fennimore said. ‘The point is, he planned this. Your killer is methodical, he plans ahead.' He turned his back on the bridge and looked across acres of unenclosed land, planted with wheat; so much empty space where the killer could have dumped the victim. He turned again and looked down onto the sad trickle of water which was all that remained of Mud Creek. ‘He didn't chance upon your pond, Mr Guffey, he chose this place.'

Basically, I'm for anything that gets you through the night – be it prayer, tranquilizers, or a bottle of Jack Daniel's.

F
RANK
S
INATRA

‘They're praying for her,' Fennimore said.

He and Deputy Hicks were headed back to Westfield. She was just as pretty as he remembered. Her hair, black with a rusty tinge, was straight and lustrous; just now, it was tied in a French knot under her hat. She had startling blue eyes with a darker rim, but her high cheekbones and the almond shape of her eyes suggested native lineage, and Fennimore was reminded that this north-eastern area of the state was part of the Cherokee Nation's Tribal Jurisdiction.

‘The Guffeys are country folk, born and raised,' Hicks said. ‘They believe in God and family and that every child is born in God's likeness. It surprises you, they pray for her?'

How could it surprise him, when thousands had done the same for him, and for Suzie and Rachel? He didn't believe in God, or an afterlife. Was it perverse to find it comforting that at least some of the people who prayed for him were like the Guffeys?

‘You still haven't had anything from CODIS?' he asked to change the subject.

‘I'm waiting on the call,' she said. ‘But she would have to've committed a felony crime for her DNA to be on there. You heard of NamUs?'

‘The United States national missing persons database,' Fennimore said without hesitation.

‘I put the victim's age and physical details on there,' Hicks said. ‘You can also input reference DNA samples from the family. Soon as a new unnamed person's DNA goes on there, it's cross-checked with all the reference DNA on the system – if they reported her missing, we'll get a name.'

‘
If
it goes on the system,' Fennimore said. NamUs was less than ten years old, and from what he remembered of the lecture he'd attended, the biggest difficulty they'd had was getting word of its existence out to front-line law-enforcement officers. ‘As I understand it, filling out the forms is not mandatory. Plus, her family would have to know she's missing,
and
they would need to know about NamUs
and
they would have to give a damn.'

She looked downhearted and he realized he'd jumped on one of his hobby horses and ridden it too hard. But Fennimore found it hard to apologize; Kate Simms always said that it was his least appealing characteristic. By way of making amends, he said, ‘What d'you need from me?'

She showed no emotion, but he noticed she did put her foot on the gas. ‘Would you take a look at the files? They're in the centre console.' She patted the armrest.

The possibility that the two cases were linked was slight. But he was here because he had time to spare, and Abigail Hicks was a pleasant distraction from his own concerns. He lifted up the armrest and drew out two folders. One bore the six-point star of Creek County Sheriff's Department. He didn't ask how she'd got hold of a file from a county sheriff she no longer worked for, but he admired her resourcefulness.

They drove past sagging wooden shacks – a hairdresser's, two bait shops, one derelict – then on into the town proper. Westfield was a solid Midwest town; the architecture mainly early twentieth century, square-built red stone, except for the Court House, which gleamed white, set back from the road amongst lawns and trees and bright municipal flowerbeds. But every third shop on Main Street was closed down and, at 9.15 in the morning, it was empty of people.

The Creek County victim that Hicks had found and almost lost entirely, three years back, was Shayla Reed, twenty-two.

‘Shayla was taken into foster care after her momma died of an overdose and her daddy walked out, leaving her and her baby sister in a two-room rental with a packet of Cheetos and a can of Tab each,' Hicks said. ‘Shayla ended up in foster home after foster home, and drifted into addiction and occasional prostitution.'