Stranded (9 page)

At first she had considered whether she and Tully should push back the men, not allow them access. In fact, she was surprised that Tully—who usually played by the rules—hadn’t suggested it. But they had all spent an afternoon digging in the mud, sharing the significance of what might be buried here and exposing themselves to the rancid smells. Maggie wasn’t going to be the one to tell these men thanks for all your help, but no, you don’t get to see what you worked so hard to uncover.

In the middle of the black body bag the small white plastic one looked less sinister. Matt and Ryan waited for Janet. She kneeled down after putting on a fresh pair of purple latex gloves. The plastic bags’ handles had been tied in a loose knot. It would have been simple enough to untie it. Instead, Janet snipped off the knot entirely and placed it into an evidence bag that Matt held out for her.

As soon as she cut it open, a much stronger odor emerged.

Maggie stole a glimpse of the young deputy who had vomited earlier. What a difference an afternoon of smelling death made. He continued to watch without expression or a single gag.

Janet spread the top opening just enough to be able to look inside. She didn’t flinch. Didn’t wince. The only look on the woman’s face appeared to be one of disappointment. She eased back into a squat and let her colleagues take a peek. Then she looked to Maggie and Tully.

“I’m guessing it belongs to the victim inside the black garbage bag,” Maggie said without leaning in or coming any closer to see.

She had already felt the heft of the item and had recognized
the smell of decomposing human flesh. A month ago in the woods behind a rest area in Virginia she and Tully had found another of this killer’s victims. Not always, but often, a killer repeated certain things, developed a pattern. The body of Zach Lester had been lying at the base of a tree, the intestines strung up through the lower branches. He had been decapitated.

She heard Tully release a sigh. Out of the corner of her eye she could see his jaw tighten. He didn’t, however, make a move forward either.

Janet dipped her right hand into the bag and gently, slowly brought up … a piece of paper. Almost in unison, several of the men expelled the breaths they had been holding. Janet handed it off to Matt, who had another evidence bag ready, but before placing it inside he took a good look at it.

He showed his colleague Ryan, and then his eyes found Maggie and Tully. “You two might want to take a look at this.”

Rather than expose the paper any further, Matt slipped it into a clear plastic ziplock bag. He pulled a marker out of his jacket pocket and popped the cap off in his mouth so he didn’t need to use the hand still holding the bag. He scrawled a date and number on the side of the bag, recapped the marker, then held the bag up for Maggie and Tully.

Maggie immediately understood why Matt didn’t want to tell them out loud what they had found. Despite not telling the construction crew and Sheriff Uniss’s men to back off or leave,
this
was information that would need to be kept quiet.

Maggie took the plastic-encased paper while Tully pushed up his glasses. It was a sales receipt, in rather good condition despite a rust-colored stain at the corner. It had been carefully placed on top of the bag’s contents to be easily found. The retail store matched the logo on the white plastic bag. The first thing Maggie noticed
was the bold type in the middle of the receipt that read: # ITEMS SOLD 1. Above, it clearly listed that item: SOCKS, $8.98.

She took no comfort in being right. The orange socks were obviously not the victim’s. They had been added later, most likely postmortem.

Maggie searched for the store’s address. There wasn’t one, but the store’s number (#1965) would tell them where it was. The manager and a phone number were also included. What surprised her was the date at the bottom of the receipt. The socks had been purchased just two weeks ago. Which meant the body had not been here as long as they had initially suspected. It also meant that it had been buried after she had received the hand-drawn map, the one that had started their scavenger hunt.

She gave Tully the receipt for his own closer inspection. She waited, watching him. In seconds he came to the same conclusion and when his eyes met hers she could see he was thinking the same thing she was.

There were definitely more bodies here.

CHAPTER 15

Ryder Creed sipped coffee from one of the three thermoses Hannah had prepared for the trip. He didn’t bother to pour it into the thermos’s cup. He had been on the road for almost eight hours now. Drinking directly out of the thermos was easier.

He glanced in the rearview mirror. Behind him, Grace sprawled on her dog bed, which took up half the back of the Jeep. Her empty kennel and their gear took up the other half. The dog lifted her head every once in a while as if to ask, “Are we there yet?” Then she’d drop it back down. But Creed hadn’t heard the heavy breathing of a deep sleep, so he knew she was simply resting, still on alert. Even one of her ears stayed constantly pitched. Most of the dogs understood that a long car ride meant a job at the end of the trip. And somehow they instinctively knew to conserve their excitement and energy.

Creed wished he could tap into his dogs’ instincts. He’d spent the last seven years of his life training and working with dogs, but what they had taught him made his lessons insignificant by comparison.

Grace was one of his smallest dogs, a scrappy brown-and-white Jack Russell terrier. Creed had discovered her curled up under one of the double-wide trailers he kept on the property for
hired help. When he found her she was literally skin and bones but sagging where she had recently been nursing puppies. What fur hadn’t fallen out from lack of nourishment was thick with an army of fleas. At the time it made him so angry he had wanted to punch something … or someone. It wasn’t the first time he had seen a female dog dumped and punished when the owner was simply too cheap to get her spayed.

Locals had gotten into the habit of leaving their unwanted dogs at the end of Creed’s driveway. They knew he’d take them in or find homes for them. In some twisted way it was their attempt at compassion. It was either leave them at Creed’s back door or take them to the nearest animal shelter, where they would most certainly be put to death.

Hannah used to roll her eyes at him every time he’d bring in a half-starved or hobbling, abandoned dog. Then she’d tell him that people were just taking advantage of his soft heart.

“Good lord,” she’d told him. “We could hire a vet on staff for the money we pay out in canine health services.”

“You’re absolutely right,” he had agreed, to her surprise. And before Hannah could enjoy her victory, what she believed would be an end to his annoying habit of taking in abandoned dogs, he’d hired a full-time veterinarian.

The fact was—and this was something he could never get Hannah to appreciate the way he appreciated it—the abandoned dogs that he had rescued made some of his best air-scent dogs. Skill was only a part of the training. Bonding with the trainer was another. His rescued dogs trusted him unconditionally and were loyal beyond measure. They were eager to learn and anxious to please.

Though Grace had been dumped, she adapted quickly to her new surroundings. She didn’t cower or startle easily. Once she
caught up nutrition-wise, Creed recognized she possessed a drive and an investigative curiosity. She was independent but followed and looked to Creed not only for praise but also for guidance. And most important, she passed his number one test—she was ball crazy.

It was a trick Creed used to test all his potential work dogs. Did a simple tennis ball get their attention? Did their eyes follow its every movement? Did they dive for it? And last, when they caught it, did they have a good grip on it? For air-scent work, it was all about drive and Grace had passed his ball-crazy test with flying colors.

Despite all the training and harnessing the independence, Creed was always surprised by how a dog’s mood and behavior could be influenced by the handler. As he started getting fidgety and looking for someplace to stop, he noticed Grace’s head coming up more often.

“It’s okay, girl,” he told her.

Even in the dark, Creed knew this stretch of Interstate 55 and knew that in a couple more miles he’d be leaving the state of Mississippi behind and entering Tennessee. He tried to avoid stopping at Mississippi’s rest areas. The state was one of the few that had security guards at their interstate rest areas 24/7. That should have been a plus, but Creed considered them a nuisance and the term “security guard” a joke. The only thing they guarded was where a dog could or couldn’t pee. He liked to have his dogs stretch their legs, walk around, and sniff without a security guard following in his motorized cart telling him to stay in the designated “pet area.” The area that amounted to a fifteen-by-twenty-foot patch of dead grass. So he waited until he passed the blue-and-white sign that read:

TENNESSEE
THE VOLUNTEER STATE
WELCOMES YOU

Then he started to look for the rest area he’d use before he reached Memphis.

He’d rather drive straight through the night. Grace wouldn’t mind. His dogs always needed fewer bathroom stops than he did. The coffee made that difficult. But stopping wasn’t about losing travel time. The truth was, he didn’t like rest areas or truck stops.

Actually, they called them truck plazas now. They’d become miniature towns with cafés, small grocery stores, and what was called “convenience retail.” Some even had a twenty-four-hour, full-service barber shop. There were places for truckers to shower, watch TV, use the Internet, and rent a bed by the hour to catch some sleep outside of their trucks. There were also places to buy drugs, if you knew where to look. And late at night there were women who went from truck to truck, knocking on the cabs.

Unlike the rest areas, the truck plazas were busy night and day, big rigs pulling in and out, motors constantly humming, brakes screeching.

Creed avoided the truck plazas.

Rest areas, however, were no less a challenge. No matter how many years had passed since his sister had gone missing from one, he couldn’t stop—especially in the middle of the night—without memories of
that
night. All it took was the smell of diesel and the sound of hydraulic brakes.

Creed knew subsequent panic attacks could be triggered by a slight reminder of the original one. Something as simple as a smell or a sound. He hadn’t experienced a full-blown attack in years
but lately he felt one simmering close to the surface. Exhaustion, stress, anxiety—all were contributing factors. He had worked three homicide scenes just this month. All young women. And each time the assignment came in, Creed had insisted on taking it himself rather than sending one of his crew.

Maybe he needed to avoid these cases for a while. Take only search-and-rescue requests. Focus on some drug cases. Devote his time to training. He had a way with dogs. He could train them to sniff out just about anything from lost children to cocaine to bombs. Dogs, he understood. People, not so much.

What had started as a desperate search for his missing eleven-year-old sister’s body had turned into a successful business, success beyond his expectations. He had a waiting list of law enforcement agencies across the country that wanted his dogs or his services. He could afford to hire more handlers and scale back or redirect his time and energies. Most important, he knew he needed to take a break, rest, and rejuvenate, and do it soon, for his own peace of mind. The panic attacks weren’t the only feelings he kept at bay. There was a hollowness inside of him that threatened to suffocate him if it continued to grow.

As soon as Creed left the interstate, Grace sat up. The exit ramp to the rest area curved down and around, taking them into a wooded area that immediately shielded them from the interstate’s traffic. The road forked: right for cars, left for trucks.

Creed was familiar with this one. He’d stopped here on several other trips. But he’d barely pulled into a parking lot when he saw something that made his skin prickle. Beyond the one-story brick building Creed could see a big man holding hands with a little girl, leading her to the truck parking lot, where big rigs filled every slot.

Creed sat back, tried to control his breathing. His palms were sweaty and his hands fisted around the steering wheel. If he
could just breathe, he could ward off the panic. But he didn’t stop watching.

Was the man leading her? Or dragging her?

How could he tell in the dark?

The pair walked from shadow to shadow, illuminated only now and again by a shot of light from the pole lamps. And those got fewer and fewer as they headed toward a rig at the back of the lot.

Creed told himself that he needed to settle down. He couldn’t afford to interfere every time he saw something that he didn’t think looked right. And yet, his heart wouldn’t stop racing.

That’s when he noticed the little girl wore only socks—bright white against the black asphalt. No shoes.

CHAPTER 16