The Body Reader (24 page)

CHAPTER 54

L
ying on her back in her old room, fully dressed, bed still made, boots on, Jude woke to the sound of scratching mice in the ceiling above her head. The clock beside her read 9:45 a.m. Could that be right?

Considering what had transpired on the property and how the event had broken the family, she was surprised to find a measure of comfort waking up in her childhood bed. So much time had passed, and she’d all but erased her own history, but there was something reassuring about knowing her younger self had actually slept here and played here. Being in the cabin shifted the boundaries of who she was and expanded her recent definition of herself.

As she stared at the ceiling above her head, trying to zero in on the location of the gnawing mice, she noticed an anomaly in the wooden slats.

A crawl space.

Until that moment, she’d completely forgotten its existence, her only memory of it being her dad reaching into the black hole, pulling down boxes when Jude was maybe five or six.

Out of bed, she grabbed the chair from one corner of the room, dragged it across the floor, and placed it below the area in question. Standing on the chair, she pressed against the ceiling, and a section popped loose to reveal the framework of a drop hatch, her action disrupting and silencing the mice.

The hatch sat freely within the frame. It had no handle; the only way to access the space above was to push it up and out of the way, which she did.

A long-lost but familiar scent drifted to her through the opening, a scent she couldn’t place, one that stabbed at her chest and made her throat go tight.

Once the square of wood was heaved aside, she groped in the darkness, her fingers coming in contact with the edge of a metal box. She continued her blind search, this time touching the tattered edges of a large book. She grabbed it, pulled it free.

Standing on the chair, she stared at the object in her hands, now understanding why the smell had seemed so familiar and why it had brought with it an echo of pain. Her scrapbook. The scrapbook that had been missing from her belongings.

She flipped through pages, pausing on photos of the cabin taken by her young self, as if the images might solve what she’d considered the mystery of her mother’s death. Her first case. Her first unsolved case.

Eric must have found it in her things and given it to her father. It seemed the only plausible explanation. What it was doing here was a mystery.

Allowing herself no time to speculate further, she tossed the book to the bed and went back for the metal box, dragged it toward the opening, and lifted it free.

She recognized it too. Gray, something designed for legal documents, secured with a padlock. In one corner was a yellow smiley face. She remembered the day she’d put it there, sitting at her father’s desk in their Minneapolis home. He’d been working. She’d come in to see him, and he’d lifted her to his lap. She’d tried to put the sticker on his cheek, but he’d laughed and pushed the lockbox toward her.

And now here it was. The box from her past, from a childhood that had seemed perfect for a short time.

She stepped from the chair and carried the box to the dining room table. Using the poker from the woodstove, she broke the lock and opened the hinged lid.

At first glance, the contents appeared to be what someone might expect. Manila envelopes that most likely contained paperwork associated with the property. Except that on top of a stack of envelopes was a Polaroid Land Camera, along with two packs of film. Even though Land Cameras were obsolete, the film could still be found in pawnshops and on eBay.

She’d always called them serial-killer cameras. It was a cliché, but serial killers liked to document their crimes, and Polaroids were one way to avoid detection. Keeping a record of kills was part of the obsession. They needed the visual, needed the documentation.

Pictures, or it never happened.

Just like other people wanted photos of vacations.

With growing dread, she opened the first envelope. Inside was a snapshot of a teenage girl wearing a gold heart necklace.

CHAPTER 55

J
ude didn’t recognize the girl in the photo. She was standing against a mildewed cement wall, barefoot, wearing a light print dress—something that could have been manufactured anywhere within the past ten years. The image was bad, blurry and dark, so it was hard to tell if her body had any telltale signs of abuse.

Where had the photo been taken? It looked like a basement—something the cabin didn’t have. Years ago there had been another structure on the property, but it was long gone, bulldozed, the basement filled.

Her eyes went to the girl’s throat and wrists. It would take someone in Digital to reproduce the image and clean it up. Maybe then it would reveal something. But Jude didn’t need to see marks or bruises or lacerations. The girl’s body language said it all.

Her smile didn’t reach beyond her mouth. Happiness reflected in the whole person, in the muscles and the nerves and eyes. Instead, the slope of the teen’s shoulders spoke of exhaustion, the tenseness in her limbs—of terror. Her eyes were flat, devoid of readable emotion.

Her fear might not be apparent to most people. Others might see a happy, pretty girl.

Jude needed to get a forensics team up there. She shouldn’t touch anything else. But who would believe her? Who would come? And wasn’t it possible that she’d just happened upon a photo of a young girl? Somebody’s crush? Maybe a family secret. A love child?

Unlikely.

Jude placed the photo beside the necklace on the table and opened the next envelope.

Another girl.

This one she recognized.

Octavia Germaine.

The pose was similar to the previous girl’s. Dark, taken in front of the same cement-block wall. False smile on the young woman’s face. Bare arms, bare legs. Another bad photo that revealed no signs of violence.

But those eyes.

And her entire body. One of her hands was open wide, clawlike, as if she were grabbing for more than air, her knuckles sharp and defined. Her other hand was partially hidden by her skirt, but not so hidden that Jude couldn’t see that it was clenched into a fist. And the way she held her head was stiff, as if she couldn’t relax enough to portray a natural pose.

She put the photo aside, fell back in her chair, and let out the breath she’d been holding. Still no solid proof of anything, although a photo of Octavia should be enough to get a team on site.

She continued and things got worse. She found the heartbreaking evidence she needed. There were photos of four dead girls, along with four necklaces that slid into a tangled pile on the table.

All of the photos were similar, taken in what appeared to be a heavily wooded area, which led her to think the burials had most likely taken place nearby, on her father’s property. All of the bodies were wrapped in clear plastic, dropped into a trench, the plastic pulled away to reveal the girls’ faces. The similarity of pose led Jude to believe that the burials were somewhat ceremonial, as if the killer were honoring them, at least in his own sick and evil mind.

None of the dead was Octavia.

Jude’s pulse raced. Was she still alive?

Who’d hidden the box there? Her father? Adam? Someone else entirely?

One envelope left.

It was obviously old and had been on the bottom of the stack a long time. Very flat, and the manila had turned dark. When she pulled it from the box, it had that smell of age, of old paper and dust and hidden spaces.

She tilted the envelope, and photos slid to the table, six in all. Like a fortune-teller, she lined them up in front of her.

Not what she’d expected to find.

Her vision darkened at the edges, and her head roared. She braced her arm against the table, hoping the support would stop the shaking of her hand. It didn’t. Instead, the shaking moved up her arm until her entire body trembled.

The photos had been taken a long time ago, back when Jude was eight years old.

Photos of her mother lying on the ground, her eyes blank with death. Salacious photos, as if the photographer wanted to get her from every angle.

In the chaos that followed the bullet to the heart, her mother’s blouse had been ripped open, maybe in an attempt to save her life or in an attempt to make it look like someone had tried to keep her alive. Her breasts were bare and covered in dark, dried blood, the gaping gunshot wound to her chest the star of the show unless you considered the blankness of her eyes.

Now she knew why the scrapbook had been hidden in the ceiling along with the lockbox. The killer was keeping all of his victims in one special place.

Jude mentally flagged Phillip Schilling as the prime suspect, especially considering the inclusion of the scrapbook, but any decent detective would say what she’d found wasn’t hard evidence. It might have been in the Schilling house, but it didn’t mean it belonged to her father.

Jude swiped at the photos, driving them into a pile, then turned the stack facedown. She couldn’t look anymore. Once they were out of sight, she let out a loud sob and pressed a hand to her mouth. She’d sensed that the cabin held secrets. Deep, dark secrets. But nothing could have prepared her for this.

CHAPTER 56

J
ude gathered up everything. Not quickly, although she felt a sense of urgency. She was careful to replace the photos in the correct envelopes, careful to touch only what had to be touched. When all the items were returned to the box, she closed the lid and placed the horrific memorabilia in her backpack, along with the shoebox and the Octavia necklaces. Evidence should remain at the scene, but she couldn’t risk leaving it behind.

Trying to ignore her shaking legs, she left the cabin through the front door and headed for the car. She’d destroyed her phone, so she’d have to drive somewhere to call the sheriff’s department, who in turn would have to call the BCA. Not Minneapolis Police Department jurisdiction, but she’d let Ortega know too. Hopefully the chief would pass the information to Uriah.

A minute later she took the turn in the lane and saw her borrowed car where she’d left it. She slowed her approach, stomach sinking, until she was close enough to confirm that all four tires had been slashed.

On a hunch, recalling Jude’s comment the day they’d driven north to the Holt crime scene, Uriah exited Highway 10 and pulled into the parking area of Black Bear Station. Inside, he flashed his badge, introduced himself, and produced an iPhone photo of Jude taken at the Minneapolis Police Department on her first day back. “Has this woman been in your store in the past several hours?”

The white middle-aged clerk looked at the photo and shook her head. “Maybe earlier. My shift starts at seven.”

The bell above the door rang, and a heavyset guy with straight dark hair entered. “Hey, you got my check?” he asked the woman behind the counter. “I gotta make a car payment.”

The clerk opened the cash register. “You should ask Teddy,” she told Uriah, nodding toward the new guy on the scene. “He was working when I clocked in.”

Uriah showed Teddy the photo of Jude.

“Yeah, she was here. Around three. Something like that. I thought it was weird because she went to the back of the store and bought a necklace from the engraving machine. Usually only kids or high school girls do that.”

The woman behind the counter handed him his check. He eyeballed it, folded it, and stuck it in his wallet. “She had the necklace on when she came up to the counter. I told her I liked the name Octavia.”

“Octavia?” Uriah asked. “You sure it was this woman?” He held up his phone again so the guy could get another look.

“Positive. That white hair is hard to miss. Plus, she was kinda cool and tough. I wondered if she was maybe in a band.”

Uriah thanked him, then hurried to his car, restarting the GPS directions as he sped out of the parking area.

CHAPTER 57

H
ands gripping the straps of the backpack that dug into her shoulders, Jude dove into the woods, ducking under tree limbs and jumping over rocks and small downed trees in her race to reach the highway and put distance between herself and whoever had sliced her tires. At one point she paused to listen for sounds of pursuit. When she turned to resume her flight, she heard a distant rustling of leaves—followed by a series of pops.

In the city, when people reported shots fired, they often said they mistook them for firecrackers. This was like that, but louder. Three rapid rounds.

It’s weird how the brain reacts to such things. Even when she felt the white-hot pain rip through her biceps, even when she felt the warm blood running down her arm, she found herself thinking it was ridiculous for someone to waste fireworks on such a sunny, cloudless day. Faced with the obvious, the brain still rejected aberrant behavior. A fraction of a second later, reality sank in. Someone was trying to kill her.

She ran, cutting through saplings, looking for terrain that would afford the most cover. From behind came the sound of snapping branches. She skidded down a slope, hit the bottom of a shallow ravine, her boots pounding the ground, buckthorn tearing her pants and scratching her arms and legs like it had scratched the girls. She stumbled, faltered. Pausing for a second, just a second, she pressed her back against a tree and squeezed her eyes shut against the pain.

Maybe it was her heavy breathing, maybe it was the roaring in her head, but something drowned out the sound of approach. She never heard him coming. Suddenly someone spoke her name. She recognized the voice even though it was one she hadn’t heard much in the past several years. But he’d always had a distinctive way of saying Jude—with a teasing tone of disdain.

She opened her eyes, blinked, struggled to focus. Her brother stood in front of her, a gun in his hand.

“How did you know I was here?” She’d been so careful.

“Your boss, or I guess I should say ex-boss, warned us, said you could be heading to the governor’s mansion,” he told her. “But when I heard you’d been flagged as a person of interest, I called my contact in the police department and he said you’d been asking about the area where Lola Holt’s body was found. From that it was easy to figure out you were probably coming here.”

Blood dripped from her fingers and splashed on her boot. Her vision was edged with undulating darkness.
Adam.
How could that be?
“You murdered those girls.” Why hadn’t he been on her radar?
Because I’ve been too obsessed with my father, that’s why.
Had Adam murdered Lola Holt too? Delilah Masters? What about Octavia?

“I made too many mistakes,” he said.

At first Jude thought he regretted his crimes, but no . . .

“I should have taken permanent measures with you from day one.”

Permanent measures.
“Are you saying you were behind my kidnapping?” Her opinion of him had been low, but she’d never have thought him capable of being responsible for her years of torture.

“I knew Ian Caldwell had something on me.” As if expecting her to understand, he told her the reporter had bragged about how he planned to supply Jude with evidence. That’s when Adam had decided it was time to be proactive. “I was going to kill you along with Caldwell, but Vang came up with the kidnapping idea.”

“Vang?”

“My contact. Without him, I couldn’t have been certain you were no threat after you escaped. Vang assured me you didn’t remember anything about Caldwell.”

Before she could begin to process the deceit of Grant Vang, Adam spilled the rest, from his part in the decapitation he’d hoped would warn Jude and the girls away, to admitting to being one of the four who’d attacked her in the alley. He seemed proud of everything except the bungled dump of Lola Holt’s body.

Jude’s mind struggled, searching for a plan. If she collapsed and played possum, maybe she could turn this around and get his weapon. Before she grew weaker, she pushed herself away from the tree and took a step closer. He didn’t seem to notice. “What about my mother?” She had to know what happened that day in the woods. “Why did you kill her?”

“It was an accident!” His face twisted in almost comical torment.

“I don’t believe that. I saw the photos.” Her voice dropped, taking on a pleading tone. He was going to kill her. He might as well tell her the truth. “I need to know.”

“You wouldn’t understand!”

“No, probably not.” Then, “How did you get the scrapbook?”

“Eric. He thought the family would want it.”

“Did Father know the truth about our mother’s death? Did he know about the girls?”

A sound came from the nearby woods, and they both turned their heads to see Uriah Ashby step from the landscape of trees and underbrush, a man out of context, incongruously dressed in a suit and tie, his weapon drawn. Apparently the whole world knew her whereabouts, and the gunshots must have fine-tuned Uriah’s search.

Jude forced her focus back to the immediate situation. She’d trained for just such a scenario, and Uriah likely had too. He might have even stepped into this encounter with that training in mind. A second cop enters a highly charged scene and diverts the assailant’s attention long enough for the first cop to act. Practice was supposed to make what happened next almost muscle memory, but in her present condition Jude lacked confidence in her ability to follow through with the dance.

Adam reacted in the most ideal and expected way possible. He turned his body toward Uriah, the handgun following his shift in stance and vision.

With no time to think, only to deploy the maneuver, Jude dredged up the strength to kick and shove hard and high, her boot connecting with Adam’s thigh. He went down, his semiautomatic, pointed in Uriah’s general direction, firing in rapid succession, the blast echoing through the woods, the smell of gunpowder floating on the air as shell casings bounced on the ground.

In the chaos of noise, it was hard to tell if Uriah had fired at all. That was until Adam dropped straight to his knees, where he remained a stretched second before pitching face forward into the leaves.

Uninjured, Uriah lunged, kicking the weapon from Adam’s limp hand. The gun slid across the dirt as Jude collapsed, watching the two men through a haze of pain.

“Is he dead?” she gasped.
Octavia. I didn’t ask him about Octavia.

Uriah rolled Adam to his back, exposing a puddle of blood and stained soil. He checked for a pulse, then ripped open Adam’s shirt to reveal a chest wound.

How odd,
Jude thought. That he would die out here in the same woods as their mother, and from the same kind of gunshot wound. The ultimate karma.

Uriah let out a breath. “Yeah.” She could see that he was already doubting his reaction, wondering if he’d fired too quickly.

“You had no choice,” she said. “You or him.”

“I know.” But still, he doubted.

She crawled to where the backpack had fallen during the altercation. She grabbed it, hugged it to her chest with one arm. Things got blurry, and she crashed to her back. “The sky is so blue. Doesn’t Minnesota have the bluest sky?”

Uriah left the dead body to crouch beside her. With one finger, he began loosening the knot in his tie.

“I can’t believe you got dressed up for this,” she said.

He let out a grim laugh. “What’s in the pack?”

“Evidence that will blow your mind.”

“You can loosen your grip on it. I don’t think it’s going anywhere.”

She let the backpack slide from her hand. “Octavia might still be alive.”

If only they knew where the dead girls had been held and the photos taken. The cement wall made Jude suspect the holding and killing room was elsewhere entirely, with the property maybe used for burial, but a sweep of the grounds had to be made. “You need to get a search team out here. Immediately.” The full implications of what had just happened continued to sink in. If they didn’t find Octavia, if she wasn’t anywhere nearby, that meant the only person who might know of her whereabouts was dead.

Knot undone, Uriah pulled the tie free of his collar. “Let’s see your arm.”

“I don’t think I want to look.”

He pushed the sleeve of her T-shirt over her shoulder. Rather than looking at her arm, she watched his face. He winced a little, and his brow furrowed in concentration, but he didn’t make his expression go blank. That would have told her it was bad.

“This is gonna hurt. The bullet’s still in there.” He wrapped his tie around her arm, knotting it off while she sucked in a series of shallow breaths.

When he was finished, she let her head fall to the ground while she waited for the searing-hot pain to subside. It didn’t. She’d always wondered what a gunshot felt like. Now she knew. Like having a red-hot poker twisted inside you.

Uriah called in the situation and location, relating the immediate need for a search team, then pocketed his phone. “Let’s get you to a doctor.”

She turned her head to the side. There was Adam staring at the same blue sky she’d just admired. “What about him?”

“He’s not going anywhere. Think you can walk? I suppose I could carry you, but I don’t really want to.”

That was funny.

“Did you just laugh?”

Had she?

He held out his hand, and she grabbed it with her good one. With his other hand at her back, he carefully coaxed her to her feet. Upright, she stood there a few ticks while waiting for the ground to quit moving.

“Okay?” he asked.

She nodded.

Keeping one arm around her, they started to leave the area.

“Wait. The evidence.”

Uriah swept up the backpack by one strap and slung it over his shoulder.

“How did you know to come here?” Jude asked, her words slightly slurred.

“Ava Germaine.”

“I really thought she could keep a secret.”

“I can be pretty persuasive.”

They made it to his car. Jude might have mumbled something about getting blood on the seats, and he might have told her it didn’t matter, that he’d send her the cleaning bill.

And even though his words were teasing, once they were in the car and moving down the road, his driving reflected the urgency of the situation. And when she nodded off, he talked to her, sometimes calmly, sometimes with obvious panic. “We’ll be there soon,” he said more than once. And she wondered where “there” was but was too ambivalent to ask. Not Minneapolis, she decided. That would take too long.

She blinked, trying to keep her eyes open, focusing on his blood-caked hands gripping the steering wheel.

She wanted to talk about the dead girls, the missing girls, Octavia, the necklaces and the photos and her mother and her theories, but she was too tired.

And then the car squealed to a stop and her door flew open and a gurney and nurses appeared with their peach-colored scrubs and black stethoscopes. The blue sky turned into a ceiling with bright fluorescent lights and green walls.

She knew she shouldn’t care about such things, not now, but she felt a seed of satisfaction growing deep inside. She wasn’t crazy.