Too Close to Home (17 page)

As we walked, a dank breeze occasionally scrambled up from the stony depths of the ravine, providing welcome moments of relief. But it wasn’t enough to offset the humidity and steadily rising temperature, which made the air heavy and difficult to breathe. Before long, perspiration was trickling
down my forehead and the clothing beneath my backpack was damp and itchy.

I called out a warning to Chad, and we carefully skirted a spot where a narrow tower of limestone had sheered away from the face of the ravine. The rockfall had created an abrupt drop-off along the edge where we were walking and added tons of jagged rubble to the dangerous tangle of debris forty feet below us.

Even Possum would be feeling this heat, I thought to myself as we moved away from the shade of the tree canopy and back along the ravine’s edge. I was glad I hadn’t been tempted to bring him with us. Though I had the equipment to lower him down into the ravine with me, and Possum—like Highball—could negotiate the trails better than any human, today Chad and I were searching for objects, not people. Unless we were looking for tennis balls, I thought with a smile, Possum wouldn’t be any help in this kind of evidence search.

By necessity, our route was a meandering one, sometimes angling sharply away from the ravine and into the surer footing of the deeper forest. The last time Chad and I had passed this way, we’d been going in the opposite direction, carrying equipment back to the crime technician’s van. Then, we’d stopped along the way to remove the temporary trail markers that Chad had placed for the technicians’ safety. It was a strategy intended to discourage the curious or the ghoulish from visiting the murder site.

Now I noticed that much of our path was marked by plant life that had been broken or trampled underfoot on our previous visits. Easy enough, I feared, for someone to follow our trail straight to the crime scene. But then I told myself not to worry. That the weather predicted for tomorrow would take care of the problem. Rain and wind would cover any sign that
we’d come this way and make the “easy” route along the edge of the ravine discouragingly slick.

Something about that thought made me stop in my tracks.

Chad, who was walking close behind me, misinterpreted my reason for stopping.

“By my reckoning, we’re just minutes away from the scene,” he said once he was beside me. “Probably as good a time as any to take a breather.”

He took a couple dozen steps away from the precipice, stopping in a small clearing beneath a clump of pines. There, with an audible sigh, he slipped the gear he carried from his back, dropping it to the soft, needle-covered ground. After rolling his shoulders and stretching, he sat down. With his backpack supporting his back, he stretched out his long legs in front of him, twisted the top off his canteen and took a long swig.

Almost absentmindedly, I followed his example. I dropped down beside him and, with my canteen in my hands, supported my elbows on my knees. As fresh air cooled the damp patch between my shoulder blades, I looked back in the direction we’d just come. I put my canteen to my lips, took tiny sips, and let the cool water trickle slowly down my throat as I tried to tease the edges of a thought into something more substantial.

Undoubtedly, this was the most direct way to get to the scene. No other marked trails or access roads were nearby, so any other approach meant hiking for many miles through the deepest part of the forest. Chad and I had encountered—and avoided—any number of natural hazards just to get safely to our resting spot. And we had a lot of advantages. Our overall fitness. Years of experience trekking in the forest. Sturdy hiking boots. Familiarity with this route. Dry weather. And daylight.

“What are you thinking, Brooke?” Chad said.

I shook my head, briefly postponing my reply as I tried to sort through a tangle of facts and emotions. None of them happy.

I put my canteen down beside my pack and shifted so that I was facing Chad. Within an easy arm’s length of him. In his clear, green eyes and relaxed expression, I saw nothing more than friendship and trust. And maybe a little curiosity.

Hope, I thought bleakly, had blinded us both to the obvious.

“Would you hike along this ravine at night?” I said.

He shook his head immediately.

“No way. Too dangerous. You’d have to be crazy, suicidal, or a pretty gal determined to find a lost kid.”

The beginning of a smile conveyed the teasing compliment he’d intended. But, almost immediately, his smile wobbled and disappeared as insight ravaged any thoughts he might have had about finally putting his long-lost mother to rest.

Then I explained my reasoning. Because, though it made my heart ache to hurt him further, we were investigating a crime. Assuming that another investigator saw things exactly the way I did ran contrary to everything I’d been taught about law enforcement.

I delivered the information as gently as I could.

“At night, even in good weather,
no one
could have made it as far as the crime scene. Not without falling. The night your mother died, it was storming. And your father was drunk. He couldn’t have negotiated this trail, Chad. Especially not if your mother was fighting him. And she would have been, wouldn’t she?”

Chad nodded. Began scraping his fingernails along his cheek. But his expression remained almost emotionless and his voice was cool. Very detached.

I wondered how he managed it.

“You think we have a daylight killer,” he said flatly.

“Yeah. Or someone who disposed of the body in the forest during the day.”

“No. That’d be too risky. And too much work,” he said, echoing the conclusion I’d reached the night I’d found the remains. “Odds are, our victim died right there.”

By then, he was struggling to keep his voice steady.

“Thank you,” he said, “for seeing this. For telling me. This is your first murder investigation, but you’re thinking clearly. Professionally. I’m the one who let it get personal, let my emotions—”

That’s when his voice cracked. And he turned away. So I couldn’t see his face. But the way he was dragging his fisted fingers back and forth along his jaw made it easy enough to guess at his expression.

“I tried to keep my perspective, but I just kept thinking how it was my fault that she died, that she’s lost,” he continued. “The only person my daddy ever really wanted dead was me. His bastard son. That night, I think his hate just spilled over on my momma.”

He looked back at me, his eyes bright with the threat of tears.

“I shouldn’t have let her push me from that truck. I should’ve hung on. Should’ve stayed to protect her.”

And then you would have died for sure, I thought. But I didn’t tell him that because, at some level, I was certain that he already knew. That he understood he’d only been a boy back then. Not a man with big fists or a tough cop with a gun and the power of the law behind him. But his words proved that, at least at this moment, he was feeling a child’s helplessness. And guilt.

I knew exactly how that felt. And how much it hurt.

Without thinking, I leaned forward, gathered him in close,
closing the inches that separated us from each other. I held him as I often had in the past, during the other times he’d had to face old loss and newly shattered hope.

My fingers smoothed the short copper hair at the back of his head, stroked his broad shoulders, patted his back. I comforted him as if he were weeping, though he didn’t cry or even make a sound. Because I knew that cops—especially big male cops from small towns—were always afraid that someone might guess they weren’t nearly as tough as they seemed.

I don’t know when comforting and being comforted demanded more than mere holding. But in the space between one heartbeat and the next, the limits so carefully maintained between friends were forgotten as lovers became desperate to reunite.

Impossible to know whose lips were the first to seek the other’s, whose hands moved from caressing cheeks and face and hair to seeking more intimate warmth. But he was the one who unclipped my bra, who held my breasts cupped in his warm, callused hands. And I was the one who tugged his shirt from his waistband and skimmed my hands upward beneath it, following the contours of the muscles that wrapped his ribs, relishing the softness of the hair on his chest as it slid through my fingers and tickled my palm.

And whether his fingers slipped beneath the waist of my jeans before mine sought the zipper on his…Who was to know?

What mattered was that the days and nights of loneliness and longing were coming to an end. That Chad was back with me where he belonged. He pushed my willing body down onto a bed of soft pine needles and his lips moved against my bare skin, following the path of his hands.

As my eyes slitted with pleasure and my thoughts focused
inward, the canopy above me blurred into a kaleidoscope of green and shadows and dappled sunlight.

Shadows tore through the pattern. Black wings fluttered in the trees above us. Angry birds screamed out a warning.

Carrion birds. That was the image that flashed to mind.

Carrion birds with yellow beaks tipped in blood.

Caught off guard by a living nightmare, my eyes flew wide open, and my body tensed as I fought the impulse to panic. A cry, almost stifled, escaped my lips.

It was not a sound of satisfaction.

Chad lifted his head. Looked anxiously down at me.

I don’t know what he saw in my face. And for my part, I couldn’t put a name to the emotions I saw slide across his. But he tugged my shirt back down over my breasts and shifted away from me.

The crows continued flapping and cawing out an alarm, alerting each other to some threat to their flock.

Between Chad and me there was silence.

As we sat up, we were careful not to touch each other, careful not to meet each other’s eyes.

I wrapped my arms around myself, fighting my body’s reaction to frustrated desire. But if Chad hadn’t called a halt to our lovemaking, I knew that I would have. Months earlier, I’d had a good reason for sending him from my bed and insisting that we had no future together as lovers. Nothing about that had changed. Except that, in recent days, the situation seemed even worse. Yet knowing all that, I’d still stepped over the line I’d drawn for myself. And for Chad.

As I cursed myself for being a weak, self-indulgent fool, Chad’s hand moved to his right cheek again. But this time his fingers deliberately sought the bandage protecting the wound on his cheek. In it, he seemed to find inspiration.

He spat out a bitter accusation.

“If I hadn’t stopped, what exactly was that going to be? More first aid? A little sympathy sex for the ex-boyfriend?”

That’s when I looked straightforwardly into his angry green eyes. I’d hurt him, I thought, and not just today. If he now despised me, I deserved it. But I had to tell him the truth. At least, about this.

“It was more than that,” I said softly. “Not at all as trivial as you’re making it out to be. But, yes, it was a mistake. My mistake. And I’m sorry.”

It was troubling that he forgave me so quickly. That his next words carried no hint of rebuke. Or inquiry. Just resignation.

“I don’t understand…about us,” he said.

For the briefest moment, he extended his hand, almost touched my face. Then he curled his fingers back into a fist, dropped his arm to his side. Quickly, he rose to his feet and turned away as he spent a minute or two buttoning, zipping and tucking.

Just as well. Because I spent that time dashing away tears I didn’t want him to see.

He turned back in my direction when his clothing was neat again.

“Can we still be friends?” he asked almost brusquely.

I nodded, managed a shaky smile.

And I wasn’t lying to him. At least not about today or even tomorrow. But I knew now that our friendship was doomed. Had finally admitted to myself what I’d been so determined to deny. Chad and I would never stop wanting to be more than just friends. More that just lovers.

Only I understood why that was impossible.

W
e hiked to the crime scene.

For a moment we stood silently in front of the big cottonwood tree, our eyes drawn to the vine-shrouded split in its massive trunk. Chad’s hand crept up to the scar on his cheek, his expression signaling that his thoughts were on what he hadn’t found there. My thoughts were likely as bleak as Chad’s as I considered what
had
been found. A murdered woman’s remains and a corroded inhaler. And I feared that Katie’s mind held more answers than this scene—or the forensics report—would be likely to provide.

“Do you still want to do this?” I asked.

Chad dropped his hand, shrugged.

“Why not?” he said. “We’ve come this far. And who knows? We might just find something relevant.”

I thought, Why not? And then I said, “Okay. Let’s get to it.”

After that, whatever else was on our minds became secon
dary as we focused on familiar technical issues. The first was finding a safe place to descend. With the big cottonwood tree as our starting point, we walked in opposite directions along the edge of the ravine, peering downward.

A few minutes of searching, and Chad called from a dozen yards away.

“How about here?”

Here
turned out to be a near-perpendicular drop of about forty feet down an irregular rock face with no jutting ledges or branches or tangles of bush. But heaped up against the base of the wall was a ten-foot-tall pile of rocky debris.

“Looks good,” I said, “except for the riprap at the bottom.”

Chad dug a boot heel into the soil near the edge, creating a mini-avalanche of dirt, plants and pebbles.

“Thick enough here that the rock’s not exposed. So we won’t have to worry about our ropes fraying. We can keep looking, Brooke, but I’m not sure we’re going to find much better.”

I had to agree.

Rapping is deceptively simple.
Deceptively
being the key word. That’s what Chad and I’d learned during our earliest climbing forays back in high school. And that was now very much on my mind as we prepared for the climb down into the ravine. Chad, I noticed, was also checking every element of the system twice. It was a good idea in any event. A great idea given how much stress we’d both been under lately. Exhausted, anxious minds tended to make simple—and deadly—mistakes.

We’d climbed together so often that we worked efficiently, each of us concentrating on our specific tasks. Because he was stronger, Chad secured the two-bolt anchor to the trunk of a healthy tree that grew well back from the drop-off. Then he passed our rope through the rappel point he’d created.

While he did that, I strapped on my helmet and buckled on my climbing harness. At the front of my harness was a strong nylon belay loop. Using a locking carabiner, I clipped the small hole of a figure-eight device onto the loop. Then I threaded the rope that Chad handed me through and around the larger hole on the device. Finally, I used an autoblock to back up the rappel I’d created. If for any reason I lost my grip on the rope, the autoblock would keep me from sliding downward, out of control.

I checked my rigging one more time, backed up to the very edge of the precipice, then grinned at Chad. Who always managed to look his most worried at this point in the process.

You know you’re a cop if…you’re compulsive about over-protecting the ones you love.
And because the unbidden quip hurt rather than amused, I awarded myself no points. Instead, I touched a couple of fingers to my helmet and flipped him a quick salute.

“See ya,” I said, my voice cheerful.

Then I pushed off.

Into midair and falling.

Into a moment of absolute exhilaration.

I felt my harness catch my weight and leaned back into it, keeping my torso upright and my legs perpendicular to the wall. As if I were in an easy chair and my legs were resting on an ottoman. But I kept my knees slightly bent and my feet apart as I touched my boots to the vertical rock face.

With one hand on the autoblock so that it would slide and the other on the rope below to provide a bit of extra braking, I pushed away from the wall again and slid downward. Several repetitions later and my feet touched the pile of rubble. After that, I used the support of my rope and harness to offset the unpredictable movement of sliding rock beneath my feet.

And then I was down.

Chad lowered the awkward metal detector down on a separate length of rope. Then, several uneventful minutes later, he was in the ravine beside me, stripping off his helmet and harness.

For almost an hour, we concentrated on the area directly below the cottonwood tree and the pair of ledges that the state’s crime-scene technicians had processed. Using binoculars, Chad and I took turns examining the ravine wall, looking for anything that might have snagged on roots or rocks or nearby branches.

When that perspective produced nothing, we moved outward from the base of the bluff in a semicircle, toward the stream at the center of the ravine. Much of that time I spent half-bent over or kneeling, looking for bits of out-of-the-ordinary debris—smooth bits of bone, ragged scraps of clothing or any suggestion of a man-made object—among the vegetation and rocks.

For a time, Chad joined me in that kind of search. Then he used the metal detector, watching a small screen mounted near the handle as he slowly swept the instrument back and forth, holding it just inches above the relatively smooth surfaces along the stream bed and between rockfalls and rotted trunks.

Our search yielded an inch-long piece of bone that, to our untrained eyes, could have been human but might as easily have been animal. And a badly corroded horseshoe—big enough, I guessed, for a draft horse—that we both judged interesting but irrelevant.

After taking a break, we began working our way downstream, in the direction of the footbridge. We’d decided to search for several hundred feet along both sides of the stream, then double back to take one last look at the terrain. After that,
we’d climb back up our ropes. A process I never particularly looked forward to. Jugging was considerably more work than rapping. And a lot less fun.

The flip of a coin had given me the federal side of the ravine.

I took off my boots and socks, rolled up my jeans, and waded into the rocky stream, walking carefully so I wouldn’t slip on the slick rocks, but still enjoying the rush of cool water over my feet. Five strides in, and the water was just below my calves. Another few strides and I was back in shallow water, then a couple more long steps and I was high and dry on a pebble-strewn shore.

On my side of the stream, the distance between the water and the wall of the ravine was little more than twenty feet. And, looking downstream, I could see that it remained that way for quite a distance. So I went to stand at a rough midpoint between stream and bluff. Once there, I turned slowly in place, stopping to visually examine the ground ten feet behind me, ten feet to each side and, finally, ten feet in front of me. After that, I detoured from my spot to check behind anything within the makeshift grid that had obstructed my view. Then I returned to my starting point and walked forward twenty feet.

I repeated that process again.

And again.

I’d searched forward for more than one hundred feet when I stopped to rest. I lifted the ball cap that I’d traded for my safety helmet, ran my fingers through my damp curls and took a drink from my canteen.

I turned in Chad’s direction, caught his eye.

“Anything?” I yelled, noticing a slight echo.

“Nothing,” he hollered back. And that word, too, bounced off the rock walls, repeating itself.

I waved to acknowledge news that was not surprising, then put my cap back on my head and refocused on my search pattern. I’d already run my eyes over the entire section, but there was one spot that needed a closer look before I moved on to the next grid. A logjam created by previous years’ flooding had isolated one of the curves in the stream from the flow of fresh water, creating a stagnant pool.

I had turned my attention to the side of the logjam away from the pond when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Chad stop. Abruptly, he bent forward. Then he dropped to one knee. And shouted my name.

Without a second thought, I jogged in his direction, paralleling a stubby section of tree trunk, then crossing the slight mound of a nearby sandbar. The soles of my boots scrunched against the pebbly, uneven surface.

That’s when the ground beneath my right foot gave way. When I felt as much as heard a wet, hollow sound, like rotted sticks breaking.

My foot encountered an uneven surface about a dozen inches down.

Surprised, struggling to remain upright, I cried out once. Loudly.

I stood teetering for a moment, managed to find my balance. Then I looked down to see what I’d stumbled into.

My right foot was surrounded by a jagged cage of bones.

Then the smell hit me.

I gagged, yanked my foot away from the dark sludge oozing up over the toe of my boot. Pulled away a couple of broken ribs, one of them tangled in a piece of rotting fabric. With a row of buttons still attached.

I don’t know how long I stood there, just staring. Noticing that blackened flesh still clung to the torso. That splintered
bits of bone showed white at the ends of the ribs that I’d shattered. How everything else was blackened and decaying.

Just like Missy would be.

I shut my eyes.

A mistake.

That made it even easier to recall her bloodied face and single, staring blue eye. Made it even easier to remember the way the ends of her bullet-shattered ribs had ground together when I’d unbuckled her seat belt and pushed her down in the well in front of her seat. Covered her with a blanket. So that no one would see her as I drove…

I pushed those thoughts away, opened my eyes. But my head was already throbbing and my face seemed to be on fire. And no matter how shallowly I breathed, I couldn’t avoid the clinging, putrid smell.

Bile rose in my throat and I gagged again.

I didn’t want to contaminate the crime scene.

I turned, staggered back to the logjam, managed to make it to the far end of the stumpy log. Stood there, staring at a beetle crawling along the rough bark, holding my breath, pressing my lips shut, willing myself not to vomit.

And then my best friend was there behind me, his hands cool against my neck and shoulders, his voice soothing.

“No shame in being sick,” he said. “Sooner or later, every cop sees something that makes him puke. Lucky if it only happens once in your career. Don’t fight it. Just get it over with.”

He supported me as I retched violently, painfully onto the ground.

We worked around natural obstacles, pushing the sturdy wire stems of tiny orange flags into the ground, making the body a bull’s-eye at the center of an irregular circle.

When we were finished, I stood looking back at the body from the downstream side. Realized that, from this angle, I might have recognized a human form beneath a crusty layer of earth. Or noticed the triangle of tattered fabric that the sand hadn’t completely covered and recognized it as the corner of a man’s trousers. Unfortunately, what I now saw most clearly was the terrible damage my misplaced footstep had caused.

I sighed.

“Sure messed up that crime scene,” I said.

Chad put his hand on my shoulder, gave it a little squeeze before releasing it.

“You
found
the crime scene, rookie,” he said, smiling. “Don’t be greedy.”

Minutes later, we crossed the stream to deal with what Chad had found, the discovery that had prompted him to call out my name so urgently. The bits of spine he’d discovered near the mouth of a fox’s den prompted us to search for a few minutes longer. It took a much larger circle of flags to mark the scattered remains of a body that hadn’t been buried beneath a layer of sand. That’d had no protection from the teeth of small carnivores.

“Two,” I said, thinking out loud.

“Three if you count the first victim,” Chad corrected. “We should go back, call in. We’ve got a hell of a lot more here than a simple murder.”

I nodded, agreeing with him. But then I said: “Let’s walk for another hundred feet, see what’s there.”

“Greedy,” Chad repeated, then softened that judgment with his smile. “Which side of the stream do you want?”

I lifted my chin in the direction of the opposite ravine wall.

“I’ll go back there,” I said, mostly because I wanted an
excuse to wash my boots and the cuffs of my jeans in the stream again. And then I had another, unrelated thought. “The Feds are going to be involved in this one, aren’t they?”

Chad nodded, sighing heavily.

Because of Hardin County’s odd mix of jurisdictions, it wasn’t at all unusual for FBI field agents to work with deputies investigating crimes that took place in the forest. I’d never heard Chad complain about it, so didn’t understand his obvious lack of enthusiasm.

“I thought you liked working with those guys.”

“Those guys, yes,” he said. “But we both have the same gut feeling about what we’re going to find out here, don’t we? If we’re right, this will be a headline-getter—one of those cases that’s too high-profile to be left to mere field agents. And it’s been my experience that those big-city bureaucrats don’t play well with others.”

Twenty feet was all it took for me to confirm our gut feelings. Twenty feet and a sun-bleached skull hanging almost upside down in a fallen tree. Impaled on a jutting branch a few feet from the ground. A veil of browning leaves and other debris from the flooding that had put it there framed the jawless skull.

The branch entered through the right eye socket and exited through a slightly smaller man-made hole. The opposite route, I thought, than the bullet had taken. Strands of dried grass and tattered bits of fabric hung from the other eye socket. As I watched, a tiny yellow finch darted into that opening, intent on feeding a demanding chorus of nestlings inside the dome.

No shouting was needed over this one.

I simply planted a flag, crossed the stream and caught up with Chad.