What Hides Within (3 page)

Nothing. He's learning. But he always picks the same old hiding places.

Alexia shrugged. She crept slowly toward the trunk of the oak, her fingers outstretched like claws, mimicking the roots of the tree she approached. Standing beside the tree's base, she wondered if he knew he'd been found.

"Got you!" she yelled, darting around the oak's roots. What she had caught, however, was merely disappointment. Her brother was gone.

"You're getting better," she said, the pride in her voice evident. After all, she taught him everything he knew.
You can't get caught if you keep moving
, she always told him. Of course, that plan worked for her because she was faster than Timothy.

"But don't get cocky," she called, glancing about the woods. "I'm hot on your trail."

She picked up the path blazed by Timothy's footprints and followed it deeper into the forest. It coincided with a dark, red streak that appeared as though someone had dragged a large paint brush along the ground, sweeping away the pine needles and leaves to create a landscape of red and brown. Along the trail, she saw a sparkling blue shimmer. Alexia reached for it and considered herself lucky. Someone had lost a beautiful sapphire earring, and now she was its proud owner. She stuffed it into her pocket and continued down the makeshift trail.

It wasn't long before she came upon her brother. He stood with his back to her, motionless, silent and unhidden. He didn't so much as stir as she made her approach.

"Hey," she said. "You didn't even try this time."

Timothy didn't respond. He remained motionless, his back still to her. Alexia moved closer but slower, more cautiously. Something seemed out of sorts. Timothy loved hide-and-seek. It was his favorite game. It wasn't like him to miss the point of it so thoroughly.

"Don't think I'm not going to tag you. You'd better start running and hiding." Alexia laughed, but it was a nervous laughter rather than her usual, joyous one. Her brother seemed lifeless, and it worried her.

"Timothy?" Her anxiety amplified. "What's wrong, Timothy?" With no answer forthcoming, she raced to him.

When she reached her brother's back, she squatted to his eye level. Grabbing his shoulders, she wrenched him around so that the two were face-to-face. He didn't resist.

Alexia succumbed to desperation and confusion, and it made her cry. The look on Timothy's face seized her fear and exploited it. His expression was ghastly, his skin pale and clammy. His eyes were blank, lightless, like those of the dead. He wouldn't speak.

Alexia shook him softly. "What is it, Timothy? Tell me what's wrong."

Not knowing what else to do, she drew Timothy into her, clasping him snuggly within her arms. Her chin rested tightly against his shoulder. From that vantage point, she could see behind him. What she saw made her scream, a scream so loud that it sent her parents running from their home toward them.

Behind her innocent, sweet brother, Alexia saw the body of a little girl no older than Timothy himself, perhaps a classmate of his even. Her flesh was torn and ravaged. Her remains told a story of unspeakable atrocities, its message retold through the face of its impressionable discoverer.

***

"Where's the body?"

Detective Samantha Reilly approached the officer on duty. Her words were monotone, void of compassion. They reflected her composure, confident but stern. She had a sureness about her one only obtains through experience. With her athletic body and wavy brown hair hidden beneath a drab, grey trench coat, she made herself as androgynous as possible. But her face was all woman, beautiful yet unapproachable, the gravity found therein enough to scare off the most daring playboy. It bore the markings of her long career.

Reilly had been a police officer for nearly a decade and had seen the worst Fall River had to offer: armed robbery, arson, gang rape, and the foulest of the foul, murder. Just last year, the city had seen its first serial killer since Lizzie Borden hacked her parents to bits. The beginning of the end, Reilly called it. But it was more like the end of the end, the city's last step into the lowest depths of oblivion. The final chapter had closed on all that was once good and moral about her city.

"It's a little deeper in," the officer replied.

Reilly knew the officer well. Captain Horatio Sanchez was a friendly face back at the precinct. Out there, though, he didn't seem friendly.

Sanchez's face was worn by the years, his expression despondent. His voice was soft and dejected, but he was no rookie. Reilly knew he had spent enough time on the force to share her nightmares, provoked by the horrors their profession caused them to witness.

No ordinary body would have caused the distress Reilly read in Sanchez's eyes. She prepared herself for a disturbing crime scene. And when a child was involved, sentiment and emotions often flared.

Reilly followed Captain Sanchez toward the dead oak tree that had housed a happy, playful boy only an hour prior. Timothy's sneaker prints marred the earth amid splatters of blood. To Reilly, the oak's decaying branches foretold death and the labors that would follow. Halogen lights circled the tree's roots and formed a trail deeper into the woods in preparation for the oncoming twilight. The lighting cast an eerie glow on the hollow innards of the tree. Reilly shuddered as she approached its uprooted veins.

"It looks like the victim was dispatched here," Sanchez said. "Then she was dragged a hundred yards or so farther into the woods."

Reilly stared at the blood--so much blood. It was everywhere, soaking the leaves around her feet, streaking alongside the lighted pathway.

"How many victims are there?" she asked, unable to believe that a single body could contain that much blood.

"Only one that we could find. My best guess is that the short rain shower we had earlier only soaked the ground enough to moisten the blood rather than wash it away. It flowed easier with the water, spread around more. Although it looks bad, I'm guessing that most of what we see is just blood-stained water. With the ground already drying, the blood is curdling and is giving off that horrid stench closer to the body. Come on, I'll show you."

As they neared the body, Sanchez stopped. "I should warn you. This isn't pretty."

"Same old shit, different day," Reilly scoffed.

She cared little for the victims of the city's depraved and lecherous. Her job had desensitized her, particularly over the last few years. Too many had been victimized, so much that, to Reilly, it was no longer shocking but commonplace. The dead were no more than objects to her, something to analyze but never befriend. They weren't innocent. No one in that shit hole of a city was.

"If you say so," the seasoned officer replied. Reilly sensed that her words had shot like bullets into his soul. She could see that Sanchez felt for the victim. She couldn't understand why. When they beheld the body sprawled lifeless on the naked earth, Sanchez reeled. Then he steadied himself, a true professional.

Reilly, however, couldn't help her morbid curiosity. She moved in for a closer look.

"Good God!"

She thought she'd seen everything, but the victim before her touched even Reilly's indelicate sensitivities. She covered her gaping mouth with her hand.

"Who is she?"

"We're not sure. We cross-referenced her with all the missing children in the area. She may be Valerie Page. Page was reported missing two days ago. The description her parents gave us matches that of the deceased, blonde hair, blue eyes. Even her age, eleven years old, seems to coincide with that of the deceased's. We won't know for sure until somebody checks dental records or the parents identify her, or what's left of her and her clothing."

"Please tell me no one has called them yet."

"The parents? No. We figured we'd let the morticians clean her up a bit first."

"Good work, Horatio."

Reilly peered in closer to the body. She flipped back the adolescent girl's jacket with her pen. Half the victim's rib cage had been torn open. Her entrails lay strewn about her. Parts of some organs were missing; others were missing altogether. Her flesh hung shredded and torn.

"Only an animal could have done something like this."

The image before Reilly had already begun to haunt her, yet she couldn't avert her stare. Human depravity had hit a new low.

"In some ways, you're right, literally speaking. Most, if not all, of the lesions weren't made by anything human. If you look closely at the wounds that serrate her neck, you'll notice some well-defined teeth marks."

Reilly's heart sunk. "Don't tell me--"

"No!" Sanchez exclaimed, realizing immediately that Reilly had misunderstood him. "God no. Those bites are canine. I'm guessing the coyotes got to her body before we could."

"Are you suggesting this wasn't a homicide?"

"With all the blood spread around like it is, her heart had to be still pumping when the coyotes found her. It makes me sick. She was just a kid." Sanchez gasped. He swallowed hard.

"It's not unheard of for coyotes to attack small children, babies and toddlers mostly. But this girl looks just shy of her teens, and an animal attack wouldn't explain how she got out here in the first place."

"No, it wouldn't."

Reilly's smugness rang clear. She knew murder when she saw it. The only parts that the animal kingdom played in this were in the obliteration of her crime scene and the desecration of her evidence. Even on the off-chance that the girl had lived somewhere in the vicinity and her caretakers had simply let her wander off alone, someone was responsible. Reilly was going to make sure that someone hanged for it.

"Hey, I'm merely giving my admittedly unqualified opinion," Sanchez protested. "I'll leave the detecting to you detectives."

"You're right. I'm sorry. All avenues must be explored. At the least, the coyotes may have dragged some evidence back to their den. Looking for that could be difficult. Plus, there's no guarantee we'd find anything unless we cut them all open."

Reilly delved deeper into the remains. "I've seen markings like these before." She jabbed her pen into the exposed ribcage, highlighting for the officer a set of small slashes and partially chipped bone barely visible within the bloodless skeleton. "Those cuts weren't made by teeth. They were made by a knife."

Reilly rose to her feet. For the first time since she laid eyes upon the corpse, she was able to turn away from it. It was time to begin her search for answers. She hoped the search wouldn't be long.

"Okay. Keep the perimeter in place. No one besides me, you, and forensics comes anywhere near this place."

"Got it."

"Who found the body?"

"A boy, Timothy Samartino, and his sister, Alexia."

"Did they see anyone or anything?"

"The boy is too traumatized to speak. From what I could gather from his sister, they were playing hide-and-seek when the boy stumbled upon the body."

Sanchez's gaze returned to the body. "It looks like she's been here at least one day. I doubt the kids would be able to help much."

"Like I said, all avenues must be explored. Particularly now, when we have no other leads to follow up on."

"Understood. We'll get full statements from the entire family."

"Whose tracks are those?"

Reilly approached a large footprint, too big to be that of a child. Others like it tapered off farther into the woods, barely visible under the dimming sky.

"We assume they belong to the perp."

"Where do they lead?"

"We lost track of them not far from an opening to the woods on Dyer Avenue. We think he may have entered and left from there. There aren't too many houses in that area, which means less people would have been around to see him."

"Get people over there right away to question the neighbors. And tell the lab rats to get their sorry asses up here already, before nightfall and the return of scavenging coyotes. Have them concentrate their investigation around the tree and the body, and branch out from those two focal points. Despite animal tampering, this site has got to be infested with evidence. Dumping a body out in the open like this, not even trying to hide it? This guy wants to get caught. Let's not fail to oblige him."

Clive awoke the next morning to a piercing headache. The incessant wail of the alarm clock was no consolation. He hurriedly swatted it off. Without air conditioning, his second-floor apartment was sweltering hot. The fall heat wave continued yet another day. More than a few "experts" blamed it on global warming. The heat brought out the crazy in everyone. It always did.

It made Clive a little crazy, too. Sweat drenched his body and his sheets. How he ever managed to fall asleep in that climate was a mystery to him.

Already drained before his day could begin, Clive still would have preferred the sticky, stale heat under his bed sheets over the alternative. But his need for a paycheck forbade that option. He sat up, put his feet to the floor, and braced himself for another shitty day at the Harcourt Insurance Company.

At Harcourt, Clive wasn't lucky enough to sell insurance. Instead, he was relegated to a dead-end, data entry position with no chance of career growth or job satisfaction. Most of his day was spent flicking paperclips over the walls of his cubicle at half-expecting coworkers or surfing the latest entertainment gossip on the Internet. He could recall all of Lindsay Lohan's latest fashion flubs and lesbian escapades and was a diehard follower of the Brittney child-custody saga. His day wasn't filled with fulfillment.

When Clive arrived at Harcourt, he did his best to make it unannounced. He sat at his desk, buried his head in his hands, and planned to space out for his first hour of work, a usual Monday ritual. It wasn't until that moment that Clive realized his ear was still clogged.

"Are you ignoring me?" a gorgeous brunette asked, pressing her shapely hip against the edge of Clive's desk. She hung just over his right shoulder, an angelic beacon in the sea of despair he bitterly called work.

"What?" Clive asked, barely making out the muffled jargon coming from the woman's perfectly pouted lips. He tugged on his right earlobe and realized his hearing troubles persisted.