What the River Knows (2 page)

Bates met him just inside the door. “Glad to see you, Aylward.” He took a sip of the cup from the table, made a face, and tossed it in the trash. “Even with help, this will take a while.”

Scott nodded toward the notepad. “What have you got so far?”

Bates turned to pick up the pad, consulting his notes with the thoroughness that had earned him Chief Detective, even though he probably had every detail stored neatly in his mind. “Not much. She left work with the bank deposit before 3:30, just as usual.” He glanced up. “She has an office to herself, but the door is usually open with three other ladies just outside. Several of them mentioned that she had gone through a divorce about a year ago, but after the initial emotional trauma, that had seemed to settle down to be a fairly amicable one.” He laughed. “As if there is such a thing.”

Scott nodded. Many of his fellow officers had first-hand knowledge of the bitterness of divorce. It was an occupational hazard. “What do you want me to do?”

Bates pulled a sheet of paper from his notebook. “I’ve got fifteen left to interview.” He wrote some names quickly on another sheet and tore it from the notepad. “Would you take seven and I’ll take eight?” He handed the sheet to Scott. “Check with the receptionist for a room to use and to get them in there.”

Scott glanced at the list. “Are they all as upset as the last one?”

Bates nodded. “At least the women have been. The last one was here when she was hired.”

Scott headed back down the corridor. Again, curious faces watched him.

He was just interviewing his last witness, Sandy the receptionist, when Bates’ face appeared in the window of the smaller conference room Scott had been assigned. Scott motioned Bates in. His bulk filled the doorway as he edged inside. Sandy glanced up at him. Though her eyes were rimmed with tears, and she had stopped to master herself often, she hadn’t cried during the interview. “Sandy, would you please tell Detective Bates what you just told me.”

“Sure, Detective Aylward.” She turned to face Bates, who stood at the end of the table, another cup in his hand. “Delia had a direct line, so not many of her calls went through the switchboard, unless she didn’t answer, then they would roll to me.” She glanced back at Scott. “I’ve been here about a year and a half, so I was here when she went through her divorce. I know her husband’s voice, and he’s been calling her a lot the last two or three months. Or maybe she’s not taking his calls and that’s why they’ve been rolling to me.” She glanced down at her hands. “I haven’t asked her.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “Maybe I should have.”

Scott put down his pen. “Thanks, Sandy, you’ve been helpful.”

“I hope so,” she said, standing. “I hope you find her soon.” She turned toward the door, glancing at Bates briefly. “And safe.”

Scott sighed and closed his notebook. “How did your interviews go?”

Bates dropped into the chair Sandy had just left. “Hard.” He gulped the coffee in the cup, stared at it, and tossed the cup. “Everyone seems to like her, though she kept to herself somewhat. No indication that she may have just taken off. From what they say, she was pretty content with her life, things were smoothing out between her and the ex; they were doing fairly well in sharing custody of their three-year-old daughter. He had the baby this week, or the sitter might have raised an alarm if she wasn’t picked up.”

“Have we talked to the ex-husband?”

Bates nodded. “When he called her in missing, and again when we found the car.” He laid his notebook on the table. “Guy seemed pretty shook up.” He looked up at the clock in the room. “Shit, we’d better get these interviews typed up.”

Scott glanced at his watch. Five-thirty. This office must be ready to close; he’d seen several people heading past the door as he interviewed people. And his phone hadn’t vibrated, no call from Rica, even though she must have been home at least an hour by now. She was likely very pissed at him. “I’ll just grab some fast food and head back to the station.”

Bates chuckled. “Can’t get used to typing them up on the laptop in the car?”

“All the cars were out, so I drove my own truck.”

Bates stood. “I’m gonna run home for dinner, hug the wife and kids, then I’ll catch you at the station. Maybe we can have a meeting with the other investigators there, see if anyone’s turned up anything.”

“Roger.” Scott stretched, not accustomed to sitting for such long periods. He followed Bates out of the room, and they bumped into a tall man in a good gray suit.

“Did you get any leads?” the man asked Bates, with a glance at Scott.

Bates shrugged. “We’ll see if anything goes anywhere.”

The man followed them to the door and pulled keys from his pocket. “I’ll let you out.”

“Howard Moran, company president,” Bates remarked, after they stepped from the cool office to the convection oven of Kansas in July.

“How’s his reaction?”

“He’s concerned. Small company, he knows all of the employees. But he’s also got a tough bottom line to keep him occupied.”

Scott turned toward his pickup. “Yeah, gotta keep an eye on that bottom line.” He unlocked and rolled down the windows, to let the hot air escape, though it was so hot outside that there was very little change until he started the motor and kicked the air to high. It was the beginning of their third straight week of triple-digit heat. Even with the air on high, he was nearly to Thirtieth Street and the Arby’s he had in mind before the cab of the truck was cool enough to dry the sweat on his face.

He pulled out his cell phone to double check for messages. Nothing. He knew he should call Rica, or stop by the apartment to share the dinner he had prepared, but he also knew she would be mad, likely to start throwing things, and he had too much to do on this case to deal with her now. It sounded from the radio traffic squawking out of the walkie-talkie at his belt like a typically busy summer evening—speeding, stalled cars, several fender-benders. All the street officers were working their asses off in this blast furnace, making Scott glad he’d made detective last year, even though it meant more irregular hours, and, perhaps, put even more strain on his marriage.

He pulled into the drive-through lane at Arby’s, trying to decide if he’d go for one of the new sandwiches he’d seen on TV or stick with his standard regular roast beef, while he waited on the two cars ahead of him. The cab had cooled off, so he had to turn down the temperature as well as the fan on the air. That was the beauty of having a regular cab mini-pickup—it didn’t take long to heat up or cool down. It was the only advantage.

The radio at his left side crackled. “Any available unit.” He grabbed for it.

“Seventy-three here,” he gave his radio number.

“Have a call that a walker has found a body on the dike by the river, just west of the Big D.”

“Ten-four.” He swung his little truck out of line. “I’m on my way.”

Chapter 3

It took Scott eight minutes with his under-hood flashing lights to work his way through traffic to the south end of town. He crossed through the intersection of Highways Fifty and Sixty-one and turned west on the frontage road past a long-closed truck stop, now storage for highway construction material, that all the natives still referred to as the “Big D.” Near the end of the road, where a locked access gate shut off traffic except for official maintenance vehicles, a middle-aged man with a yellow Labrador retriever sat on the gatepost. The dog panted in the heat, and the man looked up as Scott’s vehicle approached.

Scott was pulling out his badge as he threw the truck in park and scrambled to the sandy roadway. “Detective Aylward, PD.”

“Thank God, you’re here.” The man moved toward him, the dog at his side wagging his tail in greeting. Scott noted that he seemed pale under his sweat. “Ed Thorson,” he said. As Scott drew abreast of him, he turned away, waving his arm to the south. “She’s over there. Beau found her.” He patted the dog beside him. “It was awful. I pulled him back as quick as I figured out what he found.” His hands were shaking and scratched. “I didn’t want to destroy any evidence.”

“You’re sure she was dead?”

The man merely nodded, his face growing even paler.

Scott stepped over the access gate arm. “To the south?” It had to be south; to the north the path led under the highway, totally exposed to traffic. He knew the north end of the trail well; he ran it every day he could. The south end wasn’t officially trail; just a footpath along the top of the dike that a few people like the dog-walker used. Even the dirt bikes and ATV’s kept to the riverbed north of the bridge.

The man nodded, leaning over the gate, but making no move to cross it. “Almost to the big cottonwood.” He indicated a huge gnarled tree about a hundred yards from the gate. “Maybe twenty feet from the pathway, by an old tree trunk, through a sand plum thicket.”

“Wait here. I’ll need to take a formal statement.” Scott glanced back at him. “But you might wait in the shade over there.” He pointed to a grove of scrubby autumn olive trees throwing a lengthening shadow along the ditch at the edge of the road.

He scrambled up the steep face of the dike, trying to maintain his professional demeanor and keep the sand out of his shoes as he waded through the deep pocket of sand deposited at the base of the dike. In years past, the dikes had protected the flat city from the waters of the raging Arkansas River when it flooded. In Scott’s memory, the dikes had seemed pointless, as the once-mighty Ark now barely murmured as it flowed past the city, tamed by John Martin Reservoir in Colorado and increased pumping from the Ogallala Aquifer beneath it. He studied the ground at the top of the dike. The dry sand of the hardened path told few stories, as the relentless wind swept it daily. He saw shallow depressions that perhaps indicated the footsteps of the man and the dog, but they were indistinct. He pulled out the radio.

“Seventy-three to dispatch.”

“Go ahead, seventy-three.”

“Have the reporting party waiting at my truck at the end of the dike road. Might get another unit en route to help secure the scene if needed.”

“Ten-four. Will send the next available unit.” That meant that other officers were still busy. He would be on his own, even if he needed backup.

“Twenty-one to seventy-three.” He heard Bates’s tired voice crackle at him.

“Go ahead, twenty-one.”

“I can be there in ten minutes.”

“Ten-four. Thanks.” He slipped the radio back in its case and started cautiously south along the top of the dike. Step by step, he walked as lightly as he could, scanning all around the pathway for anything not native to the site. Halfway to the cottonwood, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up, and he unsnapped his holster. He slowed his pace within twenty feet of a gray and twisted tree trunk that must have once supported a massive cottonwood, but now instead provided a windbreak that allowed sand to settle in its lee and let shrubs gain a foothold. He looked down the sloping bank of the dike toward the river, noting the lazy flow as it rippled barely a foot deep in half a dozen shallow braided channels within the banks. A gray heron took off from a sand bar, long legs dangling behind him.

He stopped and squatted to view the path from a different angle. Just this side of the tree trunk, he saw indistinct grooves in the sand of the path that could have been made by a body being dragged. Big bluestem waved behind the tree trunk, and a sand plum thicket guarded the north side of the approach. Buffalo grass carpeted the ground from the path to the tree, obscuring any sign from this angle. He stood up again.

Now it looked like there were faint marks in the grass, here and there, that could be drag marks. He continued on the other side of the path, careful not to disturb the sign. At last he was even with the northern edge of the sand plum thicket. Again, he went down to see what he could observe from this angle. He spotted some broken branches and a few tufts of buff fur, where the dog had bounded in to make his discovery and dragged the man in his wake. He followed the path of fur and branches with his eyes, and finally saw something large and too pale a pink to belong in that environment. Reminding himself to stay detached and professional, he stepped up on the tree trunk to get a better view.

She lay naked, legs spread as if inviting, one arm flung over her abdomen, the other at her side. Blood matted the once golden hair that splayed around her head, her throat black and gaping in a grotesque smile. Flies buzzed about the wound. Her eyes, wide open and as blue as the sky around him, seemed to seek his and hold them. He had seen death before, but his stomach clenched despite his resolve, and he hopped down from the tree trunk to grab the radio.

Hands shaking, he took a deep breath to steady his voice and coughed to quiet his stomach before he keyed the mike. “Seventy-three to twenty-one.”

“Twenty-one. I’m almost to the gate. Got your reporting party in sight.”

“Twenty-one, I found the forty.” He paused, gulping for air. “It’s the one we were looking for.”

The radio stayed silent a full two seconds. “Secure the scene, then, till we get the crew here.”

Scott stood, the radio in his hand, eyes scanning the scene. The cottonwood swayed in the wind above him, leaves twinkling as if death did not surround it. What had the tree seen, not just Delia’s death, but the other life and death struggles it must have witnessed in its half-century or so of clinging to the bank of the life-giving river? And the river. How many deaths had it seen, even caused, in the eons it had cut through the prairie? What secrets had it swept away in its deceptive currents?

He forced himself back to cold logic to keep from seeing her eyes. She had obviously been dead at least several hours, although he knew that the stages of decay after death accelerated rapidly in the kind of heat they’d had the past two weeks. And he hadn’t seen any pool of blood around her wound, which probably meant she had been killed elsewhere and the body dumped.

The hot wind blew over and around him, drying the sweat from his face and body, carrying the scent of death away from him. He heard radio traffic, as the officers who doubled as the forensics team gathered near the gate. The dead end road would soon be very busy.