Collecting the Dead (33 page)
It’s on the ground before me, just a brief touch no larger than a silver dollar. Maybe it was a heel, or an elbow. Maybe it was the palm of her hand as she tried to get away. Dead color, without pulse, faded by time. It’s starting to make sense, and I shiver at the realization.
“Come on.” I don’t wait to see if Jimmy’s following, I just charge after the shine. Sad Face’s trail stays to the animal path a short distance and then turns to the west. It doesn’t take long. A hundred and fifty feet into the scrub I find them, scars upon the ground, his shine all around them. The dirt covering the two graves has settled over the years, blending back into the surroundings by some degree, but the shine outlines them as clearly as yellow police tape around a crime scene.
Two graves, two distinct shines. I recognize them both.
I see where he laid their bodies while he dug the grave. One of them was still alive; she tried to get away. Bound hand and foot, she moved by the tiniest of increments as he toiled with the shovel. It took ten incremental moves to gain the first foot, less for the second foot, and soon she was ten feet from the monster at his hole. Distance gave her courage and she began in earnest, pulling with her bound wrists and pushing with her bound feet.
She found a rock.
It’s an old piece of granite the size of a football, but with a large chunk broken off; it leaves an edge, not sharp but enough.
Enough.
I kneel beside it, run my fingertips over the jagged, broken edge where she tried to sever her bindings; whether she succeeded or not, I can’t tell. The stain of old blood is on the rock where she cut herself in the frenzy of sawing and scraping, but there’s no trail leading away from the rock, no shine running away from the hole and the monster, running away to a future.
This is where he came for her.
I see it all in my head as if it were played out before me.
“Command—” I jump at the sound.
“—this is FBI, over.” Jimmy waits for a response. I don’t hear it because he’s using the earpiece, but Jimmy continues. “We have a crime scene at…” He checks his GPS unit for the coordinates and rattles off the latitude and longitude. “Looks like two shallow graves. One has been disturbed by predators, exposing a number of bones. They appear human.” Silence for a moment, then, “Negative, these appear to be earlier victims.” There’s another pause, this time longer. “Copy that. We’ll be standing by. FBI out.”
Five minutes later, Jimmy’s earpiece startles him. “Go ahead,” he replies, fumbling with the radio. As Jimmy listens, he shakes his head slowly. “Copy that.” There’s a pause, then, “I don’t know. I’m not sure of anything right now.” Pause. “Yeah, I’ll tell him.”
“What? Tell me what?” I blurt as Jimmy lowers the radio.
“That was Walt. He just heard from the hospital. Zell’s dead.” Jimmy looks at the graves, then at the sky, then at the great nothing on the far horizon.
“He wasn’t going to help us anyway,” I say flatly.
“Still…” Jimmy leaves the word dangling.
“We’ll find Susan,” I insist, trying to sound confident. “We’ll find her alive. And we’ll find Lauren and bring her home. There’s nothing else to be done about it. This is the way it is.”
A half hour passes slowly before the first vehicle arrives. More follow. Crime-scene tape goes up around the graves, photos are taken, measurements, everything. A trail of small red flags marks the path from the dirt road to the crime scene. It’s another hour before Dr. Noble Wallace and his understudy show up.
“You caught me just as I was about to tee off,” Dr. Wallace says as he exits the coroner’s van and shakes hands all around. He and Walt talk golf for a minute, which I find odd … and not just because we’re at a crime scene. I’ve only ever played miniature golf, which probably doesn’t count. Still, from my limited experience, Nob looks every bit the golfer, and I can easily picture him on the green driving a ball down range.
Walt’s a different story.
The sheriff is a big man—which is great if you’re a cop, but I’m not sure how that might translate to golf. From their brief conversation, however, I get the impression he’s not half bad, but then they switch gears and we’re back to bodies and shallow graves.
“I’m afraid this is going to be a slow process,” Nob tells Walt. “We’ll be digging them out one trowelful at a time, cleaning the bone with the tip of a brush as we go. Every scoop of dirt will get sifted for evidence. Anything that was lodged in the body is now part of the soil, so that’s the only way we’ll find a bullet fragment or the broken edge of a knife—evidence that points to manner of death.
“Any idea who they are?” Nob asks; this time he’s looking straight at me.
Tawnee Rich and Ashley Sprague
, I think to myself, but for Nob I just shake my head and say, “They’ll be on Zell’s death list.”
Nob seems satisfied and helps his assistant retrieve several waterproof cases from the van. As a ten-legged group, we make our way along the red-flagged trail.
“I can’t tell you how long it’s going to take,” Nob says in response to a question from the sheriff. “This isn’t a normal crime scene for us; in fact, I don’t think I’ve done a shallow grave for at least five years. Every bone is going to need to be photographed in place, tagged, and bagged. I’m also going to need to take some soil samples and who knows what else. Our actions, and the time it takes, will be dictated by what we find.”
Nob, Walt, and the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office still have a case to build. Zell may be dead, but they need to show the public that this was his work, that the real killer has come to ultimate justice, and that there’s no more danger. That comes from evidence.
I don’t need evidence.
I have shine.
July 9, 12:13
P.M.
“We’re burning daylight, Jimmy.”
“I know.”
“Then what are we waiting for? Walt’s got things under control here. We’re not CSI, this isn’t our show.”
“We found them … I just want to make sure—”
I step in front of Jimmy as he tries to move past, placing my hand solidly on his chest. “It’s—not—our—show,” I repeat. That seems to pull him back. Jimmy’s a cop at heart; I’m not. It’s hard to step back from a crime scene when your nature is to dive in and help; and it doesn’t matter what kind of help, you could be holding a flashlight for the world’s biggest jerk of a detective and it would be enough; you would know that you were helping in some small way.
Pulling Jimmy away from a crime scene is like pulling an open bottle from the hands of an alcoholic: there’s bound to be some resistance. But we’ve wasted too much time standing idly by while we should be looking for Susan.
“We save the ones we can.” The mantra spills from my lips out of habit or just some misguided hope. “Susan’s still out there and we’re close. I can sense it. If he’s burying bodies here, he must have a cabin or a bunker nearby that he’s operating from. It only makes sense. As remote as this place is, there’d be no reason to pack a body out for disposal. This whole area is one big hiding place.” I give Jimmy a light punch to the left chest; it’s like punching an oak wearing a T-shirt. “Come on, you know I’m right. Let’s go find her.” Then, in a softer voice, I add, “Please?”
The word is long in coming: “Okay.” Pulling it out of him is like yanking a rubber boot from ankle-deep mud. “I’ll let Walt know,” he says.
Jimmy wanders off and I wonder if I’m going to have to wait another hour before he breaks free again, but he’s back in less than two minutes and we make our way with long strides back to the quads.
The dirt road is a logjam of emergency vehicles, with the Kawasakis hemmed in tight on the right shoulder of the road. It takes some maneuvering, but we skirt around the barrier of cars and SUVs and soon the hum and vibration of the Brute Force ATV again becomes my world.
My eyes never leave the road, darting from the left to the right and back again, looking for any sign of Sad Face. Five minutes pass, then ten, twenty. I’m just about to suggest backtracking a few miles and taking a road that cut to the southwest.
Then I see it.
It’s not shine; it’s not even overly promising; but it’s worth investigating. At the edge of the road are two parallel tracks heading due north—vehicle tracks. The two narrow strips are well worn, suggesting frequent usage, but the driver was careful to always drive exactly in the same path each time, keeping the tracks narrow and less noticeable.
I’m right next to the trail before I see it, and almost decide to just keep riding. Instead, I brake hard and hail Jimmy on the headset as I circle back.
“Whatcha got?”
“Looks like someone’s been off-road,” I reply. “You can tell the trail’s been here awhile, but there are also signs of recent activity.” I pull the quad onto one of the ruts and reach down. Picking up the crushed golden petals of a California poppy, I hold them up as evidence.
“Very recent,” Jimmy confirms. He tips his helmet down the rutted way. “Lead on.”
But there’s little leading to do; the trail dies quickly.
Three hundred feet beyond the road, the earthen ruts suddenly sputter and fail. And spilled upon the ground at the terminus of this wayward spoor, as if in testament to the sudden death of the trail, a rust-textured amaranth shine lies upon the dirt. It paints the wild grasses and the low brush. Like the slime trail of a neon slug, it presses itself into the earth and leads north to a dense copse of trees.
Blackness lies within.
“This is it,” I whisper. “It’s all fresh.” My voice mutates into a barely controlled staccato. “He was here within the last few days, and he’s been here a lot.” I look around and gasp. “He’s all over the place.”
The thicket is two, perhaps three acres, yet even in the midday sun, the belly of the small wood is cast in deep shadow. The trees are uninviting and the array of thorn-riddled bushes around the edge couldn’t have been better placed. It’s almost as if they were intentionally planted and cultivated … and perhaps they were. This is exactly the type of spot Zell would have chosen; his own woodland fortress. What better way to protect it than to plant a wall of thorns around the perimeter?
“Over here,” I yell, bolting forward, weaving past the thorns and into the center of the copse of trees, where I tear into a pile of brush, tossing aside dead bushes recently stacked there and nearly hitting Jimmy with one of the shrubs in the process. It doesn’t faze him; he’s as eager as I am and tears into the brush pile.
“I see it!” Jimmy shouts, kicking the last of the debris out of the way. It’s the end of the trail; the Holy Grail. Laid out upon the ground is a rectangular black metal hatch about three feet by two feet, with a thick clasp on one end that’s secured with a solid brass Master Lock padlock.
“Call it in!” I cry, searching my pockets for anything metal that we can use to pick the lock and finding nothing.
“Walt, this is Jimmy, do you copy?” There’s a pause, then, “We found it, Walt. We found Zell’s bunker.” He rattles off the GPS coordinates. “Hurry, Walt. We don’t know if she’s got air down there—or when she last had water.” As an afterthought he adds, “And we’re going to need some bolt-cutters.” Pause. “No, I think it’s too big to shoot off.” Pause. “Copy that.”
Finding my pockets useless and nearly empty, I turn to the backpack and am just about to upend it and empty the contents on the ground when a thought suddenly occurs to me. Dropping the bag, I glance around, searching the ground.
Jimmy’s yanking on the hasp to no avail and gives up in disgust. Like me, he begins to search the ground, but we’re searching for two different things. Ten seconds later, he has what he wants and returns to the hasp with a two-inch-diameter branch in hand. He’s trying to get an angle on the latch when he notices me and pauses, watching.
“What are you doing?”
I hold a single finger in the air; a signal for him to wait, a signal for patience. Following the various trails of shine drifting off from the main pool, I check eight locations before the hunch pays off.
Tossing the three-pound rock aside, I retrieve the small treasure hidden beneath and hurry back to Jimmy, dangling the single brass key between my index finger and my thumb. Placing it in Jimmy’s palm, I close his fingers around it. “I was thinking like Zell,” I say, trying to control the fear and adrenaline coursing through my body. “If I had a place like this, I wouldn’t want to risk losing the key or driving all the way out here and forgetting it.”
Jimmy’s quiet a moment, staring at the key. “Good work, Steps.” His words are soft and I know he’s feeling the same apprehension. We’ve felt it before on too many cases; sometimes it ended well, sometimes it didn’t.
We save the ones we can
.
It’s an odd sensation. I felt the same prickly panicky rush when we were waiting for the results of my mother’s biopsy last year. A mammogram turned up an “anomaly,” and we had to wait nearly two weeks for the results. They told us when to expect the lab report, so on the big day we all gathered at my parents’ place and spent the day playing cards, watching movies, watching the phone.
The call came just before four.
As my mother stood in the kitchen with the phone pressed to her ear, nodding and answering in one-word sentences, it felt like every pore in my body was open and sweating. My body tingled with panic and fear, and my stomach was a twenty-pound concrete ball.
And then she turned and smiled … and it all washed away like so much dust under a warm spring shower. It was as if my soul just shrugged and let it all go. That night I slept for fourteen hours.
“Are you ready?” Jimmy has the key in the lock.
I nod and immediately hear a
click
as the key turns. Jimmy twists the lock from the latch and then pulls back the hasp. Together we lift the lid and reveal a rectangle of darkness yawning in the earth, like the lair of some feral beast.
A foul smell oozes from the black hole … a familiar smell.
I cover my nose quickly and reel back. “Jimmy, that’s—”
“I know,” he says, trying not to gag. “Let it air out a minute.”
