Fatal Storm (9 page)

“We need proof,” John said. “We need to
compare John Doe's fingerprints with Rick Jensen's. Anything in the
case file, Luther? Like sample prints, hair off of a hair
brush?”

Luther held up one finger while he read from
the file. “Evidence box should have hair samples and fingerprints.
Missus Jensen had submitted a plaster of her husband’s hand. It was
a wall hanging of all three hands when Bella was born. Forensics
made a mold of his print so that should confirm the identity of our
John Doe.” His finger tapped one of the entries. He picked up his
current autopsy report on John Doe. “This is interesting. Fourteen
months ago Kara Jensen reported that her husband left for the
airport after eating scrambled eggs, a cinnamon roll, and drinking
three cups of coffee.” He nodded at the body of John Doe. “The
stomach contents of our friend here consisted of coffee, eggs, and
a cinnamon roll consumed roughly one hour before his death.”

“I haven’t been in this thick of brush since
I was a kid on my family’s ranch in Oklahoma.” Mike Reynolds carved
his way through the weeds, his heavy boots crushing dried stalks
and leaves before sinking into the soggy earth. His trained eyes
were looking for cleared areas, mounds of overturned dirt. Anything
that would give them a hint that a body had recently been
buried.

“Weren’t you ever a boy scout?” Abe Galto was
ten feet away, eyes on the cadaver dogs shuffling through the
brush. “We could clear an acre in less than a day using only our
pocketknives.”

Mike studied his fellow guardsmen dotting the
landscape with brown camouflage outfits. Abe was the oldest and his
responses were always prefaced by words that sounded like, “back in
my day.” Compared to Mike and the other eight National Guardsmen,
Abe was a dinosaur, preferring to never rise in rank. The younger
guys didn’t think it was because Abe wasn’t worthy of a stripe or
two. They felt it was because he wanted to spout off his years of
experience to the young pups. To his credit, Abe was still fit and
active, despite the graying hair and sagging chest.

“Pocketknife, right,” Mike said with a shake
of his head. “You probably set the damn acre on fire and stood
there with a water hose.”

“Yep, back then,” Abe continued, ignoring
Mike’s comment, “we weren’t soft the way kids are today. We could
work from sun up to sun down without one word of complaint.”

Mike had to agree with him there. Even his
own son who was eight would rather lie on the couch and play video
games than chase a baseball with the neighborhood boys. They were
raising a generation of couch potatoes.

Abe looked back at the sprawling mansion.
“Can you believe how the rich lived? Probably entertained royalty
and a few shady characters, you know, like Capone.” Abe still lived
the past, not just in his thinking but also in his appearance. His
hair was kept in a short brush cut, the same as his college
yearbook picture. His street clothes were something out of a
sixties Sears catalog. And the younger men salivated over his 1968
Ford Fairlane which had less than twenty thousand miles on the
odometer.

“Back when I was growing up we lived in a
brick bungalow with one bedroom and one bathroom. Me and my two
brothers slept upstairs in the attic which was converted into two
bedrooms. We had two inches of ice on the inside of the windows in
the winter. Two inches. And we didn’t have air conditioning.”

“It’s a wonder you survived.” Mike shoved his
boot against a boulder, flipping it over which disturbed a family
of multi-legged insects. Abe continued as though he hadn’t heard
Mike’s rhetorical jab.

“My dad provided for a family of five on ten
thousand dollars a year. But look at that house. Bet it takes that
much just to pay the monthly electric bill.”

One of the dogs started scratching at the
ground, sniffing, scratching some more, then laid down. Another dog
started to bark an alarm and then the boots started pounding toward
the area.

They moved quickly to where the lead dog lay.
Colonel Tom Hegner held his arms out to keep the men back. He knelt
down and patted the German shepherd on the head. “What did you
find, Abby?” Two guardsmen approached with shovels while the
colonel took a gloved hand and raked away leaves and dead weeds
with his fingers to reveal a square slab of concrete.

They were gathered now, all ten guardsmen
surrounding the colonel and cadaver dogs. “Well, Abe,” Mike said.
“In your day, what significance was a square piece of
concrete?”

“It’s probably a cover to an old well. Since
this is unincorporated area, I doubt they were hooked up to city
water. However, with a mansion this size, I doubt the owners had to
carry water from a well. Place has electricity and all the other
modern conveniences. The well probably hasn’t been used in decades.
Might have been dug and never used.”

Colonel Hegner said, “Let’s see if it will
pry off. According to Abby, there’s something here.”

They didn’t need the shovels to pry off the
lid, just four strong men to lift and move it to the side. The well
was six feet across, the walls lined with brick. Several of the men
stepped back, expecting the scent of decomposing flesh, but all
that escaped was a musty, moldy odor.

Hegner leaned over the edge. It was too deep
to see the bottom. “Let’s get a light down there.”

Within five minutes, one young guardsman was
suited up like a rock climber. Hegner checked the guard’s helmet,
turning on the miner’s light in the front. “Your mike working,
Biejewski?”

“Testing one, two, three.” Biejewski was
slight in build yet quick and agile as a crab when it came to
climbing.

Hegner checked his own earpiece. “Coming in
loud and clear.” The colonel shook his head as Biejewski hooked the
rope onto the side of the well, gave it a few tugs to make sure it
held, then started down. “Bebe. Young, dumb, and fearless,” Hegner
said under his breath. In his youth Hegner probably would have been
just as daring.

Hegner heard Bebe’s voice in his earpiece.
“Pretty slimy walls. Mold, multi-legged creatures. I’ve descended
about thirty feet so far. No sign of scraping on the sides to
indicate anyone or anything had been tossed down here
recently.”

Hegner wasn’t above asking Abe’s opinion.
After all, Abe was at least fifteen years his senior. “Abe, what’s
the water table in this area?”

“I’d say they’d have to go down a minimum of
one hundred feet to hit water.” Abe leaned over and peered down
into the vast cavern. “Hope it isn’t two hundred feet or Bebe would
have had to pack a lunch. In my day...” Everyone groaned.

“I can see bottom, I think, Sarge,” Biejewski
yelled. “I’ve gone down a little over one hundred fifty feet.”

The men jockeyed for a view. They were of all
ages and backgrounds. Almost all of them had been deployed to the
Gulf region during the BP oil spill last year.

“Would be nice if we had a camera on his
helmet,” Mike said.

“Oh, jeez.” Bebe’s voice sounded strained in
Hegner’s earpiece.

“Did you find a body, Bebe?” Hegner
asked.

“No, Colonel,” Bebe replied. After a pause he
added, “I found two.”

Padre rushed from the car to the back of the
mansion. The fast food hamburger he had rammed down his throat on
the drive over was burning a hole in his stomach. It had been
twenty-five hours since the Monroes had reported their daughter
missing. As he approached he saw two National Guard trucks parked
in an area one hundred yards from the mansion. Guardsmen and police
officers were huddled around what Padre could assume was the well
where the bodies were found. The area looked as though someone had
taken a machete to the overgrowth. Overhead the overcast skies gave
little hint as to when it planned to dump its next rainfall.

Parked nearby was the medical examiner’s van.
Luther was climbing into a jump suit of some type. Padre couldn’t
believe Luther was contemplating going down into the well. Since
what were found were skeletal remains, Padre saw no reason to
contact Leyton Monroe.

“Aren’t you getting a little old for cliff
climbing, Luther?”

“Nah. Besides, I’m going down, not up.”

A sophisticated pulley system stretched
across the opening to the well, supported on either side by
National Guard vehicles. One of the guardsmen tested the pulley
while another helped Luther into a harness. The men in camouflage
were a mixture of middle-aged office workers who had added a few
pounds over the years to young studs who looked as though they
spent eight hours every day in the gym.

One rather large, muscular black man wore his
sunglasses on the top of his bald head. Dog tags hung around his
neck and his biceps looked larger than Padre’s thighs. He appeared
to be the man in charge.

“Are you Colonel Hegner?” Padre thrust a hand
toward the large man who sported a tan tee shirt. “Sergeant Padre
Martinez. You can call me Padre.”

“Guess it’s a good thing we didn’t find your
missing woman. Leaves hope she might still be alive.”

Padre peered into the dark well, then shook
his head at the medical examiner. “You’re really going down there?”
He had firsthand knowledge that Luther was a bit of a daredevil.
Padre had discovered that when hanging onto the back of Luther’s
motorcycle while it careened down a gravel road into a quarry. “So
there’re two skeletons down there.”

“So I’m told.”

Padre eyed the equipment hanging from
Luther's belt. There were two toaster-sized flashlights, a video
cam, and a modified evidence kit. His helmet was equipped with a
miner’s light and a camera. Finally, he shrugged into a backpack.
It looked to Padre like all the equipment weighed more than
Luther.

“Are you going to stay for the show?” Hegner
asked Padre. “I hear this house has all kinds of secrets.”

“That it does.”

Two guardsmen helped Luther to the edge of
the well. They hooked him up and slowly lowered him. Luther gave a
thumbs up and ignored Padre when he made a sign of the cross.

Padre stepped to the back of one of the
trucks where a computer monitor rested on a tailgate. “Got some
fancy equipment here,” he told Hegner.

“We have training exercises in caves. Never
know when it might come in handy.” Hegner tapped several keys on
the keyboard. “Luckily your medical examiner brought his own
computer monitor. With the video cam we can see and record
everything he is seeing. And there’s a microphone here if you want
to talk to him.”

Two of Luther's assistants hauled stretchers
from the back of the van and carried them to the side of the
well.

“How are you doing, Doc?” Padre asked. On the
monitor Padre could see the brick walls of the well. Some type of
algae coated the sides and eight or more legged beasts were
scurrying away from the light. “Please don’t bring any of your
friends back with you.”

“There’s like nothing to touch,” Luther
reported. “There are slimy things everywhere. The well looks about
six foot wide. Shouldn’t be too difficult getting those stretchers
down here. With all the rain we’ve had lately, it appears to have
saturated the ground. Makes the bricks look like they are
bleeding.”

“Thanks for the visual, Doc.”

The further down he descended, the dryer and
less damp were the walls. Portions of the wall had crumbled from
age. The light beam lit up the bottom of the dry well as Luther
hovered overhead, angling for a spot to place his feet without
stepping on the deceased. “I have reached bottom. Have you got
visuals on your end?”

“Yes, Doctor Jamison. We hear you loud and
clear,” Colonel Hegner said. “And it is recording so go ahead and
give us your assessment.”

Luther detached the flashlights from his
belt. From a backpack he removed metal legs, which, when extended,
became a tripod in which to fasten each light. After setting one on
each side, he squatted down to first examine the soil.

“The ground is bone dry.” Luther pointed for
the benefit of the camera. “There is evidence of copious amount of
fly pupae cases.”

“That far down?” Padre asked.

“Sure. They have been found in Indian burial
grounds dating back three thousand years.” He used tweezers to
place several of the pupae cases in a plastic container. He snapped
on a lid and placed the container in his backpack. On the monitor
the camera panned the skeletons. They were clothed in fabric that
had long since started to deteriorate. He pulled out his own camera
and took digital snapshots on the off chance anything disrupted the
computer recordings. Next he carefully peeled away the clothing and
studied the ribs, pelvic area, tibias, and then the skull. “We have
one female and one male. I would estimate their age at death
between forty and fifty years of age. Difficult to tell height
without measuring the bones.” With gloved hands he carefully lifted
just the corners of the fabric to search under the bodies but the
fabric started to disintegrate in his hands. “I don’t see a weapon
but it could be under their bodies. Have to wait until my assistant
removes the bodies to get a better look. Clothes are definitely
from another period, maybe early nineteen hundreds.” Luther lifted
the collar of the man’s shirt. Puzzled, he did the same with the
high collar of the woman’s dress. “I do see some type of rope under
the victims. They could have been hung or perhaps restrained before
being thrown down the well.”

Padre felt a drop of water on his hand and
looked up at the sky. “We’re going to have to erect a tent over the
opening, Doc. We’ve got a light rain starting up.”

“Connor, Miller,” Hegner yelled at two men
near one of the trucks. “We need a canopy constructed over the
well.” Hegner turned back to the monitor and said, “Maybe the house
was part of the underground railroad and they had been helping to
free some slaves,” he suggested. “Or maybe they were slaves.”