Forgotten (12 page)

“Now, if only everyone were as considerate, what a wonderful world this would be.”

“I’m saying thank you and hanging up before you break into song, Larisse.”

“A wise move on your part, Cahill. Get me the sample, I’ll run your tests as soon as I can.”

“Thanks. You’re a peach.”

“Fucking-A.”

Portia laughed and hung up. Next call, the one to Don Rollins, would have to wait. Her GPS announced that Three Crow Road was the next left turn, a mere one hundred feet ahead. As she approached, she could see the state trooper’s vehicle alongside the road. She made the turn, and pulled behind the parked car.

“You Agent Cahill?” The tall, lanky trooper got out of his car and walked toward hers.

“Yes. Trooper Heller?”

“You got it.” He stepped back as she opened her car door and got out.

“Belted Galloways,” he told her.

“Excuse me?” She frowned.

“The black cows with the white stripe around the middle are belted Galloways.”

“Oh. There is such a thing?” Woods hadn’t made up that part. Maybe the rest would hold true as well.

“Sure enough.” He pointed down the road. “I asked around, and just like you said, the third farm down the road here used to have a herd of them, but when the farm was sold about ten years ago, the guy who owned the place sold them all to a farmer in Delaware.”

“So he told the truth about that much.” She nodded. “Shall we go see if he was telling the truth about the boy he buried there?”

“Let’s do it. You just follow me.” He began to walk back to his car.

“Wait a minute. Shouldn’t we find out whose farm it is? Maybe call them, give them a heads-up?”

He shook his head.

“That’s the King farm, ma’am. They don’t have a phone.”

“No phone?” She frowned.

“The Kings are Amish, Agent Cahill.”

“So we just knock on their door and say hey, we heard there’s a body buried behind your barn?”

“Pretty much. Though we’re more likely to find Amos King in the barn this time of the day.”

She glanced at her watch. It was twenty minutes before six.

“Milking time, Agent Cahill.” He was grinning as he returned to his car. “Amos King has a whole herd of Jerseys, and somebody has to milk them right about now.”

THIRTEEN

“Y
ou seem to know Mr. King well,” Portia commented after the trooper had located the startled farmer in his barn and explained the situation.

“I’ve worked this part of Lancaster County for over twenty years, and I know most of the people,” he told her. “Amos King is typical of the Amish farmers around here. He’s cooperative, friendly, won’t get in your way, will help you out when you need it.”

“I thought the Amish were a pretty closed community.”

“That hasn’t been my experience. Most of the ones I know are helpful, and like I said, pretty friendly. They tend to handle their own problems most of the time, don’t like to ask for help as a general rule, but are always happy to help out some one else.”

The sun had dipped a bit in the sky and the barn’s shadow offered them shade as they rounded the corner and stood facing the back of the building.

“Where exactly is this body supposedly buried?” Heller asked.

“He said behind the barn is a stream and behind that there are woods.” She turned to look behind her. A dry streambed lay twenty feet behind the barn. “That’s probably the stream he referred to, though it’s dry now. And there are the woods. He said he planted some tulips right where he planted the boy.” She glanced up at Heller. “His words, by the way, not mine.”

They walked to the edge of the woods.

“Well, hell. Tulips bloom in the spring, right? It’s now August. Even the leaves would have died back.” Portia looked around. “How are we supposed to know in summer where the tulips bloomed in the spring?”

“We ask Amos.” Heller took off for the barn.

Portia stepped back onto the rocks lining the creek bed, acutely aware that the boy could be buried just about anywhere. She was uneasy about standing over an unmarked grave. A hot breeze came through the trees and rippled the rye grass that grew along the dry bank. She walked to the corner of the barn and looked out over the fields where corn grew tall for as far as she could see. A farmhouse—mostly white clapboard but with one small section of stone—stood across from the barn, its neat flower beds erupting with the colors of the summer annuals that someone had taken much care to plant. The house itself rambled, one wing venturing off to one side and a section off the back going in the opposite direction. She stared at the house for several minutes, wondering what was missing, before it occurred to her that there were no electrical wires leading in off the main road. She wondered if the people who lived here still read by candlelight or gas lamps at night. She’d ask Heller. He seemed to know a lot about the locals.

Heller returned with a bearded man of indeterminable age dressed in a black shirt and black pants held up by suspenders. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and a straw hat that looked as if it had been used to beat out a fire.

“Agent Cahill, this is Amos King, the man who owns this farm.” Heller introduced her. “Amos, this is the FBI agent I told you about.”

“Hello,” he said cordially. “You’re wanting to know about the tulips.”

“Yes,” she said, gesturing in the general direction of the woods. “We were told that some had been planted out here about eleven years ago. I guess you wouldn’t know where they grew.”

“I wouldn’t, no. But my daughter, Lydia, picked some and brought them into the house for my wife a few months back. I can ask her, if you’d like.”

“If you don’t mind, that would be very helpful.” Portia nodded. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, I’m sure. She’d be helping with supper right now. I’ll just go get her from the house,” Amos King told them.

“We’ll be right here,” Heller told the man who’d set off for the house.

“So let’s say the girl remembers where the flowers were,” Heller turned to Portia. “What are you proposing we do next?”

“We ask Amos if we can dig.” She shrugged.

“Who digs?” he asked pointedly.

“Oh. I see. ‘Who digs,’ as in, whose crime scene.”

“Right.”

Portia thought it over. She could very well bring in an FBI team to process the scene and recover the body. On the other hand, if it hadn’t been for Heller, she would not have been allowed access to the farm by the property owner without going through a lot of red tape. Would she have gotten a warrant on such dubious grounds as Woods’s word that a body had been buried here eleven years earlier? She didn’t know. More important, if in fact they did find a body, she’d need Heller’s help in identifying it and notifying the family.

“You bring in your people, your crime scene techs, your ME. The boy was from this area, you should be involved,” Portia said. “But I’d ask that there be no publicity whatsoever on this case unless we absolutely need the media’s help in identifying the body. I don’t want it known that Sheldon Woods is giving up the names and locations of some of his victims. It would be devastating to those families whose boys have not—and will not—be returned.”

“I understand, yes.” Heller nodded. “I can promise that. If the King girl can point to the spot, I’ll get a few handpicked techs out here—people I trust completely—to start the process. Starting with the coroner.”

“Thanks. I appreciate that.”

“And I appreciate you recognizing that, if there’s a local boy buried here, it’s best handled by the people the Amish know best, feel most comfortable with.”

“You’re assuming it’s an Amish boy?”

He nodded. “A boy whose disappearance wasn’t reported to the authorities—one we never even heard about—who’s buried on Amish ground?” Heller lowered his voice as Amos King came across the field with his daughter, who appeared to be seven or eight, skipping ahead of him. “What else do you think he could be, Agent Cahill?”

She’d never considered that the victim might be Amish.

Portia opened her mouth to greet the girl, expecting her to point to a place very near where Portia and Heller were standing. But Lydia went right past her, still skipping.

“Lydia,” Portia called to her. “Did your father tell you we were looking for the place where you picked tulips in the spring?”

“Yes,” she nodded. “Over here…by the little stream” and she continued past the end of the barn, past the fenced-in pasture beyond to where a previously unnoticed spit of a stream trickled over the dry ground.

“Woods said behind the barn.” A puzzled Portia turned to Heller. “Maybe the tulips she picked were planted later. Maybe in eleven years, the tulips that Woods claimed to have planted just sort of petered out. It happens sometimes. The bulbs get old and they…”

“Oh, it’s the old barn you’re thinking about, maybe. There was another barn when we bought the farm,” Amos King told her. “It burned down about seven years ago, and we never rebuilt it since we had this one to use. We were in need of more pasture, so we fenced in a…” He stopped, his attention drawn to his daughter.

Lydia stopped several feet from the fence and was calling to her father in German while pointing excitedly toward the ground.

“What did she say, Amos?” Heller asked.

“She said the ground’s all dug up,” the girl’s father replied. “She said it looks like someone buried some clothes there.”

Portia’s face drained of color. “Oh, my God. Tell her to come back.” She cupped her hands and called to the girl. “Lydia, that’s fine, thank you. Come back now. Walk as close as you can to the fence. That’s terrific, thank you.”

Portia met the child as she walked back to the barn.

“Someone buried a pile of clothes there,” she pointed behind her. “The dirt’s all moved around and I saw a shirt. Maybe someone dug up the tulips, I don’t know. But that’s where they were when I picked them for Mother.”

“That could be it, yes, thank you.” Portia turned to Heller. “I think you’d better call your people, the best that you have. And call your coroner’s office. Tell them there might be two…”

After asking for and receiving Amos King’s permission to dig, Heller suggested that the farmer take his daughter back to the house while they waited for the techs to arrive.

“Why two, Agent Cahill?” Heller asked after King was out of range.

“The last grave that Woods gave me contained the remains of two victims. Two boys. We knew the first was there going in, but we didn’t expect to find a second boy, and Woods refuses to identify him.”

“So you think he might have done the same thing here?”

“Maybe.” She paused, frowning, then took off for the area Lydia had indicated, Heller at her side. “But of course that doesn’t make any sense at all. Whether he buried someone here two or eleven years ago, the dirt shouldn’t be disturbed now.”

“Maybe some animals…,” Heller began, then stopped as they approached the dirt mound.

It was obvious that the digging had been very recent.

Heller knelt on one knee and began to carefully scoop some of the dirt away. A bit of gray T-shirt fabric appeared, then a hand.

“Holy shit.”

Portia stared at the fingers. Fully fleshed fingers attached to a fully fleshed hand.

“I’ll call the coroner’s office.” Heller stood and took his phone from his belt.

Portia glanced at the horizon, where the sun was just beginning its descent. “Tell them they’d better bring some lights and a generator,” she told him. “Something tells me it’s going to be a very long night.”

I
t had taken very little time to uncover the recently buried body of a young boy. He appeared to be eight to ten years old, had brown hair, and was dressed in an
Iron Man
tee and cutoff jeans. His feet were bare, which for some reason unbearably saddened Portia. The techs moved in to carefully remove the dirt as Jason Fritz from the coroner’s office stood by watching.

“There will be skeletal remains in that same grave,” Portia told him. “Under this victim.”

“How do you know that?” he asked.

“The killer told me. It’s a boy he killed back in nineteen ninety-seven. We think we know his name, but we’ll need some DNA samples to make certain.”

She gestured to Heller to follow her to a place where they wouldn’t be overheard. “Any thoughts as to who Joseph Miller’s parents might be?”

“There are several Miller families out here.” The trooper sighed. He stood with his hands on his hips, his dark glasses still covering his eyes despite the fact that the sun was already setting.

“Any idea who might have had a boy between seven and ten who might have disappeared in nine teen ninety-seven?”

“Any one of three or four of them could have had a boy that age back then.” He scratched the back of his neck where a mosquito had landed and fed. “Maybe Amos knows of someone. I can tell you there were no reports of a missing kid. I checked our records back fifteen years and there was nothing for a Joseph Miller. If he was Amish, like we suspect, they most likely would not have reported it. They tend to like to handle their own.”

He set off for the farmhouse seeking Amos King, and Portia sat on a large rock where she could watch the exhumation, her head spinning, her professional armor starting to crack. She needed to see Sheldon Woods. Now.

She wanted nothing more than to beat the crap out of him, and probably would, if given the opportunity.

He’d set her up.

How, she wasn’t certain, but there was no doubt in her mind that the sick bastard had known exactly what she’d find here.

Had he talked one of his “fans” into taking this boy’s life, just to mess with her? Had he been coaching someone to copycat what he’d done? Had he found someone as soulless as himself to follow in his footsteps?

What had Dr. Rollins said about Woods? That he’d find a way to make her take part in his game if he decided it was in his best interest for her to play? “Wrong move, asshole. Wrong, wrong, wrong.”

She stood, her anger building, and walked toward the farmhouse, her pace increasing with every step. Heller stood on the front porch talking to Amos King. At her approach, he looked up and nodded to her.

“I’m going to have to leave,” she told him, “but I wanted to thank you.” She smiled wanly at the farmer. “You, too, Mr. King. I’m sorry…”

“I wasn’t thinking it was your fault,” King said gently.

Because she couldn’t think of anything else to say to him, she handed Heller her card. “My cell number’s on the back. I always have it with me, but just in case, the office number is there also. I’ll be in touch.”

He tucked it into his shirt pocket. “Israel Ever-sole over on Bartville Road lost a boy about ten or so years ago,” he told her. “I’m going to hold off talking to the family until we confirm that there are, in fact, other remains in there. Then we’ll see about getting some samples for DNA testing, just to make sure.”

“The remains will be there. I don’t know why this is playing out this way, but Woods’s victim will be in that grave.”

“How would anyone know about that?” Heller asked, obviously as baffled as she was. “Who besides Woods could have known where he left that body?”

“That’s exactly what I intend to find out.”