The Rivers Run Dry (2 page)

I thanked Fern Valley for her time, gave her my card, and told her she could leave now. She spun, red hair scything the air, and stomped back to the white pickup parked at the edge of the gravel. The truck door read “Issaquah Parks Dept.” I watched the truck pull onto Sunset Way, the tailpipe belching noxious clouds of exhaust.

The trooper, on the other hand, received my genuine smile and a business card with all my FBI contact numbers, including my cell number. But his reaction was more wounded than Fern's. He suddenly looked childlike, the most athletic boy dismissed early from the big game. There was no polite way to explain that evidence collection had a better chance of withstanding cross-examinations in court if only essential personnel were involved; nobody wanted to be told they were inessential, particularly in law enforcement.

“You don't want me to stick around?” he said. “I can help. Really.”

“Thank you, Officer Lowell. We appreciate your time. We'll be in touch.”

“Ma'am, I'm happy to help.”

“Yes, thank you. We will be in touch.”

His brown eyes roamed my face, searching for some motive. Finally, he tipped the lapis blue hat, and his cruiser made a wide U-turn through the parking lot, disappearing down the two-lane road lined by trees with flaming leaves.

I walked to my car, popped the trunk. The detective followed.

“Did you notify the media?” I asked.

“The family wants to keep this very low-key,” he said. “No media.”

“That won't help you find her.”

“What I told them. But they won't listen. The mother said, ‘Publicity will only make her circumstances worse.'”

“What circumstances is she talking about?”

“They think she was kidnapped.”

“Pardon?”

“For money,” he said. “They're wealthy, like, really, really wealthy. They talk about kidnapping like nothing else could've happened. We told them it would still help if we went public, but they're adamant. All the time begging us to find her, with no media involved.” He sighed.

“Fingerprints?” I asked.

“Just hers. On the steering wheel, door handles, stereo. The usual.”

Before I headed out this morning, my new colleague, Special Agent Jack Stephanson, had warned me the Issaquah PD would be skittish about disappearances like this. Several years earlier a local family sued the police department, alleging detectives hadn't responded diligently when their teenage daughter went missing. A chronic runaway with a known drug problem, the girl's case had received standard procedure from overworked and understaffed detectives. But when she surfaced as the second victim in a serial killing that stretched across Seattle's east side, the subsequent lawsuit raked millions from city coffers and lined the pockets of trial attorneys. These days even Seattle's smallest police departments called in the FBI for technical backup, asking for the kind of tests and procedures that might dissuade lawyers from trial. And whenever possible, they did what parents asked.

I snapped on latex gloves and squeezed my hand into the wheel well, carefully removing the soil nestled inside. The small grains crumbled between my fingers, a dirt dried by an August drought and a similarly rainless September. I deposited the sample into a sterile cotton bag, marking the paper tag with a Sharpie, pulling the drawstring tight. I ran an index finger across the tire treads. They were new tires, still holding extraneous molded rubber pieces from the factory. I found a slug of soil inside one of the treads and placed that in another cotton bag.

Then I glanced around the parking lot. The shards of gray granite were too large and loose for wheel impressions. Even if the tires had left an impression, the trooper drove directly behind the Rover, obliterating any trace. Kneeling down and opening my work bag, I took out a canister of fingerprint powder, one jar of Vaseline, and about twenty sheets of white card stock paper.

“Please pop the front doors,” I said.

The detective shimmed a flat metal Slim Jim between the door's frame and window, popping the lock. At the back of the car, I smeared Vaseline across the rear tires, coating the treads until they glistened, then laid the card stock on the gravel directly behind each wheel. Walking to the front of the car, where the doors were open, I could smell sun-soaked leather and a vanilla air freshener so heavy it powdered my tongue like talc.

“On the count of three,” I said, “push it back.”

We leaned into the door frame from opposite sides, pushing against the Rover until the rear wheels rolled across the paper with a crunching sound.

“Okay, that's good,” I said.

I picked up the paper from under the car. The bottom sheets had torn against the rocks, but I needed only the top. With the small box of fingerprint powder, I gently blew magnetic fragments across the Vaseline. The black tread marks swept into view.

“Neat trick,” the detective said. “It looks like the car drove over the paper.”

I nodded, greasing the front tires, laying more paper on the gravel before we pushed the Rover forward into the log boom. I slipped all four tread impressions between separate vellum sheets and took photographs of each tire with a digital camera.

“Do we really need all four tires?” the detective asked, frowning. “No offense meant.”

“None taken. Every shoe leaves a different print, depending on the manufacturer and wear. It's the same with tires.”

He didn't look convinced.

“We once had a case where a suspect's vehicle had four different tires, all different makes. Each tire left a completely different tread mark at the scene. Because we had a record for each, when prosecutors showed the statistical anomaly, it sealed the verdict. You want legal protection, that's what I'm offering.”

He nodded, but worry knotted his forehead. The FBI billed the local police departments for time, material, and expenses, and small town PDs were already strapped financially. The detective would have to defend every forensic procedure.

“I won't run any tests until I hear back from you,” I said. “The soil analysis is the most expensive, save that for last, if y'all even need it.”

“Y'all?”

“You and your department.”

“Where are you from?”

“Virginia.”

“That explains you calling me ‘sir.' How long you been out here?”

“About two weeks.”

“You enjoying our Indian Summer?”

“It's beautiful.”

He lifted his head, the black hair sparkling with illumination, bright coal dust riding a crystal stream. “Yep, we've got some good weather. But when it starts raining, let me know what you think.”

I shrugged. “It rains in Virginia.”

“Sure it does. But do you feel like you've been in the shower for six months?”

I snapped off my gloves, told him to call if there was anything else, and drove back to the office with the windows down. My assigned government ride was a 1997 Buick Skylark. At first glance, it looked dark blue, but in the bright sun it revealed a peculiar shade of purple, a color that provoked my colleagues to dub it “The Barney Mobile” after the fake dinosaur on children's television. The color didn't bother me as much as the smell that came from the backseat, a rank stench of vomit that rose like an apparition, testifying to the fear and panic in every collared criminal who ever puked back there. As if that wasn't enough, the car's engine knocked too, a sound like spare parts coming loose under the hood. I checked; I couldn't find anything.

But for my foreseeable future, this was my car, and the Seattle field office was home base, courtesy of a disciplinary transfer that was requested by my former supervisor in Richmond. Disciplinary transfers were one way the Bureau dissuaded agents from dis-agreeing with orders, even when the order seemed wrong. Scratch that:
especially
when the order seemed wrong. My now former supervisor claimed I had placed myself in grave danger unnecessarily, that I continued to work the case even after she'd suspended me. The case closed with spectacular effects for the Bureau, the Feds looking like heroes, but my supervisor still thought I needed punishment. To her disappointment, Alaska didn't have an opening. She chose the next farthest office from Richmond.

Now I drove down Madison Street, heading toward Seattle's waterfront, descending the steep grade that rolled across down-town in an east-west pattern. Although the Bureau's field office perched atop Spring Street in a ten-story building with an under-ground garage, my assigned parking spot sat fifteen blocks away on a sliver of leased land above the barnacle-covered piers that buttressed the waterfront.

I left the windows cracked, locked my car, and loaded up my gear. Laptop, handheld radio, cell phone, gym bag for a lunch-time workout that never happened, and my briefcase. Then I slipped on a blazer that covered the Glock .22 holstered to my belt. In the distance, a ferryboat horned the air.

The first seven blocks weren't so bad. They ran parallel to Puget Sound, but the second half pitched near forty degrees. The sun burned on my back, my hands stung from twenty pounds of gear, and my thighs ached so badly that when I reached the corner of James and Spring Street, my hello to Mike at the front desk was nothing more than a hoarse whisper. I rode the elevator to the third floor, wiping sweat from my forehead. When the doors parted, a gruff voice barked my name.

“Harmon!”

Allen McLeod, my new supervisor.

I walked down the main corridor of the Violent Crimes unit, my gym bag bouncing off my right leg. Allen McLeod approached from the opposite side of the room, lumbering through a maze of cubicles with towering stacks of paper until he reached my desk. He rested one large hand on the column of cardboard boxes with case numbers scrawled across their sides. I still hadn't unpacked.

“Where've you been?” he asked.

A big man, he wore starched white shirts that looked pilfered from the closets of his superiors. The red suspenders were flecked with oily stains.

“Jack sent me out to Issaquah. They wanted legal backup on a missing.” I explained that we'd taken tire impressions and soil samples.

“See if Jack needs anything else,” he said. “And check with me end of day.”

“Yes, sir.”

He paused, about to say something, then walked away. I set my laptop and briefcase on my desk, rubbing a sweaty palm creased by the nylon straps. My desk phone blinked with unanswered messages. I punched in my numbered code for voice mail, writing down the information, and halfway through the second message, Jack Stephanson walked over and rested a muscular haunch on the edge of my desk.

“How'd it go, Harmon?”

I raised an index finger, indicating that I was still writing. He reached down, depressing the plastic triangle in the phone bed, severing the message.

“I asked you a question,” he said.

Setting down the receiver as if it were made of glass, I described my visit to Issaquah. Jack's azure eyes were set close and they gave his face the focused intensity of a German shepherd. When he asked me to recount the evidence collection procedure again, I said, “Did I do something wrong?”

“No,” he said. “File it.”

“Pardon?”

“Send that thing down with the
Titanic
. It's another nowhere case. But that's just
my
opinion,” he added. “
You
might choose to do something different. But I know you can handle the consequences.”

“What are you saying, Jack?”

He stood up. “I need you to get to the courthouse.”

“You just said file this.”

“You need to pick up my paperwork,” he said. “Pronto.”

I counted to five. “I've got an interview scheduled in half an hour. McLeod wants a background check on a Federal applicant.”

“Tell the clerk down at the courthouse that I want certified copies of all prior convictions on a guy named Bookman Landrow,” he continued, as though I'd said nothing. “Case goes to trial Thursday. Keep that day open. I need an assist.”

He adjusted his blue jeans; they groped his muscular legs. “Oh, and another thing, Harmon . . .”

I swiveled the chair, picking up the telephone, punching in my code again. It was only fair. He wasn't explaining why the VanAlstyne case was a dead end; I didn't need to listen. He stood behind me for several moments, then walked away. When I glanced down the aisle, watching his cowboy's swagger in lug-soled shoes, he suddenly turned around and raised his voice, making sure it crossed the cluttered room. “Harmon, I need those documents now. So quit pouting and get over to the clerk's office.”

From the corner of my eye, I saw my supervisor lift his head. The phone stayed nestled between my shoulder and ear and I wrote down all eight messages, documenting the information, before logging onto the computer and checking e-mail. I replied to one message from a former colleague in the FBI's mineralogy lab in Washington DC, and ignored the Bureau's blanket request for agents willing to move to Iraq and investigate stolen antiquities. Twenty minutes later, I walked down the corridor to the squad's conference room and purchased a can of Coca-Cola and two bags of potato chips from the vending machine. Between bites, I returned two phone calls.

Forty-nine minutes later, I walked outside, heading toward the courthouse on Jack's orders. The sun was still shining and the west side of the city's skyscrapers reflected the view of Puget Sound. The glass panels made it look like the ferryboats were navigating vertical reaches, cruising up an ocean of concrete, sailing for the bright and distant sun.

chapter two

W
hen I was assigned to Violent Crimes, I expected some hazing. The good intentions of the politically correct had assigned some unfortunate token women to the toughest unit of the FBI, the unit that called out SWAT more than any other branch. As much as anything else, necessity forced the Violent Crime units to develop their own proving grounds; these guys deserved to know whether I could cover their backs.