Too Close to Home (9 page)

Never once did she mention having two little girls.

Not too long after I found those letters, a registered letter was delivered to the Cherokee Rose with a Las Vegas postmark. I never read that letter. Never even saw it. But I didn’t have to. Maryville gossip provided me with all the information that I needed.

I was in the library, sitting on the floor between shelves, reading the first pages of
The Blue Sword.
It was an adventure, which was the kind of book I liked. That’s when I overheard the librarian talking to the chief of Maryville’s volunteer fire department. And I heard my mother’s name. The librarian said that a friend at the post office had told her that Lucy Tyler had received a letter from her sister a couple of days earlier. Between that letter and the one that was mailed back—to a
bail bond
company—Lucy had pulled five hundred dollars from her savings account and bought a money order.

I didn’t understand, back then, the significance of that transaction. But I did know that my mother hadn’t ever bothered writing to
me.
Or to Katie. Certainly, she’d never phoned us. Or sent us gifts on our birthdays or at Christmastime.

My mother didn’t care about us.

That’s what I decided that day in the library. And that’s when I tried to stop caring about her. Tried to stop even thinking about her. Because I knew the truth. Though Aunt Lucy was always telling us that our mother loved us, I’d overheard Gran say more than once that Lydia Tyler cared only about herself.

I believed Gran.

Of course, I never told Katie about the letters or my decision. I didn’t want to risk her having an asthma attack and ending up in the emergency room or maybe dying. And I didn’t want her crying all the time the way she had when Aunt Lucy had first brought us home to Maryville. So I kept quiet as Katie created soap-opera fantasies about our mother’s amnesia or her undercover work in some foreign country or her long imprisonment on false charges. Someday, Katie assured me, our mother would come and find us. Gran would forgive her. Aunt Lucy would hug her. And finally reunited, we would all live happily at the Cherokee Rose.

When, I wondered idly as I lifted the microphone from its mount on the dashboard, had Katie finally stopped believing that our mother would return? I thought about it for a minute, realized that we’d been in high school before her hope had turned to bitterness. Bitterness that had festered and spread like poison through her mind. And had finally ended in murder.

My bleak turn of thought made it easy to keep my voice serious when I checked back in with dispatch and reported that the 911 on Honeysuckle Drive had been resolved. At least for the time being. In turn, I was told that Chad had just radioed. He and the state crime-scene techs were headed to Camp Cadiz and would meet me in the parking lot.

My trip back through the forest took me along the same route that Chad’s father had traveled with his terrified family a decade earlier. Past the narrow, rutted mud road that had once led to a rotted-out single-wide trailer. A few years earlier, a gang from out of the area had set up a meth lab on the property. They’d discovered too late that—unlike many of the rarely traveled roads that crisscrossed the forest and rural southern Illinois—this particular dead-end road was regularly traveled by a big, redheaded county cop.

For a while, I watched the dense green woods flash past on both sides of the gravel road. Then I crossed the narrow bridge over Big Creek. For about a mile, the creek paralleled the road’s right shoulder, occasionally visible through the tangle of green foliage. This morning, it sparkled unthreateningly in the early-morning sun. But on the night Chad’s mother had died, the rushing current had been strong enough to carry the bleeding boy almost a mile downstream.

It was a miracle that he hadn’t drowned, I thought. But he’d managed to grab onto a branch and pull himself from the
water. A county cop had found him walking down the road in the dark, headed for town, looking for help to save his mother.

Chad’s father had been arrested just after sunrise the morning after he’d killed his wife. He’d been found at home, sleeping soundly in the bed he’d shared with his wife for fourteen years. The Lord, he’d told the cops when they’d questioned him, had commanded him to punish his unfaithful wife and purge her living sin from the face of the earth. He was certain that he’d done just that. Shot her with the critter gun he’d always kept in his truck, then thrown the gun away. Down into a ravine.

“It wasn’t the Godly way to do it,” he’d explained, “but I lost my knife in the floodwater. Shortly after usin’ it on the boy.”

He’d seemed distressed by the news that his son had lived.

T
here was a stop sign at the next intersection.

In a masterpiece of coincidental timing, Chad pulled onto the gravel road in front of me. But instead of taking my turn and immediately following him, I waited for a second vehicle to pull out onto the road behind him. The unadorned minivan was white and its blue-on-white license plate read Illinois and Official Vehicle.

I stayed far enough back to avoid the dust and gravel thrown by the convoy. After a few more miles of winding road, the taillights of the van flashed as it slowed to turn at the green sign that pointed eastward toward Camp Cadiz. Five miles. I tapped my brakes, made the turn, flipped down the visor to shield my eyes from the sun that hung like liquid fire above the tree line. Not nearly noon and the temperature was already creeping above ninety.

I pulled into the lot at Camp Cadiz and turned off the
engine. Chad slid from his squad car, shrugged his shoulders to settle his bulletproof vest more comfortably around his chest, and adjusted his belt and holster to ride smoothly at his waist. I slipped from my vehicle and did the same. In the meantime, two men had emerged from the van. They introduced themselves and began unloading equipment.

The crime-scene techs were a pair of fiftysomething-year-olds. Male. Both wearing Illinois State Police badges at their waists.

One of the investigators was tall with broad shoulders, a scrawny neck, and thinning blond hair. He was dressed for a walk along city sidewalks in dark slacks, a short-sleeved white shirt and a conservative tie. Two minutes out in the sunny parking lot and he shed his sports jacket, throwing it into the front seat of the van.

The other man, who was more practically attired in jeans and a short-sleeved double-knit shirt, called to mind a bulldog. Short and muscular with bowed legs and a deep chest, he had droopy jowls framing a mouth with small, uneven teeth and a distinct underbite.

Even the shorter route to the crime scene—which, once we reached the bridge over the ravine, Chad had marked by sticking the wire ends of tiny orange flags into the ground—was a hot, uncomfortable hike. All of us were lugging heavy equipment. In the sun, the humidity made breathing almost difficult. In the shade, mosquitoes swarmed hungrily and bit despite the repellent I’d sprayed on all of us. Walking single-file with Chad in the lead and me bringing up the rear, we followed the makeshift trail that meandered its way between trees and avoided thickets of brush, but managed to stay within a dozen yards of the edge of the ravine.

We didn’t talk much and we didn’t hurry.

I kept an eye on the men in front of me, making sure that neither of the city boys strayed from the makeshift trail or collapsed from the heat. Which gave me plenty of time to recall the promise I’d made to Chad back when we were teenagers. Back when I’d wanted nothing more than to have the best search-and-rescue dog in the county.

Back then, it had been Indian-summer weather—comfortably cool, dry and sunny. Chad, Highball and I had practiced together that morning. It had taken just over an hour for Highball and me to locate Chad, who had hidden himself among the thick branches of a fallen tree. After that, the three of us had hiked along the tree line to the top of a ragged bluff. While Highball napped in the shade, Chad and I had sprawled side by side on a sun-drenched outcropping of sandstone, our bellies warmed by the rock and filled by the sack lunch Aunt Lucy had fixed us, our chins propped on our elbows. From our vantage point, we’d looked out over miles of treetops burnished red and orange and gold.

At some point, Chad began rubbing his cheek. Hard. I still remembered the loneliness I’d glimpsed when he’d finally turned his face toward me.

“My momma’s buried out there,” he’d said. “Somewhere. She never liked the forest, y’know. She always said it was dark and gloomy. Even this time of year. It was too closed in. That’s what she always said. Momma loved sunshine and flowers. She’d want to be buried in a place like that little cemetery up on the hill in Golconda. You know the one. It’s planted with lilacs and black-eyed Susans and purple coneflowers. And, hell, you can see practically into the next county from there.”

That’s when I—naive and overconfident—had promised that someday my dog and I would find her for him.

Now, more than a decade later, maybe we had.

When we arrived, the two techs skirted the scene, taking photos, before ducking beneath the yellow crime-scene tape that Chad and I had put up the night before. Then they stood a little back from the crumbling edge, peering downward.

“Nasty,” the taller man observed.

“Very nasty,” his jowly partner agreed as he used the back of his latex-gloved hand to brush a trickle of sweat from his forehead.

They both insisted that processing the scene—even on a narrow ledge down inside a ravine—was their job. No offer of help that Chad or I made was going to change their minds. But neither turned his nose up at the safety harnesses Chad had brought with him or the quick lesson on rappelling I offered. Once down on the ledge, the taller man took photographs and the shorter took samples of soil.

Then we gathered up the bones.

With latex-gloved hands and more reverence than I’d expected, the techs removed the bones, one by one, from beneath the curtain of roots and passed each bone up to either Chad or me. We wore gloves, too, and carefully placed the bones in one of the boxes the investigators had brought with them. As routine as processing a crime scene must have been for the two men, they still seemed to feel sympathy for the victim. No matter that our victim was recently found rather than newly dead.

They freed the rib cage by cutting the roots around it, so we placed almost as much tree as bones in some of the boxes. As I handled the bones, I tried to identify them, hoping that I might be able to glean something about the identity of the victim from ribs and vertebrae, from the tiny bones that the investigators sifted from the soil and I recognized as being
pieces of hands and feet. But what little I knew about the identification of skeletal remains I’d learned during a short session at a weeks-long training course for rookie cops. On the campus of the University of Illinois, I’d sat in a modern classroom at the Police Training Institute among students—mostly male and all as green as I was—who’d traveled from all over Illinois to learn the basics of law enforcement. Regarding bones, we’d learned mostly that it was our job to preserve the scene for more skilled investigators. That we would never be as skilled as the Illinois State Police’s forensic lab rats. They, with their books and charts and mathematical tables, could determine height by measuring a leg bone and age by looking at the seams in a skull.

For a couple of hours, and despite the blistering heat, the two techs worked methodically, communicating in the kind of verbal shorthand that longtime colleagues often developed. Chad and I didn’t talk much, either. We stayed busy passing equipment and evidence up and down as requested and simply watching the state investigators as they moved around the narrow outcroppings—the one on which I’d discovered the remains and the ledge below it, where I’d found Tina. We called out a warning whenever either man became so engrossed in his work that he forgot he was on the edge of a precipice. Safety harness or no, an unexpected fall could cause injury and was something to be avoided.

Both ledges looked more hazardous by the light of day. Darkness had only suggested the depth of the ravine, but had left mostly unseen the jutting rocks, ragged dead branches and a rock-strewn stream far below. I realized how very fortunate Tina and I had been.

Finally, Chad and I helped the state investigators back up to safe, solid ground. Then we all stood for a moment, surveying the boxes and bags that they’d collected.

Bones, it seemed, were pretty much all that remained of the victim. Except for a small white button and a section of zipper, nature and animals had stripped away our victim’s clothing and scoured away clues.

“No ring?” Chad asked, though it was obvious there wasn’t one. His mother had always worn her wedding band and, during questioning, his father had been upset because he’d forgotten to remove it.

“An adulteress should not be allowed to defile such a sacred symbol of marriage,” he’d said.

Chad’s hand had risen to his face and, when he asked about the ring, he was already working his fingers back and forth along his scarred jaw as he stared down at the contents of the box.

“No,” the tall crime-scene technician said.

“Are you sure?”

I expected the investigator to interpret Chad’s words as a challenge to his competence, to stiffen his body and snap out a response. But he didn’t. Chad was staring down into the box, so he didn’t see the flicker of sympathy that I saw on the tall tech’s face.

“No ring,” he said, and no hint of sympathy colored his voice. “No jewelry of any kind. And we were thorough.”

I was fairly certain that Chad hadn’t mentioned his suspicions about finding his mother’s remains to anyone but me. But cops were a gossipy brotherhood and I knew that this particular tale of duty and devotion had reached near-legendary status statewide. Although few were acquainted with the actual man or even the specific circumstances of the murder, the story of the young cop and his unrelenting search for his mother’s body was well-known. I’d heard the story several times and, each time, the facts had been just enough off that I could tell they weren’t based on first-or even secondhand information.

Apparently the tale had traveled as far as the Illinois State Police crime lab. Or maybe, I told myself, Chad’s chief had simply made a call to the crime lab on behalf of one of his favorite deputies.

“But it’s probably not a complete skeleton,” the stockier tech added as he began placing lids on top of the boxes of bones.

I noticed nothing about his manner or tone suggesting that
he’d
heard the story.

“I found a few bones on the second ledge,” he continued, “but I suspect some of the tiny bones from the hands and feet have been washed away by the rain. Or carried off by rodents. It’s surprising, really, that all the major bones are intact.”

“We have enough to confirm the obvious,” his partner said. “And maybe eventually come up with a description of the victim.”

The stockier man nodded, then lifted the skull from the last open box and held it upright in his palm.

“Here’s what we can tell you now,” he said matter-of-factly, “which is probably nothing that you haven’t already figured out. GSW to the head.”

He turned the skull to display the hole I’d noticed the night before above the bony ridge of the left eye.

“Entry wound.”

Then he rotated it to reveal a much larger hole at the back of the head.

“Exit wound.”

For a moment, he lifted his hand a little higher, briefly looked into what had once been a face.

“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew h—”

It was the kind of humor that Chad and I both understood, black humor that kept cops one step removed emotionally from the tragedies they investigated. But this time, at least one
of the state investigators knew that the tragedy
was
personal. He interrupted his partner’s soliloquy.

“Actually, our vic is a female,” he said quickly, his eyes flickering to Chad’s expressionless face.

Taking the skull from the hands of his unresisting partner, the taller man hunkered down on one knee beside the box and placed the skull carefully inside. After putting the lid on the box, he rested his right hand on it for the briefest of moments.

A benediction, I thought, though I couldn’t have proved it.

“Yeah, definitely a woman,” he said as he stood, then concentrated on brushing soil and bits of vegetation from his knees. “Pelvis gave us that much. And based on the general conformation of the face, my bet’s Caucasian. Of course, the lab’ll have to confirm all that.”

“Any idea about her age?” Chad asked.

Both of the state guys shook their heads.

“Adult,” the stocky tech said. “Lab guys will look at her teeth and pelvis more carefully, narrow it down for you. But you probably already know that your gal won’t get priority treatment. Lab’s already got a backlog of recent deaths to deal with. It may be weeks before you’ll get a formal report.”

Chad nodded. So did I.

“Whatever you can give us informally would be appreciated,” I said.

“Yeah. No problem,” the tech said.

“Any idea how long she’s been here?” Chad asked.

The taller tech lifted his chin in the direction of his partner.

“Nature boy,” he said, as if that explained something. And when his partner spoke, I realized it did.

“This is just a good guess, understand? But it might just help you track down a few possibles before you get the official report. Figuring on the size of the roots that grew in and
around the ribs and spine, I’d say—” he stopped, thought about it for a moment “—ten years. Give or take a couple of years on either side of that.”

Chad nodded, and then his eyes met mine.

Twelve years would be about the right time frame, I thought. But maybe the body had been there for as few as eight. And I was comforted to see more caution than optimism in Chad’s expression.

“You didn’t find a bullet,” I said, hoping that somehow I’d missed them bagging one up.

“No,” the stockier tech said. “And given this—”

Briefly, he shook his head as the sweep of his hand took in the forest. Then he stepped to the edge of the ravine, looked downward, and shook his head again as he spoke.

“What we’ve got here is a decade—more or less—of constant erosion, aggressive plant growth and exposure to the elements. Odds are, any physical evidence is long gone or so deeply buried that there’s no hope of finding it. Not even with dozens of people looking for it. And, frankly, this kind of case doesn’t warrant the manpower. So anything we find out about this gal is going to have come from her remains.”

As his partner spoke, the taller blond technician had slowly turned in place, his thoughtful gaze taking in the entire area enclosed by the yellow plastic tape.