Authors: Lis Wiehl
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths, #Thrillers, #General, #Christian, #Suspense, #ebook, #book
“If he finds her, he won’t disturb her, will he?” Allison had her own disturbing thought. Animals had already been eating at Katie. “The dog would still know Katie is a person, right?” She swallowed, trying to push down a sudden rush of nausea. “Toby wouldn’t see her as a meal, would he?”
Belinda shook her head sharply. “Don’t worry. Toby’s trained. He knows he can only possess the scent, not the object. As soon as he’s located the body, he’ll go down well away from it. By going prone, he controls himself. And he’ll wait for us to come.”
They waited, mostly in silence. Five minutes passed. Ten. Twenty.
In the distance, a bark. Allison froze. The ERT members raised their heads, listening with all their beings. A minute later, there was another bark. Triumphant.
S
tanding about twenty feet away from Katie Converse’s body, Leif Larson was making a list of everything that needed to be done to process the scene. Half hidden by a rhododendron, the body lay sprawled on its belly, head turned to one side. The right arm stretched overhead. The right hand was gone. The left hand, which still wore a black knit glove, was curled near what was left of her face. The glove had saved the hand from predation, but it also meant there would likely be nothing under the nails. Leif just had to hope they had better luck with the scavenged hand.
And around the neck, looped tight, was a bright red dog’s leash, with ten feet of lead lying on the ground next to the body.
He returned to where his team waited, taking care to step from stone to root so he wouldn’t leave any footprints. His team members were putting on shoe coverings, hairnets, and white Tyvek suits. The suits served a twofold purpose: to keep them from accidentally leaving trace evidence at the scene and to protect them from any biohazards they might encounter.
Leif assigned some of his team to set up the high-tech lighting system and others to mark a way in and out with pin flags. To the rest, he pointed out four trees that would serve as the rough square for the interior perimeter. Leif ’s back-pocket rule was to rope off at least one hundred feet from the farthest item of visible evidence.
He settled for setting the first boundary two hundred and fifty feet from the body. It was easier to decrease the size of an area than to increase it, and he didn’t need the press and onlookers destroying any evidence.
Because this was such a high-profile case, he also asked them to set up a second perimeter about a hundred feet back from the first. The nearer one would still not contaminate the crime scene—if that was what this was—but it could be offered to any VIPs who wanted closer access than the general public. The second perimeter was for everyone else. Along it, Leif stationed local officers and special agents who weren’t part of the ERT to make sure no one trespassed. Privately, the ERT called the yellow crime scene tape “flypaper” for its ability to attract gawkers. But for the moment the only people on-site belonged here. Portland police had stationed officers at all the formal entrances to the park, but that wouldn’t keep the media and the simply curious out for long. Not once they heard that Katie Converse had been found.
And they would hear, even though officials were keeping it off the scanners. With the amount of police presence alone, there was no hope of keeping it a secret. A few minutes earlier Leif had heard a helicopter buzz overhead, but the trees made too thick a canopy for them to see anything.
While they were getting ready, he saw Nicole Hedges taking a quick look at the body. She came back to Leif as he was pulling on a second pair of latex gloves. She wore a single pair, which she was already stripping off and stuffing into the pockets of her parka.
“It’s her. It’s Katie Converse,” she said grimly as Leif began to apply duct tape where his left glove and the suit met.
“The hair, the height, the build, the clothes—they all match. There’s even a gold bracelet we were told she owned, although now it’s just loose. Must have been on the hand the coyote took.” She pointed at the roll of tape. “Need help with your other hand?”
“Sure.”
Leif held out his wrists, and she began to wrap the duct tape where his suit and gloves met. He watched her without seeming to, her face intent as she carefully pressed it into place. Her slanted eyes, her comfort with silence, how she had looked on New Year’s Eve—it all intrigued him. Nicole was a cipher.
And Leif liked ciphers.
He had only gone on a couple of dates since he’d moved to Portland. Nice enough girls, he supposed, but neither of them had been the kind he could imagine discussing his day with. They liked that he was in the FBI, but didn’t want to know the details. Details like those that would consume him today.
When Nicole had finished, she gave his gloved hand a pat. “All done.” She sighed. “I’m going to go back and tell the parents.”
“How do you think they’ll take it?” Leif knew the question was stupid even as it left his mouth. Shoot, he knew Nicole had a kid. Could a parent even recover from such a thing?
“I’ll come back afterward and let you know.” She said it flatly, no sarcasm, and it was worse for that.
Pushing aside his embarrassment, Leif picked up his camera and re-entered the crime scene. Within the ERT he had a dual role: team leader and photographer. Before the team began work, he took entry photographs to show how the scene looked when they arrived. Next he would take evidence photos. And once his team was done processing the scene, he would take exit photographs to show what it looked like when they had finished.
Being the ERT’s photographer meant you had to get up close and personal with the body in order to document exactly what had been done to it. It meant struggling to retain a clinical detachment as you photographed maggots on a corpse.
Or in this case, it meant documenting the evidence of what coyotes and crows and perhaps rats could do when presented with a nice fresh body. Only this one wasn’t so fresh anymore. The smell of death coated the inside of Leif ’s nose and filled the back of his throat. It was sweet and rotten, acidic, like nothing else. No wonder the dog had found her so quickly.
Using a Canon SLR, Leif took establishing photographs of the body, then midrange photos, close-ups, and finally close-ups with a paper ruler laid down for scale. It was easier when he was focusing through the camera. It put some distance between him and what he was seeing, as if it were already two-dimensional. He took dozens of pictures, looking for abrasions, bruising, bite marks or impression evidence, bloodstain patterns, defensive wounds—and finding precious little.
Still, Leif had been taught to photograph everything. Evidence disappeared. Processing went awry. A photograph might offer the only clues they would ever have. How much evidence had already disappeared or degraded, washed away by the rain or dried up by the faint sun that had shown intermittently since Katie’s disappearance?
As the shutter opened and closed, Leif asked himself the four questions he did at every crime scene: What was the cause of death? Could the victim have caused her own death? Were there any signs of a struggle? And what object had caused the injuries?
So was this murder—or suicide? Leif wondered as he bent over the body and snapped another photo. Someone had fashioned a simple noose by threading the end of the leash through the hand loop, forming a second loop that was now buried in the swollen purpled flesh of the girl’s neck. The rest of the leash trailed on the ground next to her. Right now it looked like suicide, but looks could be deceiving. He remembered another case, a man’s body found in a crashed car. It had seemed open and shut: a single-car accident. Then the autopsy had turned up five stab wounds to the chest.
Besides, if it was suicide, why wasn’t she still hanging? He looked up but didn’t see any broken branches.
Leif held his breath as he bent closer to the girl. Only she wasn’t a girl anymore. She was a husk, a shell, a life-sized rag doll. It was easier to think of her that way. Not as a girl who might have been wondering what she might get for Christmas.
Normally he paid particular attention to the victim’s eyes, hands, and feet and the soles of their shoes, but for the first two he had to be content with photographing where each had been.
Seasoned veteran of the ERT, Rod Emerick, kept the photo log. As Leif worked, Rod carefully noted the pertinent facts of each photograph: its number, a description of the object or scene, its location, and the time and date. Every evidence tech had heard the cautionary story of what had happened when the FBI took photos of JFK but neglected to note whether the photos were of entrance or exit wounds. The pictures had wound up being useless.
Leif took another photograph, this one of the head. Hanks of dark blonde hair clung wetly to the skull, but most of the face had been eaten away. What was left of her visible skin looked brown and stiff. She had been out here long enough that she had begun to mummify.
He straightened up and stretched, pressing his fists into the middle of his back. It gave him a chance to check in on his team without being obvious. Even the seasoned agents looked upset. A young kid like this, chewed up by animals—it was a hard scene for anyone. Leif decided to organize a trauma debrief in the next week, get a chaplain to come in. It was a good way to check in with everyone while underlining that the ERT was a team in every sense of the word, a team that looked after each other.
He leaned over again and snapped photos of the red leash. Some of Katie’s hair was caught underneath.
Leif imagined how it had gone down. She could have looped the leash around her own neck, tied the other end around a branch, let her weight sag forward. It was a lot easier than most people thought to hang yourself. Your feet didn’t even need to leave the ground. Over the past few years he had been called to scenes where people had died with a noose around their neck leaning, kneeling, sitting, or even lying down. The noose didn’t even need to be tight to be effective. The heart and the lungs failed, although the brain probably eked out a horrible minute or two.
Alternatively, someone could have looped the leash around Katie’s neck and strangled her.
What had happened to Katie Converse—and why? The why was the most important thing. Her navy blue parka seemed to be zipped all the way. Her coat covered her butt, but her pants looked like they were in their proper place. But just because her pants weren’t down around her ankles didn’t mean she hadn’t been raped up here. Throw her down on a bed of leaves and there would be no one around to hear. But Leif saw no signs of a fight—no defensive injuries, no broken branches or scuffed earth. Could she have been killed someplace else and then dumped here? But this area would only be accessible by ATV, and he hadn’t seen any tracks. And it was hard to picture someone carrying her all the way up here. So whatever had happened had probably taken place here.
Had the girl fled here from one of the popular trails, chased down by a killer? Or had someone stuck a gun in her back and forced her up here?
Or had Katie come up here to solve her problems in her own sad way?
November 19
I
know I haven’t written much lately. A lot has been going on, but I can’t say most of it.
The Senate worked until 2:00 a.m. last night. Senator X had a whole bunch of pizzas delivered, just for us. Everybody likes him. And there I am thinking that I know him on a whole different level.
We got excused from school today, but not from work. I feel terrible. I’m so exhausted. I keep drinking coffee, but all it does is make me feel like I want to throw up.
C
hannel Four had gotten a tip from a woman who lived near a parking lot for Forest Park. She reported a lot of police activity, including some kind of search dog.
Cassidy and Andy had had to park their car three blocks away. Once they made it to the parking lot, the policewoman stationed at the entrance would let them come no farther. And, she said, no one was available to speak on camera about what was going on.
They began to set up for a live shot in the yard of the woman who had tipped them, with Andy’s camera pointed in the direction of the parking lot full of marked and unmarked cars, as well as a mobile command post.
In her head, Cassidy was putting together the story—as sketchy as it was—when she spotted Nicole walking to her car. She hurried across the street.
The policewoman sighed when she saw Cassidy tick-tocking toward her again in her high heels and short skirt. “I already told you, you’re not allowed in the lot.”
“But I know her,” Cassidy said, and called and waved. “Nic! Nic! Can I talk to you for a second?”
Nicole stopped, turned, and finally—reluctantly, Cassidy was sure—nodded assent. With a huffy grunt, the policewoman let Cassidy past.
“So have they found Katie?” she begged. “Is that what happened?”
“Come on, you know I can’t say,” Nicole said, her expression unreadable. “Notifications have to be made.”
“Is that what you’re doing?” she guessed, remembering that Nicole was the liaison to the Converse family. “Come on, Nicole,” Cassidy begged. “You’ve got to give me something here. I’m the one who told you guys about the rumors about Fairview. And I’m the one who turned up Luisa.”
Nicole stared at her without answering, without twitching a muscle, without any kind of expression on her face. Typical Nicole, with her typical poker face.
When it was the three of them—Nicole, Allison, and Cassidy—the relationship worked. They laughed, they shared tips, they shared gossip, they shared desserts. They were the real Triple Threat Club. But when Allison wasn’t around, it was out of balance. Cassidy was painfully aware that, compared to Nicole, she talked too fast, shared too much, laughed too loud.
“Please?” Cassidy begged. “They’re threatening to let Madeline McCormick take over the story if I don’t keep on bringing it home. The only reason I haven’t been bigfooted yet is that they know I have sources nobody else does. But I’ve got to give them a reason for keeping me on!”