In the Belly of Jonah (4 page)

Her hushed whisper was reproachful. “Damn it, Streeter, it’s eight o’clock. I’m helping my kid with her math homework. Don’t you have something better to do than work?”

“Nope,” he answered. “Are you on it?”

“On what?”

“The murder vic found west of Fort Collins,” he said calmly.

She sighed. “I heard about it, but no. I didn’t see the point.”

“The point is I need you,” Streeter said.

“So what? So, do my kids. And my husband,” she said defensively.

“Berta?”

“She was assigned to Mark. He’s scheduled to start tomorrow morning after the ID.”

“Berta,”Streeter pleaded, switching the phone to his other ear and pivoting his chair for a different view of the snowcapped Rockies in the distance.

Her sigh of concession spoke volumes over her protests. “That’s why I hired Mark and Eddie and Shayla. They’re all capable, bright, young assistants.”

“But they’re not you,” Streeter said.

He could hear the young girl in the background singing a Room Five song, and he pictured her bopping to her iPod, tapping a pencil against her schoolbook. A pang of guilt stabbed his gut for having made this call.

“All right,” she said. “But not until Hannah’s off to school in the morning.”

“Great choice.”

“You know I’m trying to retire, don’t you?”

“Mmm.”

“Jackass,” she whispered. This brought him another smile. “You know,
you
should think about retiring, old man.”

“Come on, Berta. I only just hit the big 4-0.”

He could hear Hannah croon a few more bars while Berta mulled over the situation. She finally connected the dots. “You think this has something to do with our de Milo?”

“Don’t know for sure yet, but something in my gut says it does. I’ll be talking to the detective assigned to the case in a few minutes and I’ll know for sure. Just a hunch, but I think we may have a serial on our hands. That’s why I need you.”

“Then meet me at ten. I should be in the middle of things by then.”

“I’ll be there,” Streeter promised.

“Frank’s going to kick your ass,” she promised back.

“As he should,” Streeter said before hanging up, knowing her husband would do nothing of the sort.

He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes, and then he raked his fingers through his butch. He could see his ghostly image in the windows and noted the similarity between himself and the snowcapped mountains. Neither seemed right being capped in white, this being June in the Rockies and he being only forty. “As old as the hills and twice as dusty,” according to his goddaughter, whom he’d seen last weekend. She couldn’t possibly know he’d gone prematurely gray—or white, as luck would have it—after Paula’s death. At least she had made her father, Tony, laugh.

Having Berta at the table reviewing the results eased his mind. Having Tony Gates rather than Doug Brandt as the lead detective would make it even better. But that wasn’t going to happen. It wasn’t Denver Police Chief Tony Gates’s jurisdiction.

Streeter filled his coffee cup, looked at the clock, and made the phone call to Brandt.

“Better now?”

“Yeah. Hey, thanks for the tip,” Brandt said, sounding more confident. “What can I do for you?”

“I need some confirmation on a few details. The word down here is that the perp—how do I put it?—cut a window into the girl’s body. Is that true?”

“That’s what the guy who found her keeps saying. We can’t muzzle the guy. He’s a mess. We held him for six hours going over and over his story. But we finally had to let him go.”

“Not a suspect?”

“Nah,”Brandt said. “And believe me, he’s an emotional basket case over this. Kept babbling about the window. We tried to keep him away from the press, but I won’t be surprised if his story hits the AP within hours.”

“Tell me about the ‘window.’ What are they talking about?”

Brandt’s voice became a bit shaky. “It was like someone took a cookie cutter and punched a hole right through her torso.”

“How big?” Streeter was jotting down notes, trying to suppress the repulsion and shock that ripped through him. Remaining calm was critical to keep Brandt talking, but Streeter’s mind was already racing toward a connection with de Milo.

“Oh, about six inches high and four inches across. Her stomach, lungs, heart were gone. Looked to me like the guy tossed her guts into the reservoir as fish bait.”

“Why do you say that?” Streeter swallowed hard, tasting a bit of the bile that had crept up his throat.

“I waded out into the shallows and found some bits of bone and stuff in the rocks. Too much to be fishermen gutting and deboning their catch of the day.”

“Did you bag and tag?”

“Uh-huh,” Brandt answered.

“Tell me about the scene,” Streeter pressed.

“I got there at . . . oh, I’d say about 9:30 to 9:40 am. I’d been out at the quarry talking with the vic’s boss on the missing persons call when I got the call from dispatch. That was at 9:10. The fisherman had found the vic just ten minutes before and had called it in immediately.”

“And tell me what you saw when you arrived.”

Brandt took a deep breath. Streeter imagined the detective was leaning back in his chair at his desk, just like he had been doing earlier. The ultimate thinking position. But now Streeter hunched over his desk and wrote as fast as Brandt was speaking.

“It was awful. Worst crime scene I’d ever been to.” Brandt blew out a breath. Streeter didn’t fill the uncomfortable silence that followed, allowing Brandt time to gather his thoughts and composure. “Okay. The first responders had cordoned off the entire south shore of the reservoir. There were just four officers trying to keep dozens of looky-loos away from the beach. It was kind of crazy because we had some fishermen returning to the nearby dock, unaware they had slipped off in the early morning darkness right next to a gruesome murder scene.”

“Did you question any of them?”

“All of them were detained and interviewed at the station. We thought one of them might be the perp,” Brandt explained.

“And now?”

“Doubt it.”

“Okay,” Streeter said, sketching a time line at the top of his paper. Predawn, fishermen launch. Nine ten, call taken by Brandt. Nine thirty to nine forty, Brandt arrives at crime scene.

“Interviewing the fishermen kept us busy. Securing the crime scene tied up a bunch more of our guys’ time. So, I was the one investigating the crime scene. It was a circus out there.”

Streeter knew Brandt was stalling. Recalling a crime scene as gruesome as this one must have been a strain, to say the least. Streeter felt sorry for the poor guy, knowing he’d need months, even years, to get to the point where the images were blurred from memory. If ever.

“There were these cabinets near the water’s edge. Two of them.”

“Cabinets?”This was a detail Streeter had not heard from the coroner’s office.

“The kind that have two doors in them. One had an empty brown bottle sitting on top. We hauled all that stuff off to the lab right away to dust. Didn’t want any more commotion out there than we already had.”

“Smart,” Streeter said. “You think the killer put the cabinets out there?”

“Know he did,” Brandt said. “There was a stream of blood running across the rocks from the girl to the water that pooled around the base of each of the cabinets, like the guy planned it that way.”

“All right, good eye.” Streeter was impressed. He had also earned Brandt’s trust and therefore was getting more information in a shorter time frame than he would if he pulled jurisdiction from him and took over the case. “What else?”

“The boats nearby kept rocking around, knocking into each other. Every time I looked that way, I about lost my lunch. Kept it real, if you know what I mean.”

Streeter knew. It was the girl, the blood, the smells that were making Brandt sick, but the mind has a powerful ability called transference. It was easier for Brandt to blame the rocking boats, which symbolized seasickness, for his urge to throw up.

“She . . . the girl was sitting up, hands in her lap, legs straight out, facing the reservoir,” Brandt struggled.

“North? The body was facing north?” Streeter asked, drawing Brandt’s attention to details so his memory would be sharp. Plus, Streeter had sketched the reservoir in relation to Fort Collins and was marking areas as Brandt spoke.

“Yes, north. It was weird, Pierce. She had a . . . a wooden stick shaped like a T propping her up, stuck under her collar bone. Kind of like where her spine should have been . . . ”

His words trailed off.

Streeter was losing him to the world of nightmarish memories. “What kind of stick, Brandt? A tree branch? A walking stick? A pole?”

“More like a crutch, I’d say. It was a wooden crutch with a T . . . no, more like a U-shaped handle. The shaft was about three feet tall.”

Streeter ruminated on this image. “One piece or two?”

“You mean was the handle attached? No, it wasn’t a separate piece. The shaft and the handle were both hewn from one piece of wood.”

“Same wood as the cabinets?”

Brandt paused. Streeter heard a clicking noise and imagined Brandt tapping a fingernail or a pen against his tooth or something.

“No. Different wood. Maybe the same wood as one of the cabinets. I can’t remember. I’ll have to check.”

“Anything else around? Other furniture, weapons, cigarette butts, clues, anything?” Streeter had diverted Brandt’s attention from the girl for the time being, trying to extract as much as possible before getting back to the emotionally draining images.

“We’re still combing the area. We’ve picked up boxes and boxes full of crap off that beach. Bottle caps, cigarette butts, candy wrappers, fishing hooks and line, you name it. It’s a really popular spot for locals.”

“Anything catch your eye that might fit with the murder?”

Brandt hummed. “Nope. Well, just that . . . nope.”

“What?” Streeter urged. After a long pause, he added, “Trust your instincts.”

“Well, the odd thing to me was what
wasn’t
there,” Brandt offered.

“How so?”

“Like, where was her middle? I mean, I know I found bits of bone and gunk in the shallows, but where was the spine? Did he take it home as a trophy or something? There wasn’t anything nearby except a lot of blood, and even that wasn’t as much as I would have expected considering the damage that was done to her.”

“So you think this wasn’t the spot where he killed her?” Streeter switched the phone to his other ear and shoulder and kept writing.

“My gut says it was, but not where she sat. The gravel looked wet all around her body and to the water’s edge, like she’d been in the water and dragged up on shore or something. Maybe the water washed away most of the blood. The stream of blood from her body was more like a trickle, and the pooling around the cabinets was minimal considering the wound. Least ways that’s how I figured it.”

“Maybe he tossed the spine, the bigger chunks into the deeper water.”

“Maybe.”

Streeter’s mind imagined the gray rocks on the beach at Horsetooth Reservoir. He had been there before with his late wife. The reservoir was long and narrow, running north and south, with a road encircling the water. It was a stunning, rocky area with pebble beaches, not sandy ones. The pebbles were smooth and round after decades of being polished by whitewater rapids spilling from the peaks of the Rockies and varied in shades of gray, dark brown, and black. If the victim had been in the dark waters and dragged onto the beach, the pebbles around her would be much darker than the surrounding dry areas. Darkened by water, blood, and bodily fluids. And if the killer had carved out a chunk of the girl in the shallow waters, they should have found some remnants, even if the fish had chummed for a few hours before the girl was found. The waters were still and little would have washed away in that short a time.

“Was she found naked?” Streeter asked.

“Nope. She was wearing a dress and shoes.”

“Can you get water samples from her clothes to compare to the reservoir?”

“Well, that’s the thing. Her hair was damp, but her clothes and shoes were dry.”

“He dressed her
after
she was in the water?”

“Seems so.”

Streeter’s mind processed all the information he had assimilated. He flipped back through his notebook. “So, he cut her torso after she was out of the water?”

“Don’t think so. Not based on the area around her. The rocks were pretty clean, like I said, except for the blood that trickled from her. She had to have been cut while she was in the water,” Brandt concluded.

Still flipping through his notes, Streeter’s eyes landed on the first note he wrote. “If she was sliced up in the water, dragged back up on shore, and dressed afterward, then how did the fisherman see the window through the girl?”

Brandt slurped what Streeter imagined was a hot cup of coffee. “That’s the thing. The dress had been cut to mimic the torso. Looks like a carpet knife or something crude.”