In the Belly of Jonah (7 page)

Mark asked, “First time?”

I nodded.

He smiled. “She is still completely covered. I have pulled back the sheet just enough for you to see her face.”

Like that would help.

I had avoided funerals all my life, and at those I was forced to attend, I made sure I had a reason to disappear when it came time to walk by and gawk at the deceased. So yeah, it was my first time ever to see a dead person. Shit. I am almost thirty and I’ve never seen a corpse. How I had managed to avoid that all these years I’ll never know. It freaked me out when at age sixteen I saw my grandpa lean down to kiss my dead grandma while she lay in her casket. Romantic, yet creepy at the same time. I must have watched too many
Creature Feature
episodes when I was a kid.

I slowly lowered my eyes down Mark’s torso, not really noticing where my eyes were so much as focusing on where they were not. I willed myself to rein in my peripheral vision so I wouldn’t have to see Jill before my eyes were ready. What must have seemed like eons later, my eyes finally rested on Jill’s angelic face. She looked like she’d just stepped out of a cold shower, her long brown hair stringy, her skin gray, her lips slightly parted, her bulging eyes closed as if in deep, childlike sleep.

An incredible calm settled in my chest, my mind resting on the images of Jill during her interview, bagging fifty-pound bags of pulverized limestone one after another, eating lunch with the other employees on her shift, smiling and laughing at their stories and jokes. Jill so full of life, now so empty of it.

“That’s her,” I said. My words sounded distant and small.

The policewoman nudged me. “That’s Jill Brannigan?”

“That’s Jill Brannigan.”

Joe was waiting for me in the lobby and he walked me to his truck. Thank God for small favors and thank Joe for following me down here!

“I’m taking you home,” was all he said.

I didn’t argue with him. I was feeling unlike myself: unsure, dizzy, a little out of control. I don’t remember what or if he said anything to me during the long drive back to Fort Collins or while walking me to my front door, but I was thankful he was there for me. I couldn’t go back to work. I just couldn’t. It wasn’t like me to miss work. Ever. But I’d never had someone I knew be a murder victim before. Never had an employee die by a butcher’s hand. Never seen a dead body. I just sat in my living room, staring at the television for what must have been hours. The television wasn’t even turned on. The ringing in my ear turned out not to be my imagination as I first thought.

“Hello?” I answered.

“Liv?” asked a voice that was vaguely familiar.

“Who is this?” I asked.

“Lisa Henry. From UW.”

My mind quickly scrolled through my college days—the faces of teachers, roommates, classmates, and friends—and landed successfully on a picture of my teammates. I had played basketball with Lisa Henry in Laramie. She was two years ahead of me, and the most intelligent athlete I ever met during college. Lisa was nearly six feet tall, had long black hair and striking robin’s-egg blue eyes, and could have been a model. Plus, she was a helluva starting forward.

“Do you remember me, Liv?”

“Of course I do, Lisa,” I said, even though I hadn’t seen her since I walked off the court my sophomore year, which would have been almost ten years ago. “How’s Elsa?”

Elsa, a guard like me, had been Lisa’s roommate and best friend during college.

“Great! She has two kids already,” Lisa said.

“Jeez, and I’m not even married,”I remarked, not knowing why I found it so important to share that tidbit about my life. Maybe it was because I’d always wondered if Elsa and Lisa were an item. Being so surprised by the news that Elsa was married, with kids, I wanted Lisa to make no mistake that my sexual preference was for men, too. I truly felt in those undergrad days, especially when I was with fellow athletes, that I was in the minority when it came to that particular issue.

“Me neither,” Lisa added. “Liv, I was wondering if I could talk with you.”

“Talk? With me?” I was confused. I had been giving my money to the alumni association ever since graduating from the University of Wyoming, but I hadn’t responded to any of the special invitations to come back and play demonstration basketball games or to help get donations for the athletic department. “Hey, Lisa, I just don’t have the time to do more fund-raising than I’m already—”

“No, no,” she laughed. “This isn’t about the Cowgirls, Liv. I’m getting hounded, too, believe me.”

“Then what’s it about?”

“Jill Brannigan.”

I opened my mouth, then shut it. I eventually managed, “How did you ... why did you call
me
?”

“Because you were her boss. You and Joe Renker. I want to talk with you about her if you have time.”

My mind had trouble computing. Lisa Henry, Jill Brannigan. Both basketball players, but at different colleges and years apart. Different last names. Nothing was adding up. “Are you related to Jill somehow?”

“No,” she said. Before I could protest that I would not talk with her about this if she were a journalist or part of the media in any way, Lisa added, “I’m with the FBI.”

“FBI?”

“Federal Bureau—”

“I know, I know. My question was more along the lines of how the hell you got from the court as a UW Cowgirl to the FBI. I would have expected you to be a model or an actress or something exotic.”

That made her laugh. “I’m serious, Lisa.”

“Thanks, Liv,”Lisa responded. “You always could make me laugh. And you’re now running your own mining company. Good for you.”

“Not quite,” I corrected. “I’m just a division manager for our Colorado sites.”

“Same, same. You always were goal-oriented, not to mention being the one who brought the team’s grade point average up.”

“I thought that was
your
role.”

If I remembered correctly, Lisa had been almost a straight-A student who then studied for the LSATs with her heart set on being accepted into UW’s law school. No easy feat even for someone with her intelligence.

“Will you meet with me, Liv?”

“Sure, Lisa,” I said. “What day works for you? I’m at home so I don’t have my schedule here in front of me, but I could—”

“I’ll be over in ten minutes,” she said.

“But you don’t even know where I—”

The dial tone buzzed in my ear before I ever finished my sentence.

She must have been at the corner of Drake and College, because Lisa was at my door within five minutes. I swung the door wide and gave her a big hug. She was a vision of beauty, as always: tall, lean, with a timid smile,

yet her face revealed confidence because of her piercing eyes.

“Come in, please,” I told her.

It took us a few minutes to catch up on the past ten years and everything we’d been up to. I talked her into having lunch, and we made turkey and avocado sandwiches with a smear of cottage cheese.

“I thought you were in pre-law?”

Lisa finished her bite. “I was. I took as much psychology as I could to be a better trial attorney, which is what I thought I wanted to do, only to find out I loved psychology.”

“So you got your doctorate in psychology instead?”

“Behavioral. This sandwich is good.”

“Help yourself.”

She made herself a second one.

“You were always forgetting to eat. That’s how you stayed—and stay—so slim,” I said.

“And you were always so thoughtful and well prepared. That’s why you had a cabinet full of good food to eat no matter what time of day or night we all crashed at your dorm room,” she countered. “Nothing ever changes, huh?”

“Yes, it does. You’re an FBI agent. Amazing.” I worked the last few bites of my cottage cheese as she devoured her second sandwich. “How long have you been living in Fort Collins?”

Lisa shook her head. “D.C. Five years. Profiling as part of the Behavioral Assessment Unit of the Special Investigations Branch. I’m just working with the Denver office on a case they’ve been following. Ever heard of Special Agent Streeter Pierce?”

I shook my head.

“He’s a legend. And incredibly handsome,” Lisa added. “I’m lucky to be working with him on this case.”

He must have been something special because, although Lisa was a stunner, I never saw her date and never heard her mention any interest in men. She never seemed to stray from her goals, which didn’t seem to include marriage or children.

“Cool,” was all I managed.

I’d always wanted to be an FBI agent. My softball coach in high school was an FBI agent, and I had a deep admiration for him both as a coach and as a human being. Class act.

“So how does that fit with Jill Brannigan? And when did it become the FBI’s case?” “It’s not, yet. And me first,” she said, dusting the crumbs off her hands and pushing her plate aside. “I have some questions for you.”

She pulled out a pen and a pad of paper from her satchel and dated the top of the sheet, writing my name beneath and the time of day. Organized.

“When did you last see Jill?”

I looked over at the clock. It was three. “About four hours ago.” Lisa stopped writing and looked up at me. I added, “I had to ID the body.

”Her face collapsed. “So sorry, Liv.”

“Me too. Before that, the last time I saw Jill would have been ... what is this, Thursday?”I was struggling to remember anything since this morning, let alone how to count backward. “About five days ago. Last Saturday.”

“Where did you see her?”

“At work. She is—was—on day shift Wednesday through Saturday, so it would have been the last day of her shift last week. I went into the plant to talk with Allan, our team leader for that shift, around two o’clock. I must have talked with Allan about an hour, then did a quick inspection around the plant during which I stopped to talk with Jill. That would have been around three thirty or so.”

“Where was she?”

“In the warehouse. Bagging,” I said.

“What’s bagging?” Lisa asked.

“We mine high-grade calcium limestone at our quarry between here and Laramie on U.S. Highway 287. At the plant, we pulverize the limestone so that it’s small enough to be suspended in liquid. You know, like flour or face powder. Our smallest product is called #325, which means there are three hundred and twenty-five holes in a one-inch square and the material is fine enough to pass through those holes. At least that’s the basic concept.”

I caught myself delving too much into the details, like always. I kept hearing my little brother Jens saying, “Forty-thousand-foot view, Boots. Give me the forty-thousand-foot view.” Translation: stick with the big picture, sister.

To my surprise, Lisa’s eyes hadn’t glazed over out of boredom; instead she asked, “Why does it need to be so minute? Why do you need to suspend it in liquid?”

I smiled. “Our biggest market for the high-grade limestone is for agricultural feed as a calcium supplement. The limestone has to be so small it suspends in the liquid feeds for the cows that drink it. Make sense?”

“Perfectly,” Lisa said, jotting notes as I talked.

“We either ship the limestone to the customers in a pneumatic truck, meaning a container that can be pressurized so the material can be blown into and out of the vessel, or it can be shipped in bags. We bag the materials in fifty-pound paper bags up to one-hundred-pound paper bags or as much as one thousand pounds in a canvas bag.”

“Wow. Nearly half a ton?”

“Sometimes almost three-quarters of a ton is bagged for the customer in the super sacks, as we call them. Just depends.”

Lisa shook her head. “And Jill was filling these bags? By herself?”

“Well, the super sacks can be tricky for one person to handle because they require a forklift for each bag, but she could manage the paper bags, sure. She filled and palletized most of those by herself.”

“All with the aid of machines?” Lisa pressed.

“Well, not really. We have an antiquated system, so Jill had to manhandle each bag onto the pallet. Four to six bags to each layer, with about ten to twelve layers high on each pallet.”