Читать книгу Once Lost - Блейк Пирс - Страница 13

Two people were standing by the freshly revealed body. Riley headed straight toward one of them, a brawny man about her own age.

“Chief Joseph Sinard, I assume,” she said, offering her hand.

He nodded and shook her hand.

“Folks around here just call me Joe,”

Sinard indicated an obese, bored-looking man in his fifties who was standing beside him, “This is Barry Teague, the county medical examiner. You two are the FBI folks we’ve been expecting, I guess.”

Riley and Jenn produced their badges and introduced themselves.

“Here’s our victim,” Sinard said.

He pointed down into the shallow hole, where a young woman lay carelessly splayed, wearing a bright orange sundress. The dress was hitched up over her thighs, and Riley could see that her underwear had been removed. She wasn’t wearing any shoes. Her face was unnaturally pale, and her open mouth still had dirt in it. Her eyes were wide open. The soiled body was dull in color, no longer the shade of any living human being.

Riley shuddered a little. She seldom felt any emotion when seeing a dead body – she’d seen far too many of them over the years. But this girl reminded her too much of April.

Riley turned toward the medical examiner.

“Have you come to any conclusions, Mr. Teague?”

Barry Teague crouched down next to the hole, and Riley crouched next to him.

“It’s bad – real bad,” he said in a voice that expressed no emotion at all.

He pointed to the girl’s thighs.

“See those bruises?” he asked. “Looks to me like she was raped.”

Riley didn’t say so, but she felt sure that he was correct. Judging from the smell, she also guessed that the girl had died the night before last, and that she’d been buried here for most of that time.

She asked the ME, “What do you think was the cause of death?”

Teague let out an impatient-sounding growl.

“Don’t know,” he said. “Maybe if you federal folks let me haul the body out of here and do my job, I might be able to tell you.”

Riley bristled inside. The man’s resentment of the FBI’s presence was palpable. Were she and Jenn Roston going to face a lot of local resistance?

She reminded herself that it had been Chief Sinard who called in the request. At least she could count on Sinard’s cooperation.

She told the ME, “You can take her away now.”

She got to her feet and looked around. She saw an elderly man some fifty feet away, leaning against a tractor and staring straight toward the body.

“Who’s that?” she asked Chief Sinard.

“George Tully,” Sinard said.

Riley remembered that George Tully was the owner of this land.

She and Jenn walked over to him and introduced themselves. Tully seemed barely to notice their presence. He kept staring toward the body as Teague’s team carefully got ready to move it.

Riley said to him, “Mr. Tully, I understand that you found the girl.”

He nodded dully, still not taking his eyes off the body.

Riley said, “I know this is hard. But could you please tell me what happened?”

Tully spoke in a vague, distant-sounding voice.

“Not much to tell. Me and the boys came out this morning early for planting. I noticed something odd about the soil there. The look of it bothered me so I started to dig … and then there she was.”

Riley sensed that Tully wasn’t going to be able to tell her much.

Jenn said, “Do you have any idea when the body might have been buried here?”

Tully shook his head mutely.

Riley looked around for a moment. The field seemed to have been recently tilled.

“When did you till this field?” she asked.

“Day before last. No, the day before that. We were just getting started seeding it today.”

Riley turned this over in her mind. It seemed consistent with her guess that the girl had been killed and buried the night before last.

Tully squinted as he continued to stare ahead.

“Chief Sinard told me her name,” he said. “Katy – her last name was Philbin, I think. Odd, I didn’t recognize that name. I didn’t recognize her either. Time was …”

He paused for a moment.

“Time was when I knew pretty much all the families in town, and their kids too. Times have changed.”

There was a numb, aching sadness in his voice.

Riley could feel his pain now. She felt sure he’d lived on this land all his life, and so had his parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, and he’d hoped to pass the farm down to his own children and grandchildren.

He’d never imagined something like this could possibly happen here.

She also realized something else – that Tully had been standing in exactly this same spot for hours, staring with horrified disbelief at the poor girl’s body. He’d found the body in the early morning, reported it, and then hadn’t been able to make himself move from this spot. Now that the body was being taken away, maybe he’d leave soon.

But Riley knew that the horror wouldn’t leave him.

His words echoed through her head …

“Times have changed.”

He must have felt as though the world had gone mad.

And maybe it has, Riley thought.

“We’re terribly sorry this happened,” Riley told him.

Then she and Jenn headed back toward the excavated spot.

Teague’s team now had the covered body up on a gurney. They were awkwardly moving it over the tilled soil toward the medical examiner’s vehicle.

Teague approached Riley and Jenn. He spoke in that seemingly perpetual monotone of his.

“In answer to your question, how’d she die … I got a better look, and she’d been bludgeoned, hit more than once. So that’s it.”

Without another word he turned and walked away to join his team.

Jenn let out a scoff of annoyance.

“Well, it sounds like the examination is done as far as he’s concerned,” she said. “He’s a real sweetheart.”

Riley shook her head in dismayed agreement.

Then she walked toward Chief Sinard and asked, “Was anything else found with the body? A handbag? Cell phone?”

“No,” Sinard said. “Whoever did it must have kept those.”

“Agent Roston and I need to meet with the girl’s family as soon as possible.”

Chief Sinard frowned a little.

“That’s going to be pretty rough,” he said. “Her dad, Drew, was just out here a little while ago to identify the body. He was in pretty bad shape when he left.”

“I understand,” Riley said. “But it’s really necessary.”

Chief Sinard nodded, took a key out of his pocket, and pointed to a nearby car.

“I figure you two are going to need your own transportation,” he said. “You can use my car as long as you’re here. I’ll drive on ahead in a police vehicle and show you where the Philbins live.”

Riley let Jenn take the keys and drive. Soon they were following Sinard’s police car toward the town of Angier.

Riley asked her new partner, “What are your thoughts at this point?”

Jenn drove in silence for a moment as she seemed to mull the question over.

Then she said, “We know that the victim was seventeen years old – within the age range of about half of the victims of this kind of crime. It’s still an unusual case. Most victims of serial sexual predators are prostitutes. This one may fall into the ten percent who are victims of acquaintances of one kind or another.”

Jenn paused again.

Then she added, “More than half of these kinds of murders are by strangulation. But blunt force trauma is the second most frequent cause of death. So in that sense this murder may not be atypical. Still, we’ve got a lot to learn. The most important question is whether we’re dealing with a serial killer.”

Riley nodded grimly in agreement. Jenn wasn’t saying anything she didn’t already know, but whatever her misgivings might be about her new partner, at least she was well informed. And they were both facing the possibility of a terrible answer to that last question, both hoping the answer was “no.”

In a matter of minutes they were following Sinard into Angier and driving down Main Street. Riley saw nothing to distinguish it from other Main Streets she’d seen throughout the Midwest – bland and characterless rows of shops, some of them old and some of them new. She detected no hint of charm or quaintness. Riley had much the same feeling about the town as she’d had during the drive across the rolling prairie – a sense of something dark lurking behind the veneer of Midwestern wholesomeness.

She almost gave voice to her thoughts. But she quickly reminded herself that it wasn’t Bill who was at her side, but a young woman she barely knew and still didn’t know if she could trust.

Would Jenn Roston share Riley’s feelings, or even want to hear them?

Riley had no way of knowing, and it bothered her.

It was hard not having a partner she could talk to freely, expressing ideas as they came whether they made sense or not. She missed Bill more with every passing minute – and Lucy as well.

The victim’s family lived in an older but well-kept brick bungalow on a quiet street with large trees in the yard. The curb and the driveway were crowded with parked vehicles. Riley guessed the Philbins had a lot of visitors at the moment.

Sinard stopped his marked patrol car in the street and got out. He gestured Jenn toward a small parking space and stood giving directions to help her squeeze the car into place. Once the car was parked, Riley and Jenn got out and walked toward the house. Chief Sinard was already on his way to the front door, his patrol car still double-parked in the street.

Riley wondered – were they going to meet an innocent grieving family and many sincere and well-meaning friends and loved ones?

Or were they about to encounter people who might be capable of murder?

Either way, Riley always dreaded this kind of visit.