made.”
The two women stared at the tire treads in the soft red earth of a bare spot alongside the road, encircled by the patrol cars. Another state trooper came through the thicket and said, “I'm on it, boss. Just have to get the kit from my cruiser.”
“ Thanks, Wil,” replied Stoffel, “and don't forget the shoe prints.”
“ I'm on it! I'll do the shoe prints first.”
“ You've got shoe prints, too?” asked Jessica.
“ We do. It's why I have to lead you in and outta the crime scene. So far, they're intact and untouched.”
Jessica clenched her medical bag to her chest. “I want to see the shoe prints.”
He led Jessica and Combs to the shoe prints, again a sparse area giving way to soft red clay. “Photos've already been taken of the tire and shoe prints.”
The shoe impressions were clear and easily read, like giant fingerprints against the earth, the wild swirls and eddies of the pattern indicating a unique design and wear. As a result of design and wear, no two shoe prints were the same. The prints isolated by Stoffel showed a man going into the field and coming out. “We'll need an impressions expert to be sure, but my guess,” said Jessica, “he weighs between one hundred and seventy and one hundred and ninety pounds. I'm going by the shoe prints pointing away from the body, not toward it.”
“ I calculated him somewhere in there, too, if not heavier,” said Stoffel. “Ground's soft here, so he made quite an impression, especially going in… carrying her weight, we speculate.”
Jessica examined the prints with more care. “Given the size of the foot, we can calculate him at between five-eight and six feet tall.”
“ How do you figure that?” asked Stoffel.
“ There's a definite logic to assumptions about the size and weight. Body parts correspond and align with one another in surprising harmony. A foot this size indicates a tall man wearing casual shoes-sneakers.”
“ Now all we need is for the guy to come in with his shoes,” said Combs.
Stoffel said, “Figure he couldn't get through the thicket in his vehicle, and maybe… just maybe he took the clearing under last night's moon to be a body of water, so he come through the trees, expecting to dump her in a pond or a lake that isn't here. Tells us he doesn't know the area so well.”
“ So we got lucky with the tire prints and the shoe impressions,” said Combs.
“ It's something, Lorena. This guy's left so little behind because he's always dumped them in water before now,” replied Jessica.
“ In Jax-Town, the St. John's runs north, so the body traveled upstream to Venetia Wharf. We couldn't locate the actual entry point, every possibility was littered with tire marks. During the day, those places are busy parks, but at night they're pretty well empty.”
“ Lotta these old dirt roads look alike,” Stoffel added, “but still… Savannah's not that for away. There's water everywhere going east. If he wanted to stow her body in water, he coulda just gone east of 1-95 for a ways. Hell, the tide comes in over there and you got instant lakes surrounding you.”
“ And if the tide's out at the time?”
“ Has been dry.”
Jessica shook her head. “He must've simply run out of time. He's on the road again, likely 1-95 but who knows.”
“ Maybe he's going back to where he came from to begin with, north toward home, maybe?” suggested Combs. “New Jersey, maybe?”
They carefully stepped around the shoe prints just as the officer named Wil showed up with the plaster of paris mixture that would make the impressions permanent and portable.
As Jessica and Lorena were led through the final thicket, Stoffel said, “The crime against young Winona here… Well, it's the worst ever thing I've seen on the job aside from a motorcyclist we once had to get a crane for.”
“ A crane?”
“ To get his headless torso from the top of a pine tree out on County 345A. Fool had to have been hitting 110 when he left the rise at Three Forks. Had sixty or seventy lacerations, his clothes and most all of his skin'd been peeled and was hanging like bloody garland. Some of the officers on scene tried shaking the tree, but that only dislodged the head, which hit one of the officers on the skull and sent him in with a concussion. It took a crane and a lot of effort to peel the rest of the motorcyclist down from that tree.”
Deputy Stoffel spit out tobacco and pulled back the last of the branches and brush. They stepped into a farmer's open field where a tractor and discs sat idle some ten yards from the body of a young woman lying amid a field of decaying and turned under cornstalks. Neat rows of furrows led up to the body where the discs had turned under the dead stalks, weeds and earth, but the other side of the tractor looked like a burned out jungle. The heat and the rotting stalks, whipping now in the growing evening wind, sent up an odor of plant decay. When the killer had left the body, he would have been looking at a field of picked over, dead stalks, several miles of them. He likely did not expect the body to be discovered for some time.
In the distance, Jessica saw a white farmhouse with a green roof, little specks of movement and activity telling her that children were at play there.
“ We've already been up to the house; everything's all right there. Nobody being held hostage. No one being harbored or taken in,” said Stoffel.
“ The girl… you know her name.”
“ Winona Miller, yes.”
“ Does she belong to the house up there?” Jessica pointed.
“ Oh, no… no, that's the Pratt place. What happened was old Lyle Pratt come up on the body in the dark of early this morning.”
Jessica imagined the old man's fright and his proximity in time and space to the killer.
Stoffel continued speaking. “Winona Miller, the dead girl, is-was-a native of Savannah, and I'm told a good kid, normal kid…. You know, typical fun-loving, free-spirited, happy kid. Lived in Savannah with her aunt and uncle, dealing with the usual teen angst and rebellion.”
“ And her parents?”
“ They live in the city, too, but they had all agreed on a trial period with the girl at her aunt's place. Parents filed a missing persons rep›ort with Savannah PD after being told that Winona had failed to come home from a date.”
“ A date?” asked Jessica. “What about the boyfriend?”
“ Boyfriend has been grilled, but he appears to be of little help. Last saw her out his rearview mirror getting into a dark van, possibly navy blue, possibly black.”
“ Wait… the boyfriend saw something?” asked Jessica.
“ We got very little from Nathan. He's shook up pretty bad. Blaming himself for her disappearance. Don't know what he's going to do with the truth.”
“ I'll want to talk to this Nathan, right away,” insisted Jessica.
Combs agreed. “He's the only eyewitness of any sort that we have except for the girl in Fayetteville who may or may not have come across the killer's path. She also said the van was dark blue.”
“ We already canvassed the club where her boyfriend left her in the parking lot. According to Nathan, they'd had a fight, an argument, he says, over her using too many drugs and mixing them with alcohol.”
“ Toxicology can verify or refute that,” said Jessica.
“ Like I said, she was a good kid at heart, but a mixed up kid, too. She might've been using pills or sniffing this or that,” Stoffel said, “but no tracks on her. Still, I know it'll take an autopsy to tell for certain.”
“ Even if she were using drugs, that's no reason to wind up dead and having your g'damn head cut open and your g'damn brains stolen,” shouted a younger deputy who'd stood watch over the body. The anger in his thick- throated attempt to keep from losing complete control was understandable. His nameplate read Hayes. “She was basically a good kid, and she didn't have any real enemies, not a one.”
Beyond her addictions, Jessica guessed in silence.
“ You suppose she was without a care beyond school grades, makeup and make-out woes?” Combs cynically asked Jessica.
Stoffel put a hand on the younger deputy 's shoulder and said, “Jeff here was the first trooper to arrive to
