“Who is that?” she asked.
“The school principal,” Wightman replied. “You should meet him.”
Wightman led Riley and Ann Marie over to the restless man andintroduced him as Principal John Cody.
Wringing his hands, Cody said to Riley and Ann Marie, “SheriffWightman told me that you found a dead body yesterday. What do you expect tofind here?”
Rather than try to answer his question, Riley asked, “What canyou tell us about this row of maple trees?”
Cody said, “One of our graduating classes planted them—just acouple of years ago, I believe. Yes, that was the year when …”
Cody’s voice faded away for a moment, and his eyes widened withalarm.
“Oh, God,” he said.
Sheriff Wightman said, “Take it easy, John. We don’t knowanything yet.”
“How long is this going to take?” Cody demanded. “Rumors arealready flying around the school. The media is bound to get out here soon.Parents will be asking questions.”
“We’ll find out soon enough,” Wightman told him. “Just help uskeep everybody away from this area.”
Cody nodded, but he looked more miserable than ever.
Wightman patted the principal the shoulder, then led Riley andAnn Marie back toward the excavation.
Speaking quietly, he told them, “Two years ago, the vice principalof this school disappeared without any notice. Yvonne Swenson was her name.Naturally Cody is worried … and to tell the truth, I’m worried too. It nevermade any sense for that lady to just go off like that, but we never found anytrace of her.”
They heard one of the cops who was digging call out.
“Hey, Sheriff. You’d better have a look at this.”
When they got back to the excavation, the little tree had beencut free of its roots and laid to one side. The two cops were staring withhorror into the hole they’d been digging.
Riley saw that they’d exposed what looked like a shoulder bone.
“Aw, damn,” Sheriff Wightman said.
Everyone watching fell silent as the two cops continued diggingcarefully with smaller tools, then just pulled dirt away by the handfuls. Soona ribcage draped in tattered clothing came into view.
Even Riley found it an unsettling sight.
Tree roots had wound between the ribs and continued on into theground. The body was both penetrated and webbed with a mesh of tendrils. Thusthe little tree had truly been blood red from the roots.
The cops kept scraping dirt away from the macabre remains, andthey soon revealed a skeletal hand clutching the battered remnants of a purse.With gloved hands, one cop opened the purse. He reached inside, carefullyremoved something, and laid it on the ground next to the excavation.
It was a wallet. When he nudged it open, a driver’s license witha photo and a name was clearly visible.
Sheriff Wightman leaned down to look at it, then let out a groanof despair.
“It’s her, all right,” he said. “It’s Yvonne Swenson.”
“I don’t understand,” a voice behind Riley groaned.
She saw that Principal Cody had joined them. Now he tottereddizzily, then crouched down to keep from fainting.
“This doesn’t make any sense.” he murmured, obviously strugglingnot to burst into tears. “I was here when the students planted this tree. Iwatched them do it.”
He squinted at Riley and her colleagues and added, “In fact,Yvonne was here too, helping them plant it. How is this even possible?”
That’s a good question, Riley realized.
Then she heard Ann Marie speak up rather shyly.
“I’ve got kind of a theory about that, if anybody would like tohear it.”
Riley’s young partner was now crouched beside the body, takingpictures of it like she had with the one yesterday. While even Riley herselffelt somewhat startled by the grotesque state of these remains, she saw thatAnn Marie’s attitude seemed cool and utterly clinical.
Ann Marie said to the principal, “I take it the trees wereplanted before Halloween a couple of years ago?”
Principal Cody nodded and said, “Yes, two or three days beforeHalloween, if I remember right.”
Ann Marie stood up and murmured to Riley and the sheriff, “I don’tthink the principal should hear what I’ve got to say.”
Sheriff Wightman took his cue and asked one of his cops to escortPrincipal Cody back to his office. He also ordered another cop to call the M.E.and tell him to bring his team to the scene. Then he looked expectantly at AnnMarie.
The young agent spoke clearly and confidently. “We know the treeswere planted just two or three days before Yvonne Swenson disappeared. We alsoknow that the killer doesn’t always bury his victims as soon as he’s murderedthem.”
Riley agreed. “He seems to have frozen Allison Hillis’s body for awhile before he actually buried her.”
Ann Marie nodded and continued, “My guess is that the killersnatched Yvonne on Halloween, maybe killed her right away, but put her in deepfreeze—just for a couple of weeks, maybe.”
Riley was starting to understand what Ann Marie was getting at.
She said, “The tree would still have still been freshly plantedafter that amount of time.”
Ann Marie added, “Yes, digging would still have been easy in thenewly turned soil, and the trees would have been just foot-high saplings atthat point. The killer might have brought the frozen body back late at night.He could have easily removed the tree, buried the body right here, thenreplanted the tree above the body.”
Riley observed, “If he did it skillfully enough, nobody would havenoticed that anything here had changed.”
“Right,” Ann Marie said. “And that would explain how these rootsgrew down through her remains.”
Riley nodded slowly and said, “That’s a pretty good theory, AnnMarie.”
The rookie smiled and went back to snapping pictures.
Suppressing a bitter sigh, Riley said, “Now we know for sure thatwe’re dealing with a serial killer. He’s murdered two victims, and unless westop him, he’ll kill more.”
Sheriff Wightman said, “I’m afraid things might be even worse thanthat.”
Riley saw that Wightman’s face had gone pale from some awfulrealization.
He stared at her for a moment, then said, “Come on, let’s headover to the station. I’ll explain it there.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Riley’s apprehension grew as she and Ann Marie followed SheriffWightman’s car to the police station. Now that they’d found a second body, thiscase
