Next to Mother, one hand holding onto her skirt and the other covering her mouth, stood Lily.
Jim Daniels lingered a short distance away, on the edge of the cornfield he managed. A woman I recognized hovered beside him. His second wife, my half-sister Karyn, had her hands clasped, her lips fluttering as if in prayer. Daniels wrapped an arm around her shoulder. Stoic. The word described his pin-straight posture, his emotionless expression. I thought about him, how peculiar he was, distant. I recalled what I’d mentioned to Hannah just that morning, how odd it was that all three of the girls lived in houses that backed up to the cornfield.
Jim Daniels’ cornfield.
I ached to go to my family, to comfort them. I needed to ask again about Delilah. Dead bodies can convince people to open up. I wanted to talk to Daniels, figure out if he was a piece of this puzzle. But I couldn’t. Not yet. At that moment, someone else needed me more—the girl in the field. If there was evidence on her body, it might be the key to finding her killer. More than that, it might lead us to Delilah and the other girls. It had to be preserved.
I grabbed a black vinyl body bag out of Doc’s truck. Back at the rock pile, I unzipped it and laid it out next to the body.
“I’ll take the head,” Doc instructed. “Clara, get the feet.” Pointing at the videographer, he added, “Let’s let this strapping young man take the hips.”
Rigor mortis had long passed and the body hung limp, light and bone thin. As we carried it, the long skirt brushed to the side.
From the crowd, painful screams pierced the air. It broke my heart when a woman shouted, “It’s one of us! One of our girls!”
I kept my attention focused on the body, moving it carefully, slowly, trying to keep the corpse and clothing together, not wanting to let anything fall away. After we had the body removed, the crime scene unit would rake the area, searching for fibers and hair, anything that might be tied to the dead girl or her killer.
I thought of what I held in my hands, the end of a life.
Sobs and screams came from the growing crowd of townsfolk as we laid the body in the bag. I glanced over and saw Mother round up Naomi, Sariah, and two young girls I didn’t recognize, family of mine that I’d never met. Mother urged them away, taking them by the hands and leading them off. Jim Daniels and Karyn followed obediently behind. Her arms were around Lily, who wept, her shoulders hunched as if she’d pulled back into a shell.
I skimmed the crowd and saw others I knew, relatives, old friends. Off to the side, a group of men in work boots and carrying machetes clustered together, talking. I guessed they were the ones who’d been cutting the corn stalks.
“Max!” I called out. I walked toward him, where he stood with the sheriff. I noticed Gerard Barstow was gone.
“What, Clara?”
“Where’s the chief?”
Max huffed, as if in disgust. “He threw a fit. Took off. Told the sheriff that he wasn’t going to watch you run the show.”
“Figures,” I said. “Max, have the photographer take photos of the crowd. Send some of your men in to make a list of who’s there. Maybe someone has heard or seen something that can help. Okay?”
“I’ve already got them canvassing the neighborhood,” Max said. “But good idea about the crowd. Maybe the killer likes to watch.”
“Yeah. It happens,” I said.
Max raised his hand and shouted at one of his men and waved him over. I turned back to the matter at hand and bent to take a closer look at the body. The weight of the rocks, I guessed, had broken her nose, smashing it flat and disfiguring her profile. I thought about the position we found her in, laid out so straight, her hands folded one over the other across her chest. She’d been arranged in her rocky grave as if staged in a coffin.
“Look at that,” Doc said, reclaiming my attention.
“At what?” I asked.
“Just above her hands.”
I leaned in for a closer look. The girl’s skin slacked then pinched in tight, leaving a series of indentations at the narrowing of her wrists. I scanned the body and saw similar marks above her thin, delicate feet.
“Rope marks? She was tied up, hands and legs.” I felt sickened even saying it. I thought of the terror she endured before her death. How could anyone do this? What if that same person had Delilah?
“I guess.” Doc moved in closer, then grabbed his battered leather medical bag. Out of it he pulled a wooden tongue depressor. He knelt down and pushed a bit at the fibrous tissue, carefully inspecting the indentation on the girl’s right wrist. “From the braided appearance, I’d say a heavy rope maybe, but most likely chains.”
“Whoever did this had her chained up. Chained to something?” I muttered, thinking it through. “Or to someone?”
“Guess so,” Doc said.
“I wonder who she is,” I said. The misshapen, dried-up face was unrecognizable, but her long dark brown hair matched Eliza Heaton’s description. Jayme Coombs had lighter hair, blond, so maybe not. But I wondered if the hair on the corpse could have been discolored from blood and fluid.
“I’ll pull DNA,” Doc said.
“That’ll take a while?”
“Maybe a week,” Doc answered. “I’ll put a rush on it.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“And I’ll do the usual, look for dental work, fillings and such,” Doc said. “Probably won’t find any…”
I finished his train of thought. “Because most of the families don’t see dentists.”
“Sadly, no.”
“We do have the dress.
