“Could happen,” Doc said. “But the likelihood is that this girl may take a while to identify. We haven’t got a lot here to work with. You got enough pictures?”
“Yes.” I bent over and started zipping up the body bag. I hadn’t noticed any gunshot or knife wounds. I wondered if the doc had seen anything I’d missed. “So, Doc, any idea what we’re looking at here? How this girl died?”
“Nah,” he said.
“Any chance this is natural causes?”
“I’ll need to take a good look at her,” he said. “But no. I don’t think so.”
“I agree,” I said. “Not with those chain marks around the wrists and ankles. Not with the body buried like this, hidden behind the field.”
“All true,” Doc said. “Most likely a homicide.”
I felt my rage building, and I fought to keep my focus, to not let my feelings interfere. I had a murder to solve. I had Delilah to find. Giving in to anger would slow me down. I couldn’t risk that. “Can you give me an estimate on date of death? Just a ballpark on number of weeks?”
“Well, based on the condition of this body, the advanced mummification, I’d say we’re probably looking at months,” he said. “At least two or three, maybe considerably longer. But I’ll know more once I take a good look at her in the lab.”
Eliza disappeared five months ago, in March, and Jayme three months ago, in May. Based on Doc’s estimate, it could have been either of them. Or it could have been someone else, a girl or woman whose name I hadn’t yet heard, one never reported missing. I thought about my sister. I looked at the dead girl’s thin figure in the body bag and felt as if the universe pointed at it and shouted: Find who did this, and you’ll find Delilah.
Doc must have had similar thoughts, that this wasn’t an isolated case.
We’d been in the field for two hours, and the sun loomed high overhead. In the searing heat, he wiped a thin coat of gritty sweat from his forehead with a white cotton handkerchief. As he folded it to put it back in his pocket, he scanned the lingering crowd and said, “My guess is that there’s a really sick bastard in this town. The big question, who is he?”
Twenty-Six
The man came back.
Delilah heard the sound of gravel crunching under a car or truck, moments later the bang of a car door. Once before, Delilah thought she heard voices, but this time they came up clearly through the vent. The girl must have left it open.
“Please, don’t,” the girl begged.
“You’re my wife. You’ll do as I say.” After that, Delilah heard ragged breathing and the girl sobbing. Delilah covered her ears and waited for it to be over.
A while later, the door slammed and she heard someone drive away. She waited for the girl to say something, but heard only silence.
“Is he gone?” Delilah asked.
At first, the girl didn’t answer. Delilah thought she heard soft weeping. “Yeah.” The girl’s voice sounded different, hoarse and tired. “I wish… I just wish…”
“I wish he was dead and we were home with our families.” Sariah had taught her not to desire that anything bad happen to anyone, but Delilah judged this an exception to that rule. “Are there any others in the house? Any other girls in this house with us, girls that the man took?”
“Not now, but when I got here there were others.” She explained that when she arrived the man had two girls. One, an older girl, whose name she’d never learned. “She disappeared a few days after the man took me. I never talked to her. I saw her just once through the edge of my blindfold. She was beautiful, tall with long dark hair. The man ordered her to feed me, like he told me to feed you. She was kind.”
“What happened to her?” Delilah asked.
“I don’t know, but one night I heard a lot of shouting. The man was hot angry, screaming. I heard him yell that if she didn’t do as she was told he had others who would.”
“Did you ever ask him what happened to her?” Delilah wanted to know.
“No. But I asked the other girl. Her name was Eliza,” she said. “She said the man told her that he took the older girl up the mountain and left her there.”
“Set her free?”
The girl was quiet for what felt like a long time. “Maybe.”
“What happened to Eliza?”
The girl didn’t answer for a long time, and then said, “I’m not sure. He got mad at her one night. Just like the other time, I heard him screaming. Then, she was gone.”
Delilah wondered what the man had done to the girls. “He must have killed them,” she whispered. After a while, she asked, “If something happens to me, I want you to remember my name, so you can tell my family about me, okay?”
“Yeah, you said it’s Delilah, right?” the girl answered.
“Delilah Jefferies.”
“Would you tell my family about me? I’m Jayme Coombs.”
Twenty-Seven
Sheriff Holmes gave me his conference room to use, but not before I raised my right hand and vowed to protect and defend the citizens of Smith County, Utah. As he pinned a deputy’s badge on my shirt, I couldn’t help but consider the strange and unsettling fact that I’d temporarily become part of Alber again. When the sheriff officially assigned me to head up the investigation, I eagerly agreed. I intended to find the monster that had murdered the girl in the field and, I hoped, in the process rescue my sister.
“The forensic team will be on the scene for at least a couple more hours,” Max announced as he walked into my temporary office.
I’d gone straight to work, setting my computer up on the large oval table and emailing Chief Thompson in Dallas to tell him I’d be gone a while longer. “What about the cadaver dogs?” I asked Max.
“They’ve arrived. We have them checking
