She released years of held breath.
One
Four weeks earlier…
Leaning back in my office chair, I intertwine my fingers behind my head and close my eyes. It’s been a long couple of weeks and I’m lost in thoughts about a case that won’t leave me while I prepare for undercover work in the days ahead.
“Am I interrupting?” Sam’s voice comes from the doorway.
I straighten up and look over to where he’s leaning in the door, a smile on his lips as he watches me.
“Of course not,” I grin.
He walks into the office and gives me a kiss before setting a folder in front of me and tapping it with his fingertips.
“What’s this?” I ask, turning the folder toward me and opening it so I can look at the documents inside.
“We identified her,” he says just as I’m looking at the first picture.
It’s an image that I’ve seen many times before by now. One that is etched in my mind. The body of a girl curled in the corner of a cavern, wearing one shoe. The other shoe had already been found long before.
“The girl in the cavern?” I ask. “With the shoe?”
Sam nods, leaning back against the edge of my desk.
“Her name is Delaney Mendoza. She was twelve years old. She wasn’t from the area. She had been abducted two states over and brought to Sherando Ridge,” he tells me.
I can hear the emotion in his voice. It’s hard to describe what it feels like to come to this moment. Finding a body is a moment that changes you. I’ve encountered dozens of bodies in my years of service to the FBI. There’s a point when you’re able to turn off the humanity of it for long enough to get through without the trauma.
Rather than seeing the blood, the gore, the tragedy of that life being ripped away, I see a puzzle. I’m able to remove myself from that harsh truth enough that I can push forward through the details and find out what happened.
It’s harder when there’s no name. When I know who the person is, or at least have some way to identify the victim, it’s a stepping stone. That information is valuable to understand what happened. It gives me the focus to work through the case. That’s when the humanity returns. Once I’ve processed the scene and started working through the puzzle of understanding what happened, knowing who the person was drives me.
When I don’t know, there’s a hollow feeling. It’s still a person, a human being taken from life, but without that name, that connection to the life he or she lived. It’s deeply sad and infuriating at the same time. The entire concept of murder is so arrogant. So unbelievably entitled. To believe yourself so important you have the right to determine another person’s life and death, just on a whim, is something I can’t understand. It completely disgusts me.
I’ve been put in positions when I’ve had to take the life of another human being. But it’s never done lightly. It wasn’t because I just wanted them to die, or thought it would be a fun, thrilling way to pass the day. It was a necessity. I never once endowed myself with the right to destroy that life, or thought to myself that it was perfectly fine that I did. Just because those deaths were justifiable and essential to my own survival, the weight of those moments never escapes me.
Finding a body and not having an identity to attach to it is painful, sad, angering, and frustrating. But then there’s a strange reversal when the body is finally identified. There’s happiness and relief, but there’s also a renewed sense of sadness and finality. You finally have a name and a face. A life to attach to that body. And the sense of grief, that this victim has gone without those things and without true mourners, can come down hard.
There’s a picture of Delaney in the folder and I look down at a pretty girl with big eyes and a smile on her face that said she believed the world was at her feet. She was only twelve years old. A little girl with so much life ahead of her. Then someone snatched it away. The very worst type of entitlement. The kind that says a child is his to hunt, and if he can catch her, his to keep and use as he pleases.
Even I have a hard time pushing away my rage at those monsters.
“What’s going to happen to her?” I ask.
“Her family will need to be contacted,” he says. “Then we’ll decide from there.”
“I’ll do it,” I say. “They should hear it from me, because I’m the one who found her.”
“That would be great,” he says. “I think it’ll be comforting hearing it from you.”
It’s not an aspect of my job I enjoy, but one I take seriously. The responsibility of taking away the hope of a parent and replacing it with gut-wrenching despair and fury is a heavy one. These calls and visits never get easier. They are always painful and uncomfortable. But they aren’t about me. I’d rather they get the news from someone who cares, someone who has been a part of the case from the beginning than a generic officer who has no insight and no connection.
It might not make that much of a difference. And I’ve had cases when the families were angry at me when I came to tell them. They felt I’d betrayed them in some way. But if there’s a single person I can make feel a little better in this horrible time, that’s what I want to do.
Looking at the girl brings my mind back to the woods, and a phone call the police got when the news
