“I was fishing by that deep hole down there, about a quarter mile in.” Swallowing hard, Foster jabs his thumb toward the path from which he emerged. “I’d just put my line in when I noticed something on the bank, tangled up in some tree roots.” He heaves a phlegmy cough. “I thought it was one of them mannequins, like at the department store down there at the mall. I put my light on it and got the shock of my life. Scariest damn thing I ever saw.”
“You sure she’s dead?” Tomasetti asks.
“Her eyes were all fuckin’ glassy and looking right at me.” He blows out a breath. “She’s dead all right.”
Tomasetti digs out his cell phone, hits speed dial. I listen with half an ear as he explains the situation to Goddard and asks him to set up a perimeter with roadblocks around this part of the creek.
“What did you do after you found the body?” I ask.
“I puked my guts out; then I called nine one one.” He takes a deep breath, blows it out. “Then I got the hell out of there.”
The flash of blue and white lights on the treetops announces the arrival of a law-enforcement vehicle. I glance behind me and see a sheriff’s department cruiser park behind the Tahoe.
“Where, exactly, did you find the body?” Tomasetti asks.
Foster thrusts a finger toward the mouth of the path. “Take the trail. You’ll hit the creek a quarter mile in. Go another thirty yards and you’ll see it on your right. There’s a tree grows into the bank. Floods washed out the soil and the roots are exposed. She’s jammed up in all them roots.”
Beyond where Tomasetti stands, I see Sheriff Goddard slide out of his Crown Vic, his Maglite in hand, its beam trained on the fisherman. “Danny?” he calls out. “That you?”
“Yeah, Bud.” The man heaves a huge sigh. “I’m here.”
The sheriff nods at Tomasetti and me, then turns his attention to Foster. “What the hell you doing out here this time of the morning?”
“Fishing, like I always do. There’re large-mouth bass down in that deep hole. I don’t know why everyone keeps asking me that when I done answered already.”
“Well,” the sheriff drawls, “you know how cops are.”
I see sheet creases in his face and I know he was also ripped from his bed, the same as Tomasetti and I, and he’s not in a very good mood.
Goddard shines his light on Foster’s clothes. “How’d you get that mud all over you?”
Foster looks down at his pants, realizes his crotch is wet, and pulls out his shirttail to cover it. “I got so shook up when I found that woman down there, I dropped my flashlight and got off the trail. I fell down in some bramble.”
Tomasetti looks at Goddard. “You get a perimeter set up?”
Goddard nods. “I got two deputies out there. State Highway Patrol’s on the way. We’re covered, but barely.”
“We’d like to take a look at the scene, if it’s all right with you,” Tomasetti says.
The flash of relief that crosses the chief’s face is palpable. Most cops are, to a degree, adrenaline junkies. When something big goes down, most want to be in the thick of it. Some, I would venture to say, have an overstated sense of morbid curiosity. Goddard seems to break the mold on all counts. “Probably best if a bunch of us don’t trample the scene,” he says. “You two go on, and I’ll wait for the coroner.”
With Tomasetti in the lead, we descend the steep shoulder, cross through the bar ditch, and enter the path cut into the woods. The canopy closes over us like a clammy, smothering hand. Around us, the woods are dark and damp and alive with insects and nocturnal creatures. Mist swirls along the ground and rises like smoke from the thick undergrowth. Neither of us is dressed for wet conditions—no boots or slickers—and within minutes the front of our clothes is soaked.
The redolence of foliage and damp earth and the dank smell of the creek curl around my olfactory nerves as we move deeper into the forest. Dew drips from the leaves of the brush growing along the path and the treetops overhead. Mud sucks at our shoes. The low rumble of thunder tells me conditions are probably going to get worse before they get any better.
Tomasetti’s Maglite penetrates the darkness like a blade. But the path is overgrown in areas and difficult to follow. Twice he veers off the trail and we have to backtrack.
“There’s the creek.”
I follow the beam of his flashlight and catch a glimpse of the green-blue surface of slow-moving water. We continue for a few more yards, and I spot the tree Foster mentioned. An ancient bois d’arc grows out of the steep bank, its trunk leaning at a forty-five-degree angle. “There’s the tree.”
My heart taps out a rapid tattoo as we approach the water’s edge. Vaguely, I’m aware of the flicker of lightning overhead and the patter of rain against the canopy above. Tomasetti stops where the ground breaks off and shines the beam downward. The dead are never pretty, but water does particularly gruesome things to a corpse. I come up beside Tomasetti and my eyes follow the cone of light.
I see the glossy surface of the muddy bank, the spongy moss covering the rocks, and the spindly black veins of roots. My gaze stops on the gauzy fabric flowing in the current like the gossamer fin of some exotic fish. I see the white flesh of a woman’s calf, a slightly bent knee, a waxy thigh. Lower, the foot is swallowed by the murky depths below. She’s clothed, perhaps in a dress, but the current has pushed the skirt up to her hips, exposing plain cotton panties—the kind a young Amish woman might wear.
She’s faceup; her left arm is twisted at an awkward angle and tangled in the roots. My eyes are drawn to the pallid face. Her mouth is open, as if in a scream, and full of water and leaves. A cut gapes on her lower lip. Her eyes are partially open, but the irises are colorless and cloudy.
“Fuck me,” Tomasetti mutters.
Looking at the body, watching her long hair ebb and flow with the current is surreal. Neither of us moves or speaks. The tempo of the rain increases, but I barely notice. I don’t feel the wet or the cold. I can’t stop looking at the dead girl, and I wonder how her life came to this terrible end so long before her time.
I pull myself back to reality. When I speak, my voice is level and calm. “How long do you think she’s been there?”
“She’s intact. No deterioration that I can see.”
I wait for him to elaborate, but he doesn’t. “No visible wounds,” I say, thinking about the blood we found on the road that afternoon.
“Still wearing her underclothes.”
But we both know it’s no guarantee that a sexual assault wasn’t committed. Perpetrators have been known to re-dress their victims. “No makeup or jewelry. Nails are unpainted. Tomasetti, that dress is an Amish print.”
“Goddamn it.”
I look upstream, toward the bridge, but it’s too dark to see anything. “You think someone dumped her here? Or at the bridge?”
He shines the beam on the ground, illuminating several footprints, ours and a waffle stamp that may or may not be Foster’s. But there are no broken branches. No crushed grass. No blood. “No obvious sign of a struggle,” he growls. “We’re going to need to get tread imprints from Foster’s shoes.”
He trains the beam on the steep bank directly below us, then shines it across the surface of the water. The creek is about twenty-five feet wide. It looks deep, but I can hear the gurgle of a shallow bottleneck a few yards downstream. “He could have dumped her upstream. Current carried her down.”
“Or stopped on the bridge and threw her over,” I say.
“Shit.” Pulling out his phone, Tomasetti calls Goddard and asks him to cordon off the bridge. “Tire-tread impressions are a long shot,” he says as he snaps his phone closed.
“We might get lucky.”
Neither of us believes that. It’s extremely difficult to extract meaningful evidence from an outdoor scene that’s spread over a large area, especially if it’s been left unprotected or trampled. Or rained on.
For several minutes, we stand there, using our flashlights, getting a sense of the scene. I wish for a camera, but we’re going to have to hoof it back to the Tahoe to get it. I make a mental note of the time and memorize as much as I can—the location and position of the body, the slant of the tree, the erosion of the bank, the profusion of roots at the water’s edge, the victim’s clothes. But I know it’s her face that will stay with me.
“We need to go back, get the camera, and a generator and lights,” Tomasetti says after a moment.
“I hate leaving her like that.” I know it’s a stupid comment; we can’t move the victim until the scene has
