The Body in the Woods

  “That’s your job?” Alexis still wasn’t following.

  “No, I’m a volunteer, like you. TIP likes to call out younger volunteers when the victims are young.”

  “So they’ve already figured out who she is?” It was a relief to think that the girl had a name, that she wasn’t going to be just Dead Girl Found in Park.

  Bran shook his head. “I wasn’t talking about the girl who died. I mean you guys.”

  “But I’m not a victim.” Alexis took a step back. “We’re not victims. I just found her. That’s all.”

  “Being a victim doesn’t just stop with the person who was killed.” Bran waved his hand in the direction of Nick and Ruby. “The people who are left behind after something like this—the witnesses, the family, the friends—sometimes they’re more affected than anyone else. It just keeps rippling out, and some people can get overlooked. Forgotten.”

  It still seemed wrong to call herself a victim when there was a real one lying dead in the woods. But Alexis decided not to argue and changed the subject. “So is it Bran like the cereal?”

  “Bran like Brandon.” He tucked in his lips, looking serious. “But let’s get back to you. How are you doing?”

  Alexis stated the obvious through teeth that danced in her mouth. “I’m really cold.”

  “Follow me.” He walked over to one of the idling cop cars. “Lean against the front fender, and you can get some warmth from the engine.”

  She did as he suggested. It was a little better. “How come they leave the cop cars on when there’s nobody in them?”

  “I used to wonder about that, too,” Bran said. “But they have tons of electronic equipment—laptops, dash cams, radios—and they all suck up power. If the cops turn off the car, they have to turn off all that equipment or it’ll drain the battery. And if they do that, then they can’t use it until it reboots.” He squinted at her. “Warmer now?”

  “A little.” But not enough.

  “Then we go to plan B.” Pulling his keys from his pocket, he ran over to a small brown Honda, opened the trunk, and came back with a gray blanket that he draped over her shoulders.

  Gratefully, Alexis pulled it close. Her shivers began to slowly subside.

  “So listen, Alexis, I’m here for you,” Bran said. “Basically my job is to keep my mouth shut and listen. Really listen. You can say anything you want to me.”

  “I don’t want to talk.” If she did, it might make what had happened back there real. And she preferred to think it wasn’t.

  “Okay. Then I’ll just stay here with you.” Bran stood absolutely still, not even shifting his weight. He was facing her, but not looking directly in her eyes. He seemed … serene. It was not a word Alexis had ever thought would apply to a guy about her own age.

  The silence stretched on for a few minutes, but it was even worse than talking. Finally, the words burst out of her. “I keep seeing that dead girl’s eye.” The green eye shadow on her lid, the rim of white below. “It was almost all the way closed, but not quite, you know? It’s like part of me is still standing there in the woods looking at her eye and thinking that at any second it’s going to open.”

  “That sounds scary.” His words were even.

  “It was like waiting for a zombie to come back to life. I kept feeling like she might twitch and then get up.” Alexis looked around the parking lot. “Even now I still feel like I’m in a bad movie. Everything looks too two-dimensional.” She gestured with her chin. “Like that’s not really a tree. It’s something the prop department just wheeled into place and then they hid the wheels behind those ferns.”

  Bran’s smile lifted one side of his mouth. “Feeling unreal, not believing things, that’s pretty common after something traumatic happens. It takes a while for things to sink in.”

  “But I don’t want it to be real.” Keeping things not real was one of Alexis’s skills. “Because reality is awful. Isn’t it better for it to feel like a nightmare or a movie?”

  “The thing is, Alexis, can you really deal with it if you don’t deal with it?”

  Before she could answer, Alexis heard a choking sound.

  It was Nick. He was doubled over, throwing up on his boots.

  CHAPTER 9

  TUESDAY

  HIS LITTLE REMEMBRANCE

  He was invincible.

  He was God.

  He sat in a parked car a block away, watching as the police scurried around like ants, tiny and useless.

  He had walked among them, but they knew him not.

  His hands held the power of life and death. Of breath and stillness. Of thought and nothingness.

  Lifting them from the steering wheel, he held them out in front of him. In the glow of the streetlight, they were perfectly still. Perfectly controlled.

  Today he had taken another life. Taken it and held it close until it dwindled to nothing. Afterward, he had let the girl’s empty shell fall on the grass. Then he had leaned down and cut off his little remembrance. The better to remember you with, my dear.

  Putting his hands back on the steering wheel, he thought about the teenagers he had met, the ones who had asked about a missing man. But only one had captured his attention.

  The redhead with milky skin. He had been searching for such a girl for a long time now. He had seen plenty of brassy reds, hennaed reds, dyed reds, clownlike reds, but this was the real deal. Not from a box or a beauty salon. As pure as nature had intended her.

  He had to have her.

  CHAPTER 10

  TUESDAY

  ASLEEP FOREVER

  Ruby waited impatiently while the detective talked to Nick. Meanwhile, a volunteer named Mandy put a blanket around her shoulders and even tried to hug her. Ruby stiffened. She didn’t like to be touched by someone who wasn’t a relative. Mandy finally stopped trying to get her to talk and fell silent.

  The engine of a nearby truck made a ticking sound as it cooled. Every time Ruby breathed, the air slipped inside her lungs like a knife, flat and cold. The detective’s car was running, and its headlights cast shadows so sharp they could have been scissored out of black construction paper.

  Ruby felt 100 percent alive. Usually at home or school she was playing a role. She observed the people around her, studied their behaviors, and used that knowledge to create a character, like Quiet Chick or Smart Girl, that would allow her to blend in. But tonight she was in her element.

  She bounced in place, waiting her turn to be interviewed. Finally the homicide detective beckoned. After shaking his hand, she climbed into the passenger seat. The space between them was filled with three sets of controls, each with lights and buttons. She guessed one controlled the lights and sirens, one a radio, and one the PA system.

  Detective Harriman asked her name, address, phone number, and email address. Ruby provided them, even though Officer Ostrom and the other cop had already gotten the same information. She couldn’t hold back her own curiosity any longer. “So do you normally do this in an interview room? With one-way glass?” She had a million questions. This was her chance to get the inside scoop on a real investigation.

  “This is a field interview,” the detective said. “And you’re a witness, not a suspect. So this is just how I would normally do it.” His features bunched together.

  “I like to read about famous crimes,” Ruby explained. “The kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.” She’d picked some of the tamer ones. Not the serial killers. “My mom doesn’t like me to watch true crime on TV, but after she goes to bed, I watch it on Netflix on my computer with my earphones.”

  The detective just grunted. “Why don’t you tell me about what happened today.”

  Ruby took him step by step, from the moment the van had driven into this parking lot to the last look she had given the girl before they left the clearing. For everyone they had encountered on their way up, she provided approximate heights and weights, the color of hair and eyes. “Of course, I’m sure you’re aware that e
ye color can vary depending on lighting conditions.”

  Detective Harriman’s pen had been flying over the pages of his narrow notebook, but now he shot her another sideways look. “Of course,” he agreed. “And you’ve got quite the eye for detail.”

  “That’s true.”

  He tilted his head. “So it’s like a photographic memory?”

  “Not exactly. But it’s way better than most people’s. Nobody likes to watch TV or go to the movies with me because I can’t help noticing all the errors. Like we were watching that movie Looper on Netflix last week? And the little boy was playing a game with tiles. When you saw it from his point of view, the tiles were on certain squares, but when you saw it from his mom’s, there were fewer tiles and they were in different locations. That’s called a continuity error. It happens a lot when they show the same scene from a different perspective. They forget that the character was supposed to have just been out in the rain or that someone was wearing a scarf. Have you ever seen a continuity error?”

  He pushed air through his lips, making a puh sound. “Okay, Ruby, we’re talking about what happened tonight. Not a TV show. Not a movie. And I’m the one who’s supposed to be asking questions here. I appreciate that you have a lot of interest in this subject, but I need to stay focused on the task at hand. Not get sidetracked into talking about continuous errors.”

  “Continuity errors.”

  “Whatever. My focus is on figuring out who this girl is, why she was killed, and who killed her.” His voice didn’t sound mad. His face didn’t look mad. But even so Ruby thought he might be mad.

  “Is this like good cop, bad cop?”

  “If you hadn’t noticed, there’s only one of me.” With a sigh, Detective Harriman turned a page in his notebook. “Now tell me again about finding this girl.”

  So Ruby did. How Alexis had blown her whistle and how Ruby had come running. How she had tried to assist the girl before realizing she was dead.

  “So you touched the victim?”

  Was he judging her? “I didn’t know she was dead. I touched her wrist and neck, but I was wearing gloves. To check for a pulse. It’s what we’re trained to do.” Just remembering made Ruby rub her fingertips together, thinking of the girl’s cool skin. “I also brushed her hair out of her face. And later I put my palm on her leg, right below her left knee, when I was trying to see that footprint in the dirt. This was before it got destroyed by the paramedics. All of those I did with gloves on. But before that, I put my palm on her shoulder when I was checking to see if she was conscious. So do you need to swab the inside of my cheek?”

  “What?” Detective Harriman’s face crinkled up like a crumpled ball of paper.

  “For touch DNA,” Ruby said patiently. “Because I touched her.”

  “Everybody watches CSI,” he said, although he really didn’t seem to be saying it to her. “We might be looking for touch DNA, but it’s probably not going to be at the spot where you touched her. So you’re okay.”

  “I like knowing things. Like about Locard’s exchange principle?” The whole idea was so fascinating that Ruby gave in to the urge to lecture. “Locard figured out that when there is contact between two items, there will always be an exchange. Like walking on a carpet—some of the dirt on the shoes gets left on the carpet, and some of the fibers on the carpet get picked up by the shoes. That’s what makes crime scene evidence.” She loved Locard’s exchange principle because it felt so balanced. So logical. Back in Locard’s day, the exchanges had been things you could see with the naked eye. Now the tiniest traces of soil, blood, paint, or even spit could be detected in a lab. “And if you had the ligature,” she continued, “you could check it for touch DNA. But the ligature wasn’t there.”

  His eyes narrowed. “How do you know she was strangled with a ligature?”

  “No bruises in the shape of fingerprints.” Ruby pressed her fingers against her own throat. “There was just a line. So it was made with something thin that made a dent in her skin. But it wasn’t too thin, or it would have cut the skin. So not as thin as a wire.” She speculated aloud. “An electric cord? A thin rope? A dog leash?”

  At the words dog leash, Detective Harriman hummed and then made a note. “Lots of people walk their dogs in Forest Park.”

  “That guy we talked to had two dogs. And he had at least one leash stuffed in his pants pocket. I saw the end of it sticking out. It was red.”

  Ruby tried to imagine the man they had met coming across the girl and looping the leash around her neck. Yanking it back and tightening it as her hands clawed futilely at her throat.

  But if that was what had happened, what had those dogs been doing? She remembered their muddy paws. But there had been no paw marks or even mud on the front of the girl’s jeans.

  Ruby knew that when you strangled someone, it usually wasn’t about cutting off their access to air by compressing their airway. Instead, death came from squeezing closed the carotids, the two big arteries on either side of the neck. Just thinking about them made Ruby touch her own neck, feel her own regular pulse under her fingertips. Compressing them deprived the brain of blood and the oxygen that the blood carried. In seconds, the girl would have been unconscious. Her head would have flopped forward, as if she had suddenly dropped off to sleep. And then when the killer kept the ligature tight around her neck, she had stayed asleep. Stayed asleep forever.

  Detective Harriman’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “What else did you notice about the victim?”

  “There was mud spatter on the backs of her jeans, so I think she walked up there. I don’t think anyone carried her. I think she was killed there.”

  He made another humming noise as he wrote in his notebook. “Okay. We’re almost done. I’m going to need to take a print of the bottoms of your shoes. In case we find any footprints.”

  Ruby ground her teeth at the memory of how the EMT had destroyed such an important clue.

  * * *

  While the detective took her footprints, Mitchell stood off to one side, waiting for her.

  “How are you doing, Ruby?” he asked when she was finished.

  “I’m fine.” She knew what to say back. “How are you, Mitchell?” Even to her eyes, Mitchell didn’t look well. His face was pale and shiny.

  “I’m the one who sent three uncertifieds down the trail together.” His mouth twisted. “I’m going to get in a lot of trouble.”

  She tried to reassure him. “No one knew we were going to find a body. Logically, the three of us weren’t even going to find Bobby, not in the area where we were going. It was more like a training exercise. You didn’t know it would turn real.”

  “I hope the deputies see it the same way. Since the van already left, they’re sending someone out to take us back to the sheriff’s office if we want. You drove today, right?”

  Ruby nodded, realizing she had been so focused that she hadn’t even thought of where her car was or how she would get home.

  “We already told your parents you were present when a body was found. But remember that you can’t say anything more to them. This is a law-enforcement matter. You can’t say it was a girl, you can’t say she was murdered, you can’t say there was a mark around her neck. Even once it’s been released to the media, you can only talk about what’s been released. Nothing more. No further details.”

  Ruby nodded. They had already learned this stuff in training.

  “The sheriff’s office has called for an evidence search at first light tomorrow. But you don’t have to be part of it. It’s no problem if you want to opt out. Everyone will understand. After what happened today.”

  “No. I definitely want to be there.”

  One side of Mitchell’s mouth lifted in a sort of smile. “That’s funny. That’s just what Alexis and Nick said, too.”

  CHAPTER 11

  TUESDAY

  AFTER DARK

  Alexis was exhausted. This day just kept dragging itself forward, and there was no end in sight. First she had
had to wait for her turn to be questioned, had had to watch Nick throw up and then hear him claim he must be getting the flu. Now it seemed like she had been trapped forever in the detective’s car as he asked her again about what she had seen, what she remembered, what she guessed. And whenever he finally decided he was done chewing on her and spit her out, she would still have to get home.

  “I need to take a print of the bottoms of your shoes,” he finally said.

  “Why?” Alexis had never gotten that close to the dead girl.

  “It’s for exclusionary purposes. If we find any more footprints, we want to know if they’re yours.”

  As they both got out of the car, he picked up a slim black folder from the dash. Inside were several long, loose sheets of paper, blank on one side and with a form to be filled out on the other. He flipped back a piece of thin rubber protecting a yellow pad, and then set it on the ground, with the yellow pad and one of the pieces of paper, blank side up, next to each other.

  “Okay, step on the yellow pad with your right foot and then put it down on the paper. Make sure you press straight down so the print is nice and clear. That paper costs forty bucks for a hundred sheets.”

  Alexis did as he asked and then assumed they were done. He set down a second blank piece of paper. “I need the other boot, too.”

  “But they’re the same boots.” Still, she was already complying.

  “Only when they’re brand-new.” As the detective spoke, he scribbled her name and the date on the back of the first print she had made. “Once you start walking in them, things happen that make each into one of a kind. You step on a piece of glass or a rock, you wear them down on one side, you scuff your toes—a shoe print can be as unique as a fingerprint.” He flipped the kit closed. “Okay. We’re done here. Thank you.”

  Alexis turned to walk down the hill toward the bus stop. She had told Harriman she didn’t need a ride home. It would be just her luck for her mom to be outside and for the cop to start asking questions. She had also told Mitchell she didn’t need a ride back to the sheriff’s office, which was even farther from her house than Forest Park was.