The Forgotten Girl (Lynn Rivers Mysteries, Book One)

Chapter 1

1

Special Agent Lynn Rivers was hugging her upper body and shivering so hard her teeth were chattering as she walked through the woods. Leaves, rotted and fresh, squelched, rustled and cracked under the rubber soles of her leather boots. The air was icy-cold, even though bright rays of the sun, glaring through dark blue autumn rain clouds blinded her the whole way here. But that’s not what made her shake.

That was all down to the sickening anxiety roiling and burning in the pit of her stomach. Her hands were clammy as she held her long Pepita grey coat tightly closed, her breathing came in short erratic gasps, and her heart was thumping, pumping blood through her with all the speed and noise of a freight train.

At the end of this trek, she would find a terribly disfigured young woman. But that wasn’t the real reason for her body’s violent fight-or-flight reaction either. For now, she could still pretend that the victim was not the same young woman she watched grow up.

Pretend. That’s all she could do. Because, as her body already seemed to know, her life would be forever changed by what she was about to find at the end of this trek. Once again irrevocably changed.

Just as it had been at the end of those other two treks in the past, through woods just like these. Not just like these, they were the same woods. They even smelled the same—rotting leaves on the ground, fresh ones dying and about to fall, the air crisp carrying just a hint of snow that wouldn’t fall for at least another month. The smell of autumn. The smell of her childhood. The smell of what had always been her favorite time of year.

Memories of those past treks were flooding her mind now. The bright sun blinding her made the leaves above her and all around her glow copper and gold, but she didn’t really see any of it. All she saw was the darkness in her mind.

The first of those two terrible treks had occurred in the faint grey light of a misty autumn dawn. She’d been on her way home, but saw a yellow light shining unnaturally brightly amid leafless trees in a forest that should’ve still been dark. She walked towards it.

The air had been cold. Colder than it was today. Ice hung heavy in the damp morning air. The fallen, rotten leaves crunched and broke under her sneakers, because they were frozen. But she’d still been warm. Because she’d just come from the best night of her life.

Her father’s deputy—Terrence—had caught her in a wide embrace before she reached the pool of bright light, his broad back shielding her from the view that light illuminated from her. But not before she saw her best friend’s sightless blue eyes staring at the grey sky. Alicia’s skin glowed gold in the artificial light of the reflectors, everything else seemed to be in black and white.

The second time a trek through these woods ended the life she had known, it had been night and the lights guiding her were blue and white and flashing. They were bringing her to a two-story house with well-kept, white wood siding, and a pitched roof, red carnations in white pots on all the windows and embroidered lace curtains obstructing the view inside. Only the window of her bedroom on the second floor overlooking the forest was open. Only her window was dark.

Deputy Terrence didn’t rush out to intercept her this time. He had been standing by the old, wide, oak tree growing just to the side of the front door as she passed him, one of his hands braced against the thick trunk, the other across his stomach like he had been about to throw up. No one stopped her from going into the house.

So she had entered her home. And saw the blood. Saw her mother in her pink and yellow floral night gown lying in a glistening pool of crimson by the kitchen counter, the cup of warm milk and honey she’d always drink before bed laying in pieces beside her, the white almost swallowed by the red.

Her father was in the den just off the kitchen. Sitting behind the honey-colored walnut desk in his high back, black leather chair, his head thrown back, a single star-shaped circle of black in the center of his forehead. His face and white button-down shirt covered in dark blood.

Her brother Drew had already been taken to the hospital. She wouldn’t see him again for a while. Not until he healed from the gunshot wound to his stomach and the stab to his throat, claiming he remembered nothing of that night and protesting his innocence, screaming that he hadn’t killed his mother and father.

No one had believed him. Not Deputy Terrence or any of their father’s other men. Not anyone in town. Not the twelve men and women of the jury. Not their sister Kate. Not even Lynn. Not all the time, anyway.

Lynn stopped and took a deep breath of the cool air. Then she let her coat fall open relaxed her arms, shaking them out as she threw her head back and slowly counted to ten, picturing each number in her head like the glowing green digits on a radio alarm clock, focusing just on the freezing air going in and out of lungs. An exercise in grounding and focus that usually worked. Today she’d have to count to at least a thousand if she wanted to get even close to calmness. She didn’t have that kind of time.

These woods touched the ones surrounding the house and the town she grew up in. It’s been twenty years since she was anywhere near them. And it’s been nearly that long since the memories of what happened there had been this vivid in her mind.

But that’s all they were, memories. Things long since done and dusted and dealt with, however poorly.

She was needed here and now. That’s all she should be focusing on.

Her former criminal psychology professor and one of her closest friends, Cindy Myers, had called her last night. Frantic. Speaking disjointedly and almost incoherently, saying her daughter had gone missing in the woods upstate two days ago and no one was looking for her. Asking Lynn to help find her.

Cindy and her husband Roy were in the middle of their annual two-week break in Cabo, but were returning on an overnight flight this morning.

Lynn had tried to calm her friend down, placating her as best she could, promising she’d look into it. Which she did. And got the call this morning.

Shanna Myers wasn’t missing anymore.

She’d been found at dawn by a camper who couldn’t sleep.

No one had requested the FBI’s presence, but Lynn was here anyway and her partner TJ would be arriving shortly. And as much as she’d rather still be far away from these woods, she’d find out who killed Shanna Myers.

Which, twenty years on, was a lot more than she could say about the murders of her parents and her best friend.

* * *

Lynn heard the chatter of voices and saw the officers making it long before she reached the yellow and black crime scene tape tied around thick tree trunks in a haphazard manner, higher up on one side and lower on the other, forming an irregularly shaped circle. The arrangement worked fairly well to keep the gawking public at a good distance from the body, behind thick trees and bushes so they didn’t have a good view, but too few officers were manning the perimeter, and she was about fifteen yards from the bloodied body tied to a tree before anyone stopped her.

Bloodied. That’s the only way to describe it. Shanna’s pretty face was gone. Concealed by maroon-colored blood and black gashes. Her clothes—jeans and a hot pink windbreaker—were maroon too. The only reason they could ID her so quickly was her phone and wallet, which had been placed at her feet. One of her shoes was tightly laced, the other loose and slanted sideways as though she had just sprained her ankle and hadn’t yet righted her foot. She never would. The thought made Lynn’s throat constrict painfully.

“Who are you?” a gruff voice asked her.

She turned to face the man who spoke. He was wearing the black-on-black sheriff’s uniform, the collar of his fleece-lined leather jacket turned up around his neck, his moustache, hair and eyebrows a silvery grey.

But she didn’t really see him. She saw Shanna as she had been—the baby Cindy and Roy brought back from New Mexico where she was born to a mother that didn’t want her, the little four-year-old with golden brown hair laughing and talking a mile a minute, thanking Lynn for the birthday present of a robot dog, the eighteen-year-old graduating from high school, her golden face aglow with joy and pride. Lynn was always there during Shanna’s early years, so much so that Shanna called her auntie, but then life had taken them all in different directions since then.

Yet she did still make an effort to attend at least the most important milestones in Shanna’s life. The last such was her high school graduation. That was only three years ago now. Lynn was glad she couldn’t see Shanna’s face today. And she had to put the vivid one from her memories out of her mind too. Else she’d be no help.

She produced her badge from the pocket of her coat and showed it to the Sheriff. “I’m Special Agent Lynn Rivers. FBI. Here at the request of the family. And who are you?”

She’d forestalled his question of why she was here by already answering it, and his mouth worked silently for a couple of moments, probably trying to come up with a new one.

“Sheriff Payton,” he finally said. “Rivers, you say? We had a Sheriff by that name in the next county once. Any relation?”

Lynn pocketed the badge again and pointed to the crime scene tape. “You need to extend the perimeter, get people further back. And find more men to oversee it.”

She ignored his question because they were standing in one of the more gruesome crime scenes Lynn had visited in the last twenty years. And because, yes, her father had been Sheriff Clyde Rivers from the next county over and she would not be taking that particular trip down memory lane with this man.

He puffed out his chest and harrumphed. “This is my crime scene and I know what I’m doing.”

“The victim’s parents are on the way,” she said. “No one stopped me from walking right up to the body. Do you want her mother and father to see her like this?”

He paled, muttered something under his breath and called over two of his deputies, instructing them to oversee the cordon and not let anyone nearer than a hundred yards. Easier said than done, since they were in the middle of a popular camping ground and most of the dark wood log cabins scattered amid the trees looked occupied.

Lynn walked up to the body, careful to only step in the prints left by the thick-soled boots the Sheriff and his deputies were wearing. As it was, they’d trampled the area around the tree and Shanna’s body to a nearly flat surface, but she’d do what she could to preserve the rest of it.

It had rained sometime during the night. Not much, but enough to turn the ground muddy. She could still smell the fresh moisture infusing the leaves and branches, as well as the rot and dying that moisture accentuated.

She passed several puddles of greenish brown liquid and the stench of puke mixed with the smell of Shanna’s blood as she neared the body. She felt no urge to throw up herself, or anything much at all. But that was because she’d somehow managed to disassociate. She was very good at dissociating. This sight would haunt her nightmares for years to come, probably until the end of her life, but right now she no longer saw the daughter of her good friend, but a victim that she needed to get justice for.

A young woman whose face and neck and probably much of the rest of her body were covered by shallow knife slashes, some of which had already scabbed over. This death didn’t come quickly. Shanna had suffered. And Lynn dreaded the moment she would have to face Cindy and Roy and tell them that.

Shanna’s hands and feet were bound to the wide maple tree trunk by a thick black nylon rope. But despite all the blood covering her face, torso and legs, there was none on the ground around her. Or the tree trunk behind her. Except a few swipes from where the killer maneuvered her into position so he could tie her to it. She had been dead by then. A small mercy.

Shanna was killed somewhere else and brought here after the rain had already stopped. Lynn was sure of it, because otherwise the rain would have washed the blood off her face too.

Lynn snapped a few photos of the body and the scene, carefully stepping around the tree noting all she could. Nothing struck out.

Sheriff Payton had begun approaching and she waved at him to stop, then retreated back to him, careful to only step the tracks she had already made on her way there.

“Why hasn’t she been cut down?” she asked Payton. “Has the medical examiner attended yet?”

Payton nodded. “Yes, he pronounced her dead. But we agreed it was best to keep everything else as it was for the forensics to take a look at.”

Lynn glanced around. “Where are the forensics?”

They were in a part of the camping ground that seemed out of service. The five or so cabins nearest to there had shuttered windows. Bushes and trees grew right up to their porches, and in some cases through them. On one, a tree sapling had sprouted in the middle of the porch and had already reached the awning. Some of the bushes came up to Lynn’s waist and at almost five feet nine inches she wasn’t a short woman.

“Getting here soon,” Payton said. “They’re coming out from Albany.”

In the distance, she could see a few occupied cabins. And the pale faces of the renters—people who had come here for a fun, adventurous getaway, but instead woke up to a gruesome crime scene.

“I’ll get our people on it,” she told Payton. “Have your deputies find a tent to conceal the body from view. Something big, like what they put up at outdoor weddings.”

He gave her a dark look.

“I don’t take orders from you,” Payton said petulantly, sounding like a kid and not a man over sixty, which he was. “And I didn’t say you could stay.”

That wasn’t up to him. Lynn hadn’t asked for his permission to investigate this case, and she didn’t need it. Getting the local authorities to cooperate is always better and easier in the long run, but it’s also always a dance, according to her colleagues, anyway. Lynn was in no mood to be friendly with rude old men for this morning.

“I will be conducting the investigation into Ms. Myers’ death. I hope we can find a way to work together,” Lynn told him bluntly. “My partner will be here shortly and we will be utilizing our crime lab and techs. As well as our own pathologist.”

Payton’s light blue eyes had started growing narrower and narrower as she spoke, and they were mere black slits now.

“We can’t rule out that this was a hate crime either, which would put it under FBI’s jurisdiction,” Lynn added. “The victim was mixed race, African American and Indian. And this is a predominantly white area of the country.”

He’d opened his mouth to argue, doubtlessly to say something nasty, but laying out those facts for him had shut him up.

“Please find a way to conceal the body and preserve the area around it as quickly as possible,” she told him. “Has anyone started canvassing the area and interviewing possible witnesses yet?”

“I have four deputies taking statements, and the police are enroute,” he said.

“Who reported her missing?” Lynn asked.

“She was here with a group of ten film students from New York University, as far as we can tell,” Payton said. “She was the star of the movie they were making. And when she didn’t show up for filming yesterday evening, they called us.”

“But you didn’t come out last night, did you?”

Payton shrugs, the left side of his mouth twisting up. “Procedure is to wait 24 hours before going to look for a missing person.”

“Not when a hiker might’ve gotten hurt,” Lynn interjected.

Payton nodded. “Right, which is why a deputy was dispatched. And after speaking to the victim’s friends, the ones who reported her missing, he concluded that she had most likely just gone back home without telling them. According to them, she’d spent more time complaining about the role she was playing and the conditions under which they were filming than she did acting.”

Lynn’s heart felt like someone was squeezing it in an iron-clad fist. Shanna was spoiled. She’d grown up with everything, including the love and devotion of her adoptive parents. But she wasn’t a bad kid. She was kind and attentive and caring.

“Did she take any belongings with her when she left?” Lynn asked. “How was the Deputy so sure there was nothing to worry about?”

The town she grew up in was surrounded by vacation homes much like the cabins in these woods. If an out-of-towner back home had gone missing on a hike, her father would’ve organized a full search right away. The Sheriff’s office, canine unit, volunteers and townsfolk would all have participated. But Sheriff Rivers ran a tight ship, both at work and at home. Payton might not be cut from the same cloth.

“There was a strong reason to suspect she’d simply gone back home,” Payton said, waving to someone over Lynn’s shoulder.

She turned to see the forensics unit finally arriving—a woman and three men all in white coveralls, carrying silver-colored cases.

“Deputy Walsh took the report. Speak to him.”

Then he hurried to meet the forensic team without waiting for Lynn to say anything else. Lynn saw no harm in them getting started while they waited for the Bureau’s crime scene specialists to get here.

She walked over to the crime scene tape, looking this way and that, trying and failing to read the officers’ name tags in the gloom under the thick foliage.

“Walsh is in the dining hall building talking with the victim’s friends,” a female deputy said to her.

She was maybe thirty years old, with nearly white blonde hair pulled into a tight ballerina-type bun on the back of her head and the lightest blue eyes Lynn had ever seen. The black uniform made her seem even paler than she was and her hand was ice cold as she offered it to Lynn. “I’m Tara Stone. I can show you the way.”

“That will have to wait. I’m going to meet the victim’s parents now,” Lynn said and the deep hurt entering the young woman’s eyes almost made Lynn change her mind about asking what she was about to. But at the same time, it also made Tara perfect for the task.

“I would like to do so in a private room at the Sheriff’s office, with someone on hand who can tell them everything that’s been discovered and offer them comfort. Could you come with me and facilitate this?”

Tara’s eyes clouded over, turning glassy and Lynn was sure she’d try and make an excuse. Then she squared her shoulders and nodded. “I can help. I’ll go ahead to the office and make the arrangements. Bring them in when they arrive.”

Lynn thanked her and checked her watch as Tara walked away. It was just after ten AM.

Shanna’s parents had taken a red-eye flight out of Mexico City that would have put them at JFK Airport at seven AM. They’d be here soon.

She had to intercept them before they stumbled onto the crime scene the way she had.

Getting over the loss of their only child would be hard enough without seeing exactly how she had died.