CHAPTER TWO
1801 Words
CHAPTER TWO
Harley felt her pulse quickening in anticipation as she followed Callaway down the road. As reluctant as she was to admit it, crime was as much a d**g to her as it was to many criminals. It felt good to hit the ground running, even though she had too much to do at her new place to help with the investigation.
“Local PD is under-staffed,” Callaway explained. “Budget cuts, bureaucratic bullshit, you know how it goes. We just wrapped up a s****l assault case, so Newbury thought it would be a sign of goodwill to send me down here to lend a hand.”
Harley nodded, studying the area. The desert on either side was peppered with juniper bushes and scraggly grasses, rising toward a tumble of hills that dominated the horizon. A raven perched on the shriveled remains of a coyote, glancing up to give a sharp “Caw!” at the visitors before taking flight.
As they neared the scene of the crime, Harley watched a woman in a plastic white suit and mint green gloves lean into her tripod-mounted camera to take a snapshot of the body. Numbered yellow cards were staggered about the area, marking evidence.
The victim lay sprawled on her back in the withered grass fringing the road, arms stretched over her head like a diver jumping into a pool. A mop of curly black hair hid most of her face, leaving only a protruding chin, childlike in its roundness. Ugly purple-yellow bruises colored her throat. Two rows of faint tire tracks could be seen in the flattened grass.
Harley studied the brittle elasticity of the victim’s tanned skin. “What do you think? Mid-forties?”
“Mid-to-late,” Callaway agreed, handing Harley a pair of plastic gloves before putting on his own. “No ID. We’re running her prints, so we’ll see if we get any hits.”
His voice was professional, all hint of levity gone. It was impressive to Harley how easily Callaway could switch hats. She wondered if it took a toll on him, this line of work. She’d like to think it hadn’t taken a toll on her, but the fate of her former marriage suggested otherwise.
“Strangulation?” she said.
Callaway nodded. “Looks that way. In this heat, she can’t have been out here long. An hour, maybe, two at the most.”
Harley squatted down to examine the woman’s outstretched right arm. A sleeve of tattoos covered elbow to wrist, all vines and flowers.
“Nature-lover, by the look of it,” Callaway observed.
Harley nodded. The clothes – a plain white dress with pink flowers – struck her as odd. There was something unusual about the tailoring, but she wasn’t sure what.
“Look how stiff her arms are,” Harley murmured. “He must have stretched her out, probably as he was dragging her body into a vehicle. Then rigor mortis set in.”
“He? You’re assuming it’s a man?”
“Ninety percent of homicides are perpetrated by men,” Harley answered. “Besides, it’s a little confusing to say ‘they’ when we’re probably talking about only one person.”
Callaway raised an eyebrow. “Again, seems like an assumption. It could have been two men—or two women, for that matter. A whole mob of people, maybe.”
Harley shook her head. “No, my money’s on one killer. This whole situation has panic written all over it. He kills the woman, then gets rid of the body. But he doesn’t bury it. Why not?”
“Maybe he wasn’t hiding the body. Maybe he put it here for us to find it, like a trophy.”
“Then leave her on the highway, in the city—somewhere obvious. This is too…” She paused, searching for the word. “Remote. Maybe he wasn’t the only one involved in the crime, but I’ll bet he was the only one involved in getting rid of the body. I don’t think he had a plan for what to do, or if he did, he got sidetracked. This looks like a Plan B to me, not a Plan A.”
It felt good, the way the thoughts hummed through her mind like high-speed traffic. She had missed this in the past few weeks, like a bodybuilder who goes without lifting weights for a time due to injury. The speed at which the details locked together in her mind only confirmed what she already knew: She was good at this.
“Okay,” Callaway said patiently, playing along. “So let’s assume for a minute you’re correct and we’re dealing with one killer, a man. How does he get her body out here? A trunk?”
“Pickup,” Harley answered without hesitation.
Callaway sighed, rubbing his forehead. “You’re gonna tell me you can read that from the tire tracks?”
“Not the tire tracks.” She pointed to a small brown object clinging to the underside of the victim’s clothes. “That.”
Callaway stooped to examine it closely. “Bark?”
Harley nodded. “Bits of leaves in her hair, too.”
“But only the back,” Callaway said, catching on. “You think the killer puts her in the back of a pickup, drives her out here, then…” He mimed grabbing a pair of ankles at waist-height and pulling.
“It would explain the debris beneath her,” she answered.
“Seems risky. What if someone spotted the body while the killer was transporting her here?”
She paused. “The sun rises at, what, six? And it’s…” She reached for her phone, but Callaway read his watch before she could reach it.
“Ten-o-eight,” he said. “If he dropped her off in the last hour or two, it would have been broad daylight.”
“Then he must have covered her.”
She leaned over the victim’s wrists, searching for burns or any other signs of restraints. She noticed a series of faint white scars on the underside of the right wrist.
“Looks like she was a cutter,” Harley observed. “The scars are old.”
She straightened, not sure what to do with this new piece of evidence. “Has forensics checked beneath the nails?” she said. “I don’t see any indication of restraints, so there’s a good chance she fought back.”
“They took samples,” he answered. “Cast the tire tracks, too, though there’s not much to go on, given all the grass.”
Harley bit her lower lip. She was still thinking about how the killer had transported the body. As she circled the victim, she noticed an earring hidden beneath the halo of curly hair. It appeared to be leather cut in the shape of a leaf. A thin blue strand was caught on the metal.
Harley pulled out her phone and took three pictures of the strand, just to be sure. Then, using one hand to carefully brush the victim’s hair aside, she pulled the strand free. Callaway passed her an evidence bag, and she slipped the thread inside.
“What does that look like to you?” she said, holding it up.
“A tarp,” Callaway mused. Neither spoke for several moments. There was something both chilling and exhilarating about putting together the pieces of a crime. Harley loved the challenge, yet with every new piece of evidence the crime became a little more real, a little more terrible.
Callaway said, “So you think he puts the body in the back of his truck, covers her with a tarp?”
Harley shrugged. “A pickup driving down the road with a tarp in back. Who’s going to notice?”
Callaway rubbed his jawline, making a faint rasping sound like sandpaper against wood. “Doesn’t narrow down the pool of suspects much, though. Just about everyone around here drives a truck. Different in the cities, sure, but in the country…”
Something else about the body, however, had caught Harley’s attention. She stared at it, puzzled.
“Harley?” Callaway said. “Still with us?”
“Her clothes. Anything strike you as odd about them?”
Callaway shrugged. “They’re probably not the latest fashion in Paris, but…”
“I wore a dress just like that when I was a kid—got it from a roadside vendor.” It was fairly common to see someone at the side of the road selling clothes, firewood, fry bread, corn, or other items from the back of a truck, an old shack, or even an RV. It was something she had missed when she moved east. There was nothing quite like a fresh, hot tamale.
Harley lifted the fabric and began studying the seams. She was no seamstress, but the irregularities in the stitching – not to mention the absence of tags – suggested what she had already suspected.
“This dress was homemade,” she mused.
Callaway’s face brightened suddenly. “You know, there’s a place not too far from here sells that kind of thing.” He snapped his fingers. “What’s the name of it…”
Looking up, he called to a nearby officer. “Hey, Ned! What’s that place where all the people live without electricity or anything?”
“You mean the one with the kids always throwing rocks at cars?”
“That’s the one!”
“Holy Hope Community, I think it’s called.”
Callaway turned back to Harley. “There you go. I’m pretty sure everything they wear is homemade—wouldn’t want to support the evil empire that is capitalism.” He grunted. “If anyone around here can tell us about homemade clothes, it’s them.”
Harley nodded. “Sounds like we should check them out.”
“We can take my truck. Just give Bodie your address, and he’ll make sure your things get to your house, safe and sound.”
Harley walked a few paces and then stopped. She had gotten so wrapped up in the details of the case that she had forgotten her weekend plans. Callaway’s mention of her address, however, reminded her she didn’t have so much as a bed set up at the new place.
“What is it?” Callaway said, studying her.
“It’s just that if I go with you, I’m committing to this thing. In for a penny, in for a pound. I don’t believe in half measures, not when we’re looking for a murderer.” She sighed. “It’s almost like I can’t help myself.”
A sunny smile dawned on Callaway’s face. “And you’re just realizing this now?”
- Writer
