Kreaver held up his hand to block the harsh light. “Hey Kimberly, come here and help me, there’s a girl in the van who may injured. Fred, can you call for an ambulance and a tow truck. And keep an eye on our friend here.”
“You’re a cop?” Phil said under his breath.
Kimberly Lee came over to help Kreaver while her partner, Fred Andersun, returned to the cruiser. Kreaver opened the driver’s side door. The car smelled rank with beer and cigarettes. Empty cans littered the floor. The girl sat back in her seat, unmoving, her mouth open. Her blouse was partially unbuttoned, her bra was showing, and the white skin of her belly. Her jeans were undone, pulled partly down, exposing the top part of her pink panties. Kreaver reached in and tapped her arm.
“Wake up. Miss, wake up now. Come on, honey, wake up.” He touched her small, pale hand, picked it up and waggled it. No muscle tone, no reaction whatsoever. “Shine the light in her face please,” he told the patrolwoman. She did so as Kreaver held the girl’s eye open. The pupil contracted in the bright light to a black pinpoint in a round circle of blue, but the girl herself didn’t flinch. He checked her breathing, shallow but regular, then took her wrist to check her pulse, rapid, thready. Kreaver climbed out of the van.
Lee was looking at him, worried. “Is she okay?”
“She’s alive. You keep an eye on her while I talk to my new friend Phil about his niece.” Kreaver felt a hot coal of rage burning in his gut as he walked back towards the cruiser.
Andersun got out of the cruiser. “The ambulance will be here any minute. Everything okay, Sarge?”
Kreaver shrugged. “Not sure. Where’s Phil?”
The patrolman looked puzzled. “You mean that guy?”
“Yeah. Where is he?”
The patrolman bit his lip. “I don’t know. He can’t have gone far.”
Kreaver looked down the dark stretch of road in both directions, then into the darkness at the side of the road. Phil could have taken a dozen steps into the brush and disappeared if he’d wanted to. And apparently he had done just that. “Dammit.”
“Why the heck would he run?”Andersun asked.
“I don’t know. I need to use your radio.” Kreaver called dispatch and had them send out another cruiser. They would need to run a search on the van, on the girl, on everything they could. Andersun’s question was a good one. At most Phil could be charged with drunk driving, maybe reckless endangerment, corrupting a minor, but why add on evading a police investigation and fleeing the scene of an accident?
The patrolman had no luck in finding Phil on foot. “Sorry, Sarge, I guess I should have been watching him. I just never thought he’d take off like that.”
“It’s okay. Kimberly’s going to take care of the girl. I need you to do a search on motels and hotels within a ten kilometre radius. Stop any hitchhikers and taxis you see with passengers inside.”
“Okay. What did the guy do anyway?”
Kreaver stared off in the darkness. “I’m not sure yet, but it can’t be good.”
Chapter 3
Chalk Valley - 21:45h
Detectives John McCarty and Tony Laupacsis drove along Highway 1 in an unmarked navy blue Caprice. Just before crossing the Causewell Bridge that led into Hell’s Gate Canyon they came to West Gimly Highway, a narrow two lane of faded asphalt pocked with potholes that followed the U-shaped bend of Chalk River. It sloped sharply uphill, following the line of the valley ridge. Three kilometres further along, a small white sign hanging under a low overhang of tall firs indicated Concession 48. McCarty pulled the cruiser over to the side of the road in front of a line of parked patrol cars. A rough dirt road extended from the upper ridge of the highway to a small meadow, where it continued as a beaten down trail through a field of knee-high grass towards the valley ridge where half a dozen uniformed cops were gathered. The moon was high in the sky, casting everything in a cold, silvery glow.
“The body’s about five hundred feet or so down the pathway over there, Mac,” said one of the cops, waving his flashlight towards a clearing on the ridge, where a length of yellow tape had been strung across the black mud path that led down below.
“Did you call the coroner?” asked McCarty.
The other cop nodded. “I kept everyone away from the body site.” The patrolmen had made the teenagers wait on the rock and told them to not touch anything. The kids were scared enough to do the unthinkable for teenagers – they did exactly as they were told without question. They had also realized too late that they had never even bothered to hide their party accoutrements, although they were all clearly underage. A case of beer, a bottle of white Bacardi, some bags of Doritos and a ziplock containing half a dozen joints sat out in the open. McCarty and Laupacsis talked to the teenagers for a few minutes. McCarty sensed they weren’t they weren’t hiding anything, they were just a frightened bunch of kids, so he took down their names and let them go home. All except for Peter Caiden, the boy who had found the body in the first place. Peter was a tall, gangly seventeen year old with a swath of angry red pimples across his forehead and a wispy blonde beard and mustache. His clothes and face were caked with dry grey mud.
“You guys party here a lot?” McCarty asked the boy.
“No?” he replied, uncertain what he should say.
McCarty smiled. “Listen, Pete, I don’t give a rat’s ass if you get out with your buddies for some pops or a few spliffs, understand? I’m just trying to figure out why there’s a dead body in the woods.”
The boy nodded. “Well, we came here maybe a couple of other times, like two, three weeks ago, but that’s it. We didn’t even know about this place before.”
McCarty looked at the ground, noted a few crumpled beer cans, scattered cigarette butts and the circle of scorched rocks that marked an old campfire. “Who found it?”
“We all did. I mean, we were headed to our usual spot down near the bridge and found this place kind of by accident.”
Cuthbert and Morris arrived just then. Cuthbert had a black duffle bag slung over his shoulder. “We got some company,” he said, jerking a thumb up towards the night sky. Helicopters.
“News crews already?” McCarty asked. At this early phase of the investigation, he wanted to allow himself and the team to get oriented to the crime scene without spotlights, noise, cameras and questions they weren’t ready to answer yet. McCarty took a couple of flashlights from the duffle bag. “You two stay up here and sort things out,” he told the detectives. “Set up the base camp right here. Tape it off. We can get the trailer down, right?”
“I guess,” Cuthbert shrugged.
“Okay,” Laupacsis said to the boy. “Can you show us to the body?”
A black dirt path cut from the grassy field to feed deep into the valley forest. The detectives carried the flashlights as they followed the boy, walking down the slope along the path, like a children’s game, pushing aside the tangles of bushes, stepping over the naked roots that jutted from the ground, the sound of their footsteps smothered as they moved deeper into the forest. The deerflies were biting at their arms, neck, face, every inch of exposed skin they could find. The detectives kept swatting at them, but almost instantly more arrived to replace their fallen comrades, swarming in it seemed from everywhere. “How much closer are we?” McCarty asked the boy.
“It’s just down here.” The first officers on the scene obviously didn’t have a chance to mark things off yet. “We’ll be there any second now. Just keep to the left.”
McCarty lingered behind the others. The tiny branches that tore at his face and clothes seemed to grow denser every minute. He stared up at the trees for a moment. The leaves and branches hanging high overhead were so thick they choked off any remnants of the dying daylight that tried to reach the ground, making the forest dark and silent as a tomb, except for the incessant whine of the deerflies and occasional chirruping of birds. Laupacsis and the boy were just up ahead, standing with another patrolman who had been assigned to protect the scene. Yellow tape had been strung up around a small square in the forest.
At their feet, lying in a pool of yellow-white light from Laupacsis’ flashlight, was what was clearly a human skull, face down, turned slightly sideways as though it was looking up at them. A single clump of long, reddish-blonde hair remained on the skull, tangled with dirt and leaves. The knobbled ridge of vertebrae was covered with a thin skein of brown parchment-like skin, while a fingerless arm stretched out before it, reaching into limbo. A thin white line of maggots surrounded the remains, wriggling in the black dirt, trying to escape the beams of the flashlights.
McCarty knelt down beside the body. The stench was nauseating. He shone the flashlight on the exposed part of the face. The decayed flesh appeared to be covered with tiny bite marks. Laupacsis narrowed his eyes. “What is that?”
“Animal depredation probably.”
“Think it’s a murder?”
McCarty shrugged. There were maybe eight to ten homicides a year in the entire region; most of them domestics, a couple of drug-related murders over the years, but murder victims rarely turned up in the forest in Chalk Valley. McCarty stood up and stretched. The Coroner’s Investigators would have to do their work before the detectives could examine the remains. He looked at the boy, whose face had turned a pale shade of green beneath the streaks of dried mud.
“Why don’t we have somebody take you home.” The boy gratefully agreed and the patrolman escorted him back up the path.
Not even a buzz of traffic could be heard from here; they could have been in a primeval forest a thousand years ago and it would have felt no different. McCarty noticed the small pathways that led from this clearing and disappeared under the bushes, so low you’d have to crawl under them on your hands and knees. The little predators were watching their every move, their bright eyes gleaming from the darkness of the forest. They weren’t used to visitors.
“Okay, get a few other guys down here and set up the perimeter,” McCarty told Laupacsis. “Give me five hundred paces out and around, all directions. No one has access but the investigation team. We’ll grid search it in the morning.”
The coroner’s investigation team arrived a few minutes later. McCarty knew the CI well, Sally Donovan, a straight forward, fortyish woman whom he respected. The CI team quickly set up a bank of floodlights around the area. The silence suddenly exploded all around them with the loud chugging sound of a diesel generator churning to life. In a few seconds, the clearing was filled with artificial daylight. The body, hidden so long in the shadows of the deep forest, now lay brutally exposed, luminescent in a bath of stark white light. Donovan removed the crime scene tape that had been put in place by the first patrol officers and had a technician pound a three foot long metal stake into the ground near the victim’s head. She followed that with three smaller wooden stakes, one near each side of the body and one at the feet, then tied lengths of yellow tape to the stakes, forming a perfect square around the body. The metal stake would serve as their point of reference for all evidence they discovered around the site, like the centre point of a compass.
Other policemen officers had arrived and were busy combing the area with flashlights. Black jokes flew like charms in the falling night. Donovan took photographs of the body in situ from several different angles. McCarty pointed out specific areas of interest for her as she took closer shots of sections of the body before she knelt down, pulled on latex gloves and started to carefully sweep layers of leaves and detritus off the body. The body was shirtless, wore jeans but no shoes or socks. McCarty had the CI techies place the leaves into clear garbage bags so they could be sifted through later at the lab for evidence.
“From the size and shape of the body, and from the clumps of long hair, I’m assuming the victim was a female,” Donovan said. “The state of decay makes it difficult to confirm until the autopsy.”
“What’s that around her neck?” Laupacsis asked. The body had what looked like a dirty rag wrapped around her neck. Donovan raised her eyebrows and shook her head. She and one of her tech’s laid out a body bag on the ground and carefully rolled the body over into it. Clusters of insects scurried from the sudden wash of white light, pale maggots squirmed helplessly while flat, gleaming checker beetles scrambled for cover. Patches of flesh had decayed or been predated from the victim’s face, leaving the bare skull only, stripped of its fragile humanity. The bone over the right orbital crest had been crushed, a spider web fracture the size of a silver dollar. The cheekbone was also fractured. The blows that could have caused such damage could have been death blows, delivered savagely, mercilessly.
Donovan took photos of the rag tied around the victim’s neck. A short, broken-off stick was twisted up in it. “Ligature,” she said of the rag. Shit, McCarty thought, his stomach lurching. It was easily the most brutal body find he’d ever come across. The coroner’s team worked methodically under the floodlights, occasionally swatting at the bloodthirsty flies that buzzed around their heads, but otherwise oblivious as they worked. The human tragedy of what lay before them had been put aside, compartmentalized. Now, they had a job to do.