Блейк Пирс - Once Lost

Partly to get her mind off the landscape, Riley took out her cell phone to text her whole family as a group – April, Jilly, Liam, and Gabriela.

Got here safely.

She thought for a moment, then added …

Miss you all already. But I’ll probably be back before U know it.

After about an hour on the two-lane highway, Doty turned the car off onto a gravel road.

As he kept on driving, he said, “We’re coming up on George Tully’s land now.”

Riley looked around. The landscape looked exactly the same – huge stretches of unplanted fields interrupted by gullies, fences, and lines of trees. She did notice a single large house in the midst of it all, standing next to a ramshackle barn. She figured that must be where Tully lived with his family.

It was an odd-looking house that appeared to have been added onto and cobbled together over the years, probably for quite a few generations.

Soon a medical examiner’s vehicle came into sight, parked on the shoulder of the road. Several other cars were parked nearby. Doty parked right behind the examiner’s van, and Riley and Jenn followed him and his younger partner out onto a recently tilled field.

Riley saw three men standing over a dug up spot. She couldn’t see what had been found there, but she did glimpse a bit of brightly colored clothing fluttering in the spring breeze.

That’s where she was buried, she realized.

And at that moment, Riley was hit by a strange gut feeling.

Gone was any sense that she and Jenn would have nothing to do here.

They had work to do – a girl was dead and they wouldn’t stop until the killer was found.

Two people were standing by the freshly revealed body. Riley headed straight toward one of them, a brawny man about her own age.

“Chief Joseph Sinard, I assume,” she said, offering her hand.

He nodded and shook her hand.

“Folks around here just call me Joe,”

Sinard indicated an obese, bored-looking man in his fifties who was standing beside him, “This is Barry Teague, the county medical examiner. You two are the FBI folks we’ve been expecting, I guess.”

Riley and Jenn produced their badges and introduced themselves.

“Here’s our victim,” Sinard said.

He pointed down into the shallow hole, where a young woman lay carelessly splayed, wearing a bright orange sundress. The dress was hitched up over her thighs, and Riley could see that her underwear had been removed. She wasn’t wearing any shoes. Her face was unnaturally pale, and her open mouth still had dirt in it. Her eyes were wide open. The soiled body was dull in color, no longer the shade of any living human being.

Riley shuddered a little. She seldom felt any emotion when seeing a dead body – she’d seen far too many of them over the years. But this girl reminded her too much of April.

Riley turned toward the medical examiner.

“Have you come to any conclusions, Mr. Teague?”

Barry Teague crouched down next to the hole, and Riley crouched next to him.

“It’s bad – real bad,” he said in a voice that expressed no emotion at all.

He pointed to the girl’s thighs.

“See those bruises?” he asked. “Looks to me like she was raped.”

Riley didn’t say so, but she felt sure that he was correct. Judging from the smell, she also guessed that the girl had died the night before last, and that she’d been buried here for most of that time.

She asked the ME, “What do you think was the cause of death?”

Teague let out an impatient-sounding growl.

“Don’t know,” he said. “Maybe if you federal folks let me haul the body out of here and do my job, I might be able to tell you.”

Riley bristled inside. The man’s resentment of the FBI’s presence was palpable. Were she and Jenn Roston going to face a lot of local resistance?

She reminded herself that it had been Chief Sinard who called in the request. At least she could count on Sinard’s cooperation.

She told the ME, “You can take her away now.”

She got to her feet and looked around. She saw an elderly man some fifty feet away, leaning against a tractor and staring straight toward the body.

“Who’s that?” she asked Chief Sinard.

“George Tully,” Sinard said.

Riley remembered that George Tully was the owner of this land.

She and Jenn walked over to him and introduced themselves. Tully seemed barely to notice their presence. He kept staring toward the body as Teague’s team carefully got ready to move it.

Riley said to him, “Mr. Tully, I understand that you found the girl.”

He nodded dully, still not taking his eyes off the body.

Riley said, “I know this is hard. But could you please tell me what happened?”

Tully spoke in a vague, distant-sounding voice.

“Not much to tell. Me and the boys came out this morning early for planting. I noticed something odd about the soil there. The look of it bothered me so I started to dig … and then there she was.”

Riley sensed that Tully wasn’t going to be able to tell her much.

Jenn said, “Do you have any idea when the body might have been buried here?”

Tully shook his head mutely.

Riley looked around for a moment. The field seemed to have been recently tilled.

“When did you till this field?” she asked.

“Day before last. No, the day before that. We were just getting started seeding it today.”

Riley turned this over in her mind. It seemed consistent with her guess that the girl had been killed and buried the night before last.

Tully squinted as he continued to stare ahead.

“Chief Sinard told me her name,” he said. “Katy – her last name was Philbin, I think. Odd, I didn’t recognize that name. I didn’t recognize her either. Time was …”

He paused for a moment.

“Time was when I knew pretty much all the families in town, and their kids too. Times have changed.”

There was a numb, aching sadness in his voice.

Riley could feel his pain now. She felt sure he’d lived on this land all his life, and so had his parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, and he’d hoped to pass the farm down to his own children and grandchildren.

He’d never imagined something like this could possibly happen here.

She also realized something else – that Tully had been standing in exactly this same spot for hours, staring with horrified disbelief at the poor girl’s body. He’d found the body in the early morning, reported it, and then hadn’t been able to make himself move from this spot. Now that the body was being taken away, maybe he’d leave soon.

But Riley knew that the horror wouldn’t leave him.

His words echoed through her head …

“Times have changed.”

He must have felt as though the world had gone mad.

And maybe it has, Riley thought.

“We’re terribly sorry this happened,” Riley told him.

Then she and Jenn headed back toward the excavated spot.

Teague’s team now had the covered body up on a gurney. They were awkwardly moving it over the tilled soil toward the medical examiner’s vehicle.

Teague approached Riley and Jenn. He spoke in that seemingly perpetual monotone of his.

“In answer to your question, how’d she die … I got a better look, and she’d been bludgeoned, hit more than once. So that’s it.”

Without another word he turned and walked away to join his team.

Jenn let out a scoff of annoyance.

“Well, it sounds like the examination is done as far as he’s concerned,” she said. “He’s a real sweetheart.”

Riley shook her head in dismayed agreement.

Then she walked toward Chief Sinard and asked, “Was anything else found with the body? A handbag? Cell phone?”