Ryan Jahn - The Dispatcher

When he returns to his car he sets the bag on the passenger’s seat and grabs his radio.

Diego steps into the woods with a roll of yellow tape in his right hand. He feels sick to his stomach. He’s been a cop for six years now and this will be his third body. If he can find it. The Deans own a decent chunk of land and there’s no telling how deep into it the body might be. Of course, if someone killed a child and simply used the woods as a convenient place to dispose of it it’s probably no more than twenty or thirty yards from Main Street, just far enough into the trees that a person could park on the shoulder of the road, carry a corpse and a shovel, and dig a shallow grave without being seen by anyone driving past. People’s cars break down all the time. No one would think twice about someone’s old banger sitting on the shoulder of the road. Most people probably wouldn’t even notice it unless it belonged to someone they knew.

He thinks about how small that arm was. A child’s arm. A five- or six- or seven-year-old. And it was just bone but for a few scraps of leathery flesh or muscle. Dead a long time.

Somewhere a mother weeps.

Diego doesn’t have children of his own, but he has spent the last four years raising his nephew Elias, now nine. Elias’s parents, Diego’s baby sister and her husband, died in a car accident that the child survived. Diego and Cordelia are his parents now, and over the last several years Diego’s gotten used to that idea. He couldn’t imagine how he would feel if Elias went missing and, some time later, someone discovered his dry bones clenched in the jaws of a dog.

He can’t imagine.

As he walks through the woods he rips pieces of yellow tape from the roll in his hand and ties them to tree branches to mark his path. He remembers getting lost in the woods as a boy and being terrified. He was only lost for an hour and a half, an hour and a half of panic before he realized he could hear cars passing by and ran out to the street, but it was the longest ninety minutes of his life.

Even now, twenty yards into the woods, the street has vanished behind him and the light below the canopy is gray save a few blades that have managed to stab their way in between the branches and leaves, and the air is cooler than out on the street by several degrees.

Twigs break beneath his feet. The ground is softer here as well, feet collapsing the composted leaves that cover the earth. He tries to avoid poison oak and ivy as he makes his way deeper into the woods.

Five minutes ago he thought he was on his way to flirt with Georgia Simpson while she shelved Louis L’ Amour and Zane Grey novels. Now he is hunting a corpse. It doesn’t seem much of a trade off. A lot can happen in five minutes.

He swallows. His heart beats rapidly in his chest. He knows there’s no reason for that, but he knows, too, that a man doesn’t have much control over his heart.

He tells himself all that was left was the bone. He tells himself there’s no chance the person who did the murder, if it was a murder, is still out here. No chance at all.

But still his heart beats rapidly in his chest.

Something scurries past to his left and he spins toward the sound and draws his SIG.

A squirrel disappears behind a tree.

Diego laughs at himself and reholsters his weapon. He continues walking.

But fifty yards or so from the street he stops again. Something on the ground makes him stop. He looks at it and swallows. A thatch of hair lying amongst the dead leaves. The hair is very dirty, small pieces of leaf and dirt ground into it, and there is a blue barrette clipped onto it, holding it together. A blue barrette with a small piece of cut glass like a jewel glued to its center. The barrette is somehow worse, more affecting, than anything else. The hair is just hair, but the barrette-Diego can imagine a small girl standing before a mirror and clipping it into her hair and smiling at herself and how pretty she looks. The hair is blond. Might once have been, anyway.

He ties a piece of yellow tape around a fallen twig and stabs the twig into the ground near the thatch of hair. Then continues on.

In another fifteen or twenty yards he comes across a black shoe with a silver buckle. Poking from the black shoe is a white sock with a small pink bow sewn to it. The white sock has a hole eaten through it, and at the edges of the hole what might be black blood. Perhaps some insect ate the bloody part of the sock away. Diego picks up the shoe. Within it is a foot. The remains of a foot: nothing but dry bone, the rest long ago eaten by flies and beetles and such. He can easily hold the shoe in the palm of his hand without either end of it touching air. The girl it belonged to could not have been older than two. The girl it belonged to was smaller than the girl or boy whose arm is even now lying bodiless in Diego’s police cruiser.

There is more than one body out here. He is sure of it.

He sets the shoe back down and ties yellow tape around a nearby rock.

And continues walking.

A hundred yards into the woods he comes across a piece of tattered, rotting fabric.

And twenty yards beyond that, disturbed ground. The floor of the woods has been uniformly covered in a blanket of decomposing leaves from which small plants are growing-weeds, and mushrooms like boils, and young trees-but here the ground is disturbed, the leaves clawed aside, and it is here that he-

‘Oh, fuck.’

It is impossible to tell how many bodies are here, as only parts of them have been uncovered. An arm jutting from the soil here. A foot there. A scrap of yellow fabric. One human eye socket staring out of a white skull, all the soft parts long destroyed by time.

He walks to a tree and leans against it. He stares down at the ground. The ground spins.

After a moment he begins to cordon off the area. It takes him only a minute or two, and when he’s done he starts making his way back out to the street, following the yellow flags he left on his way to this bone-scattered nightmare. The boys from the sheriff’s department will be arriving soon, and he’ll have to lead them to the crime scene.

As he walks he pulls his cell phone from his pocket and dials Ian.

Ian pulls the headset off and gets to his feet. He picks up his cup of cold coffee and takes a swallow, just to wet his suddenly dry mouth. He walks out to the police station proper.

Chief Davis is sitting with the phone to his ear, saying, ‘Well, goddamn it, just let her do it then. I don’t know why you call and ask if you don’t care. All right. Goddamn it. All right . I love you too.’ He hangs up.

‘Chief.’

‘Uh?’

‘We got a situation, maybe related to my daughter.’

Chief Davis takes off his glasses, cleans them with a Kleenex, and sets them back onto his narrow nose, blinking at Ian.

‘What’s the situation?’

‘Couple corpses in the woods.’

‘No shit?’

‘None.’

‘So Diego found the owner of the arm?’

‘Looks like. Plus more.’

‘And it might be related to your daughter?’

‘Little girls.’

‘Diego didn’t say one of them might be,’ he licks his lips, ‘might, uh, be your. .’ Chief Davis lets it trail off and finds a thread on his shirtsleeve that needs to be pulled.

‘He doesn’t think so.’

‘He say why?’

‘There’s nothing left but bones and a little bit of hair and fabric.’

‘But little girls?’

Ian nods.

‘Sheriff ’s boys on the way, yeah?’

‘They are. Might even be there. Nance was in town to go over the case with Finch.’

‘I should be heading down too. And you wanna go?’

‘There might be something there to lead us to Maggie.’

‘All right,’ Davis says, getting to his feet. ‘We’ll get Thompson on the phones. You wanna ride with me or take your own car?’