Chris Mooney - The Missing

'He's got me,' Rachel said over the headphones. 'He's got me real good this time.'

'He's not here.'

'Yes, he is. I saw him.'

'There's no one in here but you and me. You're safe.'

'He came to me last night and put on these handcuffs.'

Darby hit STOP. Handcuff key. Rachel said she had a handcuff key. Darby hadn't found one underneath the porch.

She pressed the PLAY button and leaned forward, listening.

'I know what he's looking for,' Rachel said. 'I took it from his office. He can't find it because I buried it.'

'What did you bury?'

'I'll show you, but you've got to find a way to help me out of these handcuffs. I can't find my handcuff key. I must have dropped it.'

Darby stopped the tape again and hunted through the pictures.

Here was one of Rachel Swanson in the back of the ambulance. Her arms were covered in mud. The next three photos were close-ups of the wounds on Rachel's chest.

Here was a close-up photo of Rachel's hands. The fingernails were caked with dirt, the skin cut up and bleeding not from fighting but from digging.

Darby ran down to the kitchen and grabbed the cordless. Coop answered on the sixth ring.

'Coop, it's Darby.'

'What's wrong? Is it your mother?'

'No, it's about Rachel Swanson. I think she hid something underneath the porch.'

'We searched that area, including the trash, and didn't find anything.'

'But we didn't search the ground,' Darby said. 'I think she buried something.'

The rectangular-shaped area underneath the porch was about half the size of a small bedroom. The ground was still muddy. Darby couldn't see any recent evidence of digging, so she started working in the far left-hand corner where she had first spotted Rachel.

Darby did the digging. She filled the bucket and handed it to Coop. He dumped the dirt on top of the sifter set up on a large garbage can lined with plastic.

They'd been at it for well over an hour, and the only thing they had to show for their efforts was a collection of rocks and glass shards.

Kneeling underneath the porch, her pants wet and soaked with mud, Darby handed Coop another bucketful for sifting. Carol's mother stood on the neighbor's back porch, watching them dig, her face twisted with worry and hope.

Coop ducked his head underneath the porch. 'Just more rocks,' he said, handing her the empty bucket. 'What do you think?'

It was the third time Coop had asked the question.

'I still think she buried something in here,' Darby said.

'I'm not saying you're wrong. I looked at the same pictures you did, and I agree she dug in here with her hands. But I'm beginning to think maybe she buried something only she could see.'

'You heard the tape. She kept mentioning a handcuff key.'

'Maybe she believed she had a handcuff key. The woman was delusional, Darb. She thought you were Terry Mastrangelo. She thought the hospital room was her prison cell.'

'We know, for a fact, she escaped the van. I think she had a handcuff key. It's got to be around here somewhere.'

'Okay, let's say you're right. What's a handcuff key going to buy us in terms of evidence?'

'What do you want to do, Coop? Sit around and wait for Carol Cranmore's body to turn up?'

'I didn't say that.'

'Then what are you saying?'

'I know how badly you want to find something. But there's nothing here.'

Darby grabbed the trowel and started digging at a feverish pace. She had to remind herself to slow down. She didn't want to damage any evidence with the trowel.

Rachel Swanson might have been delusional, but it was brought on by real trauma and not some imagined event. The woman had suffered unimaginable horrors over the course of five years. Mixed up in her fear were grains of truth. Something was buried here, Darby could feel it.

'I think the Dunkin' Donuts is open,' Coop said. 'I'm going to grab a coffee. You want one?'

'I'm all set.'

Coop crossed the backyard, walking past the crime scene vehicle, which was still parked in its original spot from this morning.

Darby dug up two more pails and sifted the damp dirt on the screen. More rocks.

Forty minutes later, Darby had dug up about three-quarters of the area underneath the porch. The muscles in her legs and lower back ached. She thought about hanging it up when something caught her eye – a folded, corner section of what looked like paper sticking out from the dirt.

Darby moved the portable light into the hole. She used her gloved fingers to scoop away the dirt and then switched to the brush.

A handcuff key sat on top of the folded piece of paper.

'Looks like I owe you an apology,' Coop said.

'Buy me dinner and we'll call it even.'

'It's a date.'

Once the photographs and documentation work were completed, Darby lifted the folded piece of paper out of the hole and set it up on top of the sifting screen.

Documents required special handling and care. Because paper was nothing more than pulverized wood and glue, when wet paper was allowed to dry, it turned to glue. Folded pages and papers stacked on top of one another would be stuck together and couldn't be pried apart.

'Any idea when these mobile forensic units are arriving?' Coop asked.

'I don't know, but if we wait too long, these pages will start to stick together and we'll be screwed.'

As it turned out, Darby didn't have to wait long. By the time she finished bagging the handcuff key into evidence, a Ford 350 turned the corner at the far end of the street, towing a seventy-foot trailer with antennas and a small satellite dish.

Darby borrowed Coop's cell phone and called Evan Manning. When he picked up, she got right to it.

'Sorry for the early call, but I've found some evidence at the Cranmore house – a folded wet piece of paper that was buried, along with a handcuff key, underneath the porch. One of your mobile units just arrived, and I need to open the paper before it dries. How soon can you get here?'

'Look across the street.'

The trailer door opened. Evan Manning waved to her.

The mobile forensic unit contained all the latest equipment, all of it carefully designed to fit inside the long, narrow space. Everything looked and smelled new. Displayed on one of the computer monitors was the FBI's DNA identification system, CODIS.

'Where are your forensic people?' Darby asked as they walked.

'In the air,' Evan said. 'They're scheduled to touch down at Logan sometime in the next three hours. The other two mobile units have already started working the blast site in Boston. Does the paper have blood on it?'

'I don't know. I haven't unfolded it yet.'

'We should suit up, just in case.'

After they dressed, Evan handed out masks, safety goggles and neoprene gloves.

'The neoprene will leave indentation marks if we touch the paper,' Coop said. 'They'll show up during fingerprint processing. We should use cotton gloves over latex.'

The examination room was cool and gleaming white. The work counter was small. Evan stood behind Darby to give her some space.

She transferred the paper to the clean work space. Using two pairs of tweezers, she went to work unfolding the paper.

Prying the pages apart was slow, painstaking work. In addition to being wet and flimsy, the paper was badly wrinkled and had started to tear in several places from having been folded and refolded so many times.

It was an 8? 10 sheet of white paper. The side facing them was a printout of a computer-generated color map. Most of it was unreadable. The colors had faded and several spots had been rubbed away, most likely from the perspiration from Rachel Swanson's hands.

Two areas of the map were caked with mud. Other areas had absorbed the dirt's dark color. Some spots were covered in dried smears of blood and with some yellow liquid, either mucus or pus.