Gerald’s old camcorder was tucked in the top of my suitcase. I pulled it out and set it up on the back of the pickup, hitting the record button on a brand-new tape and centering myself in front of the lens.
“Okay, hi.” I wiped my eyes, breathing deep into my diaphragm the way Gerald taught me. “This is me now. My name is Henrietta Sue Hoffman.”
And by the time I was done with Pine Valley, no one would ever forget who I was.
DEL / Saturday, April 12, 2008
THE DEAD girl lay faceup in a corner of the abandoned Erickson barn, half floating in the lake water that flooded the lowest part of the sinking floor. Her hands rested on her torso over some frilly, bloodstained cloth that must have been a dress, and below the hem her legs stretched bare and shocking into the water, each swollen to the size of her waist and floating like manatees in the dirty lagoon. The upper half of her body had no relation to those legs. I’d seen slashed-up bodies before and a share of floaters, too, but never both nightmares lying side by side in the same corpse. Even though her face was too mutilated to ID, there was only one report of a missing girl in the entire county.
“Must be Hattie.” That from Jake, my chief deputy.
Dispatch had gotten the call from the youngest Sanders boy, who’d found her when he and some girl snuck out here. There was a fresh spot of puke, just inside the crooked door, where one of them had lost it before they’d made their escape. I didn’t know if it was that or the dead stink that made Jake gag a little when we first came in. Normally I would’ve made a point to rib him about it, but not now. Not staring down at this.
I unhooked the camera from my belt and started snapping pictures, angling out and then in, trying to get her from every side without slipping into the water next to her.
“We don’t know it’s Hattie yet.” The sudden stone in my gut aside, we had to do this by the book.
As soon as we’d walked in the door I’d called the crime lab up in the cities and requested a forensics team to tag and bag every last scrap of evidence. We had maybe an hour alone with her before they got here.
“Who else could it be?” Jake moved around her head, watching his step as the boards groaned underneath his ex–defensive tackle weight. He leaned in closer and I could see the lawman had clicked on in his brain.
“Can’t make a positive ID with her face like that, especially since she’s already bloating. No rings or jewelry. No visible tattoos.”
“Where’s her purse? I’ve never met a girl that didn’t keep one glued to her hip.”
“Taken, maybe.”
“Hell of a place for a robbery/murder.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself. ID first.” I crouched down next to her. With a gloved finger, I nudged her lip open and saw her teeth were intact. “Looks like we can go dental.”
Jake checked the dress for pockets, didn’t find any.
“Cause of death, stabbing, most likely.” I pulled up one of her hands and saw the knife wound either right at or just above her heart.
“Most likely?” Jake snorted.
I ignored him and lifted her arm up a little farther to reveal where the white skin on top met the red skin underneath.
“See that?” I pointed to the line separating the colors. “That’s liver mortis. When the blood stops pumping it gets sucked down by gravity and pools at the lowest spots. That’s how you can tell if a body’s been moved, if the red isn’t on the bottom like it should be.”
We checked a few other places on her. “Looks right. This is probably our murder scene.”
I kept at the teaching line and focused on the body as just another set of remains. I’d seen hundreds, mostly in Vietnam, of course, and right now I would’ve even gone back there rather than think about who belonged to this wrecked corpse.
I showed Jake the poke test.
“If you poke the pale part of the skin and it flushes red, it’s been less than half a day.”
“So the blood settles within twelve hours.”
“Mm-hmm.” The skin under my gloved finger stayed white. There wasn’t any blood to show beneath it. So she’d been here since at least the early morning.
The barn floor croaked a warning and we both eased back.
“This place is going to fall in on our heads.”
“I doubt it. It’s been like this for the last ten years at least.”
I’d seen this barn almost every weekend during the summertime, from fishing opener to frost, leaning into the east bank of Lake Crosby like it was watching the sunnies dart under the surface. Seen was probably saying too much, though. Sure, I knew it was there, as good a landmark for fishing as the public beach on the exact opposite bank, but I’d never stopped to look at the old Erickson barn for who knew how long. That’s how it always was with things right next to you. Lars Erickson abandoned the building twenty years ago when he sold most of the lakeshore to the city and put up new barns next to his prefab house on the other side of the property, a good mile away. The only visitors this old girl had, besides the lake itself that lapped up during flood years, were teenage kids like the Sanders boy who wanted somewhere private to have sex and smoke joints.
Just about all the place boasted was privacy. It was one big room, a twenty- by thirty-footer, with empty rafters except for the remains of a hay loft on the end that dipped into the lake. The double-wide doors opened on the opposite side and there was a hole in the wall where a window used to be.