Open Grave Page 5

  If there even was a crime, TK reminded herself. Her first case as lead investigator could be over before it began, depending on what they found inside the car.

  Chapter Six

  Lucy Guardino steered her Subaru onto the exit ramp leading to Altoona. The city sat on a shallow plain in the heart of the Alleghenies, surrounded by mountains and newly completed highways. A city constrained by geography even as its citizens built new ways to escape it.

  Or maybe that was her gray mood talking. She’d love to escape this particular task. Despite the bright sunshine and brilliant blue sky—or maybe because of it—she felt nothing but sorrow.

  “Thanks for coming with me,” she told her boss, Valencia Frazier, owner of the Beacon Group. “We’re never really trained for this kind of thing at the FBI. Local law enforcement or medical examiner offices usually handle next of kin notification.”

  She wished she’d gone to Greer with TK—a cold case from sixty-odd years ago was eminently more appealing than what she faced now. But this was important, and she needed to get the job done right.

  Valencia’s smile was comforting despite its lack of mirth. “You never really get used to it, I’m afraid. But at least when we arrive, families know it’s with answers instead of more uncertainty. Even if those answers are years or decades in the making.”

  Fourteen years since eleven-year-old Benji Randall stepped off his school bus but never made it home. Fourteen years Lucy had been working his case. First, using it for her thesis on interagency cooperation in law enforcement. Revisiting it when she was working on the FBI’s geographic profiling system, as well as using it as a teaching case when she was stationed at Quantico as an instructor. Then, assigning it during slow times to her team after she was promoted to Supervisory Special Agent in Pittsburgh. And finally, now, bringing it to completion.

  Ironically, it had taken Valencia and her coalition of civilian resources, including NamUs and the Doe Network, to help her discover Benji’s fate. And his body.

  Fourteen years the Randall family had waited, never leaving their home on the outskirts of Altoona. As the mother had once told Lucy, how could they? They had no choice but to stay, just in case Benji found his way home.

  “What do I say to them?” Lucy asked, surprised by how nervous she felt. It was a breathtaking responsibility, handling a moment that would forever change a family.

  Valencia was silent for a long moment. Lucy edged a glance in her direction. When Nick had first met Valencia, he’d described her as all the best of Michelle Obama and Audrey Hepburn combined. She boasted impeccable taste, had an aura of refined elegance and intellect, but most of all, she genuinely cared about the people who came into her life, especially the families of the victims she’d created the Beacon Group to serve.

  “You’ve never met them before?” she asked Lucy.

  “No. Early on, the case was an exercise, a research project. I was mainly drawn to it because it happened so close to where I grew up. Thinking back to when I was a kid, both parents working and then after my dad died, I pretty much ran wild. There was never anyone at home, we didn’t have cell phones, we’d ride our bikes over the mountain to the dam, go swimming even though there was no lifeguard, stay out all hours when school was out over the summer.

  “At least that’s how it started. I wasn’t even focused on the victim, more the patchwork system of coroners, small town police departments, larger regional coalitions, the lack of uniformity in county sheriff agencies that actually do more than serve papers and perform actual investigations. I couldn’t believe how haphazard it all was. There are literally areas of the state where you can get away with murder, falling between boundaries of law enforcement agencies so that if the State Police aren’t called in, no investigation would occur. County coroners elected with no medical backgrounds and what little forensic backup they might have—usually hiring an outside private pathologist—limited by their budget. Anyway, that’s how I first started, using Benji’s case as an example of the limitations and need for better interdepartmental cooperation along with some state-wide authority providing oversight.” She paused. “But while I was working on my thesis, I got pregnant with Megan.”

  “And after that, Benji was no longer an anonymous case or file.”

  “Exactly. Still wasn’t my case or my place to interfere with Smitty—Matt Smith, the detective who caught the case, worked it until he retired, even after, basically until he died. That was two years ago now. Once he was gone, I did speak with the mother a few times, just to let her know that even without Smitty around, someone still remembered Benji, was still working it. Wanted to give her someone she could call, just in case.”

  “Do they know why we’re coming?”

  “No. They’ve had their hopes raised and dashed so many times, I couldn’t bear it. And it didn’t seem right, not over the phone. But…”

  “How to tell them their son is dead? They know. But you still need to say it. And even when you do, they won’t believe you.”

  “Surely after fourteen years—” Lucy stopped herself. “I’d never give up, not if it was Megan. Of course they still have hope. It’s going to break their hearts.”

  “And it’s your job to make sure they understand the truth. You won’t be doing them any kindness by lying or hedging, not even if you think it will ease their pain. You can’t leave any room for doubt, nothing that will gnaw at them from the inside out. This is their chance to finally get the answers they’ve been waiting for, even if it’s not the answer they were praying for.”

  “What if they ask if he suffered?” It was the question she’d been dreading.

  The corpse buried beneath the tool shed had been reduced to a skeleton—but the pathologist had found multiple broken bones in varying stages of healing, along with evidence of severe malnutrition and prolonged confinement. Benji hadn’t died quickly, had probably been alive for months before the skull fracture that killed him. He most definitely had suffered.

  “They deserve the truth,” Valencia said. “Don’t interpret the facts, just deliver them in plain language. Answer everything the best you can. It’s the only way.”

  The nav system signaled the final turn. They arrived at their destination, a modest two-story colonial nestled into the forest above the reservoir.

  The driveway was filled with vehicles so Lucy pulled up to the curb. “Maybe I should check in with TK first.”

  “She would have called if she needed anything.” Valencia knew Lucy was stalling, of course.

  Lucy appreciated the older woman’s patience. She got out and joined Valencia at the far end of the walk. They stood together in silence.

  Lucy twisted her wedding ring. In her old life as a FBI agent, it was always her touchstone before she began any dangerous operation. Nick often accused her of magical thinking with her need to always try to fix everything, save every victim, solve every case. As if by restoring balance to the world at large, she could somehow protect her world: Nick and Megan.

  “There are some things in this world that you can never make right,” Valencia said in a low tone, startling Lucy because it was exactly what Nick would have told her if he’d been here. No big surprise. Nick and Valencia were two of the smartest and wisest people she’d ever met.

  Despite everything she’d seen and done, Lucy stubbornly refused to give up on the idea that anything was possible if she just threw enough of herself at the problem. It was as if some part of her psyche was stuck in mid-adolescence and she would never fully mature into a pragmatic adult like the rest of the world. Times like this, she wished she could allow herself to accept that evil sometimes won—oftentimes won—and that there was nothing she could do about it.

  They walked up to the front door together. Valencia stepped aside to let Lucy ring the bell. The door opened.

  “Mrs. Randall? I’m Lucy Guardino. We spoke on the phone.” Lucy’s mouth suddenly went dry. “It’s about your son. Benjamin.”

  Chapter Seven
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  TK and Karlan walked down the incline behind the tow truck to where the water lapped the edge of the stone. The bottom dropped off precipitously, making her wonder if there had once been a collapse, cutting off access to the lower levels of the quarry.

  A woman wearing polarized sunglasses and holding a pair of binoculars stood observing the boat on the far side of the quarry. Karlan tapped her elbow. “Dr. Marcia Madsen, this is TK O’Connor, the investigator from Beacon Falls. Here to help us figure out who’s in that car and how they got here.”

  Like Karlan, Marcia Madsen was older than TK, in her mid-fifties, with close-cropped gray hair and the athletic build of someone more accustomed to fieldwork than life behind a classroom podium. She took TK’s hand with a firm grip. “Nice to have you on board.”

  “Ever do anything like this before?” Last night, after Lucy had told her about the case, TK had read Madsen’s online bio and knew she was an accredited forensic anthropologist who’d worked in war zones including Bosnia and Argentina as well as mass casualty events like the Indian Ocean tsunami and 9/11.

  “Body recovery from submerged vehicles, yes. Part of being a coroner in a county with so many rivers and lakes. But they were all fairly fresh. Never had the good fortune to work one submerged at such a depth in a relatively anaerobic environment like this one and definitely never one this old.”

  Clearly the professor had a warped idea of “good fortune.” They peered out at the boat in the distance. It and the divers had arrived last night, on loan from the Pittsburgh River Rescue team.

  “What’s the plan?” TK shielded her eyes and focused on the boat bobbing in the gentle swell created by the wind circling the quarry walls.

  Madsen’s team would be doing all the heavy lifting as far as retrieval—then it was TK’s job to cobble together tidbits from the examination of the body and other evidence so that Wash, their technical analyst back at Beacon Falls, could use it to scour his databases and hopefully track down an identity. Once they knew who they were dealing with, TK would be the boots on the ground trying to re-create his or her final journey while Wash searched for any living relatives.

  “The dive team is filming everything—both for educational and evidentiary purposes. Once they’ve documented as much as they can without disturbing the car, they’ll set float bags beneath it and fill them with air.”

  “That’s it? It just floats up?” Seemed a bit anticlimactic.

  “That’s it. Then the boat will pull it to the ramp where we’ll attach a winch and tow it onto dry ground.”

  A diver popped up to the surface, water glistening as it rolled off his wetsuit, and shouted something to his comrades in the boat. The diver swam away from the boat and the expanse of water between them became agitated. TK couldn’t help but think of a horror movie where a monster slowly emerged from the deep, ready to devour the unwary and unsuspecting.

  The water churned for a moment, air bubbles rupturing against the surface, and suddenly a light blue car popped up as if by magic. Around them the grad students clapped and cheered.

  Madsen nodded, and her students turned and got to work unrolling a large tarp between the tow truck and the water’s edge. “Once the car’s on land, we’ll collect anything that drains free as the water runs out, then move the car onto the flatbed and under the canopy for further examination.”

  “Why not just haul it back to the police’s evidence garage?”

  “I’m worried about losing potential evidence. As soon as the car hits the air, everything associated with it will begin to suffer oxidative damage. We’ll document as much as we can in situ here, collect the remains, transport them to my lab, while the police will remove the vehicle for more complete analysis.”

  Out on the water, the divers finished their task of attaching the tow lines to the boat, and the boat began to slowly return to shore, the car floating alongside it.

  “What are you expecting to find?” TK asked. “After so long underwater?”

  Madsen smiled as if she’d been waiting all morning for that question. “Anyone?” she addressed her students. “Sixty plus years submerged, what do we expect to find?”

  Her tone turned professorial. TK felt herself blushing for having asked the question, hoping it didn’t make her sound like an amateur. But Madsen herself had said that she’d never worked a case like this, so there couldn’t be much precedent—certainly none that TK and Wash had found when they got the call last night and had done a quick search for similar cases.

  “Temperatures would have held steady, just above freezing at that depth,” one of the students—in TK’s mind she thought of him as a kid, although he might have actually been older than her own twenty-six years. But his face was uncreased, his eyes clear; obviously he wasn’t older as far as experience, even if he had more formal knowledge than she had.

  “Near anaerobic conditions and the contained environment would have prevented much predation,” another student, this time a girl, chimed in.

  “Not all of it,” someone else corrected. “Small fish would have gotten in. Plus, we don’t know the pH of the water at that depth. Excessive acidity or an alkaline environment could lead to enhanced degradation of any organic material.”

  TK glanced at the assortment of future forensic scientists, all eager to prove themselves to their professor. To spend your life listening and learning, soaking up knowledge—it seemed like paradise to someone like her who’d joined the Marines straight out of high school. She’d thought about trying to go to college—Valencia and Lucy said she could take the time off, and the Beacon Group would help pay the costs—but whenever she saw students like this, she realized she would never fit in. They may be studying crime, but they had no real knowledge of it.

  “The body will be mostly skeletonized with some adipocere clinging to the bones,” another student voiced his opinion, beaming when Madsen nodded her agreement.

  “The clothing will probably be dissolved, unless the car went in during the winter and the occupant wore several layers.” This from the first student, the man with a wispy beard that TK wasn’t sure was even actually meant to be a beard or more of a statement that he was too preoccupied with more important things than personal grooming. He frowned. “Not sure what kind of synthetics they wore back then. And leather…that might be preserved.”

  They continued their debate as the boat reached the landing and the divers, Karlan, and the tow truck driver worked to attach the truck’s winch to the car.

  TK marveled at the discussion. No, she’d never fit into the academic world. None of these kids had ever witnessed bloodshed, she was certain. None of them had ever looked into the face of a man they would kill or feared for their own life.

  Just like she’d never fit into normal civilian life. Only people she’d ever fit in with were others who were just as broken and battered—like her former squad or her new team at Beacon Falls.

  “Any evidence may be hopelessly degraded,” again from Mr. Wispy Beard, this time with a tone of authority that rankled with TK.

  “You keep saying evidence—we don’t know that a crime has occurred.” TK’s attention was on the car now being winched free from the water, carefully positioned over the tarp. She had to admit, the old car was a beauty—a shade of robin’s egg blue you’d never see nowadays and a sturdy yet elegant design.

  Madsen answered. “We don’t know that any hasn’t. Best to take the time to preserve things now instead of regretting it later.”

  She and TK moved to join Karlan on the far side of the tarp as the students positioned themselves around it. Madsen signaled the tow truck driver and the winch began to slowly turn, raising the car. “Besides, I want my students to see things done correctly, learn how to take their time despite any pressures placed on them.”

  “Pressures?” From the laughter coming from her students as water sluiced from the car, splashing them, they didn’t seem to be under any undue pressure.

  She shrugged. “Law enforcement wa
nting answers, politicians wanting everything to go away, reporters looking for a story, your grant running out, forcing the dig to shut down, security telling you rebel forces aren’t happy with you unearthing their war crimes. You know, the usual.”

  “Right. The usual.” TK smiled. She was starting to like the professor’s pragmatic view of the world at large.

  Karlan stood between the tow truck’s cab and the lift mechanism, giving the driver directions. He had the operator stop when the car’s rear end was raised to about twenty degrees, water and debris draining into the waiting tarp. The students surged forward to examine their treasure trove.

  “Want him to keep going, doc?” he called.

  Madsen waved her hand. “Yes, please.” The car raised a few more degrees, releasing another wave of water that quickly subsided. “Okay, that’s good, you can position it on the flatbed and move it beneath the canopy.”

  TK joined the students, being careful to stay out of their way. The tarp had been staked so that nothing could slide back into the quarry. The students were happily straining the water, collecting their finds in plastic buckets. So far it didn’t look like much except normal debris: clumps of algae, a few rocks, bits of unidentifiable metal.

  When the water had finished draining, she, Karlan, and Madsen paced the truck as it slowly hauled its cargo beneath the canopy on the other side of the landing where the pavement was flat.

  “No one in here without protective gear,” Madsen told them, pointing to the cardboard boxes at the entrance to the canopy. They all pulled on Tyvek suits and booties designed to avoid contaminating any evidence. It was like zipping her body into a portable sauna, TK thought as she tightened the hood around her hair.

  Beneath the canopy, several students were already at work. One filming with a video camera, the other snapping still photos, as a third laid out measuring tapes around the car. There wasn’t room on the truck’s flatbed for more than one person at a time to walk around the car, so they took turns, careful not to actually touch the Dodge.