This time Creed met Maggie’s eyes. He wanted to ask what the hell was going on, but instead he focused his attention on Grace. She was in a hurry. She rushed from side to side, her nose held high, as if the scent she was trying to harvest floated up above.
She already sniffed deeply, quick breaths that in the humidity made Creed nervous. He kept track of the time, not allowing her to go over the twenty-minute work intervals. He made her stop for water, and she patiently obeyed but as soon as he gave the okay, she raced off.
She leaped over fallen branches and started bounding from tree to tree. Once in a while she hesitated at the base of a trunk and stared at the protruding roots. At one tree she pawed the ground, then stood on her hind legs and scratched at the bark. She inhaled and snorted.
Nothing there. And she took off again.
He wondered if finding the T-shirt had thrown her off. Was she expecting to find the new scent — the one she was obviously working — was she expecting it to be buried in the same way?
Creed tried not to react. She could be feeling his anxiety, his anticipation. He checked his tracking monitor. They had gone almost a mile from the house. It was going on two hours since they began. Grace was not the least bit exhausted. If anything, she was overly excited, not even concerned about her reward. She was definitely in a scent zone. They’d have to wait to find out whether it was part of the one they had just found.
He dreaded that it might be the child this time. As awful as it had been discovering those kids on that fishing boat, at least they were alive. It was nothing like finding the dead body of a child.
Oftentimes he’d lose track of the number of bodies — or parts of bodies — he and his dogs had helped find over the course of seven years, but he knew exactly how many of them were children: sixteen. He hoped today he wouldn’t be adding number seventeen.
In the next clearing between trees Creed noticed that the grass looked trampled. Small shrubs were broken, their leaves already turning brown. He stopped at the edge and put up a hand to warn Maggie and Jason to stop, as well. Almost immediately he could smell it — something rancid, as if someone had dumped out a garbage can.
“Something definitely happened here,” Maggie said before he had a chance to point out the disruption in the landscape.
Off to the right, branches had been tossed onto a pile along with other debris. Without getting closer, he could decipher pieces of two-by-fours and a roll of wire mesh. It looked as if someone had been constructing something and left the scraps behind. Then he saw the shovel, its blade half-buried in the ground, the wooden handle teetering sideways. He felt his stomach clench. So here was the torture chamber they were looking for. Or perhaps a grave.
But none of this interested Grace.
Creed turned around to find her pawing at another tree. This time she stood on her hind legs, her front legs pedaling the air and her head thrown back, as if she were trying to see up into the branches. He’d never seen her work a scent like this. It looked like she was trying to capture it floating above her.
And then it occurred to him just as she finally sat back on her haunches and turned toward him, finding his eyes and giving her alert.
Maggie and Jason only now noticed as Creed walked the short distance to the trunk of the tree. He didn’t see it until he was standing directly underneath. The woman’s eyes stared down at him, her long black hair tangled in the branches. Her body was snagged in the upper V, hidden from view by the leaves and the mass of kudzu that engulfed the tree.
He felt Maggie and Jason come up beside him. There were no gasps from either of them. Only a “son of a bitch” from Jason and a resigned sigh from Maggie. The sigh almost sounded like regret, as though she was too late.
And then in a calm, casual voice, she said, “I think we just found Mrs. Bagley.”
38
O’Dell handed her cell phone to Creed. She had called Sheriff Holt and explained to him what they had found. After a long silence Holt had asked her to “please repeat that.” He sounded out of breath.
The forensic team had arrived and had only just begun collecting evidence at the first site. There wouldn’t be enough ribbons in her daypack to leave a trail this far, so she handed the phone to Creed. He could give the coordinates according to his GPS tracker and hopefully lead the forensic team here.
On Creed’s instruction, Jason had taken Grace away from the area to enjoy her reward. Other than his first curses, the young man didn’t look fazed by their discovery, but then O’Dell didn’t expect him to be. A couple of things he had said earlier confirmed that he had not lost his arm below the elbow in some freakish industrial accident, but rather in combat, probably in Afghanistan. The vacant, brooding look on his face told her the loss was most likely recent — months, not years. So death was no stranger to him. Watching him with Grace, she caught him smiling at the dog’s crazy antics. To Grace, it had been a good day — two major finds.
But neither was what O’Dell was looking for. Not even close. She was, however, convinced more than ever that Trevor Bagley had also died out here on his own property.
She glanced at Creed. He had wandered away, trying to get a better signal on her cell phone. Now she saw him explaining to Sheriff Holt as he held his tracking monitor up. The overcast sky had begun darkening. Somewhere in the distance she thought she heard the faint rumble of thunder. They had maybe another hour if they were lucky.
The pile of leftover construction rubble had to hold some answers to this puzzle. O’Dell walked toward it, her eyes picking out pieces she could identify. Some of the wooden planks looked rotted. Certainly not from a new or recent project. The grass and underbrush had grown up around it. Even to get there she’d have to wade through an area of knee-high scrub.
The roll of wire mesh intrigued her. It reminded her of something you’d use for a window screen. She had seen gardeners put this fine of a mesh over plants to keep out pests. Or maybe, in this case, it was to keep insects in? Could it trap fire ants and keep them in one confined area?
She was almost close enough to touch it when the ground fell out from under her. She plunged down into the earth. The surprise sucked the air from her lungs. Her hip slammed against something hard before she landed on her knees. Moist burlap had broken her fall, as well as the wire mesh and branches that had been concealing the hole.
The sudden darkness made it impossible to see. She tried to catch her breath. Needed to wait for her eyes to adjust. Stanch her immediate panic before the claustrophobia grabbed hold.
She tested her feet underneath her. Clawed her way to a standing position. Her right knee hurt like hell but it didn’t collapse. With tentative fingers, she broke through the darkness. The dirt walls were wet and slick. About a foot on each side of her.
She looked up and her knees wobbled. The pit appeared to be twice as deep as she was tall. The overcast sky allowed very little light to filter down. She couldn’t hear Creed or Grace’s squeaky toy. Only muffled sounds, as if she had dropped out of existence.
“Creed. Jason,” she yelled. “Grace.”
She remembered her flashlight — not a flashlight, a black light — but even the UV purple-blue light would break the darkness. She shoved her hand into her daypack and fumbled around inside until her fingers found the long cylinder.
“Grace!” she tried again. Surely the dog would hear her and come looking.
She flipped the black light on and was disappointed to see how little it helped. Still, she swung the stream of light around her. Burlap hung from the walls in strips. Some of the rotted planks were thrown into the corner. That must have been what she had slammed her hip into.