The door did not open. “Let me run around back, see if something’s open back there…”
A minute or two later, Brody opened the front door from the inside, holding a hand over his mouth.
“Do you have something to cover my shoes with? Paper boots, maybe?” she asked.
“Not with me. You sure you want to come in? This ain’t pretty,” he told Annie, and blocked her entry into the house.
“It never is.” She stepped inside, careful to watch where she walked lest she step on evidence.
“Well, I guess this won’t be the first time you’ve seen a body after the maggots have gotten to it.” Brody moved to the left to permit her to pass.
“Not by a long shot.”
“She’s in there, between the living room and the dining room.” He followed her, his hand still covering his nose and mouth. “At least, I’m assuming it’s a she, going by all that hair. It can be tough to tell sometimes. I’ve known men with long hair, but none who wore pretty little flower barrettes. You know whose place this is?”
“She was going by the name Mariana Gray.” Annie knelt a foot from the body and studied it carefully, looking past the writhing mass that was the second generation of maggots and focusing on searching for an obvious cause of death.
“Going by?”
“Her real name is Melissa Lowery. She’s a former FBI agent. At least, I’m assuming that’s who she is. You’re going to need to confirm that.” Annie looked up at him. “What do you think, two weeks, give or take?”
“Judging by the condition of the body, yeah, I’d say she’s been dead around two weeks.”
The body was dressed in jeans and a red sweatshirt worn over a white cotton turtleneck. A thin gold bracelet circled what was left of her right wrist, and about her neck hung a small bezel-set diamond on a gold chain. On the third finger of her left hand was a wide gold ring. As the sheriff had noted, her long brown hair was held up on one side in a barrette fashioned out of a yellow silk flower.
“Driver’s license says Mariana Gray.” Brody stood in the doorway holding a tan leather wallet.
“There’s no sign of blood,” Annie murmured to herself as much as to the sheriff. “No sign of trauma to the head that I can see, but with all the insect activity, it’s going to take an autopsy to determine cause of death.”
She looked up at Brody and asked, “How’s your M.E.?”
“He’s good. He’s real good.” He reached in his pocket for his phone. “And I guess now’s as good a time as any to bring him in. I’ll be right back, Dr. McCall. I’m going to have to step outside for some better reception. I need to call in the troops.”
Alone with what was left of the woman she assumed was Melissa Lowery, Annie tried to ignore what part her inquiries into the woman’s whereabouts might have played in her death.
We don’t know if she was murdered, Annie silently protested against the first twinges of guilt. She could have been ill, she could have had…
What? Annie asked herself. What could she have had that might have caused her to die at the same time as I was looking for her? How coincidental could it be?
Annie just hadn’t seen enough true coincidences in her life to start believing in them now.
She stood and began to take note of her surroundings. The house was small but neat and well kept, the walls freshly painted, the furniture relatively new. She walked from one room to the next and found the entire house had a just-decorated feel to it. However long Melissa had been in Montana, she’d only just recently started to feather her nest.
A few family photos stood in a line across the mantel over the living-room fireplace. The same young, dark-haired woman appeared in several of them, and Annie thought that might be Melissa. In one photo, she appeared with a younger woman and an older man, a large black dog on the ground in front of them. In another, there was just her and the dog. In a third, she sat on a large outcropping of rock, with two other young women, all of whom bore a strong resemblance. Sisters, maybe, Annie thought. The older man might be the dad.
Annie went into the living room and straight to the dark green leather bag that had spilled from a chair onto the floor. She looked over the contents-makeup case, cell phone, a small address book, several keys on a brass chain from which a large letter M dangled. Her fingers itched to pick up the address book and the phone, but she hesitated, not wanting to add her prints to the surface or to smudge those already there.
“You wouldn’t happen to have a pair of rubber gloves I could borrow, do you?” she asked Sheriff Brody when he came back into the house.
“I might have, in the trunk. I can check,” he said, but made no attempt to go back outside to his car.
“Was there something you wanted to ask me, Sheriff Brody?” Annie stood and folded her arms across her chest.
“I’m wondering what your interest is here. What brought you here. What business you had with Ms. Gray. She wasn’t a friend of yours, judging by your reaction.” His eyes narrowed. “You’ve had no visible emotional reaction to seeing her body, the way you would if you knew the deceased. So it’s got me wondering why you’re here.”
“Agent Lowery was involved in an operation that took place a few years back. Recently, some questions about the operation itself have come up, and in reviewing the file, it was discovered that the report she wrote is missing. I needed to ask her a few questions about what was in the report.”
He nodded slowly, as if mulling over the information.
“It just occurred to someone in the FBI that her report was missing? After a couple of years?”
“I don’t know when the report went missing.”
“And you came all the way out here to ask her about it?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you just call her?”
“I had a presentation to give in Seattle this week, so I thought I’d make a stopover and speak with her in person.”
He went silent again, thinking it through.
“Still seems like a long way to come, when a phone call would have gotten you the same information.”
He paused, as if waiting for her comment. When none was forthcoming, he said, “Unless for some reason you thought she wouldn’t speak to you.”
“There’s a good chance she may not have,” Annie told him.
“What are you basing that on?”
“She’s gone to great lengths to change her identity. You don’t go to all that trouble unless you don’t want to be found.”
“Maybe she was being stalked. Maybe she just needed some peace and quiet.” He leaned back against the doorjamb. “I grew up back east. Can’t say I’d blame anyone who felt like they needed to escape.”
He folded his arms across his chest and appeared to be waiting for her to say something more.
“Look, I don’t know why this woman came out here or why she changed her name. I don’t know for certain that she was hiding out here, but I feel very strongly she was trying to get as far from someone or something as she could. I’d be real interested in knowing who that person was.” Annie turned to look over her shoulder at the corpse that lay fifteen feet behind her. “It has to make you wonder, doesn’t it? What brought her here under a phony name? Why she’d leave a career with the FBI and just disappear?”