When Mitch first joined the FBI more than a decade ago, the Violent Crimes Squad had been one of the best-staffed and funded units in the Bureau. They’d have had a full squad of eight out here to recover the body and evidence. After 9/11, resources for their unit were minimal and staffing was barely twenty percent of what it had been. Priorities had shifted to counterterrorism and counterintelligence. Mitch had mixed feelings about the changes, but he’d adjusted accordingly. They all had.
Mitch finished putting on his diving gear. Even though he was about to enter murky river water and face a dead man, a rush overcame him.
He met up with Young and they checked and double-checked the equipment, then went out on the boat over the spot where the Explorer rested beneath the surface. Steve and a deputy manned the boat while Young and Mitch fell back into the cold water.
Maddox had been missing since the end of January. Chances were he’d been in the river the entire time. But proving it was homicide instead of an accident would be difficult at best, unless they were lucky enough to find a bullet entry wound or obvious stab marks. The fish and crustaceans would feed on any exposed areas first, which often made it more difficult to determine how a body had been assaulted. But a gaping wound no matter how gnawed by river life would point toward foul play.
The water was icy, having traveled from the Sierra Nevadas where the snow had been melting all spring, filling the creeks and tributaries, merging to make this river. The ninety-degree weather did little to warm the thirty-foot depths where the Explorer rested, its wheels buried deep in the sediment. The wet suit protected Mitch from the worst of the cold, and he took a moment to acclimate himself to the water pressure, diminished light, and temperature.
He approached cautiously, taking the time to inspect and photograph the front of the vehicle-there were no obvious collision marks. They’d need a more detailed inspection, but it appeared that nothing had hit this SUV, front or back. There was some minimal damage on the passenger side, but nothing to indicate a collision so violent it could push a car into the river. One problem with water was that it carried evidence away from the scene. If there had been branches or leaves embedded in the undercarriage of the car, suggesting perhaps where the vic went in, the evidence could easily have been washed away under the constant pressure of the flowing river.
The Explorer was fully submerged and held fast, the front end sinking deeper into the muck because of the weight of the engine. The water wasn’t too murky at first, the sun above cutting through, though as they walked along the bottom of the river and disturbed the sludge, their field of vision deteriorated. The underwater lights he and Young used cast an odd illumination around them, making the shadows darker.
Only the windshield was intact, which suggested the driver hadn’t hit the water with any great speed. Mitch ran his finger along the window edge, felt the top of the retracted driver’s-side window. The smooth edge told him that it had been down when the vehicle went in. Mitch inspected the other windows. They’d all been down on impact; none had broken under the pressure. Who drove with all their windows down in the frigid cold of a Sacramento January? He indicated the evidence to Young, who did his own inspection and nodded.
The victim was strapped into the driver’s seat. Most victims would unbuckle themselves and attempt to escape, unless the accident rendered them unconscious.
It was virtually impossible to tell anything about the victim, though with the constant movement of the fresh, cold mountain water through the car, decomposition wasn’t as advanced as Mitch would have guessed. A recent body would have been dark green, but this body was extremely pale, almost translucent, as the gases in the body had leached out over time. The body was intact for the most part, though Mitch knew if they tried to move it, skin, hair, and potential evidence would be lost. The vic’s eyes were gone, as well as his ears, nose, lips, and a good chunk of his face. The vic’s fingers were also missing. The body could have fed the fish for some time. Clothing offered some protection because it could take years to disintegrate.
The vic wore jeans, sneakers, and a lined jacket. Under the jacket appeared to be a turtleneck. No one in the Valley had been wearing turtlenecks since early March.
The vic was the same general size and build as Oliver Maddox. Mitch’s preliminary conversations with the Davis Police Department shortly after the earthquake had given him little-the detective assigned to the missing person case said there had been no physical evidence of foul play. Mitch would have followed up with friends, teachers, neighbors-except that he’d been pulled from the case.
Oliver Maddox had gone missing in late January-about the same time that Tom O’Brien had been moved from a safe area of San Quentin into the general prison population.
Mitch didn’t buy into the coincidence. Maddox had probably been working on something related to O’Brien’s conviction, but the only person who knew what was the fugitive himself. Still, how both events connected eluded him.
When Mitch looked inside the car, he was certain he had a homicide on his hands. The car was in neutral.
He photographed the interior, the control panel, and the buckled seat belt. He mentally walked through different scenarios, including suicide, but kept coming back to murder.
Mitch decided to leave the body in the vehicle, suspecting that the corpse would fall apart if they tried to extract it. They had special waterproof body bags for the floaters that could be sealed to prevent evidence loss. He pulled plastic evidence bags from his equipment belt and strapped them to what remained of the vic’s hands and head to prevent not only trace evidence but body parts from washing away when the vehicle was raised.
Mitch and Young bagged as much loose evidence in the Explorer as they could for fear it would disappear or disintegrate. Then Mitch caught Young’s eye and pointed upstream to indicate where he was heading to search for potential evidence. He used his underwater light to illuminate the depths.
The bridge pillars were only forty or so feet from where the vehicle had come to rest. Mitch pictured the damage on the passenger side and inspected the left side of the pillars extensively. There was no evidence that the vehicle had collided with the pillars either above or below the surface, but with the rise and fall of the water level, paint chips would have been rubbed away. Still Mitch took a lot of pictures-perhaps a collision expert could match up the unique marks on the door with these pillars.
Cars submerged quickly in water, but not instantaneously. Inside air needed to be displaced, and the current of the river would move the vehicle as it filled with water. Maybe a minute or two. Still, forty feet from the bridge, windows down, Mitch figured the car had gone in relatively close to the bridge. Most likely not more than a hundred feet upstream, probably less. If they could pinpoint the entry point, they could use the known water currents from January to estimate what day the vehicle had gone in.
He surfaced and floated. Though there would be seasonal variations, and in a storm the current would be completely different, today was clear, windless, and gave him a good sense of the natural flow of the river.
It was a hunch, but Mitch suspected that the Explorer had gone in approximately eighty feet from the resting spot. He swam upstream, draining his energy. Agent Duncan saw him, but didn’t approach. Mitch wasn’t surprised.
He hadn’t made a lot of friends in the two years he’d been with the Sacramento regional FBI office. Everyone knew that he and Supervisory Special Agent Megan Elliott used to be married. It wasn’t like he had announced it, but Meg insisted that everything be on the up-and-up when Mitch came on board.