“No apology requested. It’s what I would have done.”
“Really? I’m amazed I did something a big-city detective would do. My day is made. Thanks and bye.”
I kept my seat. “Any ID come through on the body?”
“There’s a problem. The fingers were burned. The prints were damaged.”
I saw the case materials arrayed on her desk. Felt a rush of adrenalin. I said, “McCoy told me about the murder of the snack-truck guy. How about I take copies of the cases back to my cabin and check for anything you might have missed.”
“Excuse me, did you say ‘missed’?”
I nodded toward the remnant-store surroundings. “I’m just trying to be helpful, Detective. This is hardly the forefront of law enforcement.”
Donna Cherry brushed back a bright lock of hair from her forehead and leaned forward with her elbows on her desk. “It’s true that I work in a thirty-year-old trailer that smells like cigars. I got a busted answering machine and a vehicle with a hundred forty thousand miles on it. I spend half my time trying to cement jurisdictional alliances with politicians who can’t spell either word. But guess what, Mister Big-city Hotshot? This program is eight months old and serious crime in my territory is down seventeen per cent. How y’all doing in Mobile?”
She snatched up the pencil. Looked down at her work.
“Have a nice vacation, Detective, but please have it somewhere besides my office.”
I made it two steps from the trailer before turning back inside. Cherry didn’t look up. I stood in front of her desk and did my best contrite look, a good one, because it was real.
“Now what am I doing wrong?” she said, still writing.
“Absolutely nothing. You’re obviously a professional doing exceptional work with limited resources, Detective Cherry. Mobile’s not generally considered a major metropolitan area and usually I’m the one considered a hick and a yokel. I’ve never been on the other side and I guess I was seeing how it felt. It was stupid and small and I apologize for my general everything.”
She looked up and stared at me with the off-centric eyes. The left one still didn’t like me, but I think the right one was coming around. She started to speak, but was interrupted by the phone, grabbing it up.
“This is – Oh, hi, officer, what’s—”
Her face darkened. She asked several questions and hung up. “Come on,” she said, standing and pulling her weapon from inside the desk. “Maybe you can be useful somehow.”
“What is it?” I followed her to the door.
“Judd Caudill reports a new addition on the geocache website. He and Beale are heading there now. It’s in the national forest so they alerted McCoy. Number eight is back.”
I buckled my seat belt as Cherry swooshed away, the big engine sucking air and burning tires. Cherry drove like a female version of my partner, Harry Nautilus: with total confidence and less-than-total control. As with Harry, I pulled the belt tourniquet-tight, holding my breath and closing my eyes when the situation warranted.
After fifteen wild minutes, we rounded a bend with tires flinging gravel into the trees. I saw McCoy’s SUV parked beside a Toyota compact with a Transylvania University sticker on the bumper.
“Uh-oh,” Cherry said. “Civilians. Probably saw the coordinates online.”
She pulled a large shoulder bag from the trunk of the cruiser. I offered to carry it but she waved me off. We jogged down the sole path for several hundred feet to a shallow meadow at the base of a cliff. We found McCoy, talking to a young male and female in T-shirts and hiking shorts, she wearing a floppy Tilley hat, he a Cincinnati Reds ball cap. I saw a GPS unit clipped to his belt. The girl was the kind of distraught that shivers, stops, starts shivering again.
“We were looking for a new cache,” the girl said, holding her shoulders like she was hugging herself. “It was on the Gorge-area site. We were looking upstream where the coordinates directed us. But we didn’t see anything. Then we came down here and we-wuh-wuh-wuh … We saw … that thing in the water.”
Her words drowned in a spasm of shivers. McCoy tossed me his GPS. It was a good one, displaying the site in the manner shown on the net:
=(8)=
N XX.XXXXXo W XXX.XXXXXo
Eight again, not five. The local coordinates.
I handed the device back. McCoy flicked his eyes toward a line of oaks. Cherry and I headed that way, finding a meandering creek on the far side of the trees, pools separated by shallow, rocky runs, the water maybe a foot in depth. Floating face-down in a pool was a woman’s body. It was slender and well maintained. Strands of false blonde hair drifted in a Medusa circle around the head.
I stepped into the water for a closer look. The victim wore a black leather corset, black boots, a black collar. Hooked to the collar were several yards of blue climbing rope. I held the dripping rope up for display. Cherry grimaced.
We heard voices. Beale and Caudill had arrived. The two cops ran over and looked down.
“Shit,” Beale said, looking disgusted. “Let’s pull it out.”
“Let’s deal with the kids first,” Cherry said. “Get them gone.”
The girl was still speaking, wiping her eyes with a tissue. “No, we j-just saw the coordinates. We were at M-Miguel’s Pizza and Ken was on his laptop. W-we saw a new cache had been added, so we turned on the GPS and went l-looking.”
She dissolved into shivers and tears. I saw Cherry catch Beale’s eye, nod toward the couple. Beale looked back, confused.
“What you want?”
“Get their statements, Sheriff Beale. Did they see anyone else on the way here? Cars, hikers, that type of thing.”
He patted his pockets. “Got something I can write in?”
Caudill said, “There’s a pad in the car, Chief. I’ll go fetch it.”
“Bring me a goddamn pen, too.”
Cherry and I trudged back to the body. She opened the bag and pulled out evidence bags, latex gloves, scene tags, a camera and other necessaries, photographing the scene from every possible angle. We splashed into the creek and wrestled the woman from the water and laid her supine on the ledgerock.
She was a woman who had been attractive while alive. Even at her age – which I guessed as late forties – her body was well-sculpted, slender and heavy-breasted. Her black corset laced through the front, plump white breasts spilling from hard cups. The boots were knee-length, laced. A black leather collar circled her neck, and centering the collar was a stainless steel O-ring. The blue rope was attached to the ring with a carabiner.
“Captive somewhere?” Cherry suggested.
“Looks that way.”
“The boots are maybe three sizes too big,” she said, wiggling the boots as water dripped out. “Plus that corset get-up isn’t laced tight, and doesn’t look like it would. One item’s too small, the other’s too large.”
“You don’t think the boots and boogie gown are hers?”
“No,” Sheriff Beale interrupted from behind us. “Not a chance.”
Cherry and I turned. Beale had finished his note duties and dismissed the kids. “You know the victim, Sheriff?”