The Virgin of Small Plains (19 page)

There’d been a place inside him where he had still held out hope.

Suddenly Mitch felt the rise of the old anger again, a red, vicious, pulsating fury, accompanied by the cry that had echoed in his skull for seventeen years:
I didn’t do anything wrong. I don’t deserve this. This was my town, too.

Something in his peripheral vision caught his attention.

He looked up the hill. The young woman was waving at him, a limp, slight wave, but it got her message across.

Fueled by the energy of his anger, Mitch walked quickly up the hillside to her.

“Ready to go?”

She nodded and even held up her arms to him, like a child, to be picked up. This time when he did it, she smelled of grass.

As he did it, he asked, “Who’s buried here?”

“The Virgin,” she said.

“Excuse me? Who?”

“The Virgin.” When she didn’t see comprehension in his face, she said, “Don’t you know who the Virgin is?”

“Never heard of her.” He thought she felt even lighter in his arms, if that was possible.

“She’s a girl who was murdered a long time ago. A horrible murder, and nobody knew who she was. She had been beaten so badly that they couldn’t even identify her. Her face was all beaten in.”

Mitch stumbled on a clod of dirt, causing her to shift in his arms.

“I’m sorry,” he said, barely able to get the words out.

He thought he was going to be sick.

“That’s okay,” she said, though she had gone even paler and there was sweat beading her upper lip now. Still, she kept on telling him the story. “So, what happened was, the people of this town gave her a funeral and they buried her in that grave. And they say that out of gratitude she heals people and helps them.”

He suddenly felt so ill that he thought he was going to have to put her down and turn away and actually throw up in the bushes.

“Are you all right?” she asked him.

He swallowed. “I’m okay. Do you live around here?”

“Me? Oh, no, I’m from Wichita.”

“Then how did you ever hear about…the Virgin?”

“She’s kind of famous, like that place in France…”

“Lourdes?”

“Yeah, that’s the one, where they say the water cures you.”

He felt bile rising in his chest again, and fought it back.

“I asked her to help me,” the girl told him in a reverent whisper.

“Did you?” They had returned to her van. “Here we are again.”

Mitch gently set her on her feet long enough to allow him to open her van door for her, and then he helped her back into it.

“Is it cancer?” he asked bluntly, looking into her wide eyes in her thin face.

She nodded, and then stuck out one thin hand. “I’m Catie.”

“Mitch,” he said, and took the hand. “How far do you have to go? Are you sure you can drive?”

“Not far. I’m staying in town. And really, I’m okay when I’m driving.”

Mitch stood by the side of the road and watched her leave the cemetery. There had been a kind of happy glow to her face as she gave one last look out her side window at him. If nothing else, the visit to the grave seemed to have made her happier for a little while.

When she was gone, he walked slowly back to the grave of the girl that Catie had called the Virgin. Mitch stood staring down at it for a long time, until enough other people began to enter the cemetery with their memorial flowers that he began to worry about getting spotted by somebody he knew.

One last time, he looked at the gravestone.

“So they couldn’t identify you,” he said with a cynical, bitter twist to his tone. “But there’s one person who still knows who you are, isn’t there…Sarah?”

On his way out of the cemetery in his own car, he looked to the side, right into the face of a woman who looked vaguely familiar to him, as if she might have been someone with whom he had gone to school. Mitch didn’t allow any expression to enter his eyes, but he thought he saw a startled spark of recognition in hers.

“Screw it,” he thought angrily, as he found himself turning left toward town instead of right toward the interstate up north. “If I didn’t have a good reason to stay longer before, I do now.”

His heart was pounding hard as he crossed the town limits.

As he slowly drove around the once-familiar streets of Small Plains he put on his sunglasses again, and his Royals baseball cap, and he propped his left arm on the doorsill to hide the side of his face. He took in the surprising fact that downtown looked better than he remembered it, but he also noticed a number of
FOR SALE
signs placed in storefront windows.

His father, Abby’s father, and Rex’s father had considered Small Plains to be their territory, their fiefdom, theirs by right of inheritance by their own fathers and grandfathers before that. As Mitch drove around, an idea began to grow in him of how he might get a measure of revenge, and possibly even justice.

He recalled his own vow to himself:
I’ll never forget. I’ll never forgive.

He thought of a beautiful girl with her face beaten, her identity erased as if she had never existed, and he thought of how too many years had gone by without him doing anything about it.

Feeling a turbulent mix of fear, anger, and resolve, Mitch turned his car toward a bit of acreage and a small ranch house that his family had owned. He was betting it was still there and that his father still owned it. If the ranch house was still there, if they hadn’t sold it or rented it to somebody else, if the keys were still hidden where they had been for all the early years of his life, if it was still habitable, then that’s where he would spend the night.

Chapter Sixteen

“Because I say so.”

At 11:30 that morning in his office in the sheriff’s department in downtown Small Plains, Rex gave two of his deputies an exasperated look that did not even begin to hint at the indigestion they were giving him. Unfortunately, when they heard him say that, instead of taking him seriously, they both laughed at him.

So did his other visitor, the fourth person in the room.

“Yeah, right, Dad,” the male half of the deputies scoffed.

“And go to our rooms?” chimed in his female counterpart, with a grin.

“You tell him,” Abby said, egging them on.

That earned her a darkly repressive glance from her old friend and their boss.
This is all your fault,
his expression said. And, of course, it was. She had driven here straight from her father’s house and solely to encourage Rex to reopen the Virgin’s homicide case, having decided to keep moving while the impulse was still strong in her, and while the holiday gave her time on a Monday that she didn’t usually have.

By happy chance, she had run into a couple of eager deputies in the hallway outside his office and promptly enlisted them in the cause.

Abby knew them both, having gone to high school with one of them and having sold a lot of garden supplies to the other. The female deputy and gardener was Edyth Flournoy, thirty years old, only the fourth woman ever to serve in the sheriff’s department of Muncie County. The male deputy was John Marvel, a ten-year-veteran whose last name provoked eternal ribbing from the good guys and the bad guys alike. Now he leaned forward, looking as eager and excited as a rookie cop, instead of the jaded thirty-three-year-old he really was. “Listen, boss, when’s the last time we even had a homicide to investigate? Seventeen years ago, when she was killed, that’s when! And there wasn’t another murder for five years before that, and it got solved. We can’t leave this one homicide hanging over our department!”

“Hell, no,” Flournoy weighed in. “It makes us look bad.”

“How come it didn’t make us look bad until now?” their sheriff asked.

But they all knew that that was merely a rhetorical question.

“Think of how many new technologies have been invented since the Virgin was killed,” Flournoy said.

“Dozens, probably,” Abby chimed in, helpfully.

“Don’t call her the Virgin,” Rex griped.

“Why not?” Deputy Flournoy shot back at him. “Everybody else does. If we call her Jane Doe, nobody will know who we’re talking about.”

“They’ll know.”

“But listen,” Flournoy persisted. “There’s so much we could do now that your dad couldn’t do back then. We could use CODIS, we could try AFIS…”

“What’s Codis?” Abby asked her.

“Combined DNA Indexing System,” Deputy Flournoy said, rather proudly. “And AFIS stands for Automated Fingerprint Identification System.”

“Uh huh,” Rex interrupted, “and do any of you happen to have the two thousand bucks we’ll need for a DNA comparison with the DNA of missing people?”

“I might,” Abby offered.

“Oh, shut up,” he snapped at her, and then turned back to his deputies. “And where do you think you’re going to find fingerprints when there wasn’t any weapon and she wasn’t wearing any clothes—”

“There was a blizzard, right?” Flournoy asked him. “Was your dad able to collect any evidence at the scene?”

“No, not until the snow melted, which took a few weeks.”

“And?”

He shrugged. “Nothing.”

“Why didn’t he go out with a generator and heating fans and melt the damned stuff?” Marvel said.

“I don’t know. I could be wrong about some of this. Maybe he did.”

“We could go back out and search all over again,” Flournoy offered.

Rex gave her a deeply skeptical look. “In a pasture? Seventeen years later?”

“Hey, boss, what do you think archeologists do?” she retorted. “What difference does it make how many years have gone by? Something could have gotten buried, or even just overlooked—”

“Definitely,” Abby agreed, with a vigorous nod of her head.

“Or eaten by coyotes, or trampled by cows, or picked up by a tornado,” Rex shot back. He sat forward to try to impress them all with his earnestness. “Listen, I know you’re eager to delve back into this. I understand that. Or, at least I understand why the two of you are. You’re being good cops. And it’s quite the thing these days to solve old crimes. You—” He glared at his dear friend. “You, I don’t know what you’re up to. You, I suspect of just being a pain in the ass. But hey.” He forced a smile at his deputies. “I watch
Cold Case,
too.”

His deputies grinned back at him, both of them looking a little shamefaced to be caught getting their inspiration from a TV show about investigating unsolved crimes.

“And I am happy you want to get into this, truly, I am,” Rex continued. “But here’s the thing. You’ve got to face some facts that aren’t cold. One of them is that we have the same limited resources we’ve always had. No county crime lab. Not enough money. Not enough people like you.”

Rex inclined his head, his way of pointing out the window of his office.

“We may not have much crime in this county, but hell, we don’t even have the budget or personnel to handle what little we do have, much less remove any of you from those duties in order to investigate a seventeen-year-old crime.”

He held up a hand when all three started to speak at once.

“Do you know how much work is involved in cold cases?”

Flournoy’s face brightened again. “There’s a seminar down in Miami…”

“Yeah, right,” Rex said, and had to laugh. “That’s gonna happen. I’m going to send both of you to Miami about the same time I buy Hummers for everybody.” He got serious again. “It is incredibly tedious and time-consuming. The paperwork alone is enough to kill you. And I know how much you guys love paperwork.”

Their eager looks faltered a bit, as he had hoped they would.

“And speaking of paperwork that needs doing,” Rex said ominously.

His deputies took the hint. They picked up their coffee cups and departed the office together, leaving Abby alone to face the bad mood their boss was in this morning.

Rex swiveled his chair so he could stare at his old friend Abby.

“What’s up with this?” he asked her.

“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “Or maybe I am. It started when we found Nadine, Rex. I started to think more about that girl who was killed, and how maybe now we could find out who she was—with all the new technology, like Edyth said.”

“And find out who killed her?”