Web of Lies (11 page)
One by one the features took final shape. When the composite was finished, I handed the drawing to Chelsea once more. “Does everything look right now?”
With one glance Chelsea pulled her head back, as if shocked to see the face fully translated from memory to paper. “Yes, absolutely. That’s him.” She stared at the drawing, lips parted. “I don’t know how you do it. This is just . . . it’s
right
.”
Oh, Chelsea, I hope so.
She handed the drawing pad back and I laid it on the desk. Whatever my lingering doubts, I would not voice them. Together we had done the best we could.
Now what?
The composite beckoned me, humming for attention. I found myself looking through it until the features blurred. The projector in my head kicked on, throwing out imagined pictures of
Amy and this man, huddled in the middle of a concrete floor. He is talking to her, trying to keep her calm. Amy’s shoulders are drawn in, hands fisted at her waist. She whimpers, afraid to move, afraid to lift her head. A large black spider creeps toward her ankle. Tests her skin with one leg, then crawls upward. Amy screams, smacks it off . . .
I pressed my eyes shut.
“Annie?” Chelsea’s voice pulled me back. “You okay?”
I shook my head. “Yes. Sorry. I just . . . I’m thinking all kinds of things. If this
is
the man we believe is missing, and if he’s with Amy Flyte, this drawing could help save them. Amy’s picture is being distributed in the media, but if it produces no leads as to her whereabouts, maybe this one will.”
If it’s on target.
Chelsea nodded. “But we don’t know for sure. So what do we do?”
There was only one answer, but I didn’t want to admit it. Not at all. I thought of Tim Blanche, his attitude toward me.
Lord, I don’t want to do this.
Leaning my head back, I swiveled my chair a slow quarter turn to gaze out the window. Dave was outside, kneeling by his front sidewalk, pulling weeds. At the unexpected sight, my heart tumbled. Suddenly I longed to run across the street, feel his arms around me, beg him to tell me what to do.
“We should pray about it,” Chelsea said.
I turned back to her. “Yes, but we can’t sit around waiting for a definitive answer, because we both know God doesn’t always give them. In the meantime, if this — ” I gestured at the composite — “is who I think he is, the scene in your vision has already happened. And we’ve got two people who need to be found
now
.”
Chelsea inhaled slowly. “You think we should go see the detective working the case, don’t you.” It wasn’t a question.
Mentally I thrashed about for a denial. Tried to imagine shoving this composite in my desk drawer, doing nothing. Why couldn’t I do that? We didn’t know for sure that it had anything to do with Amy Flyte. But if it did? If she and this young man were shut up in that room, praying for help . . .
“Yes, I do.”
Chelsea ran a hand across her forehead. “Thing is, I’ve been down that road in the past. And the police didn’t believe me.”
“I know.” I said the words gently, hoping she would hear the empathy behind them. “And
this
detective . . . I have to warn you about him. He’s not exactly fond of Christians in general — or me, in particular.”
Chelsea drew herself up with a weary sigh. The dejection in her face surely mirrored my own. “Great. Then we’d
really
better pray.”
We bowed our heads and Chelsea began. “Lord, we’ve come this far and now we need guidance from You.”
Vaguely I registered the sound of the front door closing hard. Swift footfalls across the great room floor. Probably Kelly, on some critical teenage mission to fetch something from her bedroom.
“ . . . so, Lord, I ask that You lead us. You’ve brought us together, and we trust . . .”
The feet grew closer, then muted. Whoever it was had hit the carpet of the hallway.
“ . . . open our ears so we can hear . . .”
My office door burst open. I jerked up my head. Chelsea swung around in her chair.
Jenna stood in the threshold, hair windblown, breath in puffs. “You’d better get over to the runway.” She twisted her mouth. “You’re not going to believe this. The digging crew just uncovered a skull.”
C
helsea perched in the backseat of Annie’s SUV, mind whirling as Annie hurriedly backed out of the garage. A skull discovered —
now
? Was this why God called her here?
But if that was the reason, her vision happened long ago . . .
“You call the Sheriff’s Department?” Annie asked her sister. Jenna sat in the front passenger seat.
“Yeah.” Jenna heaved a sigh. Her fingers drummed against the dashboard. “Why does this have to happen
here
? Now? They’ll close the area as a crime scene, and the runway will
never
get fixed.”
Annie flicked Chelsea an anxious look through the rearview mirror, as if she were afraid of how her sister might sound. Chelsea gave her a wan smile —
It’s okay.
They made a few turns through the neighborhood and soon were on Grove Landing’s taxiway. Up ahead Chelsea could see the confusion that the gruesome discovery had wrought. Three crewmen wandered at the paved end of the airstrip, gesturing with wide arm motions and talking into cell phones. Beyond them lay a large area of newly overturned soil, tree stumps, and brush. A dirt-caked backhoe hulked off to the side, like a pouting warrior told to stand down.
Annie pulled the car to a stop some distance from the work area. “Better leave room for all the folks who are going to descend.”
“Yeah, well, they better get here pretty soon,” Jenna mumbled. “If I hadn’t been here and seen that skull come up, I swear those guys would have kept on working. I practically had to stand in front of them to get them to stop.” She folded her arms. “Drat it all.”
Annie shook her head.
Jenna glowered at her. “What?”
“Nothing. You’re just . . . being you.”
With a huff Jenna opened her car door. Chelsea pressed her lips in amusement. Jenna was one feisty gal, so different from her quiet sister. Annie turned and smiled at Chelsea almost timidly, as if relieved that she didn’t seem to judge Jenna. With that silent exchange, Chelsea caught a glimpse of Annie’s soul. The woman cared deeply about what others thought of her and her family.
They clambered out of the car.
At the three women’s approach the crewmen clipped off their phone conversations. “Thanks for halting everything,” Annie called. She walked to the end of the broken pavement, shading her eyes. Chelsea and Jenna followed.
The skull lay about fifteen feet away. Chelsea scanned the dirt around it. Was that a bone she saw, lying to the right?
“We stopped as soon as we saw it.” One of the men, tall and with a big stomach, gestured toward the skull.
Jenna snorted. Annie paid her no attention. “Did you see anything else? Any other bones?”
A second man, with a wiry build and leathery face, pointed. “That’s a long bone there. Like maybe an arm.”
“I see it,” Chelsea said. “And look over there. Something else that’s white?” Her thoughts tumbled. Was a whole skeleton out there, scattered? How long would it take a body in this environment to degrade to bone?
They milled around, waiting for the arrival
of a detective from the Sheriff’s Department named Ralph Chetterling — the same man Chelsea had talked to yesterday. After a long fifteen minutes he pulled up in an unmarked vehicle. He climbed out, straightening his massive frame, and walked over to meet them.
“Hi, Jenna. Hey, Annie, long time no see.” His dark brown eyes searched Annie’s face. “Hear you folks found something of interest.”
Something of interest?
What a way to put it.
“Hi, Ralph.
They
found it.” Annie indicated the men, explaining their work on the runway.
He scanned the site. “Anybody been out there since then?”
“No. We’ve waited for you.” Annie introduced Chelsea to the detective. He shook Chelsea’s hand, curious eyes lingering upon her. No doubt he wondered why she’d needed to see Annie so badly. Chelsea cringed inside. She knew her reputation preceded her, and now look what had happened. Almost as if her very presence had caused this.
I’m so sorry this is happening,
she wanted to say. Instead she offered the man a weak smile.
Chetterling nodded, then turned away, his demeanor turning all business. “All right. Let’s get to this.”
The area soon morphed into a full-fledged investigative scene. As more officials arrived, Annie told Chelsea who they were. Matt Stanish, from the coroner’s office, appeared first, followed by Jim Cisneros, an investigator with the Shasta County Sheriff’s Department. The three men ventured into the dirt-churned area. Annie, Chelsea, and Jenna sidled to the very end of the pavement to watch. Matt Stanish picked up the skull first and examined it. He held it close to his nose and sniffed.
“Ooh.” Chelsea brought a fist to her lips.
“No smell.” Stanish looked to Chetterling. “Been here at least a year, but could be much longer.” He turned it over, looked at the cranium. “Got a piece missing.” He touched the back top portion.
Detective Chetterling leaned in for a look and grunted. “Foul play, maybe? Someone hit in the head?”
Oh, God, another murder? And so close to Annie’s house?
“Possibly. Or it could be postmortem.” Stanish surveyed the nearby soil. “We’ll need to find the missing piece, see how it fits. Or pieces — could be more than one. If the pieces fit tightly together, that’s an indication the damage occurred here.” He held the skull up, pointing to the broken area. “These things become more brittle after death, so any break is a clean one. But in life they have a little expansion. If someone’s hit in the head strong enough to crack the skull, it’s not going to be as clean of a break.”
Jim Cisneros picked his way over to the half-emerged bone Chelsea had spotted. He lifted it for Stanish to see, his fingertips on each end. “From an arm?”
“Yeah. A humerus.”
Cisneros rotated the piece between his fingers. “Not an ounce of tissue on it. We could be looking at a difficult ID.” He looked meaningfully at Annie and she gave him a reluctant nod.
“If they can’t find out who this is,” she whispered to Chelsea, “I may have to create a facial reconstruction for the skull.”
Chelsea’s eyes widened. She couldn’t imagine it. How could anyone look at a skull and determine what the person had looked like?
“I’ve never done the process on a real case before.” Annie bit her lip. “Only studied it in a classroom.”
A sick feeling oozed through Chelsea’s stomach. She surveyed the scene — an ordinary construction site now turned surreal. The upheaval of dirt almost sneered, as if its blatant disturbance had yielded what they deserved. A backdrop of blue sky and bright sun mocked in contrast to the dismal discovery.
Chetterling and Cisneros stopped searching long enough to secure the area with yellow tape sporting bold black letters: “SHERIFF’S LINE, DO NOT CROSS.” Stanish lay the skull down with care and returned to his vehicle, pulling out a long white sheet. This he spread out where dirt met pavement, as a makeshift bed for the deceased. The skull and humerus were laid upon it in deference to their placement within a full skeleton.
What a pitiful sight, Chelsea thought. Woeful, wretched, and abandoned. No one deserved to be buried like trash in a shallow grave.
Jenna’s obvious irritation had long since vanished. She gripped her arms, a pained expression creasing her face. “This is awful.”
Chelsea murmured her assent.
Stanish lifted a bone fragment from the soil. Held it up to consider.
“From the skull?” Chetterling asked.
“Yeah, think so.”
Chetterling drew a long breath. “I’m going to call Delching.”
“The forensic anthropologist,” Annie whispered to Chelsea.
Stanish stepped over to the white sheet. Chelsea bit her lip, watching as he compared the fragment in his hand with the broken cranium. “It’s a fit,” he told Chetterling as the detective clicked off the phone.
“A tight one?”
Stanish considered the skull. “Doesn’t look perfectly tight to me. Maybe this injury did happen before death. But you know it’s not my call. I’ll leave that up to Fleck.”
Chelsea gave Annie a quizzical look. “Harry Fleck’s the medical examiner,” Annie explained. “He’s the guy who determines the cause and manner of death.”
“Oh.” Chelsea drew her arms across her chest. A shooting in Redding and now this. Why was she here, in the middle of it all?
God, I just want to go home!
The three men continued their search.
Upon the white sheet, the makeshift skeleton slowly formed.
L
arry Delching arrived within half an hour. By that time rumor, like a crooked finger, had beckoned my wide-eyed neighbors from their homes. They grouped off to the side, watching like hawks, pelting me with questions. Twice I explained what happened, then heard my story told and retold in whispers as more people appeared. Dave was not among them, but I sure didn’t want to call him. The last thing he needed was more sights of death in his neighborhood.
I focused on the scene before me. The potential area for finding more bones stretched wide. The three men were combing and picking through it one square foot at a time. The crewmen, told they could not continue work until the scene was officially cleared — and that could be days — had muttered a few expletives and left. So much for their overtime pay.
Minutes ticked by, indecision playing tug-of-war in my head. Chelsea and I had a task to do; we couldn’t stand here all day. But neither could I leave, not with more skeleton pieces surfacing by the minute. The sight of those mournful, soil-caked bones rooted me to the pavement.
I watched Delching work. The man had a lean, compact build and moved with precise motions, craning his neck toward the ground, plucking bones with thumb and forefinger. On the long white sheet the three men continued to piece the body together, one bone at a time. When this onsite work was done, the skeleton would be moved to the morgue. There Harry Fleck would measure certain bones. Shape and size of the pelvis would help determine whether the person was male or female. The skull’s eye sockets, nasal cavity, and lower portion together would lead to a determination of racial ancestry.
