Vanished. Elizabeth Heiter

Six

      Tomas had never gone home last night, but he’d fallen asleep at his desk sometime after six. The call that had woken him less than two hours later had initially seemed like a crank call, a person who refused to give his name reporting “something suspicious” in the marsh. But when asked to explain the term suspicious, the person had said it looked like a body in a trash bag.

      Brittany had been missing almost thirty-five hours now. The profiler had been on scene since yesterday and the CARD agents since the night before that. They’d given him the statistics, so he knew it was way too likely the caller was right.

      The thought made him slow instinctively as he tracked through the marsh, and his foot sank into the goop at the bottom. Tomas yanked the top of his knee-high plastic boot until it popped free and pushed onward. Ahead of him, Jack Bullock moved forward with seeming ease.

      And that was ironic. Except when taking a police call, Jack had probably never visited this part of Rose Bay. Tomas could actually see the house where he’d spent most of his formative years.

      It was raised on wooden stilts at the back for when the marsh waters rose, and the exterior was stucco. When he was a boy, there had been a deck off the back, but it was gone now. His parents had finally moved once their last son left home, and since then, the house had gone through a series of owners. From this distance, it looked forlorn and neglected.

      “Can you imagine?” Jack huffed, gesturing at a shack up ahead of them. “Who’d want to live there?”

      Tomas kept quiet, deciding to assume Jack didn’t know he’d grown up a hundred yards away. As for the shack, it was unoccupied and had been for more than a year. “It’s empty. Let’s check it out when we’re finished here, make sure no one used it to hide Brittany.” More likely, they’d just find someone’s drug stash, but it was worth a shot.

      Jack turned to say something else, then cursed as one of his feet slid out from underneath him. He caught himself before he was soaked, but still let out another stream of obscenities. “How far out into the marsh did the caller say it was?”

      “It shouldn’t be much farther.”

      “We should’ve taken the boat,” Jack groused, breathing hard in the heavy humidity.

      “The water level’s too low.” It only came up to their knees in the early-morning tide, and Tomas knew it wouldn’t get much deeper where they had to search.

      He’d spent enough time in the marshes as a child to know them. The spot he was now searching for a body had once been a favorite place for him and his brothers; it was where they’d row their dad’s old canoe, race through the marshes and out into the ocean. Back then, the main thing they’d had to worry about was their drunken neighbor, who liked to shoot at anything that moved with his hunting rifle. Tomas longed for that kind of simplicity now.

      Since Brittany had been abducted and Evelyn Baine had come to town, Jack had been a bigger pain in his ass than usual, Walter Wiggins was threatening to sue the police department for not protecting him after he’d been threatened and the whole town was in an uproar over yesterday’s arrest of Brittany’s father. To make matters worse, Evelyn had brought him a suspect.

      Despite presenting a profile that pegged the abductor as white, late last night she’d returned to the station with Jack and named Darnell Conway as her key suspect. And if Rose Bay learned that a black man was the prime suspect in the abductions of young white girls, the riot at the station the other day was going to look like a peaceful gathering. And he’d be in for a shitstorm he wasn’t sure his small police force could handle.

      “How much farther?” Jack asked, sloshing ahead of him.

      “We’re close.”

      Being from the wrong side of the tracks wasn’t something Tomas liked to advertise about himself. But it gave him an advantage in his job. He’d grown up seeing Rose Bay from the other side. Instead of the perfect, safe community where the rich could feel secure leaving their doors unlocked and their children with nannies, Tomas had seen the dangers.

      He’d been raised to respect the natural perils, from the undertow in the ocean to the speed of high tide when it poured in over the sand bars. He’d known to avoid the neighbor who always smelled like sour whiskey and not to let the man who claimed he was from the energy company into the house when his father wasn’t home.

      Brittany’s parents, on the other hand, had felt secure in allowing their daughter to play alone in the front yard, lulled into complacency by Rose Bay’s seeming perfection. Nothing bad had ever touched them, so they thought nothing ever could. Until their daughter was taken from right under their noses.

      “Over there,” Jack called, pointing, and Tomas could see it, too, floating at the far end of the marsh. An industrial-size black garbage bag, with something heavy weighing it down. Had it not gotten tangled in the reeds, it probably would have sunk.

      “Shit.” The caller was right. It did look like it could be a body. A small body.

      He’d come across enough dead bodies when he’d worked homicide in Atlanta—including a couple in the garbage. He’d taken the job in quiet Rose Bay, hoping to see fewer. And that was what had happened. But the child cases were always the hardest. If Brittany Douglas was in here, it would rank up there with the worse cases he’d handled.

      Tomas wiped a hand across his forehead and it came back wet with perspiration from temperatures that were pushing ninety, at 8:00 a.m. He forced his feet to move faster, splashing through the murky water, until he reached the bag.

      Jack got there ahead of him, but he waited, looking apprehensive. “Should we try dragging it out before we open it?”

      In answer, Tomas pulled the switchblade from his pocket.

      “What if it’s just the air in the bag keeping it afloat?” Jack asked, but it was too late, because Tomas had already run the knife through the top of the bag.

      It deflated slightly, letting out a putrid smell. Jack adjusted his stance the way Tomas had seen him do dozens of times at crime scenes in preparation for something he didn’t want to see.

      Tomas folded the knife and stuffed it back in his pocket, then slipped on a pair of plastic gloves. He tore the bag open wider with his hands and things started spilling out. A perfectly good basketball. A filthy old pillow. Some green slimy substance he couldn’t identify.

      He braced his feet wide in the gunk on the marsh floor and stuck his gloved hand into the bag, feeling for anything that might have been a body. His fingers pushed through cans and tissue and a rubber ball, but nothing in the bag had ever been alive, other than the maggots feeding on old Chinese takeout.

      “It’s nothing,” he told Jack, who rocked back on his heels with a relieved sigh.

      “What a waste of time,” Jack complained, pivoting gracelessly and plodding back toward shore.

      Tomas sighed, shoved the spilled trash into the bag and hefted it over his shoulder. It weighed far less than a body, but it felt a thousand times heavier as he followed Jack back toward a town demanding answers he didn’t have.

      * * *

      The tide raced greedily at Evelyn, soaking the bottom of her jeans as she walked toward the sand dunes shrouded by long grass. From the main part of the beach, the area was accessible only to the adventurous. To get here, Evelyn had clambered over an outcropping of rocks, fighting for purchase on the slick surface. Combined with the dunes to her right, this was an unlikely spot for beachcombers. For someone trying to hide a body, though, it might be appealing.

      Evelyn pushed determinedly toward the dunes. The wind whipped sand around, like little needles dancing on her skin, and the waves crashed loudly into the rocks.

      She’d chosen a spot away from the other searchers this morning, needing time alone to think. About Walter Wiggins and Darnell Conway. About the trickier aspects of her profile.