Chapter 18

EIGHTEEN

Josie swatted at the mosquitoes and gnats that assaulted her face. No matter where she positioned herself, they followed like a cloud enveloping her. Finally, she stopped moving. Leaning against the trunk of a large maple tree, she watched the ERT and Dr. Feist work. After Hummel and his team cordoned off the scene, setting a perimeter, they had erected a pop-up tent over the boat. When Josie and Turner made their calls, notifying everyone necessary to process the scene as well as uniformed officers to secure it, they’d kept it off the police scanners that the press and many citizens followed. The longer they could keep this quiet, the better. Remy Tate and Kellan Neal had yet to be notified. Still, there was always the chance of the press finding out and WYEP sending a helicopter out to the scene.

The sound of mud sucking at someone’s boots drew Josie’s attention. One of the uniformed officers trudged toward her. Conlen. Just like the rest of them, he was sweating profusely. He’d been the one to provide a stroller for little Gracie Tate. He was out here helping them process the body of a mother who’d been savagely ripped away from her child, all while he had little ones at home. For a moment, Josie wanted to ask if it ever bothered him. She was an overachiever when it came to compartmentalizing, but would she be able to do it as well once she and Noah had their own baby? She shook off the thought.

Conlen said, “We’ve broken up the area into quadrants. We’re going to start the line searches. See if this asshole left anything behind.”

“If I were marching a kidnapped woman out here to kill her,” Josie said, “I’d take the shortest route, which is from the north.”

Conlen nodded. “We’ll start there.”

“Keep me posted.” Josie watched him walk off. Turner had gone to interview Edgar Garcia. He had also promised to speak with Cleo Tate’s family. A knot of apprehension tightened in the pit of her stomach at the thought of letting Turner notify Cleo’s husband and father that they’d found her body, but she let it go. Noah had been drilling it into her head since Turner’s arrival that as long as he was there, they had to find a way to work with him. For Josie, that meant not trying to micromanage the aspects of every case to keep Turner on the sidelines.

Officer Jenny Chan ducked under the crime scene tape and worked her way over. Using the sleeve of her Tyvek suit, she wiped perspiration from her brow. A camera rested in her gloved palms. “We found a bunch of partial footprints around the boat,” she told Josie. Flipping the screen of the camera so Josie could see it, she clicked through several photos. “We couldn’t find one that was complete.”

“The treads look like they’re from boots,” Josie said.

Chan nodded. “We’ll likely be able to narrow down the brand through the FBI’s footwear database, but I’m not sure how helpful it will be. There’s not enough for us to determine his shoe size, unless the search turns up additional impressions.”

Josie looked past Chan to where Dr. Feist leaned over Cleo Tate’s body. “Anything else?”

“Looks like your killer left the murder weapon behind,” Chan said. She clicked through several more photos until she came to one of a large, bloodied knife. “It was in the bottom of the boat, near her feet.”

He had stabbed Cleo Tate, likely repeatedly, then dropped the knife at her feet and walked away.

The next photo showed the ruler Chan had put next to it in order to measure the knife’s length. The blade was eight inches, the black handle five point six inches. “That’s a chef’s knife,” Josie said. She had one at home in her butcher block.

“Yeah,” Chan agreed. “Once we get it cleaned up and processed for prints and DNA, we can try to figure out the brand.”

Josie’s empty stomach burned at the thought of that blade plunging into Cleo Tate’s body. Whoever had stabbed her would have made a colossal mess. There was no way the killer managed it without getting blood spatter all over himself. The search teams would probably find drops of it from where he walked out of these woods.

Josie’s eyes were drawn back to the gently flowing water of the stream. Even if he’d washed some of it off here at the scene, he’d still be dripping with Cleo Tate’s blood. It would be on his clothes, shoes, hat. Everywhere. Given the remoteness of the area, it was possible he had walked out of this forest covered in blood and gotten into a vehicle without being seen, but that vehicle would have Cleo Tate’s DNA all over it.

Behind Chan, Dr. Feist waved at Josie. “Suit up and have a look,” she called.

Josie thanked Chan and found the impromptu station that Hummel had set up containing all the equipment the ERT needed to do their jobs. As quickly as she could, she donned her own Tyvek suit. Her hair got tucked up inside a skull cap. She worked her feet into booties and her sweat-damp hands into gloves. The uniformed officer standing sentry outside the scene logged her information on his clipboard before lifting the crime scene tape to allow her to duck under.

She joined Anya at the side of the boat. The smell of decomposition was stronger now, clinging to her, invading her senses. Angry blowflies dived at their heads, their shiny green and blue metallic bodies gleaming. They still teemed over Cleo Tate’s body, trying to return immediately after Anya shooed them. Cleo’s clothes looked stiff with dried blood. Up close, Josie could see where it flaked along her bare skin.

Anya said, “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you by now that everything I’m about to say is based on my initial impressions. I can’t give you any definitive answers until after the exam and autopsy.”

“Of course,” Josie said.

“I’d put her time of death at twenty to twenty-four hours ago, based on the emergence of the maggots alone.”

Maggots hatched from the blowflies’ eggs within twenty-four hours of being deposited into a body’s openings.

“That means she was killed shortly after she was abducted,” Josie said, doing the calculations in her head. The killer hadn’t wasted time. He’d likely killed Cleo shortly after arriving here. Yet, this did not strike her as an impulsive act on his part. Stealing the Hamptons’ car and ditching it at the lot was meant to throw the police off, waste their time and resources, and stretch them thin. It was all distraction.

Which meant that there was more to this case than they knew. Josie had the sinking feeling that they hadn’t even scratched the surface.

Anya pointed to a purple lump along Cleo Tate’s hairline, near her temple. “She’s got a head injury. There’s a superficial laceration to her left hand but other than that, if you look at her forearms, there are no defensive wounds.”

“He knocked her out,” said Josie.

“Or the injury disoriented her enough to make her compliant,” Anya suggested.

“There’s bruising, so she was alive for some time after he hit her, but she was incapacitated enough not to fight back when he started to stab her.”

Anya nodded, swatting at more blowflies, causing a cloud of them to take flight. “So far, I’ve counted three stab wounds on her body. One here.” She pointed to Cleo’s chest. “Here.” This time, her abdomen. “And here.” Her kidney. Maggots writhed inside each of the wounds.

Josie tore her gaze away long enough to see a pair of EMTs approaching with a Stokes basket. She recognized one of them instantly. Sawyer Hayes. Before Josie’s grandmother, Lisette Matson, died, Sawyer had come into their lives with a DNA test proving his blood relation to her. Eli Matson had been his father. The woman who abducted Josie had ensured that Sawyer never knew his father. He hadn’t even found out about his true parentage until he was an adult.

Anya picked her way down to Cleo’s feet, pointing at the backs of the woman’s calves. The skin above her white ankle socks was striped in pink and red. “If you look closely, you can see tiny blue paint chips embedded in her skin.”

“Which means he could have walked her up to the transom, and then she turned around or he forced her to look at him, at which point she fell back or he knocked her down and then started stabbing,” said Josie.

Anya batted more flies away from her face. “I’m not so sure she would have been capable of walking with that head injury.”

“Then he carried her, slung over his shoulder, and tossed her onto her back here, scraping her calves against the transom.”

Anya made a noise of agreement but it was a long way to carry a grown woman, especially in this heat.

Josie glanced back at Sawyer. He had had precious little time with Lisette, and Josie knew he blamed her for Lisette’s death. Josie had done her best to forge a relationship with him, but it was still rocky at times. Today, however, he gave her a wide smile. It sent a shock through her, not only because it was warm but also because every time she saw him, his resemblance to the man she believed was her father for most of her life felt like seeing Eli’s ghost. Maybe the few times she and Noah had had him over for dinner in the last couple of months had helped things.

She gave him a wave and turned back to the task at hand. “But she would have been able to move, right?”

Anya brushed a blowfly from her cheek. “I can’t say with any degree of certainty. It depends on the severity of her head injury. While I can tell from looking at it that it was likely severe enough to keep her from fighting back and make her more pliable, I can’t say whether she was completely unconscious. At least not until I’ve done the autopsy. Why?”

Josie’s eyes swept over Cleo’s body, seizing on the way the fingers of her right hand clutched at the hull’s edge, as if she were trying to pull herself out. “I’m wondering if she ended up in this position on her own or if he staged her body.”

“I’m not sure we’ll be able to answer that.” Anya waved a hand, indicating the entirety of the scene. “Rigor has already worn off but that’s not surprising given this heat. It tends to accelerate decomposition. Here, help me turn her.”

Josie knelt beside the boat at Cleo’s back. She kept her mouth closed against the flies, praying none tried to climb inside her nose. Small stones bit into her knees. Anya joined her, reaching across the body to peel Cleo’s fingers from the boat’s edge. Gingerly she pulled the upper portion of the body toward them while Josie turned the lower section. As expected, every inch of skin that had rested along the boat’s bottom and its shattered wooden seats was a deep purplish-red. Livor mortis had set in. In the absence of cardiac activity and circulation, gravity made blood pool at the lowest points of the body, causing the discoloration. Twelve hours after death, it became fixed. Josie’s gaze was drawn to a slash in the side of her abdomen, above her hip. The curled bodies of larvae spilled out. She pointed out the wound to Anya.

“I see it. Hold her there while I get my camera. I want to?—”

She broke off, eyes fixed on something on the rotted floor of the boat, peeking out from under one of the bowed seats. Josie adjusted her stance, craning her neck to see what had caught Anya’s attention. There, nestled among the vegetation that had shot up through the splintered planks of the hull, under the board where Cleo Tate’s shoulder had just been, was a polaroid photo.