“How did Grandpa know I had retired from the Navy? I don’t think I’d even told Dad that yet.” I asked as we moved down the trail, well away from Cooperfield and the Chief.
“You’d be surprised at what all the Chief knows,” Ryan said, his voice indicating all seriousness. “He used to ask me how my dates went even before I gave up and just started admitting I was going on them when I got time off. Could even — I hope he was only guessing — the restaurant.”
“Follow up, "Department Consultant"?” I looked at Ryan, “That something you guys discussed when I got here?”
“It’s news to me my friend, but I’ll take it if it keeps Cooper,” he used a nickname for the Sheriff, “the hell away from me.” Ryan spat out. His brow furrowed and jaw set. Sensitive subject. I made a note to ask about what had poisoned the well between the Sheriff and the law enforcement of Deep Springs later when we got back to the house.
I changed the subject by stopping in my tracks. "Ryan, you realize this is going to be a cluster right? If there's a defense on this--"
"You mean with your father potentially having been involved, and your grandfather, his father in law being the chief, and with the primary officer responding being me, the best friend of the victim's eldest son that someone will cause a holy stink about how it's the victims loved ones coming after them instead of objectively running an investigation?" He answered, not looking back at me, and staring down the trail.
I opened my mouth to respond, but that had pretty much nailed the point on the head.
"Look, This has been a small town police station for a hundred years. It's not the first time that sort of situation has come up. That's why we document. Heavily. Back check carefully." He turned his head and winked.
"Besides, once you see the site you are going to understand why that's not the top of my list for what's going to get weird about this investigation."
After another dozen yards or so, Ryan stopped me. “This is the start of it.” He said, and twisted the cross body bag he’d brought from the Bronco around his torso to the front. He rummaged inside, and pulled out a pair of black nitrile gloves, passing a second pair to me, as well as a fistful of evidence bags. He also pulled a small digital camera with a large lens out of the front pocket of the bag and gave me a look. “In case you actually do find something we miss. I’d hate it, but I’d also be appreciative at the same time.”
I smirked a little as Ryan held out a stack of blown-up photographs to me. Crime scene shots. “I ran off a second set. Figured it’d be easier.” Taking them in hand I looked and noted that they had numbers in the bottom corner of each shot. “I’ll try to live up to your expectations. So OK. Where are we at?”
“This farthest on out here is number three. Caldwell Jackson, White male, approximately 40, one of the security team based on his clothing, blunt force is the guess at COD, looks like he was smacked into this tree here.” Ryan gestured at the trunk. I looked at the tree, there was an obvious impact damage about ten feet off the ground, the hard bark was demolished, and the flesh of the trunk was visibly dented and shattered in the light of the flashlight. “Ryan, that’s a lot of damage for a human body to have done. Like, remember when-“
“When Roger Shelby backed that Chevy into the pine outside of your Dad’s at like 20 mph and it didn’t do anything to anything but that truck?” Ryan looked at me sternly. “I do remember. I said the same thing the first time I was up here, and the guys from Jewel Hill gave me the uncomfortable reminder that the body, despite the body armor and magazines, would have been a lot less rigid than that truck. Food for thought.”
I blanched. I hadn’t considered that part. Wait. “Jesus. Wait- hold on, body armor?” I asked, turning back and looking at Ryan.
“Yeah, pretty good stuff too. If it wasn’t evidence I’d be tempted to put it in the department’s armory. Sure as shit a better level than anything we’ve got. Same with the guns and magazines. Whatever your dad was into had teeth I guess.” Ryan took out a notepad. “How high do you figure that to be? You were always better at gauging that kinda stuff.”
“Ten feet to the edge easy,” I responded. Moving to the tree and unclipping a tape measure I’d clipped to my belt, it revealed I was close to the money. 10’ 3”. Ryan snapped a picture of the measurement since we didn’t have it in the photos that we’d brought. .“So just the guys with wild equipment?” I asked, still stuck on that exposed trunk of tree, my eyes tracing the spidery cracks.
Ryan sighed and switched to his notebook and wrote a figure down as he turned a little bit to his right, to the side of the trail. “No, just a bunch of them, looks like these guys were rear guard, at a guess-” I gave him a curious look.
“What? I listen to your stories, and I read books. I know how a rear guard action would work.” Ryan said, feigning indignance. “Over there,” he pointed into the brush off the right of the trail, “Number 5, Leslie Herrington, Black male, approximately 35…. Well. He was ripped apart. The official main cause was exsanguination, but that’s really just a matter of semantics with the whole traumatic dismemberment aspect.” Ryan turned to faced south down the trail “Then we have one more just south of the encampment, plus guy number four’s arm, and the rest of number four was off to the east about 100 feet. Not a bodyguard. This guy looks to have been some sort of production crew.” Ryan’s grimace deepened as he looked at the photos, pausing a moment before continuing his overview. “Then we have the civilians. Dr. Kai Nageshi, Dr. Esmerelda Ramirez, and Dr. Anya Petrovya, all blood loss, all gruesome. Petrovya was over to the west about 20 feet in the brush and down the hill, interestingly, there’s some distance between here and Ramirez and Nageshi, not sure why, maybe they took off trying to get away?”
“Makes sense,” I said, looking at the photos. Gruesome was an understatement. Nageshi’s head was nearly removed, and there wasn’t enough in one piece of Ramirez for identification I’d think. “But where’d Dad get off to in all this?” I said aloud, looking around at the encampment we’d just walked up to. There were plenty of places to go, laterally in almost any direction. The boot prints in the trail were no good after the initial round of CSI, and besides it, despite being a somewhat dusty scar of a trail in this section, there wasn’t enough of a layer of dust for a clean print. We kept walking and Ryan pointed out where Nageshi and Ramirez had met their ends, not that it wasn’t clear from the discoloration that still decorated the dirt and duff. I looked up, and saw broken branches ten, fifteen feet above us, like something heavy had come straight down and through them.
Then I saw it. A root that had chosen its way to living just above the surface, I got down on hands and knees to look at it closer, and noted that the fibers of the root had been scored, twisted and separated in a fan pattern, folding them to the right. As if someone had heavily twisted on their heel, turning.. back towards the carnage? Carefully, to the side of the root, I planted my foot as if in mid run, and pivoted, dragging my left heel to keep from twisting my ankle out of my boot. Sure enough, the dust dragged the same way, and in a very similar pattern. “Someone turned around here.” I said to Ryan, looking up the trail at him. “Someone with a similar boot size to me.”
Ryan’s eyes lit up. My father and I wore the same size shoe and had since I was a freshman in high school. “Well,” he started “There was another body just beyond there. Dr. Margaret Jones.” He shook his head. “It wouldn’t have been her though, for one, she’s about, what, seven sizes too small for your boots?” He handed me a pair of photographs. One was a full body picture that looked to have been printed off a website of Dr. Jones, and the second was a more gruesome updated photograph. My heart tugged looking at her. “Yeah, but it makes sense for it to be dad considering.” I said.
Ryan looked down at his copy of the picture to see what he’d missed. Then it clicked. “Oh god. She-”
“Looks just like my mother? Yeah.” I groaned. Leave it to Dad to be the knight and shining armor for someone he barely knew in memory of his long dead wife. I got up and dusted myself off, and looked away from the trail towards the western slope, where the town was. Then I noticed a new thing. There was a line of tall grass over the edge of the embankment of the hill headed down towards one of the many creeks that fed into the french broad. It almost looked like it had been plowed through by someone or something running. “Hey. Look at this.” I said, moving closer to the increasing slope off the edge of the trail.
I gave the broken vegetation a wide berth so as to not disturb it further, and followed it, finally finding a broken sapling about 10 feet from the trail. The grass and vegetation under it were matted like something had landed or stomped or laid here for a while. Could have been a deer I guess, but that seemed unlikely given the context of the area.
I positioned myself to look up at the bank as if someone was sitting at the sapling. Maybe someone had tripped their way down the hill and crashed into the small tree. Then I saw it. A faint metallic glittering played off the light cast from my headlamp. I tilted my head and carefully moved to the deer berry bushel that sat just off the ground. Got to my hands and knees again as I moved and got low, just enough to see that there was a.. red journal with a metal clipped pen in the cover under the bush. A red journal just like the ones my father had used since I was a kid and he started his academic path into cryptozoology.
I fished out the journal and slid it into one of the evidence bags that Ryan had given me, and slid the whole of that into the knee pocket of the cargo BDUs I was wearing. That’ll be something to look at later, and maybe the only thing to look at later depending on what Sheriff Cooper meant about “locking down” the scene. I had found the journal but no sign of my Dad yet. But someone his age hitting a sapling as thick as my wrist hard enough to break it? He hadn’t gotten too far. I continued down the hill a little way, arms outstretched with my headlamp pointed at the ground for more visual cues when I found my second bit of evidence of Dad.
I placed a numbered marker down and shot a quick picture of the wallet, and as soon as that was done I snatched it up off the ground. I opened it to confirm what I already knew, seeing a really old picture of me and Levi faded in a plastic sleeve. It was my dads, and the Jerk was trying to kill me with love even in this situation. No Cash, several credit cards still in place, license in place. Then I noticed that there were dried reddish black spots on the ground around me. He must have given up the ghost on his escape here, at least for a little bit, and he was injured enough to be losing blood.
After a careful search around this new area, and several photographs of the scene, I didn’t see anything to guide me for where his next direction would be. Was he heading to the branch, trying to go back towards town bushwhacking to get away from whatever happened on the trail?
I continued to take mental notes on the surroundings as I assessed the scene, though there wasn’t much to go on by that basis. The forest floor was a mess of disorganized information, the detritus spread by any number of things causing the few patterns that I was able to discern, and none of those patterns definitively pointed to my father making an escape or attempting to double back.
I paused, and did a double take. My years of experience crept up my spine and tingled my brain about something I had seen but not consciously registered. I moved towards a smaller pine tree, only about as thick as my forearm. I appraised the rugged bark, and the clean, simple seven-pointed star that was carved into it. I grunted softly as I took some pictures of the marking. Why did it feel significant? It wasn’t a hiking trail symbol for sure. If nothing else because I already knew there was no trail that went through this section of forest from looking at maps before we came up here in dad’s office, and the lack of worn dust trails carved in the forest floor from frequent boot falls confirmed that without any prompting. I cast my eyes back up the embankment “...plus the steepness of the embankment makes it an unlikely candidate for one anyway.” I said to myself.
I grumbled a bit in confusion and turned back toward the trail to start hiking back up, just to come nose-to-barrel with a 9 mm.
“Who the fuck are you?” said the gruff voice from behind the gun. My eyes worked to adjust to the newcomer’s flashlight in my face. I saw a scruffy-looking man in a deep blue windbreaker with a trio of white reflective letters reading “SBI” on the left chest. He was wearing jeans over some less than practical boots, his dark hair thinning and a very tired look accentuating the 10 p.m.’s worth of five-o’clock shadow across his jaw. He wasn’t tall, but not short either, maybe around 5’8”. The intimidation factor of being at the business end of his pistol was making him seem taller. Probably also the slope.
“Hi. I’m Judah Sands, Consultant for the Deep Springs Police Department?” I said hopefully sounding truthful despite still being somewhat in a state of disbelief about that particular situation. “Also Chief Petty Officer Master at Arms at Naval Station Norfolk, retired?” Who knows, that might also help.
“Wait, When the fuck did you—?” I heard from the ridge, and looked up to see Ryan with his own pistol drawn and pointed down at us. He then froze and relaxed, putting his own hands up and showing his finger off the trigger to someone behind him as another voice, this one female said “Where the fuck do you—”
“WHY THE FUCK IS EVERYONE POINTING GUNS AT EACH OTHER?” Another very tired, very winded voice shouted, and even in the near twilight, I could see the corpulent, sweat-sheened outline of Samuel Evans huffing and puffing his way to the edge of the trail. “HEY. If I’d known you’d just start pointing guns at anybody you’d see I’d not have helped you get into the county around Coop.”
I stopped myself from laughing at the older man’s obvious frustration, if nothing else than to keep from startling the man in front of me threatening to pick my nose with a bullet.
“Evenin’ Chief Sam.” Ryan said, not moving. “Who do we have the privilege of working with this auspicious evening?” His tone was deadpan, I guess he too was also just trying to not accidentally escalate our new friends. I didn’t know Sam Evans was the chief of anything. Must be over in Jewel Hill where he had been running a hardware store for years before I’d left town.
The man in front of me sniffed and lowered his gun finally. “Sorry. It’s been a day. Agent Henry Lee.”
“Oh like Lighthor-”
“Don’t. I hate that, I’m holding a gun, and just bushwhacked my way here unexpectedly.” He holstered his gun and I saw Ryan put his hands down in my peripheral, suggesting the other, I assumed, SBI agent had also put hers down.
“I get it. My dad hates getting Ram plushies for the same reason.” I said. “I’m going for an evidence bag in my pocket, just so we don’t get twitchy again,” The agent nodded to me. Reaching into my pocket, I fished one out, dropped my father’s wallet into it, sealed it and added it to the small collection in my knee pocket. “So you guys are the SBI agents I heard about getting waylaid huh?”
Agent Lee and I picked our way back up the slope to the trail where I got introduced to his partner, Agent Kassie Duilion, a younger agent, with shoulder length blonde hair tied back tightly into a bun. She also wore an SBI windbreaker over jeans and boots, but was a much shorter 5’2” to Agent Lee. She was quiet, issuing a nod of acknowledgement when I introduced myself, but not saying much past her own name. I left her to that, I’m sure I’d not be in much of a mood for talking if I’d struggled to get here around a county sheriff getting big for his britches either.
I turned and faced Samuel Evans, who was still wiping the sweat from his brow. “Mister—,” I paused, reflexively forgetting he wasn’t just Mister Evans the hardware store owner anymore. “—Or I guess I should say, Chief Evans,” I said, reaching a hand out to the Jewel Hill Police Chief.
“Evenin’, Judah. Sorry ‘bout the circumstance, but it’s good to see you anyhow boy.” he said, nodding graciously and accepting my handshake. “You boys find anything up here while we were making our way around Cooper and the deputies?”
So that’s what my grandpa meant by that pointed “if something hadn’t waylaid the SBI” comment.
I spent a minute explaining what I’d found down the hill. The broken sapling, the dried blood, the wallet and journal. “—The only things I do know from looking is that he wasn’t dragged off like he’d died there, it doesn’t look like he got away from there under his own power unless he was being very stealthy, which given the dried blood I found, I’d find hard to believe he was capable of.”
I touched my knee pocket and retrieved the evidence bag for the wallet, then the journal in its bag.
“Oh?” Looking at the bottom corner of the plastic bag that held the journal, I could see a slit in the bottom about an inch long, like a manufacturing error missed the seal on the corner. I fished out my phone and snapped a photo of the compromised bag, making sure to get the split corner and the sealed mouth of the bag in my records. The journal itself would have to do for scale. I put my phone back in one pocket and grabbed a fresh bag from the other. I checked the bottom seal and made sure this one didn’t have the same defect, and dropped the journal, compromised evidence bag and all, into the fresh collection bag and sealed it. “Well, it’s not a paper evidence bag, but hopefully we can still get something off that.”
Chief Evans pulled a cell phone out of his pocket, and dialed a number. “David? Yes, I did that and they are up here too. Judah might have gotten something if you can get away and come back down.” After a few more affirmatives and nods, Evans put away the phone. “Alright. So David is on his way back down. I’m going to make myself scarce before Cooper follows him and I have to deal with him being in a bad mood with me all week. So I’ll see you all later, and if you need me I’m just down the road.” And with that he started trudging his way back down the trail towards the road, his round body striding with the indomitable purpose of a man who wanted no smoke from the county sheriff, which I couldn’t blame him for.