Jungle Up, page 16
Gina snapped the binaural spring off and touched the edge with her thumb. It would do the trick. Gina crawled to the back panel of the tent and pressed the corner into the nylon. It took a couple of tries, but finally she made a small tear. It was louder than Gina would have liked, but under the noise of the jungle, she doubted anyone would hear. The job would have taken twenty seconds with a good knife, but it took close to five minutes with the edge of the metal spring, making half-inch, sometimes quarter-inch, tears in the nylon. When she had finally cut a fifteen-by-fifteen-inch flap at the bottom of the panel, she wriggled through.
It was dusk, and Gina army-crawled through the relative darkness to the nearby brush. She was mostly hidden by her tent, but there would be a few seconds where she would be exposed. She didn’t dare look back over her shoulder as she closed the distance to the brush. Four feet. Two feet. She slipped through a tangled thicket of vines, crawled for several more feet, then pushed herself up.
She’d made it.
The dim light was fading fast, making it difficult to navigate through the vegetation. Gina pulled the phone out of her pocket and turned it on. It didn’t have an LCD screen like a cellphone, but it did have a two-inch screen that lit up, offering just enough light to see in front of her.
After she’d gone another hundred feet, she checked the phone’s signal.
Still nothing.
“Damn.”
She needed to get out from under the thick canopy. The only open area was where the small hut was located.
It took Gina ten minutes to work her way through the forest. As she drew closer to the drug lab, she could smell the wafting aroma of chemicals. At the edge of the brush, she glanced back at the four tents and the small fire fifty feet away. It was now pitch dark and the whipping flames of the fire were too far away to illuminate her as she dipped under the sagging tarp roof and into the hut.
She glanced down at the phone.
There was a signal.
She made her way to the far back corner of the hut, where there were two pieces of plywood arranged on top of several large plastic drums. A six-inch chunk of flaky ivory paste centered the table.
Drugs.
Gina hit the call button, the phone automatically calling the last number she’d dialed. Even with a strong signal, she was nervous the tarp would interfere with the connection. Thankfully, it didn’t, and the phone began to ring. It rang once, twice, three times, then his voice came on:
“In the current telephone system, voicemail offenses like robocalls, things that should have been sent as a text message, and long drawn-out messages—I’m talking to you, Lacy—are considered especially heinous.”
“Come on, you moron,” Gina whispered, shaking her head.
“In Thomas Prescott City, the dedicated detective who investigates these vicious voicemails is a member of an elite squad known as the Special Voicemail Unit, or SVU.”
How had she fallen in love with this idiot?
“These are my stories. Dun-dun.”
“Thomas!” she shouted louder than she intended. “I don’t have much time! Four days ago, a group of men came to my village and abducted me. They said they needed a doctor. I think they are narcotraff—”
There was a rustle just outside the structure.
Someone was coming.
“Oh, shit, here they come!” she whispered. “Please find me, Thomas! Please!”
She ended the call and pressed the phone against the front of her shirt to hide any residual light from the call screen, then she ducked under the table and found a spot between two of the plastic drums.
A moment later, the tarp crinkled as someone brushed up against it. Then footsteps.
Gina brought her knees up to her chest and sucked in a breath.
There was a flicker of light from a lighter.
It was one of the soldiers. He came a few steps in her direction, then said, “Aquí vamos.” Here we go.
She heard lips smacking and then a satisfied sigh.
Gina pulled her legs into her chest until her ribs screamed. She stiffened every muscle in her body. Her heart thrummed in her neck.
The soldier was two feet to her right, his body pressed against the plywood. Gina could see his knife dangling off his belt. There was a slurping sound, and Gina imagined him sticking his fingers in the paste and then sucking them clean.
The soldier chuckled lightly to himself.
His boot was large. Gina guessed it was Guillermo, who was well over six feet. He was the one whose wrist Gina had twisted at the Tibióno village when they first abducted her. His dirt-covered boot was nearly touching her right shoe.
Gina tried to silently wriggle backward another inch.
There was a soft creak.
She must have leaned back against one of the bamboo poles supporting the tarp.
Gina froze.
Guillermo stepped back, then squatted. He held his lighter out in front of him. He probably expected to see a snake or some other form of wildlife.
The flicker of his lighter lit up wild, drug-crazed eyes.
“¡Puta!” he said.
23
jungle
august 16, 2:02 p.m.
days since abduction: 11
I reached out my hand and showed Vern the satellite phone.
He asked, “You think that’s the phone she used to call you?”
I glanced down at the thick black phone in my hand. “Considering these are the coordinates of the phone call Gina made to me and that the phone is the same brand as the one the call came from, I’d say the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming.”
Vern bit his lip and shook his head.
I knew what he was thinking, and to be completely honest, I was thinking the same thing: This is where Gina died.
I quickly quarantined this thought and stuffed it in a folder marked 2003 Taxes, then I said, “I need everybody out of here.”
Diego might be a world-class tracker, but this was my world.
Without a word, Diego, Carlos, and Vern retreated into the sunlight and to where Juan Pablo was holding Camila.
Once they were gone, I went to work.
The first thing I did was try to turn the phone on, but nothing happened. I wasn’t sure if it was simply out of juice or if it was busted. Useless for the time being, I returned the phone to the rectangular depression in the dirt where I’d found it.
Then I started taking mental snapshots of the entire crime scene.
On the table was the white paste that was probably the cocaine base Vern had spoken of. There were a few spatters of blood on the paste, turning it a heavy pink in spots. To the right of the drugs were large sprays of dried scarlet. Above the table, the tarp roof was heavily speckled.
I ran my hand over the blood droplets on the plywood, then I crouched down and ran my hands over the blood spray on the blue plastic drum. There was two feet of space between the drums.
A perfect place to hide.
I stood and gazed upward at the tarp. I followed the blood spatter in a clockwise semicircle. I took three steps to my right and glanced down at a nine-inch diameter of darkened earth. To the naked eye, it looked as if someone had poured a bottle of water on the dirt. But had there been a jungle crime scene tech available, they would have sprayed the area with luminol—which reacts with the hemoglobin in blood—and under an ultraviolet light, the dark patch would have been a glowing pool of white.
After snapping more than sixty mental photographs, I fed them into the TPSD—Thomas Prescott Super Detective—database. The results came back a few seconds later.
The carotid.
There was a considerable amount of blood, but that alone didn’t say a whole lot. Whether it’s a knife wound, bullet hole, or tractor accident, a lot of the four to five liters of blood in the human body is going to drain out.
At least until the heart stops pumping.
But the pattern of the blood—which was more spray than spatter—narrowed down the cause of death considerably. It could only have come from a severed artery.
But which one?
Those four or five liters of blood are pumping under high pressure through more than twenty major arteries in the human body, the most notable being the aorta, the femoral, and the carotid.
It’s difficult to sever the aorta as it’s shielded by the sternum and the ribcage. The femoral artery in the thigh can easily be punctured, but the blood pattern didn’t fit the trajectory that would have resulted from such a wound. A puncture to the carotid artery—which supplies blood to the neck, face, and brain—however, fit the blood pattern profile to a T.
My best guess was that the victim was standing close to where the satellite phone was found. They were hit in the neck, puncturing the carotid artery. Puncture being the operative word. If the artery had been severed, I doubt the blood would have traveled as far as it did.
At a two-day conference on blood-spatter evidence I attended—in what would end up being my last year as a detective with the Seattle Police Department—one of the speakers was a biophysics professor at the University of Washington. Up to that point, it had been six mundane hours of slides and lectures, but Hank something-or-other was one-part professor, one-part Gallagher.
He brought all sorts of props up on stage and proceeded to smash, cut, pop, and poke things until half of us in the audience were covered in water. One of the first things he did was to take out a water balloon and poke it with a needle. I expected the balloon to pop, but it didn’t. Water began to spray from the balloon and the guy pointed the spray at the thirty of us there. When the water drained from the balloon, he asked everyone who got wet to stand up. I was in the fourth row, twelve feet from him, and I got a little bit of water on my knee.
It wasn’t anything profound—it was simple physics—but it stuck with me how far the water had traveled.
Anyhow, once the carotid was punctured, the victim leaned their head back and a heavy arterial spray shot up and onto the tarp. Human nature would predict the victim then grab their neck with one or both hands. At which point, they moved toward the table. They leaned against it, blood running down their hands and spraying through their fingers. It’s hard to say how long the victim stayed near the table, but at some point, they fell to their knees and crawled to the far right of the hut, where they bled out.
Confident I knew how the victim had died, I made my way to the front of the hut and yelled, “Diego and Carlos, I need you. And somebody get me a bamboo pole.”
≈
“Stand here,” I told Diego, indicating a spot a few inches from where the satellite phone was stuck in the ground.
“Okay, hand me one end of that pole,” I said to Vern.
Vern handed me a six-foot-long bamboo pole that he’d found behind the structure. I passed one end to Diego and said, “Hold this against your neck.”
If this were an actual crime scene, Diego would be a mannequin named Milton, and I would be using string. Which, come to think of it, is a dated practice. Most of this stuff is digitized now, done with fancy 3D cameras.
But in the jungle, you use the tools at your disposal.
I moved the other end of the pole up and down, which helped to visualize the different angles of the blood spatter. I made Diego lean his head back, tilt his head this way and that, fall to his knees.
After spending several minutes with Diego, I had him switch with Carlos. I ran Carlos through a similar array of positions.
“Okay, you can put that down now,” I said to Carlos, trying to fight back a smile.
“What gives?” Vern said.
I couldn’t get the angles to work with Diego, who at five foot three was an inch shorter than Gina. But for Carlos, who was six two, the angles nearly fit. In fact, for the blood spatter to fit perfectly, we needed someone a few inches taller than Carlos.
“Someone died here,” I said, “but it wasn’t Gina.”
24
jungle
august 9, 7:07 p.m.
days since abduction: 4
Guillermo reached under the table and yanked Gina out by her hair. She let out a loud scream.
She wanted the others at the camp to hear her. She might be punished for trying to escape, but she doubted they would kill her. Sadly, her scream only lasted half a second as one of Guillermo’s giant hands wrapped around her throat and tightened like a vice.
He lifted Gina up, her backside up against the plywood table. She clawed with her right hand against the hand at her throat, but it was useless. None of her combat training could help her now.
Gina squirmed, helplessly watching as the drug-crazed soldier reached down with his free hand and pulled his seven-inch bowie knife from his belt.
He lifted it up and pressed the tip into the flesh of her left breast.
Gina’s vision began to tunnel.
She only had seconds of consciousness left, and if she passed out, who knew what this monster’s plans for her were?
Somehow, throughout the struggle, she’d held tightly to the satellite phone in her left hand. With her last ounce of strength, Gina brought her left arm up and parallel to her shoulder. Then she swung her arm violently in an arc toward Guillermo’s face.
She simply intended on stunning him, hoping to hit him hard enough make him relax his grip around her throat and give her a chance to escape. Or for someone from camp who’d heard her scream to reach them and convince her would-be killer that they needed her alive. But she didn’t hit him in the face. The half-inch hard rubber antenna on the top of the phone sunk into the bottom of his neck with a sickening pop.
Immediately, the fingers around Gina’s throat relaxed. Guillermo’s head tilted back, and blood squirted from the puncture in his throat. The soldier wheeled around, spraying blood all over the table and onto the tarp roof.
Even though it wasn’t a large puncture, Gina knew it was just as terminal as taking a bullet through the heart. She backed away, watching as the soldier stumbled against the blue drums with his hands at his throat.
What had she done?
25
temple ruins
august 16, 3:12 p.m.
expedition: day 3
“Okay,” Libby said, clipping a small black lavalier microphone to the neck of Andy’s shirt. “I’m just going to ask you a few questions about the altar.”
Andy was standing with his back to the six-foot-wide trunk of a towering tree. Vines hung down the left side of the tree in a tangled riot. “Sounds good,” Andy replied, his voice screeching as if he was back in the throngs of puberty.
After finding the altar nearly seven hours earlier, Andy had quickly erased his status as both Jungle Weenie and Jungle Idiot and had been elevated to Jungle Hero.
Within fifteen seconds of Andy telling everyone over the walkie-talkie that he’d uncovered a sacrificial altar, the entire expedition team had circled around him. He’d never been patted on the back, both literally and figuratively, so many times in his life.
“Way to go, Andy!” Buxton had said, giving him a hard slap on the back.
“¡Muy bien!” Cala had exclaimed. “¡Muy bien!”
Jonathan Roth—who’d looked physically ill after Andy crested the buried temple and delivered his infamous meatball line—had put his arm around Andy’s shoulder and said, “Great discovery, kiddo. Just great, great work. You have a real knack for this stuff.”
Andy had beamed, his cheeks turning a fiery red at the compliment.
Libby took a few steps backward to where Darnell was hovering over the video camera and tripod. She cocked her head to the side, the blond strands of her short pixie cut whipping across her forehead and said, “Okay, first thing. Who are you?”
Andy cleared his throat and said, “Andy Depree.” This time his voice came out clear and even.
“Occupation?”
“Assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago.”
“What class do you teach?”
“Ancient Inca Civilization.”
“Okay, great.” Libby turned to Darnell and said, “Play that back for me really quick.”
Several seconds passed as Libby watched the playback on the video camera. Andy took the time to glance around. Alejándro Cala, Nathan Buxton, and Jonathan Roth were huddled near the altar, continuing to excavate around the large boulder. The others, Andy assumed, must all be back atop the temple ruins.
“Sound levels are perfect,” Libby said. “And you’re right, it does look great with that tree behind you.”
Libby had initially wanted to shoot the interview next to the altar, but Andy had figured they had plenty of footage of the altar, and the lighting next to the giant tree was much better.
“Ready when you are,” Andy said.
Libby said, “Okay, so first question: How did you find the altar?”
Andy spent the next minute detailing how he noticed the stone while talking to Darnell. Andy skirted over the fact that he never would have made the discovery had he not been getting ready to tell the jungle just how much he hated teaching. Andy guessed Darnell would give him some guff for this later on.
When Andy finished, Libby said, “Actually, can we back up to the temple? And the large earthen mound?”
“You mean, the temple that the amazing Dr. Farah Karim discovered yesterday?”
“Yes, that one,” Libby said, with what Andy thought was a slight roll of her eyes. “What would be the significance of a temple to these people?”
Andy cleared his throat and then said, “The temple would have been a centralized place where religious activities and decisions were made. It would be similar to a neighborhood church.”
“Okay, and what would it have looked like?”
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