A Lonesome Place for Dying, page 6
“Not dirt, clay.” Mal had on gum boots and was moving fast. “I knew I’d seen it before somewhere.”
They walked over fallen boards from the church’s side. Mal pointed at a depression where the earth had been turned. “There used to be a well there, but it was filled in. See the clay? Same rusty color as what I found on the tracks near the body.”
Narrow tire treads crisscrossed the depression. Dirt bikes, maybe, from the width of the tracks.
“Good find,” Ethan said.
“It gets better.”
Mal trudged to the back of the ruined building, reached behind an ancient potbellied stove. His gloved hand emerged with a mustard-colored canvas backpack. Herschel brand, no name written on the cloth. The bag looked empty inside.
“Wanna bet this is Jane Doe’s?” Mal shook the bag. From one of the pockets came the jingle of coins. “She paid in cash for those drinks on the train, right? So this could be change from—damn, look at that.”
Turning the bag slightly, he held it up for Ethan to see. Along the side of the pocket was a swipe of dark red.
9
Hours were chewed up searching the rest of the churchyard, walking stooped across the grass, wading through muddy patches. They found no more tire tracks or items belonging to Jane Doe. Each time his foot caught, pain shot up the ankle. Ethan was almost hobbling by the time they concluded the search.
Back at the station, Brenda Lee Page made a point of meeting them at the door. She and Mal Keogh began speaking over each other, Brenda Lee asking why he thought he could disobey orders, Mal explaining that he was the only one who could have followed up that lead.
“No one else here knows jack about soil composition or forensic geology,” Mal said.
“But we do know something about chain of command.”
“I found the dead woman’s backpack,” Mal said, as if that meant the end of the discussion. “There’s blood on it, which means we have evidence, and we’re one step closer to finding out her name.”
“Laura Dill,” Brenda Lee said. “What do you think I was doing all morning? Sweeping?”
The former chief’s son didn’t answer that.
Laura Rae Dill had booked a round-trip ticket, Bellingham to Vancouver and back. She’d gone over the border two days before her murder. Laura was thirty-one years old, born in Whatcom County. Brenda Lee hadn’t found a current address for her, but Laura’s father Robert Dill lived at the Royal Coachman trailer park in Lynden, half an hour southeast of Blaine.
Brenda Lee had even found a photo of Laura, taken from an abandoned social media account. The woman resembled Jane Doe, though maybe ten years younger, hair longer and eyes hidden behind shades. Laura Dill flashed a peace sign at the camera.
“I’d have more if you’d actually done the job you were assigned,” Brenda Lee said.
“So sorry that I played a hunch,” Mal said. “Which totally paid off, in case you didn’t hear.”
“If you can’t do your job—”
“Thought the job was to solve this—”
“Good work, the both of you,” Ethan said, louder than normal to quell the dispute. “Finish up talking to the passengers and crew. I’ll pay a visit to the father.”
In his private office he unlaced the boot, chased an aspirin with cold coffee, and massaged his ankle. Not so bad. He’d tracked mud through the station, though. Clay, he corrected himself.
Brenda Lee Page and Mal Keogh had never been chummy, but they’d also never squabbled like that before. Maybe that was his doing in some way. A new boss and the first murder investigation in years: that was a lot of change for a small department to absorb. Each officer wanted to know where they stood.
He left the office to break the news to Robert Dill. An unpleasant task, but if there was a relative to notify, he’d spare them hearing the news from Brenda Lee Page. His senior officer was naturally blunt. Knowing this, she tended to lean to the other extreme. He’d once seen her sit with a woman for nearly an hour, after which the woman thought her missing cat had been located. “Actually it’s your father we found,” Brenda Lee had told the woman. “He’s in Lincoln Park. And he’s dead.” Better to do this himself.
Jay Swan was waiting for him outside the station. The Skyline’s lead reporter had a satchel of recording equipment slung across their chest.
“Lunch, remember, Chief?” Jay said. “We were going to record that podcast.”
It was the last thing on his mind. He liked Jay, and had watched them grow up, hiring them as a babysitter when he and Jazz needed a night out. Being a nonbinary person in a small town couldn’t be easy. Neither could being a journalist with an entire town to cover.
“Can we push it an hour?” he asked, heading to the truck. “I have an errand to run that takes priority.”
“I could ride with you, kill two birds?”
He was too hurried to think of a reason to say no.
* * *
“I’m going to call the episode Last of the Gunfighters,” Jay said. “How you’re a throwback to an Old West way of doing things, Wyatt Earp but in a contemporary milieu. What do you think, Chief?”
“I always liked Virgil Earp better. Seemed to have more of a conscience.”
“Do you see yourself in that way?”
“As having a conscience?”
“As a gunfighter.”
He shook his head. “I’ve never had to draw my service weapon.”
“But you served in the Marines. You saw action.”
Action wasn’t the word for it. He felt awkward, self-conscious, aware of being recorded. He tried to think of something clever to say while the truck merged onto I-5, heading south toward Lynden, where Robert Dill lived.
“That era you’re talking about,” he finally said. “Dodge City, the town tamers. Part of hiring those people was to get them on your side. Keep the bullets flying in the right direction.”
Jay made notes. “Do you think Chief Keogh had that in mind when he recommended you?”
“He and I both feel the point of carrying a weapon is not having to use it.”
“So why carry at all?”
Ethan shrugged. “Sometimes you have to use it.”
“Would it be fair to say the frontier mentality was part of your upbringing?”
“All my life.”
He was getting more and more uncomfortable. Not Jay’s fault as an interviewer, but the questions didn’t have straight-ahead explanations. Some were things he’d been puzzling over for decades. Any answer would seem pat.
“My father named me after Ethan Edwards,” he said. “The Searchers was his favorite film. Wayne and Ford. Seen it?”
“Don’t think so,” Jay said.
“Ethan Edwards is a Confederate renegade, a racist who’s so driven by hate he can’t be part of civilization. That made him a hero to my father.”
“An intense legacy,” Jay said. “He died when you were fifteen?”
Ethan nodded, only then realizing the mic wasn’t picking up his body language. “Yes. Every summer he’d make camp in someplace wild, where he’d never been. Alaska, the Sangre de Cristo mountains. I went with him a few summers when I was eleven, twelve.”
“His body was never recovered, is that right?”
Again he found himself nodding, not caring this time.
They’d fought, he and his father. Sometimes it felt they’d been fighting all their lives. Jack Brand assumed his son would go with him that last summer. In fact, he’d ordered Ethan to. Ethan was finished taking his orders. He’d gotten a forestry job instead. His mother backed his decision. As ornery and difficult as his father could be, the man wouldn’t balk Agnes Brand. So his father had gone alone, not telling them where.
Three weeks later, a pilot friend told his mother he’d dropped Jack Brand off at a lake in northern Saskatchewan. When the pilot came back on the prearranged day, he’d found the camp still standing, no one in sight. The first search party found nothing. The second, which Ethan and his mother had been part of, was led by two men from the Plains Cree who knew the area. Cutting for sign, the men found tracks, and a small section of raft floating in some reeds. The fresh-cut timber had been lashed together with rope that matched his father’s. Jack Brand had likely taken sick, built a raft to cross the lake for help, foundered, and went down to the bottom.
The lake was too deep to drag, and his mother didn’t have money to hire a diving team or sonar. As a burial place, Ethan thought his father would approve of the lake.
All he could say to the Skyline reporter was, “No, he was never found.”
* * *
Robert Dill’s home in Royal Coachman park was a double-wide trailer with an overhang and carport. The homes were arranged in a long row, on hard-packed dirt and amid sparse evergreens. Dill’s wash line was hung with faded bedsheets, despite the gathering clouds. A small Honda with a dented hood was parked out front.
Before he could ask Jay Swan to wait in the truck, the reporter said, “This is about the dead person found yesterday, right?”
Ethan nodded and pointed at the recorder. Jay switched it off with only a little reluctance.
“This is her father’s place,” he told the reporter. “I’d appreciate if you’d let me handle this alone. On the way back, I’ll tell you what I can.”
“Was she murdered?” Jay seemed stunned.
“Think up your questions,” he said.
Robert Dill answered the door, a round-shouldered man with a paunch and a jowled, careworn face. He reacted to Ethan’s uniform, to his solemn expression.
“Laura,” Robert Dill said, in a very small voice.
Ethan shifted a blanket off the couch and took a seat beside the father. He told the man simply that a body had been found, that it was possibly Laura, and an identification from the father would be a great help.
“But there’s a chance it’s not her, isn’t that right?”
“There’s a chance,” Ethan said.
Dill nodded. “Probably not her.”
Robert Dill’s wife had passed. The urn sat on top of the small refrigerator. He had a sister in Everett who could come with him for the identification when she finished work. It wasn’t a good idea to drive himself.
“Was Laura ever in an accident?” Ethan asked.
“She’s real cautious,” the father said. “She was in the passenger’s seat when her mama crashed. A truck took a corner of the PCH a little too fast, and sideswiped them. Suzie died instantly, but Laura only broke her leg. Ever since, she’s been wary of cars.”
Ethan nodded, thinking of the broken tibia on Jane Doe. “Does Laura have friends up in Canada?”
“I don’t know her friends.”
An only child, Laura had gone to school in Lynden, working at an outlet mall until she moved out at twenty-four. That was a year after the accident. The loss of her mother had been tough, and Laura had retreated from her friends, spending time on her own, staying out late and sometimes not coming home till the next day. When her father asked where she was, Laura hadn’t said. Neither of them wanted to argue. After a few more broken curfews, Laura packed and left.
From time to time she dropped in to see Robert, the last time around Christmas. Laura gave him the impression of living in Seattle, couch-surfing, waitressing or working retail. She seemed to be doing okay.
“I should have asked more questions,” Robert said. “I wanted to ask. I just, I dunno, couldn’t.”
“Did she seem desperate?”
“Never. Laura can look after herself. Always could.”
“Does your daughter carry a purse, bag, anything like that?”
“Pocketbook belonging to her mama. The leather’s all cracked to hell, but Laura sewed in a new lining.”
“Any other personal items?”
“Just her backpack.” Robert smiled. “She’s lived out of backpacks since high school. Most recent one was kind of a hazy yellow color.”
“Mustard yellow?”
“Could call it that. Why?”
Reading his answer in Ethan’s face, Robert Dill began to cry.
10
On the drive back, Ethan’s answers were terse, his mind preoccupied with the knowledge that Laura Dill had been murdered, and while he now had a name and a piece of her luggage, that was all he had. The department was still far from finding her killer.
As they pulled into the station parking lot, Jay Swan said, “I won’t include her name, Chief, but can you give me a quote for the story at least?”
“We’re doing what we can, as fast as we can.”
“No offense, but as a sound bite, that kind of stinks. How about I write that ‘The new chief assures us justice is winging its way to Blaine’?”
“Sure hope that’s true,” Ethan said.
* * *
In the department’s muster room, he assembled the officers assigned to the Laura Dill homicide. He’d been chief for a day and a half, he realized, but hadn’t yet been a leader. In charge, but not taking charge. Not yet.
Each officer ran down their part in the investigation. Brenda Lee hadn’t found any passenger who’d spoken with Laura Dill, though one remembered a woman with a yellow backpack in the dining car. The passenger couldn’t remember if she’d been alone or with someone.
A sample had been taken from the blood on the backpack and sent to the state toxicologist. The coins inside the pack amounted to thirty-eight cents. If the receipt for $69.62 they’d found beneath the body was from the dining car, the coins were exact change from seventy dollars cash.
The tire tracks had been preserved with plaster. With help from the forensics lab in Bellingham, the treads would hopefully be matched to a brand and model of dirt bike, if that was indeed what they were from.
Heck Ruiz had talked to the principal of Blaine High, and had names of two kids who’d broken windows in the gym. Shooter Kwon and Collin Rusk. “‘Smoke pit kids’ is how the principal described them,” Heck said. “Not bad but prone to mischief. Kwon is the instigator, Rusk is the one who takes it that little bit too far. They were both suspended last year.”
Ethan relayed the findings from the autopsy. He also made it clear that Brenda Lee was in charge of the investigation, and would coordinate their efforts. As he said this, he noticed Mal looking at his phone.
“In a couple of hours I’m meeting Laura’s father to make an ID,” Ethan said. “I’m going to tell him my best people are on this, and we will find who killed her. I’m going to promise him that. Priority number one for this office till that’s done.”
Overtime would be granted. Auxiliary officers and support staff were at their disposal. They could expect cooperation from other agencies, could come to him with any problems.
“Something else you all should know,” he said, deciding in the moment to share with the others. “I received a death threat yesterday.”
“How credible?” Mal asked.
“Not really sure I want to test that. Credible enough.”
He explained about the elk heart, looking at each of them. Mal nodded and thumbed his phone. Brenda Lee was lost in her work on Laura Dill’s timeline. Heck looked surprised, vaguely nauseous.
“Do you think it’s maybe connected?” Heck asked. “I mean, the same morning as the murder. Some messed up son of a gun could’ve done both.”
He’d considered it, but hadn’t drawn any conclusion. “There’s no evidence connecting them, but it’s one more person out there making our job harder. Say nothing about this, please, even to your spouses. Nothing about the investigation, either. If that’s understood, let’s get to it.”
* * *
At five o’clock Ethan stood behind Robert Dill and his sister Lorrie as Sandra Jacinto opened the curtain in the morgue’s observation room. The father wore a long wool coat, the kind with hook and loop fasteners instead of buttons. Beneath that a warmup jacket, and a Harley-Davidson T-shirt below that. He clutched an Irish flat cap in his hands, fingers working around the silk interior.
Lorrie Dill was taller and wider than her brother, wore jeans and a static gray cardigan. Each hand grasped one of her brother’s shoulders, as if to hold him up and keep him pointed in the right direction. She said nothing.
Sandra had covered Jane Doe’s body with a white sheet, wrapped the top of the head with a towel. No stitches visible. The face was a bluish tint, the expression slack. The eyes were open.
The Dills had already identified a picture of Laura taken before the autopsy. Robert had asked to see her. Ethan had tried to talk him out of it, but the father insisted. “We came all this way. Might as well be sure.”
Robert Dill stared at the face and shook his head. For a beat, Ethan thought not her, and felt a blast of relief. But then Lorrie Dill touched her brother’s arm, and Robert let out a sob.
“It’s,” he gasped for a breath. “Yes, it’s her.”
“You’re positive?” Ethan asked.
“Yes, sir.”
He nodded to Sandra through the window to cover the face. Lorrie wrapped her arms around the grieving father, tilting her own head up as if gravity would help hold back her tears.
* * *
In the break room of the station he sat down with the Dills, brought them juice from the vending machine, and made a pot of coffee nobody wanted. Robert Dill looked like a gate battered off its hinges. The father slumped in the chair, answered in a hoarse and lifeless tone. No, he didn’t know where his daughter was living. No, he wasn’t aware of any enemies she’d made.
Ethan learned a lot about Laura Dill’s life, though little that seemed helpful in solving her murder. Robert described her as smart, but an average student; ambitious, but not committed to any one thing. Not particularly secretive, but not someone who volunteered information about herself. They’d put distance between themselves, father and daughter, as a way to not feel the hurt of Laura’s mother’s absence.
Lorrie rubbed the back of her brother’s neck. She dabbed at his cheeks with a napkin when he teared up, and wiped his lower lip. Only when Ethan asked if Laura had a boyfriend did the dead woman’s aunt look away from her brother.
