It was all about timing.
Chapter Twenty-three
Miller’s Marsh Pond, outside of Cherrystone
The thought of a decomposing body is enough to make the skin crawl on the living. But decomp is always the natural outcome of a death. A stealthy decomp is the killer’s hope for lifelong freedom. Maybe even life itself.
A grave, not the proverbial shallow one, is always the best course of action. Bury the corpse deep enough in a remote location, scatter debris over the surface in a haphazard manner, and hope that no one stumbles upon it. That’s been a successful path for all of the murderers no one has ever heard about.
Dismemberment works well, too. Chop up the corpse in the bathtub, disperse the bits and pieces as convenience allows, and keep fingers crossed.
The killer of the woman in the water had done a mental pros-and-cons chart and decided that while enhancing the convenience of disposal, dismemberment was too messy a course of action. Blood spatter from a power saw almost always goes in a place that escapes detection by the killer with a scrub brush. Luminol with its eerie blue glow is a chemical finger that points right at the killer.
When a human body is surreptitiously dumped in the water, it becomes food for fish, turtles, and the other scavengers of the dead. If the body doesn’t get consumed, gases swell in the tissues and fill the cavities, distending the organs. Enough time in the water turns a dead person into a balloon, bringing it to the surface for discovery by a boater or in the nets of an unlucky fisherman.
Dead bodies and water don’t mix.
In Florida, a body can be consumed by alligators in a sunny afternoon. In the open sea of the Pacific, sharks dine on the fleshy morsels of what had once been a human being with the kind of glee that brings to mind the phrase feeding frenzy. In particularly pure and deep waters like Washington State’s Lake Crescent, bodies have been found preserved decades after they’d been hidden there.
That wasn’t going to happen with the body that he’d dumped that flat, moonless night. That body wasn’t going to be eaten, weighed down, or preserved at the depths.
The weather warmed and for a short time, the snow turned to rain. Mandy was about to make her return.
Chapter Twenty-four
Jack Fletcher had left his youngest son’s tackle box in the trunk. All bundled in heavy coats, hats, and gloves, Jack and his kids had made it halfway down the path toward Miller’s Marsh Pond. There, ice fishing was the order of the afternoon in the days after Christmas. Damn, the weather had likely ruined this year’s outing. A seesawing patch of weather had brought a thaw and then another hard freeze—it was an unusual occurrence that the big-city weatherman liked to call “Pineapple Express” to indicate that the genesis of the storm had come from Hawaii. It meant a lot of rain on the western part of the state and snow on the eastern region, including Cherrystone. This season, the Pineapple Express blew through with a hot breath that drove temps up to 55 degrees for forty-eight hours.
And now it was back down below freezing. New snow was coming that evening and winter was headed back with a vengeance.
“Watch the boys, Stacy,” Jack told his daughter, a fittingly sullen girl of fourteen. “I’m going back to the car to get Brandon’s tackle.”
“You always leave the boys with me,” she said. “You ought to pay me, Dad. I’m the live-in sitter around here.”
Jack pretended not to hear her rant about watching her younger brothers, Brandon and Kevin. He’d thought of asking Stacy to get the tackle back at the car, but he knew she’d complain about that, too.
“You use me like a slave, Dad!”
The Fletchers had packed up early that morning for their annual post-Christmas fishing trip, just to the west of Cherrystone. It was Dad’s time with the kids. His ex-wife, Sherry, had a new beau and between the holidays the pair headed off for a vacation in Hawaii. Jack was Mr. Mom just then and he didn’t mind it one bit. He knew that cold weather would come back in a flash and that day might be the very last one before rain, snow, and bundle-up weather. Jack had black curly hair he fluffed up to camouflage a receding hairline. He had a stocking cap, leaving his curls as fringe.
He made his way down the path toward the car. Only one other car was parked in the lot, indicating to him that the place would pretty much be all theirs that day. He smiled. Jack Fletcher’s silver Prius gleamed in the winter sun, screaming out loud to the world that he loved the earth.
He pressed the trunk key into the lock, and it popped open. He stared into the blackness below and his heart sank.
“What the?”
He moved a blanket, just in case. But it was obvious. The box was gone. He’d left it at home on the kitchen counter.
“This is the kind of day I’m having,” he said, closing the lid. “Stacy’s going to blame me for this.”
As he slammed down the trunk, he heard a scream.
“Dad!”
It was Stacy’s voice. He turned around and looked for his daughter.
“Dad! Come here quick!”
Jack squinted into the sun, the light blinding him with the shimmer of gold off the icy surface of the water.
Something was wrong.
“Stacy! Kevin! Brandon!” He called out. “I’m coming.” He started running to the spot where he left his children, but they weren’t there. Instead, about fifty yards away, he saw them huddled at the edge. The sun wrapped them in a halo of light.
Were all three there?
“What is it? Brandon? Kevin?”
“We’re fine, Dad,” Stacy said, her voice breaking, as she turned around to face her father. “Oh, Dad!” She lunged for him, and he gladly held her. At that instant Stacy was no longer a flippant teenager. In the time it took for her father to go to the car, she was once more a little girl. A scared little girl.
“What is it, honey?” he asked.
She started to cry and pointed to a spot about ten yards from shore.
Partially cemented in the cracking ice among the degraded greenery of a winter-dead patch of aquatic plants was the swollen figure of a child, a teenager. It appeared she’d been wrapped in a dark blue blanket, maybe a sleeping bag. She was facedown in the water, her hair swirling like a halo on the re-frozen surface. Her ice-sheathed skin looked waxy and white. He didn’t like what he was seeing, but Jack craned his neck to get a closer view.
No, it wasn’t a child, but a woman. He could see a wristwatch and wedding band.
The boys just stood there, their eyes fastened on the corpse.
“Want me to poke her with a stick?” It was Kevin, the eight-year-old, whose mother once caught him eating canned dog food off the broken end of a hula hoop—with his older brother, Brandon, urging him on.
“I’ll get a stick for you,” Brandon said.
Pinpricks of sweat beaded on Jack’s brow. He gently pulled his kids away.
“No stick. Let’s go back to the car,” he said. “I need to call the sheriff.”
It was almost dark when Emily Kenyon and Jason Howard, along with two patrol officers, arrived at Miller’s Marsh Pond.