Once Buried

She whirled around at the sound of the voice.

Her spirits brightened at what she saw.

Chapter Six

Chief Belt stepped toward the man who was approaching.

He said, “Mister, this area is closed. Couldn’t you see the barrier?”

“It’s OK,” Riley said. “This is Special Agent Bill Jeffreys. He’s with us.”

Riley hurried over to Bill and led him just far enough away so that they wouldn’t be heard by the others.

“What happened?” she said. “Why didn’t you answer my messages?”

Bill smiled sheepishly.

“I was just being an idiot. I…” His voice faded and he looked away.

Riley waited for his reply.

Then he finally said, “When I got your texts, I just didn’t know whether I was ready. I called Meredith for details, but I still didn’t know if I was ready. Hell, I didn’t know if I was ready when I started driving down here. I didn’t know if I was ready until just now when I saw…”

He pointed to the body.

He added, “Now I know. I’m ready to get back to work. Count me in.”

His voice was firm and his expression looked like he really meant it. Riley breathed a huge sigh of relief.

She led Bill back over to the officials clustered around the body in the hole. She introduced him to the chief and the medical examiner.

Jenn already knew Bill and she looked glad to see him, which pleased Riley. The last thing Riley needed was for Jenn to feel marginalized or resentful.

Riley and the others told Bill what little they knew so far. He listened with a look of keen interest.

Finally Bill said to the ME, “I think it’s OK to take away the body now. That is, if it’s OK with Agent Paige.”

“It’s fine with me,” Riley agreed. She was happy that Bill seemed like his old self now and eager to assert some authority.

As the ME’s team began to extract the body from the hole, Bill surveyed the area for a moment.

He asked Riley, “Have you checked out the site of the earlier murder?”

“Not yet,” she replied.

“Then we should do that,” he said.

Riley said to Chief Belt, “Let’s go have a look at your other crime scene.”

The chief agreed. “It’s a couple of miles into the nature preserve,” he added.

They all managed to push past the reporters again without commenting. Riley, Bill, and Jenn got into the FBI SUV, and Chief Belt and the ME took another car. The chief led them away from the beach, along a sandy road into a wooded area. When the road ended, they parked their cars. Riley and her colleagues followed the two officials on foot along a trail leading through the trees.

The chief kept the group to one side of the trail, pointing to some distinct footprints here in the firmer soil.

“Just your everyday sneakers,” Bill commented.

Riley nodded. She could see those prints going in both directions. But she felt sure they wouldn’t offer much information except for the killer’s shoe size.

However, some interesting marks were interspersed with the footprints. Two wobbly lines were dug into the soil.

“What do you make of these lines?” Riley asked Bill.

“Tracks from a wheelbarrow, coming and going,” Bill said. He glanced back over his shoulder toward the road and added, “My guess is the killer parked about where we’re parked now and brought his tools along this path.”

“That’s what we figured too,” Belt agreed. “And he left again this way.”

Soon they came to a spot where their path intersected a narrower one. In the middle of the smaller path was a long, deep hole. It was about the width of the path itself.

Chief Belt pointed to where the new path emerged from the surrounding trees. “The other victim seems to have come jogging along from that direction,” he said. “The hole was camouflaged, and she fell into it.”

Terzis added, “Her ankle was badly broken, probably from the fall. So she was helpless when the killer started piling dirt back in on her.”

Riley shuddered again at the thought of that kind of horrible death.

Jenn said, “And all this happened yesterday.”

Terzis nodded and said, “I’m pretty sure the time of death was identical to the murder on the beach – probably around six o’clock in the morning.”

“Before the actual sunrise,” Belt added. “It would have been quite dim. A jogger who came along here after dawn saw how the dirt had been disturbed and called us.”

While Jenn started taking more photos, Riley scanned the area. Her eyes fell on some flattened brush that had been crisscrossed by the wheelbarrow tracks. She could see where the killer had piled up dirt about fifteen feet away from the trail. The trees were fairly thick beside these pathways, so a runner wouldn’t have seen either the killer or the dirt as she’d come running in this direction.

Now the hole had been re-excavated by the police, who had piled the dirt right next to it.

Riley remembered that Meredith had mentioned this victim’s name back at Quantico, but she couldn’t recall it at the moment.

She said to Chief Belt, “I take it you were able to identify the victim.”

“That’s right,” Belt said. “She still had plenty of ID on her, just like Todd Brier did. Her name was Courtney Wallace. She lived in Sattler, but I didn’t know her personally. So I can’t tell you anything much about her just yet, except she was young, probably in her early twenties.”

Riley knelt down beside the hole and looked inside. Right away, she could see exactly how the killer had set his trap. At the bottom of the hole was a heavy, loosely woven blanket of erosion cloth, with leaves and debris tangled up in it. It had been spread out over the hole, unnoticeable to an unwary jogger, especially in the dim, pre-dawn light.

She made a mental note to call in a BAU forensics team to go over both of these sites. Maybe they could trace the origin of the erosion cloth.

Meanwhile, Riley was getting just a trace of the same sensation she’d had at the beach, of slipping into the killer’s mind. The feeling wasn’t nearly as vivid this time. But she could imagine him perched right where she was kneeling now, looking down at his helpless prey.

So what was he doing in those moments before he began to bury her alive?