The young detective shook his head in admiration. Drummond’s legend was real, and the evidence was so clear once you heard him explain it.
“You want me to call in a full forensics team?” Johnson asked.
“I think that would be a very good idea.”
Chapter
27
Starksville, North Carolina
The woods across the street from the church were thick with mosquitoes and biting flies that swarmed around me and Bree as we made the hike into the old quarry. Though it was muggy and hot, we were glad we’d taken Naomi’s advice and put on long pants and long-sleeved shirts and doused ourselves with bug repellent.
We each carried a knapsack, and between the two we had several water bottles, a measuring tape, a camera, zip-lock bags, files with pictures of the crime scene, police diagrams, and copies of the notes Detectives Frost and Carmichael had taken when Rashawn Turnbull’s body was found.
The overgrown trail wound through stands of stinging nettles and brush choked with kudzu. There was no wind. The air was oppressively humid, and the whine of insects was enough to drive us crazy by the time we crossed the stream. The path followed the waterway through a shaded, man-made gap in the limestone wall, ten, maybe fifteen feet wide and forty feet high. The creek spilled over its banks passing through the gap, making a large section of the ground mossy and slippery, and we had to support each other until we were out the other side and into the sunbaked quarry.
Bree looked back through the gap. “The killer supposedly brought Rashawn through there, but I can’t see him dragging the boy in.”
I nodded. “He’d have fallen. They both would have fallen.”
“Any notes about that moss and slime in there being torn up?”
“Not that I saw. Then again, it rained late that night. Hard.”
“It wouldn’t matter,” Bree insisted. “I don’t think Rashawn was dragged in. He went along, which means he knew his killer.”
The police thought so too. It was in the indictment.
“I’ll buy it,” I said. “What else?”
Bree smiled. “I’ll let you know when I see it.”
We moved closer to the stack of rock slabs, stopped where we had perspective. I got out the crime scene photographs, glanced at the sky for strength, and then divorced myself from being a father, a husband, a human being. It’s the only way I can get beyond the things I have to witness and do my job.
But when I saw the first picture, a shudder went through me. The small, almost naked body lay facedown, straddling the top stone, wrists bound behind his back with a canvas belt. The arms appeared dislocated. His jeans were bunched around his right ankle, and jagged bone stuck out of the skin of the lower left leg. The head was so battered and swollen it was unrecognizable as a boy’s.
“God help me,” Bree said, and she looked away. “Who does something like this to a poor little guy like that?”
“Someone with a lot of pent-up rage,” I said, looking toward the stack of rocks.
“Which the prosecution says was Stefan’s reaction to Rashawn rejecting him,” Bree said.
“I don’t buy that,” I said. “This level of viciousness suggests pathological hatred or sadistic insanity, not a fit of revenge.”
We stood there forty feet from the stack and forced ourselves to go through the photographs. They ran the gamut from close-ups of various pieces of evidence in the order they were discovered to a dozen photos of Rashawn’s brutalized body, including his sawed neck.
In the pictures, the surface of the slab around Rashawn was pale pink, blood diluted by rain. It had spilled down over the other slabs and run out in fingers onto the stone floor. Seven feet from the stack, the blood disappeared into a debris field of baseball- to football-size chunks of limestone that ended at the creek forty-two feet away.
Rashawn’s sneakers, torn Duke Blue Devils T-shirt, and underwear were all found within a twenty-five-foot radius of the stack. So was the prosecution’s most damning piece of evidence. A photo showed a white card smeared with mud tilted down between chunks of limestone thirteen feet due east of the body; in the next photograph, the same item had been turned faceup, revealing a bloodied Starksville School District ID with a picture of my cousin Stefan Tate.
Chapter
28
In our conversation at the jail the day before, Stefan had told me that the last time he distinctly remembered having the ID was three days before the killing. He said that while coaching a tenth-grade gym class outside, he’d stuck it in the pocket of a windbreaker that he’d then placed on a bleacher. He forgot he’d put the ID in there until the next day. When he looked, he couldn’t find it.
His fiancée, Patty Converse, had been teaching a class at the same time in the same area, so as many as sixty kids had been in the vicinity of the windbreaker and the ID card. The only identifiable fingerprints on the ID, however, belonged to Stefan, who had failed to report the card missing.
My cousin’s fingerprints were also on a plastic sandwich bag found in the quarry seventeen feet east of the ID. The sandwich bag was rolled and sealed inside a larger zip-lock bag. That same sandwich bag contained drugs packaged for sale in cellophane wrappers: six grams of black-tar heroin, three grams of cocaine, and nine grams of crushed crystal methamphetamine.
My cousin had no explanation for the prints on the bag; he speculated that someone could have gone into his trash at school and retrieved a bag he’d discarded after lunch one day.
It was entirely possible but a flimsy defense. The preponderance of the evidence said Stefan was there that night.
“Let’s get closer and recheck everything,” I said. “Position of evidence, measurements, photographic angle, anything we can think of.”
“A lot can change in two months, Alex,” Bree said doubtfully as we walked up to the stack of rocks where Rashawn Turnbull had been tortured and killed. “There’s nothing here that looks remotely like blood. In fact, it’s almost like it’s been scrubbed.”
I could see what she was talking about. There were swirls and shallow gouges on the surface of the top slab and down the side, as if someone had scoured the area with an abrasive cleanser and a steel brush. Looking around, I wondered what else might have been sanitized after the police had gathered their evidence.
To further confuse things, the area was littered with broken beer and whiskey bottles, shotgun shells and .22 rifle casings, fast-food wrappers, broken plastic utensils, and several empty cans of Mountain Dew.
“All this stuff was tossed here after Rashawn’s death?” Bree asked.
I shrugged. “We’ll have to compare the photographs to what’s there now.”
“But they didn’t photograph every inch beyond the twenty-five-foot perimeter, did they?”
“Not from the looks of it,” I said. “We’ll have to do the best we can with what we’ve been given.”
I started checking measurements and comparing the pictures to the current situation. The crime scene diagrams showed the entrance gap as sixty-six and a half feet from the stack. I used a small laser range finder and noted it was closer to seventy. That was unimportant in itself, but it suggested that the rest of the forensics work might have been shoddy too.
I used the range finder again to tell me where the ID card and drugs had been found. Compared with the photographic evidence, those locations were also off by a foot or more. And many of the rocks had been overturned or moved slightly from the positions shown in the pictures.
Still, I noted the trend line created by the rock stack, the ID, and the drugs. The position of the three suggested someone leaving the stack and heading due east, toward the creek. This jibed with the police theory that the killer had escaped over the rocks, gone into the water, and then waded out of the quarry.
I continued along the trend line, noting by the pictures that no stone in the twenty-four feet between the drugs and the water had been left unturned. According to the file, police had found no more evidence along
the route, but I went all the way to the creek anyway.
Rock-bottomed and algae-bloomed, the stream was no more than eight inches deep and sixteen inches wide. It ran lazily from my left to my right into and under the bramble of brush I’d seen from the lookout earlier that morning.
I got down into the water and walked in the stream, seeing how the willows overhung it. If things hadn’t changed considerably in the past months, a man would have had to crawl through there. A woman too.
Why do that? Why use the stream at all? It’s the dead of night. Why not just go out the way you came in?
I supposed someone could argue that Stefan would seek the water to keep his trail scent-free. But it had been raining when the killer left. And what had caused the fleeing murderer to drop the ID and the drugs? A pocket torn during the struggle?
I crouched to peer through the limbs and vines and saw where the creek broke free forty feet on, close by the gap in the quarry wall. On the banks, caught up in the roots, there was plenty of trash: beer cans, a plastic milk jug that looked like it had taken a shotgun blast, and a length of faded orange twine twisted through the roots like a game of cat’s cradle.
Toward the far end was what looked like a rusted bike handlebar, and—
Behind me, near Bree, a bullet ricocheted off stone a split second before I heard the distant muzzle blast of a high-powered rifle.
Chapter
29
I threw myself back and down into the stream, digging for my gun and screaming, “Bree!”
I heard the second round slap limestone before the report, and then she yelled, “I’m okay, Alex! Shooter on the northeast rim, left of the overlook!”
My backup pistol in hand, I raised my head, found the forested northeast rim, and caught something glinting in the trees a second before the third shot. This one was aimed at me.
The bullet blew up a small rock four feet in front of my position, throwing stone and grit in my face before I could duck.
Bree opened up with her nine-millimeter, three quick shots and then two more, all Hail Marys at better than two hundred yards. But the counterattack seemed to make the sniper think better of continuing to shoot at us.
For almost a minute, there was nothing. I put my face in the water, eyes open to wash them out. I raised my head and blinked before hearing the sound of an engine starting and rubber tires spitting gravel.
I stood, looked up blurrily, and saw a white flash as the shooter went past.
“Was that an Impala?” I yelled.
“Couldn’t tell!” Bree shouted back. “You okay?”
“Better than I might have been,” I said, blinking and wiping at my eyes until I could see reasonably well.
Bree was standing on the opposite side of the rock pile, scanning the rim in case there were others waiting to shoot.
“Where’d the first two rounds hit?” I asked when I reached her side.
“First shot, he had me exposed from the waist up and hit there,” she said, pointing to a fresh chip in the limestone four feet to her right. Then she pointed to a second chip on the surface of the top slab, eighteen inches in front of her. “I’d already dropped behind the stack when that one hit.”
I shaded my eyes with my hand, peered toward the spot where I’d seen the glint of the sun on a rifle scope. “Has to be better than two hundred and fifty yards,” I said. “But there’s no wind.”
“What are you saying?”
“The guy who shot Sydney Fox was an experienced rifleman at close range,” I said. “If this was the same guy, he’s military-trained or a practiced hunter, so with the right kind of rest, he should have hit us easily.”
Bree said, “Or maybe he’s a local hunter who’s good in thick cover around here, a quick shooter who falls to pieces at long distances.”
“Or the sight was off,” I said. “Or he intentionally missed us.”
“To scare us?”
“And let us know we’re being watched, and probably followed.”
Bree looked around, said, “I feel like a sitting duck out here.”
I did too, and I couldn’t shake the sensation. We decided to leave, call the sheriff’s office, and figure out where the shooter had been. But I went through the slippery gap in the wall feeling like there might be other things to be found in that quarry. I vowed to return the next day.
Once I had cell service, I called the only cop I’d met since arriving in Starksville who seemed more than merely competent. Detective Pedelini answered on the second ring. I told him what had happened. Pedelini said he was no more than twenty minutes away and would meet us at the lookout.
“Do not go into those woods without me,” Pedelini said.
We didn’t. He rolled up in an unmarked white Jeep Cherokee five minutes after we did. We walked him through it, pointing to the positions we’d been in when the shooting started and giving him our rough estimate of where the sniper had been.
Pedelini nodded, said, “Do not get ahead of me.”
The detective started hacking his way through kudzu with a machete he’d gotten from a box in the rear of the Cherokee. From our angle, the sniper had appeared to be very close to the rim, but we soon discovered that six or seven feet back from the edge, the ground turned too steep for anyone to walk on safely.
Pedelini stopped where the footing was treacherous, and we all had to hold on to trees for support.
“Here’s your shooter,” he said, pointing with the machete to scuff marks in the leaves. “There’s the legs of his bipod biting in.”
I stepped up, saw the two holes in the duff, and showed Bree where ferns had been matted down. “He was sitting, feet propped against those tree roots, and on a steady rest.”
Pedelini listened to our theories as to why a good shot on a steady rest would have missed us out there in the open, and he said all of them were reasonable but none conclusive. We searched the area and found no empty cartridges, meaning that the shooter had taken the time to clean up, which suggested he was smart and nothing more.
Pedelini led us out of the woods. We were all drenched in sweat, and we climbed into the detective’s air-conditioned car.
“What were y’all doing down there?” Pedelini asked.
“Due diligence,” I said. “I like to walk crime scenes if I can.”
“Find anything?”
“Some of the measurements on the diagrams are off,” I said.
The detective looked disgusted. “Measurements. That’s Frost and Carmichael’s work. Any other flaws?”
He said this with no defensiveness in his voice, as if he were merely looking for pointers from more experienced investigators.
Bree said, “Looks like someone’s been into that rock pile and scoured the slabs with a steel brush and an abrasive cleanser.”
Pedelini looked pained. “Cece Turnbull did that ’bout six weeks after Rashawn died. She’d heard that some of the local kids had been going out to see where her boy had been raped and killed. Like a fucking shrine. Can you imagine?”
Pedelini’s cheek twitched and his jaw drifted left of center before he said, “Anyway, Cece had gone back to drinking and drugging by then, and she flipped. She brought in a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and some meth and went at that slab with a barbecue brush and graffiti remover. I found the poor thing down there the next morning, stone drunk and weeping.”
Chapter
30
Pedelini had us follow him down to the sheriff’s office to make a statement. By the time we got there, it was past three that Saturday afternoon, and the uniformed officers were changing shifts.
The detective showed us into the detectives’ bullpen and pointed us to chairs near his desk, which featured a recent picture of him in a tricked-out bass boat, grinning and fishing with two darling little girls.
“Your daughters?” Bree asked.
The detective smiled, said, “Two of the joys of my life.”
“They’re beautiful,” I said. “When did your wife pass a
way?”
My wife frowned at me, but Pedelini cocked his head, said, “How did you know?”
“The way you were rubbing the ring finger of your left hand just then. I used to catch myself doing it after my first wife died.”
Pedelini looked down at his hand, said, “Remind me not to play poker with you, Dr. Cross. My Ellen died seven years ago this September. Childbirth.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Detective,” I said. “That’s rough.”
“I appreciate that,” Pedelini said. “I really do. But the girls and my job keep me going. Can I get you something to drink? Coffee? Tea? Coca-Cola? Mr. Pibb?”
“I’ll take a coffee,” Bree said. “Cream, no sugar.”
“A Mr. Pibb,” I said. “Haven’t had one of those in years.”
“I’m partial to them myself,” Pedelini said, and he disappeared down a hallway.
“I like him,” my wife said.
“I do too,” I said. “He’s solid.”
A female deputy came into the room carrying an armful of files and mail that she distributed to the various desks. When she got to Pedelini’s, she said, “Guy here?”
“Getting us something to drink,” Bree said.
She nodded, put several dusty old files on his desk, said, “Tell him these came over from the clerk. He’s been asking after them.”
“We’ll do that,” I promised, and the deputy moved on.
I had a crick in my lower back suddenly, and I stood to stretch. When I did, I happened to look down at the files; I saw the faded labels on the tabs, and felt my head retreat by several degrees.
The label of the file on top read Cross, Christina.
The one below it read Cross, Jason.
I picked up the file on my mother and was about to flip it open when Bree said in alarm, “Alex, you can’t just start going—”