Troy Forester’s house was an unimpressive Craftsman, painted a sun-weary green with white trim that was cracked and peeling in places. A white picket fence with a few broken boards that teetered on loose nails surrounded the front yard, which was mostly made up of dead grass and weeds. From his experience, what you saw on the outside of a house was usually what you saw on the inside; Conch imagined an interior that was dirty and unkempt. The nicest thing on the property was the black Chevy Camaro in the driveway, the newer model, not as good as any of the classics that Conch had tooled around in as a teenager, but not bad either.
There was a gate next to the car that led to the front porch. Unlatching it, Conch made note of the many bags of newspapers and magazines piled on the porch. Recyclables, no doubt. That or Troy was a hoarder.
Two thin white pillars stood on either side of the red brick steps that led up to the front door. Ascending them, Conch noticed that the neighboring homes were mostly vacant. Of the two on either side of Mr. Forester’s home, one was shuttered with a “For Sale” sign out front and the other had no cars in the driveway. This side of town had been the hardest hit by the recession. Many of the homes that weren’t for sale were in foreclosure.
The only other person around was a woman playing with her kids, about six houses down and across the street. He’d driven past her on the way here and noticed how seriously she seemed to take note of his patrol car. No wave or smile was offered, just a wary glance. In this neighborhood, it was not entirely impossible that as she played with the kids in the front yard there was a fresh batch of meth cooking inside on the kitchen stove. Conch imagined that even when everyone was home here, this was a street where people kept to themselves and minded their own business.
He was just lingering on this thought when the screen door of Forester’s house creaked open a bit. No one was there; it was just a loose hinge. Beyond was the front door, painted what was once dark green, but that now had the worn look of the rest of the house.
Conch opened the screen door and knocked on the front door three times.
Shades and closed blinds shielded the inside of the home from view, so Conch couldn’t see if there was any movement inside the house. He waited a minute or so before knocking again, louder this time. Forester’s boss said he had called out sick today. It was possible that he was just sleeping. After another minute, Conch disposed of the pleasantries and banged on the door with the heel of his hand, loudly, five or six times.
Still nothing.
Conch looked up Forester’s home phone number in the employment file and dialed. Inside a phone rang, on very low volume, eight times.
No answering machine picked up, no voice mail kicked in. Conch looked back to the file: There was no cell number listed.
Odd, for this day and age.
Conch tried again, this time letting the phone inside ring a dozen times before he hung up again.
It was possible that Mr. Forester had gotten a ride from someone to the doctor and left his car behind. Or maybe he’d ditched work for the day with a buddy. Conch’s gut said no to both ideas though.
So, Conch thought, why don’t you want to answer, Mr. Forester?
There were only two innocent explanations left: he was in a NyQuil-induced coma, unable to hear the phone or door, or he was out back doing something, maybe working in the garage.
As Conch turned to go down the steps, he looked out over his town. It was a quiet, dull day, like almost all of them here were. An army of thin clouds had scooted in from the west and were cast like egg whites against the sky, and a breeze was picking up. Perhaps a storm was coming in. If so, gray clouds would be coming next. And rain. “God’s way of crying,” his mother always used to say.
It was the breeze that carried him the odd sound of a squeal of some kind. Like a child in pain. At first Conch thought it was one of the kids from the meth-head house down the street, but the sound had come from the opposite direction, to his left, not his right.
At his age it was entirely possible that his ears were playing tricks on him. He glanced down the street at the woman. She had the kids in a small huddle and they were playing with a blanket, bouncing plastic balls in the middle of it in some sort of game. The kids were laughing, and Conch had just convinced himself that the squeal had indeed come from one of them when he heard it a second time.
Still very faint, but this time more like a scream than a squeal.
From somewhere behind Troy Forester’s house.
Damn.
He unsnapped the trigger guard on his holster and made his way back to the driveway. Beyond the car, near the end of the driveway, there was a chain link fence covered with green tennis mesh. To the left of the chain link was a brick wall that he could use to get over if he had—
A third sound came from behind the house, he was closer to it now and this time there was no mistaking it: someone was screaming.
His patrol car was at the curb. He could radio for backup, but Kendall was a half-hour away, at best, with Parker. Volunteer deputies didn’t carry radios and the call sheet for them was back at the office anyway.
He took two steps towards his patrol car, intent on fetching his shotgun and at least trying to put out a radio call, when a chorus of screams broke out from behind him, still faint, but louder and more desperate.
There was no time to go back to the car.
Pulling out his 9 mm, he advanced down the driveway. He pulled out his cell phone, too, and tried calling Kendall that way. Twice. It went straight to voice mail both times. Of course—they were in the canyons. What was it that Forester’s boss had said, that they couldn’t reach Forester the day he’d gone missing because there was no cell reception up there?
Shit. Shit. Shit.
He cursed through the entire process of his advance: down the driveway, up the side of the brick wall and over the chain link fence, proud of himself that he still had the chops to do it, but then almost dropping his gun on the other side.
Stupid, weak old man!
The sounds, closer now, were more distinct: females, two of them, yelling at the top of their lungs, from inside the garage.
The door into the garage was on the left side, ajar. The screams were leaking out from beyond it.
Okay. Okay. Stay calm.
If he’s not in there, what about the back door of the house?
Conch spun to his right. The back door was closed, but he still kept one eye on it as he moved closer to the garage.
It was the next round of screams that told Conch that Forester was in the garage with them. Only one girl was screaming now, as if she were in imminent danger.
You’ve got to stop him somehow. Flush him out.
“Beaury Sheriff’s Department. Come out now!”
The screaming stopped for a second, and so did the breeze, and the sliding clouds in the sky, and what seemed like time itself. Then…
“Help us! Help! Pleeease! Heeelp!”
Whoever she was, Conch’s heart broke for her. She was crying out with the desperate wail of a terrified child.
Advancing three more steps to the side door of the garage, he leveled his weapon at the entrance. “I say again… this is the County Sheriff’s Department. Come out now.”
His own voice embarrassed him; it sounded like it was tinged with fear.
The screams continued, and no one came out.
Conch realized that he was going to have to go in.
God help him, he had no choice.
Parker shielded his eyes against the sun and sat in the passenger seat, one eye on the Google Maps app on his phone, the other on the road ahead. Kendall was driving like a local, speeding through the curves of the mountain road to the spot that Sheriff Conch had asked them to check out.
The afternoon was waning, but they’d lost a little time earlier at the Clark Residence. Mrs. Clark was dead. Breast cancer, the year before. Mr. Clark had answered the door in a dirty t-shirt and shorts, with a beer in one hand and a half-smoked cigarette in the other, looking very much like a man with a dead wife and a missing daughter.
He was drunk and their badges seemed to agitate him. “I blame all you motherfuckers, how’s about that?” he slurred, wobbling briefly in the doorway before he wisely chose to lean against the doorframe.
Kendall tried to head the situation off. “Mr. Clark, we’re sorry for your loss—”
“Sorrrrry? Bullshit! You’re out here to cover yer asses for some reason.”
“Sir—”
“Had you guys just done your”—he paused to partially ball up his fist, the cigarette sticking up at them like a smoking finger—“your damn jobs and found my baby girl, my little Amber, then Jenny would still be here too, I know it.”
Parker tried next. “Look, Mr. Clark, we’re trying to see if we can garner any information to help find—”
“Don’t! Don’t you even say it.” His voice cracked. “We called and called that first month. You sons a’bitches and all your ideas. She ran away, my ass! My little girl would never do that.”
“Sir, I’m—”
“Sure. She was caught up with those hood rats some. They got her to do crack once. But only once. She told me so. She loved her momma and me. She’d never run away. No matter what. I told you bastards that!”
Kendall sighed and pushed on. “Well, we’re here now to—”
“Don’t say it, you rat bastard.” Then Mr. Clark flicked his cigarette past them, brought his hand to his face and completely lost it. “You come to tell me you found her body, right?”
“What? Sir, no, I—”
“You did, didn’t you? You found my baby’s body.” And he broke down in the doorway with a few heavy sobs before taking a vengeful pull on the beer can and glaring at them.
Kendall seemed stunned, so Parker took over. “Absolutely not.”
Mr. Clark teetered a bit, and then looked warily at Parker. It was the gift of a drunken mind to swing from utter sorrow to complete glee in mere seconds. Mr. Clark’s face brightened, and he gave a smile full of crooked teeth. “Oh my God. Did you find her, then? Is she okay?”
“No, sir. I’m sorry. We haven’t. We just have some questions.”
Mr. Clark’s face briefly morphed into a mask completely absent of emotion, and then it came, a scowl so full of disgust and hate that it was almost flung from him. “Questions? Screw the both of ya. Get outta here!” he screamed, banging the doorjamb with his free hand. “And don’t you come back until you find my baby girl!”
With that he stepped back and slammed the door in their faces.
Parker looked at Kendall and raised his eyebrows. “Well. That was interesting.”
“I half-expected him to swing at us,” Kendall uttered as they walked back to the car.
Parker looked over his shoulder twice as they made their way. “Well. We ain’t outta here yet. He’s drunk as shit, and if he’s got a gun in there…”
“I hear ya,” Kendall said with a nod.
They backed out of the dirt driveway of the Clark property and both let loose a mutual sigh of relief when they drove down the road.
That had been nearly forty minutes ago, and according to Parker’s phone, the spot Conch had asked them to check out was now only 1.3 miles away. The mountains around them had long slopes in some places, and steep climbs and dips in others. The phone was holding the satellite signal, but barely. It had blinked off once already and reset. If it did again they might lose it all together, and then they’d be screwed. The cell phone bars were down to 1X, a symbol Parker hadn’t seen on his phone in years.
“We getting close?” Kendall asked.
“Yep. Right around this curve up here, then a bit off to the right.”
The mountains were checkered with desert brush and foliage, green trees in spots giving way to brown and dying bushes and grass. It was a parched place mostly, but enough moisture made its way here to keep the heartier trees and plants alive.
As they turned the bend Parker saw that there was a very small turnoff up ahead, on the right. He wondered, but not for long: the turnoff matched up perfectly with where the phone told them to stop.
“Right here, Kendall.”
As they got out of the car the hot air of the day greeted them.
Before them was a deep ravine covered in heavy brush, most of it lush and full. It was the greenest, densest place they’d seen on the entire drive up.
“Well?” Kendall asked while stretching out his arms and back.
“Odd place for him to take a lunch break,” Parker replied.
“Yeah. For all we know he had a hooker and was getting a hummer on company time.”
“Long way to drive for a blow job,” Parker chuckled.
“Yeah. And no hooker I ever met is going to go to a place this isolated anyways.”
Parker nodded. “True story.”
“What now?”
Hands on his hips, Parker took a moment to think, then replied, “Well. Why don’t you make your way down the road and look around a bit. I’ll go the opposite way and do the same.”
Kendall wasted no time in starting off down the hill.
After fifteen minutes of digging around dirt piles and staring into bushes, Parker was about to consider some sort of Plan B when he saw it: a fingernail, tiny and painted pink, completely out of place in all the gravel and brown pebbles that it was lying in.
He froze. “Kendall!”
It took a second for the reply to come. “Yeah?”
“You might wanna come up here!”
Parker crouched for a closer look at the fingernail. It was a little dusty but still bright, almost shiny in the sunlight. After a minute or so he heard Kendall’s shoes crunching in the dirt behind him.
“What ya got?” Kendall asked.
Parker pointed at the fingernail. “Odd, don’t you think? I mean. There’s nothing else around here. No trash, no beer bottles, no discarded oilcans. Not even a straw wrapper.”
Kendall nodded. “Coincidence?”
Parker smiled ironically, remembering Napoleon.
They stood and both looked down into the ravine at the same time. Nothing was visible through the thick canopy of trees and overgrowth below, and some of the trees grew sideways off the surrounding mountain walls, giving the area almost a double layer of density.
“You got any rope in the car?”
Kendall nodded. “About two hundred and fitfy foot, emergency grade cord, in case of search and rescue or what not.”
“Well, I’d say this merits a search.”
“Down there? Shit, Parker. That’s a steep drop. I don’t know if I can—”
“You won’t have to. You can hold the line from up here.”
“And you?”
“I made rappels like this all the time in the army, in Afghanistan. I’ll be fine.”
“You sure?”
“Yep. Your rope should get me a good ways down there.”
Kendall secured the rope on the guardrail next to the turnoff as Parker loosened his shirt and tied himself in. A few minutes later he was over the side and on his way down, his hamstrings yelping in protest at not having been used like this in a long time. Some of the outcroppings of rock were slippery, with firmer sections then giving way to patches of shale-like areas before Parker hit a section about seventy-five feet down that was all boulders and dirt. He was just above the tree canopy, and down here the heat was worse, mixing with the smell of ragweed and the dust he’d kicked up, creating a funky atmosphere. Looking up, he saw Kendall’s head peering over at him from the road. He shot him a thumbs up and Kendall gave a wave.
Kicking off from the rock face, Parker decided to expedite things and take longer drops, fifteen feet or so at a clip, mindful to feel for the stop knot he’d tied before he began the descent. After three drops of this length he split through the canopy at last.
The smell of dead flesh, rotting and sickly sweet, struck him immediately. There was no denying this smell. He’d dealt with it many times during the war, and encountering it now almost caused him to have another flashback. He slammed his mouth shut, bit into the sides of his cheeks and tried his best to hold his breath, because he knew the smell would get into his nostrils, and even the pores of his tongue, and stay there for days if he didn’t.
Below the canopy it was much darker, and it took a moment or two for his eyes to adjust.
When they finally did, he wished they hadn’t.
The bodies were everywhere, scattered about, upside down, lying sideways, doubled over in sickly back twists, arms and legs akimbo, dozens of them, more, all in various states of decomposition, their skins like hides, distorted by the heat.
“Oh my God!” Parker shouted.
He had no idea the level of horror he had in his voice until Kendall screamed with desperation from the roadside above. “Parker! Are you okay?”
Parker closed his eyes. The smell was bad, but the dead faces, the dead eyes staring up at him, were too much. The worst of it was that there were plenty of skeletons too, with their gaping jaws and vacant, hollow eye sockets.
Skeletons? My God. How long has this been going on?
Knowing that he had a job to do, Parker forced his eyes open and looked around. His jaw trembled with mounting horror as he counted them, first by twos, and then fives, then by tens. He cracked sixty as his eyes panned around the ravine, and then he saw a flash of blue jeans.
He stopped counting.
Blue jeans, white Chargers jersey, blond hair on a fully rotted head.
It was Amber Clark.
Parker thought of her father, just hours earlier, pulling that deep swig of his beer. And don’t you come back until you find my baby girl!
It was all he could take. “Kendall! Pull me up! Now! Do it, Kendall! Get me out of here!”
The rope went taut immediately and Parker felt momentarily ashamed for screaming out like that, but this wasn’t war and these weren’t enemy combatants. Down in that ravine was a ghastly gathering of young women, snuffed out, beauty buried without even the decency of a grave, left to the exposed air and wildlife, discarded like trash.
His face said it all, and it seemed to be reflected in Kendall’s, who was looking at him with a mixture of concern and horror all his own as he finally pulled Parker back up to the drop point. “What the hell is it, Parker?”
His mouth was parched dry with shock, but Parker managed to say it: “Bodies.”
“What?”
“Bodies, Kendall. Lots.”
“Jesus.”
“The delivery guy. He’s our guy.”
Kendall stood straight up like a bolt and dug furiously into his pants pocket. Producing his cell phone he cursed while Parker rose weakly to his feet.
“Shit. Work, you piece of shit!” Kendall screamed at the phone.
“What is it?” Parker asked.
“The Sheriff.”
“What about him?”
“When he and I talked earlier?”
“Yeah?”
Kendall looked at Parker, “He was going to check out this guy’s house.”