Too Close To Home

She didn’t answer.

When I wasn’t shouting Tina’s name, the only sounds besides my breathing and the crunch of my footsteps were Possum’s panting, the tinkle of the bell on his collar and his steady movement through the brush. Overhead, the canopy of trees thickened, almost blocking the sky. Night wrapped itself around us like an isolating cocoon, heightening awareness and honing instincts. Ahead, the inky blackness was broken only by the erratic flash of fireflies that exploded, rather than flickered, with brightness. Behind us, humans waiting beneath electric lights became distant and unreal, irrelevant to the search.

Possum picked up the pace, moving steadily forward, detouring only for tree trunks and the thickest, most tangled patches of roses and raspberries. I struggled to keep up with him, knowing that calling him back or slowing him down risked breaking his concentration.

I ignored the thorns I couldn’t avoid, dodged low-hanging branches, skirted tree trunks and stepped over deeper shadows that marked narrow streams, twisted roots and fallen trees. Sometimes I used my flashlight, running it over the ground to judge the terrain ahead. Always, I paid for that indulgence with several minutes of night blindness, and I didn’t turn the light on often.

As I made my way through the forest, fragmented thoughts of Tina—fragmented bits of hope—floated to mind. Maybe we’ll find her easily. She’ll be tired and cranky and mosquito-bitten, but okay. She’ll be okay. Possum and I will take her back to her parents. To the parents who love her. Who would never harm her. She’ll be okay. We’ll find her, and we’ll go home. I’ll take a hot shower and have a cold beer. Possum can have a dog biscuit. Maybe two. If we find Tina. Alive.

Ten minutes later, Possum’s pace slowed.

He wavered, whined and stopped. He had lost the scent. A more experienced search dog, like Highball, would have known what to do next and done it. But Possum was still young and not always confident.

I hurried to his side and gave him a brief, encouraging pat, then checked him for signs of heat stress. Youth had its advantages—he was doing fine. Then I pulled Tina’s socks from my pocket. When I held the bag open for Possum, he sniffed the fabric again, lifted his head, put his nose in the air, and wandered in an erratic little circle. He whined again, definitely frustrated.

I oriented my body slightly to the left and pointed.

“Go on,” I said. “Find Tina.”

Possum followed my direction. I counted ten, slowly. When nothing about the dog’s movement hinted that he’d rediscovered Tina’s trail, I called him back. Then I turned to the right and sent him off that way.

Still nothing.

I moved forward several yards and we repeated the process. Left, then right. On each sweep, I sent Possum farther away from me. After that, he needed no direction and followed the ever-expanding pattern on his own. The night was still and humid—bad search conditions for any air-scenting dog. And although he was fit, Possum’s heavy coat made him susceptible to the heat. If he didn’t pick up the trail soon…

Patience, I told myself. Patience.

Minutes later, Possum rediscovered a wisp of Tina’s scent. His ears pricked, his tail wagged and his pace suddenly became faster and more deliberate. He continued through the woods with me at his heels.

Between the darkness and the terrain, it was difficult to know how far we had gone. I knew where I was, generally. Knew that I could turn around and find my way back to the Fishers’ house. But, at the moment, the physical landmarks that were so clearly marked on Chad’s map had little to do with the reality of the forest.

Possum’s collar disappeared. And didn’t reappear.

I could still hear his bell, so I assumed he was simply blocked from my view. I hurried forward, not considering what I wasn’t hearing—the sounds of his movement through the brush.

A spider’s web, strung between two trees at shoulder level, probably saved my life. I walked into it. And somehow noticed that, rather than trailing back over my neck and chin, the strands tickled my cheeks and nose, driven by the slightest stirring of upward-moving air. I stopped in my tracks, heart pounding from a sudden rush of adrenaline, my body sensing danger before my conscious mind registered it.

I switched on my flashlight and, with hands trembling from reaction, aimed it two strides forward. And down. A long way down. Maybe forty or fifty feet. I’d nearly stepped off a soil-covered outcrop of crumbling limestone, nearly tumbled to the stream bed below. Now that I was standing still, I could hear moving water.

The seeping groundwater that fed the stream had carved deep scars into the ravine’s limestone walls. Horizontal fissures marked places where softer rock had been washed away between layers of less porous stone. Soil had collected on the exposed ledges, creating islands of ferns and a network of slippery, narrow paths. In some places, water-weakened towers of limestone had sheered away from the walls, taking mature trees down with them. Everywhere, shattered trunks and branches were wedged across the ravine, creating a crisscross pattern of rotting and overgrown bridges.

I told myself that Tina had not fallen into the ravine. I told myself that Chad was right—that my instincts were good—and that no human monster had abused and then discarded her over the edge.

Possum’s bell jingled in the distance, and my flashlight beam made his collar glow. He had entered the ravine south of where I stood and was moving back in my direction, moving steadily along a ledge that would eventually put him six feet below me.

Just a few steps away from me was a tree that leaned precariously over the ravine. An old cottonwood whose trunk was probably seven feet around. There was a ragged hole in the trunk, partially obscured by vines, that narrowed to a point at the height of an adult’s waist. The wider opening at the base was just large enough that it might look inviting to a child seeking shelter. I got down on all fours and bent my elbows to peer inside the dark scar, hoping to find Tina curled up asleep. Safe. And discovered that eroding soil, crumbling limestone and twisted roots had created a natural chute inside the rotting trunk. A chute that would send a body downward…

I wrenched my light away from the interior, aimed it over the nearby precipice. A tapering curtain of long, thick tendrils hung directly beneath the old tree, the longest of them trailing down to the narrow ledge below.

Impossible to see what those roots might be hiding.

“Tina!” I called urgently.

The slightest echo of my own voice answered me.

She might be lying there unconscious. Or sleeping. She might not be there at all.

The slope beside the tree was steep but not absolutely vertical.

I checked the ledge carefully for signs of her as I considered my strategy. I could walk along the ravine’s edge until I found a place where I could climb down more easily. That would take time and I risked losing sight of Possum, but I’d probably not fall and break my bones. Or I could climb down right here, using the strongest of the tree roots to slow my descent.

I put one hand on the cottonwood for balance and leaned way out into the darkness. Four feet below the first ledge was another jutting outcropping that was at least double the width of the one immediately beneath me. If I could make it down to the first ledge, it was an easy jump to the next one. If I slipped and tumbled past the first ledge, the second one would be my safety net, though reaching it that abruptly was not part of my plan.

And from there? I asked myself. Too easy to imagine me sitting, stranded and broken-limbed, suddenly needing rescue myself. Embarrassing and certainly not helpful to Tina. Especially if she wasn’t even down there.

Air currents in and around ravines are complex, I reminded myself. It was impossible to know if the scent Possum was following was actually directly below me. Or upwind. Or maybe, though unlikely, drifting from the opposite side of the ravine. Common sense overcame urgency, and I decided to spend a few extra minutes searching for a safer way down. I played the light around my feet, taking one last, close look at the terrain before turning off my flashlight.

That’s when I saw the shoe print.

It was tiny, rounded at the toe and angled into the soft earth between two thick roots. The words Stride Rite were lightly embossed into the soil.

That changed everything. Now I knew, without doubt, that Tina had been here. Standing. Walking. Impossible to know if she’d been accompanied or alone, but at the moment she’d stepped next to the tree, Tina had been alive.

And in the next moment? I asked myself. I grasped for hope, for some thought that didn’t involve Tina climbing inside the tree and then tumbling down into the darkness. Or being pushed…

But Possum was intent on working his way down into the ravine.

Trust your dog. That was a fundamental rule of canine search-and-rescue work.

I radioed Chad, told him what I’d found and where I was going, and asked him to head my way. Now.

I spent another minute calling out for Tina and listening. Cicadas shrilled. Mosquitoes buzzed. Frogs trilled. But besides the sound of my own breathing, I heard nothing human. So I climbed down into the ravine. With my belly pressed against the crumbling edge, I controlled my descent by wrapping one hand around one of the thicker exposed roots, then digging the fingers of my free hand and the toes of my boots into the limestone wall. My passage triggered a miniature avalanche of pebbles and soil that poured down on my feet when I landed on the narrow ledge.

It was a sloppy descent—unsafe, poorly planned and scary. But it got me where I needed to be. I shook the loose soil away from my boots, brushed the worst of it from my face and the front of my shirt, and retrieved my flashlight. Then, turning my back on the twisted mass of tree roots, I looked toward Possum.

Instead of rushing to greet me as I expected, he stopped just out of reach. He cowered, tucked his tail between his legs, turned his head and one shoulder away from me and whined.

He wasn’t reacting to me.

Only one thing triggered that posture in a search dog. Possum hadn’t been trained as a cadaver dog, but if death had laid its distinctive scent nearby, he would pick up that less familiar but still human smell and understand at some level what it meant.

I understood exactly what it meant.

My first thought was: Oh, dear Lord! The child is dead.

Then I caught myself. This was no time for the handler to fall apart. I pushed aside my feelings, ignored the painful tightening in my gut. I pressed my eyes shut as I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. When I opened my eyes again, my emotions were back under control. I could do what needed to be done.

Certainly, recovering Tina’s body was urgent. But now, comforting my dog was more important than that. It was up to me to make sure that he was rewarded for finding a victim, living or dead. So I went down on one knee and called Possum closer. I took his big head in my hands, put my cheek against his soft, warm muzzle and ruffled his shaggy fur.

“You’re a good boy,” I murmured. “A very good dog. You found her.”

Then I lifted my head and dug in my pouch for Possum’s favorite treat—bits of crisp, thick-sliced bacon. Almost absentmindedly, I fed him tiny pieces as I considered how air currents might move in and along a ravine. Upward, certainly. But eddies of air would form on each ledge, creating pools of scent that might not have originated there. When Possum reacted, there’d been nothing visible between him and me but bare soil and a few maidenhead ferns growing from tiny cracks in the limestone wall. So unless he had sensed particles of flesh or bone or drops of blood that were invisible to me—something that was possible but unlikely in this circumstance—the body was probably below us.

Before moving again, I took careful note of exactly where Possum and I stood and what we were disturbing. If this was a crime scene, our very presence was destroying forensic evidence, our every movement overlaying traces left by a killer with traces of our own. My priority was to find Tina, to recover her body. But after that, I wanted justice. More, I wanted the child’s death avenged. Which meant that I needed a crime scene that was as intact as I could leave it.

Possum finished up the last of the bacon.

I wiped my greasy fingers on my jeans, ran the back of my shirtsleeve across my eyes, then stood and played the flashlight’s beam along the ledge just below us. Visually, I divided it into grids, carefully checking each square. I saw nothing unusual. But below that barren outcropping, detail disappeared. Whole sections of the ravine were hidden by foliage and fallen trees. If Tina’s body was down there somewhere, there was only one way to find out.

But first, there was an area of the ledge we were on that had to be searched more thoroughly. Just in case. I poured Possum a dish of water, noticed that his tail was moving again, and knew that he would be okay. Then I turned, concentrating the flashlight’s beam on the cascade of roots obscuring the limestone wall.

Behind me, Possum moved.

In some detached part of my mind, I felt his nose press briefly against the back of my thigh, heard him jump down to the ledge below. But most of my attention was on a bedraggled toy bear caught among the first layer of roots. Mint-green with a white belly and an embroidered pink smile. Tina’s teddy bear, Maxi. One of Maxi’s fuzzy arms was nearly torn away and his single yellow eye reflected the light.

I knelt, squatted back on my heels and angled my body forward so that I could look into the dark cave beneath the tree without disturbing anything. My flashlight’s beam was broken and diffused, so I peered in closely, trying to penetrate the veil of roots and soil.

I saw a body.

Headless.

A tangle of trailing roots wove together a spine, rib cage and pelvis, holding them almost upright. On the ground beside the pelvis were the double bones of a forearm with a skeletal hand and a few finger bones still attached. Nearby, half buried by soil and debris, my flashlight’s beam revealed a cheekbone, a dark eye socket and the rounded dome of a fleshless skull. A creeping vine grew like a shock of curly hair through a jagged hole in the forehead.

Tears of relief blurred the grisly scene in front of me.

Not Tina. Thank God, not Tina.

An adult, long dead.

Then my stomach twisted at a sudden and uninvited notion. These bones were Missy Porter, come back to haunt me.

Angrily, I pushed aside the preposterous thought.

Don’t be stupid, I told myself. Though she was long dead, too, Missy’s body hadn’t been concealed within the cocoon of an ancient cottonwood. She would never be embraced by warm, dry earth. Her remains were entombed in steel, hidden where water tupelo and bald cypress sank roots deep into still, oily water. A place where black vultures, frogs and water moccasins were the only witnesses to human secrets.

I knew that because I’d put her there.

Possum barked and barked again.

A child cried out, and the sound was one of surprise rather than pain.

“Go ’way!”

The voice was slurred with sleep.

Yanking my thoughts away from remembered horror and my flashlight’s beam away from newly discovered horror, I directed the light over the edge of the ledge. Below me, all I could see of Possum was his enthusiastically wagging tail. The rest of his body was hidden by the overhang I was on.

“Stop dat!”

A child’s voice.

“Tina?” I called, and then louder, “Tina!”

“I want my mommy!” she said.

I climbed down to the next ledge with more haste than care. And found her.

She was sitting tucked back into a shallow cave that was little more than a depression in the limestone wall, yelling at Possum, pummeling my dog with tiny fists and sneaker-clad feet. Possum had stretched out beside the child, trapping her against the ravine wall. The more Tina struggled and flailed, the more Possum was determined to care for her, mostly by licking her face.

I called Possum to me, ruffled his fur, patted his head, told him he was a fabulous, wonderful, marvelous dog. His body wiggled with such enthusiasm that I briefly feared he might send us both toppling over the edge.

After a few moments, I pointed at a spot a few feet from the child.

“Now sit,” I said, “and stay.”

Tina added to the command sequence.

“Berry bad dog,” she wailed. “Berry, berry bad.”

I knelt beside her and pulled the teddy bear from my belt.

“Oh, no. Possum’s a good dog. Aren’t you, Possum? See, he found Maxi for you.”

Tina quieted immediately as she grabbed the teddy bear. She hugged the poor, torn thing to her chest and covered its grubby head with kisses.

Chapter 3

There was nothing to do but wait.

Too hazardous by far to carry Tina out, risking the narrow ledge that Possum had followed down into the ravine. Foolish and probably impossible to climb back the way I’d climbed down. Chad, I knew, was already on his way. And I admitted to myself that that was a comforting thought.

I looked at the luminous numbers on my watch, saw that Possum and I had been in the woods for just under two hours. Chad and his people, using my markers to find their way, would probably only take half that long to reach us. Though the nighttime temperature was probably still in the mid-eighties, the face of the ravine and the limestone outcropping were damp and cold. So I settled Tina onto my lap and wrapped my shirt around her. Possum curled in beside me and I was grateful for the additional warmth.

As I checked Tina for injuries, we chatted about teddy bears and big trees and missing bedtime and adventures in the woods. By the time I’d determined that Tina’s tumble down to the ledge had miraculously cost her nothing but a few scrapes and bruises, I’d learned most of what I needed to know. Maxi, it seemed, had gotten hungry, so he and Tina had gone into the woods looking for a honey tree. Just like in Winnie the Pooh. It had gotten dark. They’d walked and walked. And then they’d fallen down. Now Tina and Maxi were really, really hungry.

There was no honey for her that night, but the granola bar and lime-flavored sports drink I shared with Tina seemed to do the trick. We offered Maxi and Possum crumbs, which Possum ate with tail-wagging enthusiasm. Tina announced that her teddy bear judged the snack yummy. Then, with Maxi wrapped in her arms, she fell asleep.

I was tired, physically and mentally tired. But I stayed awake anyway, irrationally alert to the presence of predatory spiders on the ledge where we sat. More rationally intent on protecting Tina and listening for the sounds of approaching rescuers. When I heard them, I would aim my flashlight’s beam into the sky to mark our exact location.

In the meantime, I waited.

Time passed slowly in the dark. I held Tina, embracing her warm, soft weight and listening to her breathing. And though it seemed inappropriate to think anything but bright and beautiful thoughts with a successfully rescued child in my arms, my mind quickly drifted to the dark, dirty business of the skeletal remains on the ledge just above me.

“Did you walk into the woods with your murderer?” I murmured under my breath.

Possible, I thought, but it didn’t seem reasonable for a murderer to lure or force a potential victim very far from a road or a trail. Why travel all the way to the ridge when the forest offered adequate, plentiful and more convenient places?

I considered another scenario.

“Were you killed somewhere else, then carried here?”

I shook my head, immediately dismissing the idea. A body is awkward and heavy to carry. My mind veered away from the reason I knew that, and I focused on the idea that no one carries that kind of weight any farther than they have to.

Killing someone in this place made no sense, I told myself. Unless the murderer had chosen the particular spot, the particular tree, for reasons that only a disturbed mind could fathom. But after nearly a year in law enforcement, I had great faith in the human impulse to do things the easy way.

Then it hit me. The ridge simply wasn’t as inconvenient as it seemed. Unless you were searching for a lost child, there was no reason to approach it from the Fishers’ backyard, to crash through the underbrush or walk along deer paths that were easy only for a child as small as Tina to follow. It was an indication of how exhausted I was that I hadn’t immediately considered that the murderer could approach the ridge from other directions.

I shifted slightly, settled Tina more comfortably into my lap, then pressed my eyes shut, picturing the map that Chad had laid out on the Fisher’s front porch. I thought about it, working to recall each of the roads and formal trails that crisscrossed the area. Then I visualized the route Possum and I had followed and estimated the distance we’d traveled.

Camp Cadiz, I realized, was actually much closer to us than to the Fishers’ house. Park a vehicle at Camp Cadiz, walk into the forest along the well-marked River-to-River Trail and cross the footbridge that spanned the ravine. After that, I figured the spot where Tina and I waited was no more than a quarter of a mile along the ravine from the bridge.

At gunpoint, a living victim could be forced to walk to this very place. And, if one was strong and determined enough, a body could be carried from the parking lot at Camp Cadiz to the place where I’d found the bones.

The campground—the most primitive of all the campgrounds in the Shawnee National Forest—was remote and only occasionally used by backpackers making the days-long river-to-river trek between the Ohio and the Mississippi. It was the kind of place where a murder could easily go unwitnessed.

I’d visited Camp Cadiz. Once. Eight years earlier. And I hadn’t been hiking. I’d been driving Gran, Katie and the woman we had just rescued to the safety of the Cherokee Rose. The detour to Camp Cadiz had been brief and unexpected, but the events of that night had seared the campground’s layout into my memory.

I cuddled Tina closer—comfort for her, comfort for me—as I remembered.

Gran had to pee.

Like many such urges, it presented itself at a most inconvenient moment. We were about thirty minutes away from Maryville. And that, as Gran was fond of saying, put us exactly at the hind end of nowhere. Certainly, we were an uncomfortably long way from the nearest public restroom.

The road, lit only by the headlights of the boxy, blue passenger van I drove, cut through a densely wooded and virtually unpopulated section of the Shawnee National Forest. As we slowed to round curves, our lights skimmed undergrowth that, from the van, looked impenetrable. Given Gran’s poor night vision and the city suit she was wearing, it probably was.

Gran was as outdoorsy as I was. Lean and athletic, she was an amateur naturalist who had spent most of her life exploring the forest, hiking alone for hours. But no matter that she’d willingly spend hours in a bog or scramble up a rocky slope in search of a medicinal plant or climb high into the branches of a tree to glimpse some endangered species, Gran wasn’t the kind of person who would relieve herself in public. And—no matter how unlikely it was that anyone would see her—she considered the side of the road as definitely public.

I mulled over the problem, but before I could come up with an alternative, Gran offered one.

“The turnoff for Camp Cadiz should be close,” she said.

We’d gone less than a quarter of a mile when I spotted the small, reflective green sign pointing the way to Camp Cadiz with white letters. A quick turn down a gravel road and we were there.

Seven decades earlier, when F.D.R. had been president and long before southern Illinois bothered itself with concerns about tourism, Camp Cadiz had been a Civilian Conservation Corps camp. The shadowy remains of half a dozen old barracks still dotted the campground. River-stone foundations and clumps of trees and brush provided privacy between a dozen primitive campsites. Along the camp’s perimeter, thick foliage joined with the night to create a wall of darkness beneath a starry sky.