Gone Missing (Kate Burkholder 4)

taps out a rapid tattoo as we approach the water’s edge. Vaguely, I’m aware of the flicker of lightning overhead and the patter of rain against the canopy above. Tomasetti stops where the ground breaks off and shines the beam downward. The dead are never pretty, but water does particularly gruesome things to a corpse. I come up beside Tomasetti and my eyes follow the cone of light.
    I see the glossy surface of the muddy bank, the spongy moss covering the rocks, and the spindly black veins of roots. My gaze stops on the gauzy fabric flowing in the current like the gossamer fin of some exotic fish. I see the white flesh of a woman’s calf, a slightly bent knee, a waxy thigh. Lower, the foot is swallowed by the murky depths below. She’s clothed, perhaps in a dress, but the current has pushed the skirt up to her hips, exposing plain cotton panties—the kind a young Amish woman might wear.
    She’s faceup; her left arm is twisted at an awkward angle and tangled in the roots. My eyes are drawn to the pallid face. Her mouth is open, as if in a scream, and full of water and leaves. A cut gapes on her lower lip. Her eyes are partially open, but the irises are colorless and cloudy.
    “Fuck me,” Tomasetti mutters.
    Looking at the body, watching her long hair ebb and flow with the current is surreal. Neither of us moves or speaks. The tempo of the rain increases, but I barely notice. I don’t feel the wet or the cold. I can’t stop looking at the dead girl, and I wonder how her life came to this terrible end so long before her time.
    I pull myself back to reality. When I speak, my voice is level and calm. “How long do you think she’s been there?”
    “She’s intact. No deterioration that I can see.”
    I wait for him to elaborate, but he doesn’t. “No visible wounds,” I say, thinking about the blood we found on the road that afternoon.
    “Still wearing her underclothes.”
    But we both know it’s no guarantee that a sexual assault wasn’t committed. Perpetrators have been known to re-dress their victims. “No makeup or jewelry. Nails are unpainted. Tomasetti, that dress is an Amish print.”
    “Goddamn it.”
    I look upstream, toward the bridge, but it’s too dark to see anything. “You think someone dumped her here? Or at the bridge?”
    He shines the beam on the ground, illuminating several footprints, ours and a waffle stamp that may or may not be Foster’s. But there are no broken branches. No crushed grass. No blood. “No obvious sign of a struggle,” he growls. “We’re going to need to get tread imprints from Foster’s shoes.”
    He trains the beam on the steep bank directly below us, then shines it across the surface of the water. The creek is about twenty-five feet wide. It looks deep, but I can hear the gurgle of a shallow bottleneck a few yards downstream. “He could have dumped her upstream. Current carried her down.”
    “Or stopped on the bridge and threw her over,” I say.
    “Shit.” Pulling out his phone, Tomasetti calls Goddard and asks him to cordon off the bridge. “Tire-tread impressions are a long shot,” he says as he snaps his phone closed.
    “We might get lucky.”
    Neither of us believes that. It’s extremely difficult to extract meaningful evidence from an outdoor scene that’s spread over a large area, especially if it’s been left unprotected or trampled. Or rained on.
    For several minutes, we stand there, using our flashlights, getting a sense of the scene. I wish for a camera, but we’re going to have to hoof it back to the Tahoe to get it. I make a mental note of the time and memorize as much as I can—the location and position of the body, the slant of the tree, the erosion of the bank, the profusion of roots at the water’s edge, the victim’s clothes. But I know it’s her face that will stay with me.
    “We need to go back, get the camera, and a generator and lights,” Tomasetti says after a moment.
    “I hate leaving her like that.” I know it’s a stupid comment; we can’t move the victim until the scene has been documented. But I hate the idea of leaving her in the water, where it’s murky and cold and her flesh is at the mercy of the aquatic creatures whose domain has been invaded.
    Abruptly, Tomasetti jerks the beam from the body, clicks off the flashlight, and stalks away. Surprised, I glance over at him. In the gray light seeping down from the canopy, I see him set his hand against a tree and lean against it, close his eyes. And I