Secrets to the Grave

67

The place where Gina Kemmer had been found, dragged from the brink of death by a German shepherd dog, was situated in a scrubby, rocky no-man’s-land between several properties, among them Zander Zahn’s home, Marissa Fordham’s home, and the Bordain ranch. The spot was back off the fire road Zander Zahn had taken nearly every day over the hills to begin his morning with his free-spirited friend, Marissa, and her daughter.

There was nothing quiet or secluded about the area now as daylight was fading. The fire road was clogged with vehicles from the sheriff’s office. Portable lights had been set up to focus on the spot where Gina had been found by Search and Rescue, and ran farther back off the road to what had at one time been a group of ranch buildings, now long abandoned and reduced to little more than sticks.

“We followed the drag marks back here,” Tom Scott said loudly to be heard above the three helicopters circling the area—one from the SO, and two up from a television stations in Los Angeles. “It looks to me like she crawled out of this old well. Whoever shot her dumped her down there and left her for dead. That’s some hell of a will she’s got, getting herself out of there.”

Mendez and Hicks both added the beams of their Maglites to the hole in the ground. The well was no more than five or six feet across and probably twenty feet or so down to the most horrific, stinking pile of garbage Mendez had caught a whiff of in a while.

“Jesus,” he said. “If the fall doesn’t kill you, the smell will.”

“People have been throwing their garbage down this hole for years,” Scott said. “Probably half the people in this valley do it. There’s nothing to stop anyone coming up here. Kids from town party out here too. There’s a lot of beer cans around. Shit, I used to come up here when I was in high school.”

He shined his light into the well and specifically on the rusty bent lengths of rebar cemented into the wall one above the other as a crude ladder. “I’ll bet she caught her foot on one of these rungs on her way down. That’s how she snapped that ankle like a toothpick.”

“There’s things moving down there,” Mendez said.

“It’s a friggin’ rat smorgasbord down there,” Scott said. “The rats get down in there through burrows or tunnels in the earth and come into the well where the old concrete has fallen away. God knows what all’s down there. Rats, mice, snakes, scorpions.”

“God knows, but we’re going to have to find out,” Hicks said. “Are you sure she was down in there?”

“I can’t swear to it, but that’s what it looked like to me. And by the way that girl smelled—she was down in there for a while.”

“She’s been missing since Wednesday afternoon,” Mendez said.

The big man was impressed. “Wow. If this gal pulls through after all that, I’ve got to meet her. She must be something.”

Funny, Mendez thought, he wouldn’t have said so, having met Gina Kemmer. He would have pegged her for the more timid of the two friends. You never knew how people would handle adversity until push came to shove.

Hicks went over to snag one of the crime-scene team to send him down the hole.

“You couldn’t pay me to go down there,” Scott said.

Mendez laughed. “With those shoulders, you wouldn’t fit, man.”

“Good! I got no truck with mice. Mice come at me, seriously, man, I’ll scream like a little girl.”

“It takes a big man to admit that, Tom.”

The CSI came with Hicks, protesting. “Are you fucking kidding me, man? You want me to go down there?”

“You’re a crime-scene investigator,” Hicks said. “There’s a crime scene.”

“I don’t get paid enough for this.”

“You’ve got to take that up with the county commissioners,” Mendez told him. “In the meantime, I want to know if there’s any evidence down there.”

“Watch out for the mice!” Tom Scott called down after him as the investigator made his descent.

“Fuck you!”

The Search and Rescue leader laughed, then stood back and looked around, sobering.

“Seriously, man, this would be a lonely place to die.”

Zahn’s place was maybe a quarter mile or more over one hill. Marissa Fordham’s house probably half a mile to the south. The Bordain ranch was even farther away to the north and west. Nobody would hear you scream up here. No one would hear your cries for help coming up out of the well. There was nothing up here but rabbits, coyotes, and rattlesnakes.

It wasn’t hard to figure why someone had brought Gina Kemmer up here to kill her.

He turned again to Tom Scott. “You didn’t find any sign of our missing math genius?”

Scott shook his head. “Nope. Nada.”

It was hard to picture Zander Zahn shooting someone. But it was even harder to picture him stabbing someone, and he had certainly done that. Where the hell had he gone?

But anybody living out in this area could have known about this spot. Anybody who hiked these hills. Anybody who might have taken a long walk with Marissa Fordham.

“You guys owe me big time,” the evidence tech said, making his way back up the ladder with a big brown paper evidence bag hooked over one arm.

“Whatcha got there, Petey?” Hicks asked.

“Black clothes with what looks to me like dried blood. Looks like they were drenched in it.”

Scott pulled him up the rest of the way out of the hole like he was a toy and set him on firm ground. He opened the bag and Hicks reached in and pulled out a large black sweatshirt that was rumpled and stiff. They all shined their lights on it.

“Drenched in it,” Mendez said. “Somebody took a fucking blood bath.”

And odds were good the blood that someone had bathed in was Marissa Fordham’s.

“Gentlemen,” he said. “We’ve finally got ourselves some evidence.”