The Virgin of Small Plains

Chapter Sixteen

“Because I say so.”

At 11:30 that morning in his office in the sheriff’s department in downtown Small Plains, Rex gave two of his deputies an exasperated look that did not even begin to hint at the indigestion they were giving him. Unfortunately, when they heard him say that, instead of taking him seriously, they both laughed at him.

So did his other visitor, the fourth person in the room.

“Yeah, right, Dad,” the male half of the deputies scoffed.

“And go to our rooms?” chimed in his female counterpart, with a grin.

“You tell him,” Abby said, egging them on.

That earned her a darkly repressive glance from her old friend and their boss. This is all your fault, his expression said. And, of course, it was. She had driven here straight from her father’s house and solely to encourage Rex to reopen the Virgin’s homicide case, having decided to keep moving while the impulse was still strong in her, and while the holiday gave her time on a Monday that she didn’t usually have.

By happy chance, she had run into a couple of eager deputies in the hallway outside his office and promptly enlisted them in the cause.

Abby knew them both, having gone to high school with one of them and having sold a lot of garden supplies to the other. The female deputy and gardener was Edyth Flournoy, thirty years old, only the fourth woman ever to serve in the sheriff’s department of Muncie County. The male deputy was John Marvel, a ten-year-veteran whose last name provoked eternal ribbing from the good guys and the bad guys alike. Now he leaned forward, looking as eager and excited as a rookie cop, instead of the jaded thirty-three-year-old he really was. “Listen, boss, when’s the last time we even had a homicide to investigate? Seventeen years ago, when she was killed, that’s when! And there wasn’t another murder for five years before that, and it got solved. We can’t leave this one homicide hanging over our department!”

“Hell, no,” Flournoy weighed in. “It makes us look bad.”

“How come it didn’t make us look bad until now?” their sheriff asked.

But they all knew that that was merely a rhetorical question.

“Think of how many new technologies have been invented since the Virgin was killed,” Flournoy said.

“Dozens, probably,” Abby chimed in, helpfully.

“Don’t call her the Virgin,” Rex griped.

“Why not?” Deputy Flournoy shot back at him. “Everybody else does. If we call her Jane Doe, nobody will know who we’re talking about.”

“They’ll know.”

“But listen,” Flournoy persisted. “There’s so much we could do now that your dad couldn’t do back then. We could use CODIS, we could try AFIS…”

“What’s Codis?” Abby asked her.

“Combined DNA Indexing System,” Deputy Flournoy said, rather proudly. “And AFIS stands for Automated Fingerprint Identification System.”

“Uh huh,” Rex interrupted, “and do any of you happen to have the two thousand bucks we’ll need for a DNA comparison with the DNA of missing people?”

“I might,” Abby offered.

“Oh, shut up,” he snapped at her, and then turned back to his deputies. “And where do you think you’re going to find fingerprints when there wasn’t any weapon and she wasn’t wearing any clothes-”

“There was a blizzard, right?” Flournoy asked him. “Was your dad able to collect any evidence at the scene?”

“No, not until the snow melted, which took a few weeks.”

“And?”

He shrugged. “Nothing.”

“Why didn’t he go out with a generator and heating fans and melt the damned stuff?” Marvel said.

“I don’t know. I could be wrong about some of this. Maybe he did.”

“We could go back out and search all over again,” Flournoy offered.

Rex gave her a deeply skeptical look. “In a pasture? Seventeen years later?”

“Hey, boss, what do you think archeologists do?” she retorted. “What difference does it make how many years have gone by? Something could have gotten buried, or even just overlooked-”

“Definitely,” Abby agreed, with a vigorous nod of her head.

“Or eaten by coyotes, or trampled by cows, or picked up by a tornado,” Rex shot back. He sat forward to try to impress them all with his earnestness. “Listen, I know you’re eager to delve back into this. I understand that. Or, at least I understand why the two of you are. You’re being good cops. And it’s quite the thing these days to solve old crimes. You-” He glared at his dear friend. “You, I don’t know what you’re up to. You, I suspect of just being a pain in the ass. But hey.” He forced a smile at his deputies. “I watch Cold Case, too.”

His deputies grinned back at him, both of them looking a little shamefaced to be caught getting their inspiration from a TV show about investigating unsolved crimes.

“And I am happy you want to get into this, truly, I am,” Rex continued. “But here’s the thing. You’ve got to face some facts that aren’t cold. One of them is that we have the same limited resources we’ve always had. No county crime lab. Not enough money. Not enough people like you.”

Rex inclined his head, his way of pointing out the window of his office.

“We may not have much crime in this county, but hell, we don’t even have the budget or personnel to handle what little we do have, much less remove any of you from those duties in order to investigate a seventeen-year-old crime.”

He held up a hand when all three started to speak at once.

“Do you know how much work is involved in cold cases?”

Flournoy’s face brightened again. “There’s a seminar down in Miami…”

“Yeah, right,” Rex said, and had to laugh. “That’s gonna happen. I’m going to send both of you to Miami about the same time I buy Hummers for everybody.” He got serious again. “It is incredibly tedious and time-consuming. The paperwork alone is enough to kill you. And I know how much you guys love paperwork.”

Their eager looks faltered a bit, as he had hoped they would.

“And speaking of paperwork that needs doing,” Rex said ominously.

His deputies took the hint. They picked up their coffee cups and departed the office together, leaving Abby alone to face the bad mood their boss was in this morning.

Rex swiveled his chair so he could stare at his old friend Abby.

“What’s up with this?” he asked her.

“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “Or maybe I am. It started when we found Nadine, Rex. I started to think more about that girl who was killed, and how maybe now we could find out who she was-with all the new technology, like Edyth said.”

“And find out who killed her?”

Abby shrugged. “I don’t know about that. I just want to put a name on her grave.”

“Why?”

“Why?” Abby blinked. “Don’t you want to identify her? Wouldn’t everybody like to know who she was?”

“Of course. That’s not what I meant. I guess I mean, why you?”

Abby took her time answering and stared over his shoulder, out the window, while she thought about her answer. “Maybe I’m just curious.”

“There must be more to it than that.”

Abby could only shrug again. “I really don’t know.”

He took a breath and sat up straight in his chair. “Okay. Well, here’s the deal. I’m sorry, but it’s not going to happen, not unless we get some kind of lucky break like we’ve always been depending on. We’d have to exhume her to get DNA, Abby. And we can’t afford to do that, and we can’t afford to do any of the rest of it, either, and don’t give me any baloney about you paying for it. I’ve seen how bad your house needs paint and I know how old your truck is. So just forget about anything like that, all right?”

“All right,” she said, so quickly and meekly that he was immediately suspicious.

“Abby…?”

“No, really, all right, Rex. I mean, what could I do by myself? Nothing.”

“That’s right,” he said firmly. “Nothing. Please do exactly that.”

Abby got up from the chair, gave him a warm smile, and started toward his doorway. When she got there, she turned around and said, “Your mother didn’t want me to do anything, either.”

“My mother?”

But Abby had already gone, leaving his doorway empty but his office filled with the musky scent of her perfume. Or maybe that was John Marvel’s cologne, Rex thought, and smiled in spite of himself.

He got up, walked over to his office door, and shut it.

Then he went back to his desk, picked up his pile of keys that lay on top of it, and rifled through them until he found the one he sought: a tiny silver key that fit into the bottom drawer of his desk. Once unlocked, the drawer revealed only papers…until he lifted the papers and then the false bottom beneath them. Below it, there was a box about four inches square.

He reached down and lifted the lid of the box.

Inside, there was a red circlet of fabric and elastic. The girls he had gone to high school with had called them “scrunchies.” This one had a dark stain on one side of it. It also had several long dark hairs curled within its wrinkles. When his father, Patrick, and he had lifted the dead girl into their truck and laid her down on the cold metal floor of it and covered her with burlap feed sacks, Rex had been the last to climb back down to the ground.

His father and brother had walked on toward the doors of the truck.

It was he who had sighted something dark lying in the snow.

He had reached down to pick it up, and found that he was holding a red elastic band that had tied back her hair.

The sound of someone clearing her throat made Rex look up toward his doorway.

He closed his fist over the red hair band, quickly hiding it.

Rex was shocked to see that a half hour had passed while he had just sat there.

Edyth Flournoy stood in the doorway with a grin on her face. Upon getting the boss’s attention, she said, “Hey, boss, I forgot to tell you…saw your brother doing something interesting this morning.”

Rex heaved a big sigh. “What? Robbing a bank? Driving under the influence?”

“Nah.” She laughed, assuming he was joking. “Shacked up with Abby, from the looks of it. I passed him coming from her place early this morning.”

Sensing a sudden change in the atmosphere, the deputy said, “Guess it’s none of my business,” and quickly walked away.

Rex felt the flash of intense anger he experienced almost every time his brother crossed his mind. It didn’t improve his temper to think that Abby had sat right there across from him and never said a word about being with Patrick last night. Not that she was likely to tell him, he had to admit, knowing how he felt about it, as she did. If he ever thought it was getting serious between Abby and Pat, he thought he might have to arrest her for something just to keep her from making the biggest mistake of her life. Or maybe he’d just shoot Patrick. He had to admit, though, that if he could have shot his older brother and gotten away with it, he probably would have already done it by now.

Rex opened his fist and stared down at the object in it.

It had slid off her hair when they handled her. When he had found the red “scrunchie” lying in the snow, he had hesitated for a moment, staring at it. Then he had quickly stuffed it down into his coat pocket, meaning to give it to his father. Or maybe he never had really meant to do that, he thought now, alone in his office. Maybe he had always meant to keep it as a private memento, since he was the one who had given it to her.