Playing Dead Part 3

"Who found it?"

"Fisherman. Early this morning, at dawn. His line got caught and when he freed it, he got a chunk of clothing with it."

"Where's the evidence now?"

"Bagged," the deputy said. "It'll go to our lab."

The deputy was more antagonistic than the older, easygoing diver. Mitch smiled at him. Play nice with the locals, he could hear Meg's stern lecture. The FBI had better relations with local law enforcement in recent years, but some cops were old school.

"How deep?" he asked.

The diver responded. "Thirty feet. We got someone from the EPA on the way since this is an environmentally protected area."

"It's now a crime scene."

Young grinned, patted Mitch on the back. "I'm gonna like you. I got the crew waiting to haul the car up, but your office said don't touch the vehicle. Don't much see what you can do down there."

"We want as much evidence as possible intact before we haul up the vehicle. We may bag the body underwater and bring it up separately to minimize damage." But if it was too difficult to remove the body from the vehicle, they'd bag what they could and haul up the body with the SUV. "What kind of fish activity do we have here?"

"Sturgeon, stripers, crawfish. h.e.l.l, this is a terrific fishing spot."

"It was an accident," the deputy interrupted.

Mitch raised his eyebrows. "You have a witness who saw it?"

"No, but-"

"Don't a.s.sume anything."

The deputy bristled at Mitch's tone. Mitch kept his expression calm: Diplomacy wasn't his strength. Action was.

Steve smoothed the tension, saying to Young, "Why don't you dive with us? You can see what we do, maybe it'll help in future investigations."

"Doesn't look like you need us," Clarkston said.

Young interjected, "I'd like to go back under. Good practice."

Mitch took Steve's lead. "Great. I need an experienced partner."

Steve pulled Young and Clarkston away from Mitch and showed them the sophisticated underwater camera the ERT unit had purchased last year with their limited discretionary budget.

Mitch walked over to Special Agents Duncan and Morales. Though both were young-about thirty, coming into the Bureau under the age of twenty-five, a rarity these days-he didn't have to tell them what to look for.

"Split up and take a Sheriff's deputy with you." He pointed north and south of their location. "We're looking for where the Explorer went in, but based on the remains it was months ago. Anything you find, mark it and inform Donovan. I'll be underwater."

When Mitch first joined the FBI more than a decade ago, the Violent Crimes Squad had been one of the best-staffed and funded units in the Bureau. They'd have had a full squad of eight out here to recover the body and evidence. After 9/11, resources for their unit were minimal and staffing was barely twenty percent of what it had been. Priorities had shifted to counterterrorism and counterintelligence. Mitch had mixed feelings about the changes, but he'd adjusted accordingly. They all had.

Mitch finished putting on his diving gear. Even though he was about to enter murky river water and face a dead man, a rush overcame him.

He met up with Young and they checked and double-checked the equipment, then went out on the boat over the spot where the Explorer rested beneath the surface. Steve and a deputy manned the boat while Young and Mitch fell back into the cold water.

Maddox had been missing since the end of January. Chances were he'd been in the river the entire time. But proving it was homicide instead of an accident would be difficult at best, unless they were lucky enough to find a bullet entry wound or obvious stab marks. The fish and crustaceans would feed on any exposed areas first, which often made it more difficult to determine how a body had been a.s.saulted. But a gaping wound no matter how gnawed by river life would point toward foul play.

The water was icy, having traveled from the Sierra Nevadas where the snow had been melting all spring, filling the creeks and tributaries, merging to make this river. The ninety-degree weather did little to warm the thirty-foot depths where the Explorer rested, its wheels buried deep in the sediment. The wet suit protected Mitch from the worst of the cold, and he took a moment to acclimate himself to the water pressure, diminished light, and temperature.

He approached cautiously, taking the time to inspect and photograph the front of the vehicle-there were no obvious collision marks. They'd need a more detailed inspection, but it appeared that nothing had hit this SUV, front or back. There was some minimal damage on the pa.s.senger side, but nothing to indicate a collision so violent it could push a car into the river. One problem with water was that it carried evidence away from the scene. If there had been branches or leaves embedded in the undercarriage of the car, suggesting perhaps where the vic went in, the evidence could easily have been washed away under the constant pressure of the flowing river.

The Explorer was fully submerged and held fast, the front end sinking deeper into the muck because of the weight of the engine. The water wasn't too murky at first, the sun above cutting through, though as they walked along the bottom of the river and disturbed the sludge, their field of vision deteriorated. The underwater lights he and Young used cast an odd illumination around them, making the shadows darker.

Only the windshield was intact, which suggested the driver hadn't hit the water with any great speed. Mitch ran his finger along the window edge, felt the top of the retracted driver's-side window. The smooth edge told him that it had been down when the vehicle went in. Mitch inspected the other windows. They'd all been down on impact; none had broken under the pressure. Who drove with all their windows down in the frigid cold of a Sacramento January? He indicated the evidence to Young, who did his own inspection and nodded.

The victim was strapped into the driver's seat. Most victims would unbuckle themselves and attempt to escape, unless the accident rendered them unconscious.

It was virtually impossible to tell anything about the victim, though with the constant movement of the fresh, cold mountain water through the car, decomposition wasn't as advanced as Mitch would have guessed. A recent body would have been dark green, but this body was extremely pale, almost translucent, as the gases in the body had leached out over time. The body was intact for the most part, though Mitch knew if they tried to move it, skin, hair, and potential evidence would be lost. The vic's eyes were gone, as well as his ears, nose, lips, and a good chunk of his face. The vic's fingers were also missing. The body could have fed the fish for some time. Clothing offered some protection because it could take years to disintegrate.

The vic wore jeans, sneakers, and a lined jacket. Under the jacket appeared to be a turtleneck. No one in the Valley had been wearing turtlenecks since early March.

The vic was the same general size and build as Oliver Maddox. Mitch's preliminary conversations with the Davis Police Department shortly after the earthquake had given him little-the detective a.s.signed to the missing person case said there had been no physical evidence of foul play. Mitch would have followed up with friends, teachers, neighbors-except that he'd been pulled from the case.

Oliver Maddox had gone missing in late January-about the same time that Tom O'Brien had been moved from a safe area of San Quentin into the general prison population.

Mitch didn't buy into the coincidence. Maddox had probably been working on something related to O'Brien's conviction, but the only person who knew what was the fugitive himself. Still, how both events connected eluded him.

When Mitch looked inside the car, he was certain he had a homicide on his hands. The car was in neutral.

He photographed the interior, the control panel, and the buckled seat belt. He mentally walked through different scenarios, including suicide, but kept coming back to murder.

Mitch decided to leave the body in the vehicle, suspecting that the corpse would fall apart if they tried to extract it. They had special waterproof body bags for the floaters that could be sealed to prevent evidence loss. He pulled plastic evidence bags from his equipment belt and strapped them to what remained of the vic's hands and head to prevent not only trace evidence but body parts from washing away when the vehicle was raised.

Mitch and Young bagged as much loose evidence in the Explorer as they could for fear it would disappear or disintegrate. Then Mitch caught Young's eye and pointed upstream to indicate where he was heading to search for potential evidence. He used his underwater light to illuminate the depths.

The bridge pillars were only forty or so feet from where the vehicle had come to rest. Mitch pictured the damage on the pa.s.senger side and inspected the left side of the pillars extensively. There was no evidence that the vehicle had collided with the pillars either above or below the surface, but with the rise and fall of the water level, paint chips would have been rubbed away. Still Mitch took a lot of pictures-perhaps a collision expert could match up the unique marks on the door with these pillars.

Cars submerged quickly in water, but not instantaneously. Inside air needed to be displaced, and the current of the river would move the vehicle as it filled with water. Maybe a minute or two. Still, forty feet from the bridge, windows down, Mitch figured the car had gone in relatively close to the bridge. Most likely not more than a hundred feet upstream, probably less. If they could pinpoint the entry point, they could use the known water currents from January to estimate what day the vehicle had gone in.

He surfaced and floated. Though there would be seasonal variations, and in a storm the current would be completely different, today was clear, windless, and gave him a good sense of the natural flow of the river.

It was a hunch, but Mitch suspected that the Explorer had gone in approximately eighty feet from the resting spot. He swam upstream, draining his energy. Agent Duncan saw him, but didn't approach. Mitch wasn't surprised.

He hadn't made a lot of friends in the two years he'd been with the Sacramento regional FBI office. Everyone knew that he and Supervisory Special Agent Megan Elliott used to be married. It wasn't like he had announced it, but Meg insisted that everything be on the up-and-up when Mitch came on board.

It was no one's d.a.m.n business, as far as Mitch was concerned. They'd made a mistake, it was over, no one needed to know anything more. But Meg insisted that someone would find out anyway, and then it could make both of their jobs more difficult, especially since they were both on the violent crime squad.

He still had respect for Meg. h.e.l.l, Mitch liked her a lot. They'd met at Quantico, become good friends because of common interests, and ended up in Kosovo together four years later, digging through ma.s.s graves as part of a national evidence response team. When they returned to America six weeks later, they both felt out of touch with everyday concerns. The weight of Kosovo tormented them, and they turned to each other for solace. They were two busy people with the same career and they thought that marriage was the answer to loneliness.

They were wrong. The marriage officially ended three years later.

Mitch pulled himself out of the water and sat on a rock at the edge of the river, looking for the most likely point of entry. The killer would want an easy place to push the car into the river. Mitch looked up. This was a curve, but the river meandered in at this point, not out. If the Explorer went in at this spot, it was coming from Isleton. Had Maddox come down here to meet with someone?

According to the locals, there was good fishing in this part of the river. A small restaurant and tackle shop was nestled on the road next to the bridge. Potential witnesses might have seen the car go under. But Mitch sensed that this killer wasn't stupid. No, the car went in at night. Cloudy or moonless or stormy. Minimal traffic. No witnesses.

There was no perfect murder. If they couldn't find physical evidence here or in the vehicle, they would officially identify the victim and go from there. Retrace his final days. But Mitch didn't intend to wait for identification. He'd start his investigation presupposing it was Maddox.

He motioned to Special Agent Duncan who was not so discreetly staring at him from across the inlet. What did he expect? He'd probably had more face-to-face time with the Office of Professional Responsibility than any active agent. And since the last visit was only three months ago when he returned from Montana after tracking down two fugitives, he was lucky to still have a job.

But what was he supposed to do, sit on his hands? Even though he'd been given a direct order not to cross state lines to follow the fugitives, he'd done it anyway. Under the same circ.u.mstances, he'd do it again. He was good at his job, he had to act. Sitting around playing bureaucratic games and shuffling paper from one desk to another wasn't in his job description.

Mitch understood his primary flaw: He had a hard time following orders he disagreed with. He'd had the same problem in the military. His issues with authority stemmed from his conflicts with his dad, a bigwig prosecutor who had seemed all-powerful and righteous while Mitch was growing up. Only when it was too late for Mitch to change his path did he learn the cold truth about his father.

When Duncan was within hearing distance, Mitch said, "Go over this area again. The turnout, the dock. The guy's been under for a while, look for any sign of new growth-it might indicate the spot he entered the water. Talk to the owners of the tackle shop and restaurant. Find out how often this dock is used, and specifically about any regulars-people who come out and fish at least once a week. I'm sure there're a few. There may be a witness who doesn't even realize it."

Mitch didn't think so. Probably n.o.body but his killer had seen what happened the night Oliver Maddox went into the river. But Mitch had to cover all the bases.

He went back under, letting water wrap around him, as he slowly swam back to the Explorer's resting place.

What were you doing that got you killed, Oliver?

FOUR.

"Tom?" Her voice sounded far away. "We're here, Tom."

He hadn't been sleeping, but he'd been trapped so far in the past Tom hadn't realized they had already arrived back at the motel.

"Sorry."

"Let's go in." Nelia's voice was quiet and lyrical. It calmed him, grounded him, like nothing else could.

My angel.

She'd saved him, physically and emotionally. He didn't deserve her, but he wasn't about to give her up. He drank in her trust, her support, her faith in him as if she were wine to the dying man.

It was quiet and they walked to the room together. Nelia had checked in two days ago, paying up front for a week. He'd hidden in the truck, sneaking into the room when it was clear. Acting like the fugitive he was; hating every minute of it. Without Nelia, her truck, her money, her faith, he wouldn't have survived this long. Coming back to Sacramento to prove his innocence would have been suicide. But Nelia was his eyes and ears. While it still wasn't easy, with her it was definitely safer than if he'd traveled alone. She bought the food, she reserved the motel, she drove.

His angel.

They walked in and Tom went immediately to the bathroom. He wasn't being fair to Nelia, but he needed to run his head under cold water and think.

The earthquake seemed so long ago. He'd run because-no use lying to himself-he ran because he was a dead man. At the end of January, he'd had five months before his date with the executioner. His appeals had been denied, over and over. Oliver Maddox had given him cautious optimism, then disappeared. Tom's thin thread of hope had been severed.

When the quake struck, others ran as well. Cold-blooded killers. Tom had to do something to stop them.

So he had pursued them. He was one of them, after all. They trusted him as much as they trusted anyone. And he ended up capturing seven of the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds before catching up with Doherty and Chapman in Idaho. He'd been c.o.c.ky. c.o.c.ky because he'd done a d.a.m.n good job and saved lives. He felt like a cop again. He felt like he was doing something positive after fifteen years behind bars.

It had been three and a half months since that b.a.s.t.a.r.d Aaron Doherty had shot him in the stomach and left him for dead in the middle of a s...o...b..nk in Idaho. Tom had played that situation wrong-he'd thought he needed to watch Chapman more closely, that he was the more dangerous of the two. Misjudging that psycho had almost killed Tom.

He would have died if Nelia hadn't found him in the s...o...b..nk along the frontage road.

It had been touch and go for a while. For over three months, Nelia nursed him back to health. He rubbed the gnarled scar on his stomach. It was still touch and go; the bullet remained in his body. For the past two weeks, he'd been having periodic sharp pains. But it wasn't like he could go to the doctor.

Nelia hadn't asked questions, at least not at first. She wasn't scared of his blood or his story; she was simply a sad and beautiful woman. And last week when he said he was leaving to find his daughter and prove his innocence, she had simply said, "I'm coming with you."

Tom O'Brien couldn't die knowing Claire believed he'd killed her mother. He would find a way to convince her of the truth she'd been too young and emotional to accept when she was fourteen.

Having Nelia, a stranger, believe him gave him the strength to make a stand. He knew he might die in pursuit of the truth. He'd accepted that fate when his last appeal had been denied. He was already a dead man. He had nothing else to lose.

He left the bathroom and his eyes rested on Nelia. Seated at the small Formica table in the corner, she was drinking coffee. When she saw Tom, she poured him a cup from the thermos she had earlier filled at a nearby coffee shop. She pulled m.u.f.fins from the bag. "You didn't want to eat before, but you need your strength," she told him.

Sitting across from her, he took her hand. She stared at him, brown eyes sad and worried. "I don't know what I did to deserve you," he said, voice cracking. He cleared his throat and sipped warm coffee to swallow the emotion.

She shrugged and glanced down. She hadn't told him everything about her past, but he knew she'd lost her son twelve years ago. He'd been murdered. She hadn't shared any other details, but even sharing those few had been like ripping open her heart.

Her loss had sent her into a self-imposed exile. It was why she lived alone in the woods, but didn't explain why she'd helped him, or why she believed him. She'd tell him in her own time.

"Claire is-" What could he say? "-not what I expected."

"She is who she is. You can't expect that the horrible things that happened in the past wouldn't affect her."

"No, but I-I wanted her to be . . . open. She was cold. She's believed all this time I'm guilty. She was angry and scared. Scared of her own father! I love her more than anyone, and she-"

"Tom."

He caught her eye. Nelia never raised her voice, but her tone commanded his attention.

"You can't expect to change her mind during one surprise confrontation. Give her a little time."

"Unless she turns me in to the cops."

"Do you think she will?"

Did he? "I really don't know." He bit back his fearful frustration. "I need her help."

"I can look for Oliver Maddox," Nelia offered, not for the first time.

"Claire has the resources and training to do this. You've already risked too much for me."

"You saved me as much as I saved you, Tom. My cabin in Idaho was as much a prison to me as San Quentin was for you. You freed me. I'm not leaving you now. Not until we find out what happened to your wife."

"Nelia, tell me the truth. How did you find me?"

"I told you. I saw something out of the corner of my eye. I went to investigate, found you."

"But you were hours away from home. And you never leave, or so you told me. Why that day? Where were you going?"