They walked the entire warehouse until Hunter said, “Let’s go outside, breathing this is giving me a headache.” The others didn’t argue and followed Hunter out the door. Several minutes in the open air cleared her head and the headache lessened but did not go away.
Andre said, “One car passed by twice while we’ve been standing here.”
Hunter said, “We can keep an eye out for it.” She looked at the area around the warehouse, “I’m going to walk the perimeter, see what shows up.”
Andre said, “I’ll watch for that car, see if I can catch a license plate.” Ariel didn’t speak, but followed Hunter.
The front of the building showed nothing but a few indistinct disturbances on the parking area. When Hunter walked around the corner and moved toward the rear of the warehouse, things started showing in the uncut grass and weeds. She said to Ariel, “Looks like six or eight people stomped around back here. Let’s keep going.”
A single back door centered the back wall and Hunter found more sign there, plus clear impressions in the grass of a vehicle that drove to, and then from the back door. There was no dirt to obtain a tread impression of the tire, or of anyone’s shoes. Hunter took her time, looked close, and there it was.
She bent lower over three long, red hairs, partially hidden in the trampled grass. “You said the woman was red headed?”
Ariel stood beside her and pointed at the hairs, “This color. These are hers.”
Hunter nodded, pulled her phone and took photos of the hairs and the area to show perspective and distance from the back door. She pulled a small, clear evidence bag from her back pocket, then found a pencil-sized twig and used it and her ballpoint pen together as if they were chopsticks to lift the hairs and place them inside. She closed it, wrote the date, time, location and her name on the bag in black ink, and put the bag in her front pocket.
Turning her attention to the vehicle impressions, she followed the tire paths across the bruised grass and flattened weeds to where it passed through a gap in the back fence. The tracks continued through several more overgrown lots to come out on a narrow, paved street. Ariel said, “The red-haired woman was in the vehicle.”
“I think so, too.”
The two women returned to the front of the warehouse, where Hunter showed Andre the hairs and told him about the tire tracks. He said, “That car passed by one more time, and the plates come back to Jean Claude Villard, of all people.”
Hunter said, “We know one thing, he’s not driving it from jail.”
Andre said, “Gives us someone to talk to, though.”
“It surely does. Now let’s get out of here.”
Chapter 7
John and Randall cruised to the far west side of the city near Highway 27 and drove through an open ranch gate into an overgrown field. They followed the trail to a large grove of trees where a small wisp of white smoke emanated from its center like a finger pointed at the sky.
A single police vehicle was there, and John parked beside it, then the two detectives walked the rest of the way on foot into the cluster of trees.
The shade was dense under the heavy tree canopy, but there was little undergrowth and that made progress to the fire easy enough.
Randall sniffed and said, “You get a whiff of that?”
John said, “Yeah. Smells like pork.” Thirty yards further, they reached a clearing the size of a large room. A police officer stood to one side, with two big-eyed boys about twelve or thirteen years old.
Randall said, “You seeing this?” He indicated the area in front of them. Tree trunks surrounding the clearing showed crude paintings done in red, black, and white. Dozens of human-shaped stick figures and effigies made of tied-together twigs hung from low limbs. A live rattlesnake, its head painted red, was nailed through its body to a stump. A smoldering campfire was centered in the clearing, which was blanketed several inches deep with dead leaves.
The policeman pointed at a large aluminum cooking pot, like those used to cook crayfish, which sat some six feet from the fire. Faint steam rose from it, and the policeman said, “You need to see that. I took it off the fire.” Randall and John crossed the leaf-covered ground and looked in the open pot.
A human head floated just below the foam-laced surface of oily water the color of weak tea. Most of the flesh was gone, lying dissolved like soft sediment in the bottom of the pot. The eyes bulged slightly from their sockets and were entirely white, resembling poached eggs. Some flesh still remained on the skull and clung to it like tiny shreds of raw fish on a fishbone.
A palm-sized portion of the scalp was attached, and long red hair wafted back and forth in the water on slow, invisible currents. John imagined crimson seaweed in a murky ocean.
John’s phon
e rang. Hunter. He said, “Hey.”
Hunter said, “Are you somewhere we can meet?”
“At a crime scene, but you can come out here if you want.”
“Andre and Ariel are with me.”