Jeffrey Tolliver took a left outside the college and drove up Main Street. He rolled down the window for some fresh air. Cold wind whistled through the car. The staticky patter of the police scanner offered a low undertone. He squinted at the early morning sun. Pete Wayne, the man who owned the diner, tipped his hat as Jeffrey drove by.
Spring was early this year. The dogwoods were already weaving a white curtain across the sidewalks. The women from the garden club had planted flowers in the planters along the road. There was a gazebo display outside the hardware store. A rack of clothes marked CLEARANCE was in front of the dress shop. Even the dark clouds in the distance couldn’t stop the street from looking picture-perfect.
Grant County had not taken its name from Ulysses S., the Northern general who had accepted Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, but Lemuel Pratt Grant, the man who in the late 1800s had extended the railroad from Atlanta, through South Georgia, and to the sea. The new lines had put cities like Heartsdale, Avondale and Madison on the map. The flat fields and rich soil had yielded some of the best corn, cotton and peanuts in the state. Businesses had sprung up to service the booming middle class.
With every boom there was a bust, and the first bust came with the Great Depression. The only way the three cities could survive was to band together. They had combined sanitation, fire services and the police department in order to save money. Economizing had kept them above water until another boom had arrived by way of an army base being erected in Madison. Then came another boom when Avondale was designated a maintenance hub for the Atlanta-Savannah rail line. A few years later, Heartsdale had managed to persuade the state to fund a community college at the end of Main Street.
All of this booming had happened well before Jeffrey’s time, but he was familiar with the political forces that had led to the current bust. He had watched it happen in his own small hometown over in Alabama. The BRAC Commission had closed the army base. Reaganomics trickled down into the railroad industry and the maintenance hub had dried up. Then there were trade deals and seemingly endless wars, then the world economy didn’t just tank, it had bypassed the toilet and gone straight into the sewer. Except for the college, which had evolved into a technological university specializing in agri-business, Heartsdale would’ve followed the same downward trend as every other rural American town.
You could call it either careful planning or dumb luck, but Grant Tech was the lifeblood of the county. The students kept the local businesses alive. The local businesses tolerated the students so long as they paid their bills. As chief of police, Jeffrey’s first directive from the mayor was to keep the school happy if he wanted to keep his job.
He doubted very much the school was going to be happy today. A body had been found in the woods. The girl was young, probably a student, and certainly dead. The officer on scene had told Jeffrey that it looked like an accident. The girl was dressed in running gear. She was lying flat on her back. She had likely stumbled on a tree root and smashed the back of her head against a rock.
This wasn’t the first time a student had died under Jeffrey’s tenure. Over three thousand kids were enrolled at the university. By virtue of statistics, a small number of them would die every year. Some by meningitis or pneumonia, some by suicide or overdose, some—mostly young men—by stupidity.
An accidental death in the woods was tragic, without doubt, but something about this particular death wasn’t sitting right with Jeffrey. He’d been running in that very same forest. He’d even tripped on a tree root more times than he cared to admit. That kind of fall could lead to several different injuries. A wrist fracture if you managed to catch yourself. A broken nose if you didn’t. You might hit your temple or bust up your shoulder if you fell sideways. There were a lot of ways to hurt yourself, but it was very unlikely you would flip around mid-fall and land flat on your back.
He took a sharp turn onto Frying Pan Road, the main artery into a neighborhood colloquially referred to as IHOP, because all of the streets were named after items you would find at an International House of Pancakes. Pancake Place. Belgian Waffle Way. Hashbrown Way.
Jeffrey saw the rolling lights of a police cruiser splashing the southwest corner of Omelet Road. He parked his Town Car at an angle across the street. Spectators stood on their front lawns. The sun was still low in the sky. Some were dressed for work. Some were wearing soiled uniforms from the night shift.
He told Brad Stephens, one of his junior officers, “Roll out the tape to keep these people back.”
“Yes, sir.” Brad excitedly fumbled with his keys to open the trunk. The kid was so new to the job that his mother still ironed his uniforms. He’d spent the last three months writing tickets and cleaning up after traffic accidents. This was Brad’s first case involving a fatality.
Jeffrey took in the scene as he made his way up the street. Older cars and trucks lined the road. IHOP was a working-class neighborhood, but to be frank, it was nicer than the one Jeffrey had grown up in. There were only a few boarded-up windows. The majority of the lawns were tidy. Lightbulbs still glowed in the floodlights. The paint was peeling, but the curtains were clean, and everyone had dutifully lined up their trashcans on the curb for pick-up.
Jeffrey opened the lid on the closest can. The bin was empty.
He spotted his team standing in a wide, open field that ran behind the houses. The forest was just beyond the rise, at least one hundred yards away. Jeffrey stepped out of the street. There wasn’t a sidewalk. He walked through a vacant lot, carefully scanning the ground as he followed a worn path through the grass. Cigarette butts. Beer bottles. Wadded-up pieces of aluminum foil. Jeffrey leaned down for a better look. He caught a whiff of cat urine.
“Chief.” Lena Adams jogged to meet him. The young officer’s blue uniform jacket was so big that it rode up under her chin. Jeffrey made a mental note to look into women’s sizes the next time he ordered uniforms. Lena wasn’t going to complain, but he was embarrassed by the oversight.
He asked, “You were the responding officer?”
“Yes, sir.” She started to read from her notebook. “The nine-one-one call came in from a cell phone at 5:58 a.m. I was dispatched at that time and arrived at this location at 6:02. The caller met me in the middle of the field at 6:03. Officer Brad Stephens arrived to assist at 6:04. Truong then took us to the location. I verified the victim was deceased at 6:08. I assessed the position of the body and noted a large, blood-covered rock by the victim’s head. I called Detective Wallace at 6:09. We then taped off the area around the body and awaited Frank’s arrival at 6:22.”
Frank had called Jeffrey en route. He already knew the details, but he nodded for Lena to continue. The only way you learned how to do something was to do something.
Lena read, “Victim is a white female between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, dressed in red running shorts and a navy-blue T-shirt with a Grant Tech logo. She was found by another student, Leslie Truong, age twenty-two. Truong walks this path four-to-five times a week. She goes to the lake to do tai chi. Truong didn’t know the victim, but she was pretty upset all the same. I offered to radio a car to drive her to the campus nurse. She said she wanted to walk it off, take some time to think. She struck me as the woo-woo type.”
Jeffrey’s jaw had tightened. “You let her walk back to campus on her own?”
“Yes, Chief. She was going to see the nurse. I made her promise she’d—”
“That’s at least a twenty-minute hike, Lena. All by herself.”
“She said she wanted—”
“Stop.” Jeffrey worked to maintain an even tone. Most of policing was learning through mistakes. “Don’t do that again. We turn over witnesses to family or friends. We don’t send them on a two-mile hike.”
“But, she—”
Jeffrey shook his head, but now wasn’t the time to lecture Lena about compassion. “I want to talk to Truong before the day is out. Even if she didn’t know the victim, what she saw was traumatic. She needs to know that someone is in charge and looking out for people.”
Lena gave a perfunctory nod.
Jeffrey gave up. “When you got here, the victim was lying on her back?”
“Yes, sir.” Lena thumbed to the back of her notebook. She had made a crude drawing of the body in relation to a stand of trees. “The rock was to the right of her head. Her chin was turned slightly to the left. The ground was undisturbed. She didn’t turn over. She landed on her back and hit her head.”
“We’ll let the coroner make that determination.” He pointed to the foil. “Someone was smoking meth recently. Junkies are creatures of habit. I want you to pull all the incident reports for the last three months and see if we can match a name to the foil.”
Lena had her pen out, but she wasn’t writing.