Once Buried

She said to Jenn, “Take some pictures and also send them to me.”

Jenn immediately took out her cell phone and started snapping photos of the hole and the corpse. Meanwhile, Riley walked slowly around the hole checking the beach in all directions. The killer hadn’t left a lot of clues. The sand around the hole had obviously been disturbed by the killer when he’d been digging, and there was a trail of vague footprints where the jogger had approached.

Vague, too, were any footprints left by the killer. The dry sand didn’t hold the shape of a shoe. But Riley could see where the marsh grass she’d come through had been broken down by someone other than the investigative team.

She pointed and said to Belt, “Have your guys scour that grass carefully to see if any fibers might have gotten caught there.”

The chief nodded.

A feeling began to creep over Riley – a familiar feeling that she sometimes got at a crime scene.

She hadn’t felt it often during her most recent cases. But it was a welcome feeling, one that she knew she could use as a tool.

It was an uncanny sense of the killer himself.

If she allowed herself to let that feeling sweep over her, she was likely to get some insights into just what had happened here.

Riley moved a few steps away from the group gathered at the scene. She glanced at Jenn and saw that her partner was watching her. Riley knew that Jenn was aware of her reputation for getting into killers’ minds. Riley nodded, and saw Jenn swing into action, asking questions of her own, distracting the others on the scene and giving Riley a few moments to concentrate her skills.

Riley closed her eyes and tried to picture the scene as it must have looked at the time of the murder.

Images and sounds came to her remarkably easily.

It was dim outside, and the beach was shadowy, but there were traces of light in the sky across the water from where the sun would later rise, and it wasn’t too dark to see.

The tide was up, and the water was probably only an easy stone’s throw away, so the sound of the surf was loud.

Loud enough so he could barely hear himself digging, Riley realized.

At that moment, Riley had no trouble stepping into a strange mind…

Yes, he was digging, and she could feel the strain of his muscles as he threw shovels of sand as far away as he could, feel the mixture of sweat and sea spray on his face.

The digging wasn’t easy. In fact, it was a bit frustrating.

It wasn’t easy to dig a hole in beach sand like this.

Sand had a way of trickling back in, partially refilling the space where he dug.

He was thinking…

It won’t be very deep. But it doesn’t have to be deep.

All the while he kept glancing up at the beach, looking for his prey. And sure enough, he soon appeared, jogging along contentedly not far away.

And at the perfect time, too – the hole was just as deep as it needed to be.

The killer pushed the shovel into the sand and raised up his hands and waved.

“Come over here!” he shouted to the jogger.

Not that it mattered what he shouted – over the sound of the surf, the jogger wouldn’t be able to pick out his actual words, just a muffled yell.

The jogger stopped at the sound and looked his way.

Then he walked over to the killer.

The jogger was smiling as he approached, and the killer was smiling back at him.

Soon they were within earshot of each other.

“What’s up?” the jogger yelled over the surf.

“Come here and I’ll show you,” the killer yelled back.

The jogger unwarily walked over to where the killer was standing.

“Look down there,” the killer said. “Look really close.”

The jogger bent over, and with a swift, deft movement, the killer picked up the shovel and hit him in the back of the head, knocking him into the hole…

Riley was yanked out of her reverie by the sound of Chief Belt’s voice.

“Agent Paige?”

Riley opened her eyes and saw that Belt was looking at her with a curious expression. He hadn’t been distracted long by Jenn’s questions.

He said, “You seemed to leave us for a few moments there.”

Riley heard Jenn chuckle from nearby.

“She does that sometimes,” Jenn told the chief. “Don’t worry, she’s hard at work.”

Riley quickly reviewed the impressions she’d just gotten – all very hypothetical, of course, and hardly a moment-by-moment sense of what had actually happened.

But she felt very sure of one detail – that the jogger had come over at the killer’s invitation – and had approached him without fear.

This gave her a small but crucial insight.

Riley said to the police chief, “The killer is charming, likeable. People trust him.”

The chief’s eyes widened.

“How do you know?” he asked.

Riley heard laughter from someone approaching behind her.

“Trust me, she knows what she’s doing.”