Once Lost

*

When the plane taxied into the Des Moines International Airport, Riley was able to check her cell phone. She was pleased to see that she’d gotten a message from Mike Nevins.

Bill’s here with me right now.

It was one less thing to worry about.

A police car was waiting outside the plane. Two cops from Angier introduced themselves at the base of the boarding steps. Darryl Laird was a gangly young man in his twenties, and Howard Doty was a much shorter man in his forties.

Both had stunned expressions on their faces.

“We’re sure glad you’re here,” Doty told Riley and Jenn as the two cops escorted them to the car.

Laird said, “This is whole thing is just …”

The younger man shook his head without finishing his thought.

These poor guys, Riley thought.

They were just regular small-town cops. Murders were surely few and far between in a small Iowa town. Maybe the older cop had handled one or two homicides at one time or other, but Riley guessed that the younger one hadn’t been through anything like this before.

As Doty started to drive, Riley asked the two cops to tell her and Jenn whatever they could about what had happened.

Doty said, “The girl’s name was Katy Philbin, seventeen years old. A student at Wilson High. Her parents own the local pharmacy. Nice girl, everybody liked her. Old George Tully came across her body just this morning when he and his boys were getting ready to do the spring planting. Tully’s got a farm just a short way out of Angier.”

Jenn asked, “Any idea how long she’d been buried there?”

“You’ll have to ask Chief Sinard about that. Or the medical examiner.”

Riley thought back to what little Meredith had been able to tell them about the situation.

“What about the other girl?” she asked. “The one who went missing earlier?”

“Holly Struthers is her name,” Laird said. “She was … uh, I guess she is a student at our other high school, Lincoln. She’s been missing for about a week. The whole town had been hoping she’d just turn up sooner or later. But now … well, I guess we’ve got to keep on hoping.”

“And praying,” Doty added.

Riley felt an odd chill when he said that. She couldn’t begin to guess how often she’d heard people say that they were praying that a missing person would turn up safe and sound. She never had the impression that prayer helped one way or the other.

Does it even make people feel better? she wondered.

She couldn’t imagine why or how.

It was a bright, clear afternoon when the car left Des Moines and headed out onto a wide highway. Soon Doty exited onto a two-lane road that stretched over the slightly rolling countryside.

Riley felt a strange, gnawing feeling in her stomach. It took her a few moments to realize that her feeling had nothing to do with the case – at least not directly.

She often felt this way whenever she had a job to do in the Midwest. She didn’t normally suffer from a fear of open spaces – agoraphobia, she thought it was called. But vast plains and prairies stirred up a unique kind of anxiety in her.

Riley didn’t know which was worse – the sheer flat plains she’d seen in states like Nebraska, stretching out as far as the eye could see, or monotonous rolling prairie like this, the same farmhouses, towns, and fields seeming to appear over and over again. Either way, she found it unsettling, even a little nauseating.

Despite the Midwest’s reputation as a land of wholesome, all-American values, it somehow didn’t surprise her that people committed murder here. As far as she was concerned, the countryside alone would be enough to drive a person crazy.

Partly to get her mind off the landscape, Riley took out her cell phone to text her whole family as a group – April, Jilly, Liam, and Gabriela.

Got here safely.

She thought for a moment, then added …

Miss you all already. But I’ll probably be back before U know it.

*

After about an hour on the two-lane highway, Doty turned the car off onto a gravel road.

As he kept on driving, he said, “We’re coming up on George Tully’s land now.”

Riley looked around. The landscape looked exactly the same – huge stretches of unplanted fields interrupted by gullies, fences, and lines of trees. She did notice a single large house in the midst of it all, standing next to a ramshackle barn. She figured that must be where Tully lived with his family.

It was an odd-looking house that appeared to have been added onto and cobbled together over the years, probably for quite a few generations.

Soon a medical examiner’s vehicle came into sight, parked on the shoulder of the road. Several other cars were parked nearby. Doty parked right behind the examiner’s van, and Riley and Jenn followed him and his younger partner out onto a recently tilled field.

Riley saw three men standing over a dug up spot. She couldn’t see what had been found there, but she did glimpse a bit of brightly colored clothing fluttering in the spring breeze.

That’s where she was buried, she realized.

And at that moment, Riley was hit by a strange gut feeling.

Gone was any sense that she and Jenn would have nothing to do here.

They had work to do – a girl was dead and they wouldn’t stop until the killer was found.

CHAPTER TEN

Two people were standing by the freshly revealed body. Riley headed straight toward one of them, a brawny man about her own age.

“Chief Joseph Sinard, I assume,” she said, offering her hand.

He nodded and shook her hand.

“Folks around here just call me Joe,”

Sinard indicated an obese, bored-looking man in his fifties who was standing beside him, “This is Barry Teague, the county medical examiner. You two are the FBI folks we’ve been expecting, I guess.”

Riley and Jenn produced their badges and introduced themselves.

“Here’s our victim,” Sinard said.