Beneath Devil's Bridge(2)

She reaches the end of the bridge and starts down the steep gravel trail that twists around and leads beneath the Devil’s Bridge overpass.

A car rumbles above. Headlights silhouette trees. Then all is black. Dead quiet. Leena feels disoriented. Fear whispers. She moves carefully, feeling her way with her feet down the dark trail. A distant part of her brain sends a warning. It’s too quiet. Too dark. Something is off.

But the vodka keeps her moving down the trail. To the rocks. To the water. A dot of orange suddenly flares bright in the blackness under the bridge. She sees a partial silhouette, then it fades. She smells the cigarette smoke.

“Hello?” she calls into the darkness.

“Leena—over here.”

The voice sounds behind her. She turns.

The blow comes fast. It smacks her on the side of the face. She staggers sideways, stumbles, and falls hard onto her hands and knees. Gravel bites into her palms. The world spins. She’s confused. She tastes blood. She tries to take a breath, but the next blow strikes her in the back of her neck. She flails face-first into the ground. Stones cut into her cheek. Dirt goes into her mouth. Another hard wallop, as if from a mallet, smacks between her shoulder blades.

Leena can’t breathe. Panic swirls. She raises her hand to make it stop. But the next kick is to her head.





TRINITY


NOW


I don’t even know when it started . . . long before that cold November night when the Russian satellite hit the earth’s atmosphere. By the time it happened, there was nothing any of us could do to stop it. Like a train set on its rails miles away, it all just came trundling inexorably down the track.

—From the true crime podcast It’s Criminal, “The Killing of Leena Rai—Beneath Devil’s Bridge”

Wednesday, November 17. Present day.

I watch the green tractor move along a line of poplars in the distance. The trees are leafless, and a ghostly mist sifts across the valley. Three seagulls swoop and cry in the tractor’s wake, diving to snatch whatever is being exposed by the teeth of the plow. Heavy clouds hide the surrounding peaks. A soft drizzle is beginning to fall.

“I thought seagulls were supposed to stay by the sea,” says Gio Rossi. My assistant producer has his hands sunk deep into the pockets of his black trench coat. The hem whips in the wind. It’s cold. Wet cold. The kind of cold that seeps deep into one’s bones and lingers for hours after.

“Gulls have moved inland everywhere,” I say absently. Because my attention is riveted on the woman driving the tractor. A black-and-white border collie sits at her side. Rachel Walczak. Organic farmer. Retired detective. A recluse by all accounts. The earth churning in her wake is black and wet. “Scavengers,” I say quietly. “Survivors. The gulls adapt to humans. See them as a food source. Like the bears around here. Like raccoons in urban environments. Besides”—I glance at Gio—“we’re still pretty close to the ocean.”

Rachel’s farm, Green Acres, nestles deep in a valley between plunging mountains carved by glaciers and scored by avalanche chutes and raging rivers. It feels remote. Hostile almost. But it’s only a forty-minute drive from the town of Twin Falls, which lies at the northern tip of the sound. Twin Falls itself is about an hour or two north of the bustling Pacific Northwest city of Vancouver, yet it feels many more miles away, lost in time.

“Maybe as the crow flies,” Gio mutters, hunkering deeper into his coat. “You probably need a snowmobile and snowshoes to get around here in winter. Can’t imagine a snowplow coming along that shitty, twisting dirt road that leads out here.”

I smile to myself. Gio in his designer shoes that are now caked with mud. Gio who is better suited to the streets and bars and coffee shops of downtown Toronto. Or Manhattan perhaps. Gio who parks a bright-yellow Tesla in his high-end condo garage back home, and who’s not terribly impressed with the utility van I’ve rented for our West Coast podcast project. The van, however, is ideal for our sound and recording equipment and can serve as a makeshift studio. I parked it up on the shoulder of the road, behind a line of bushes, when I spied the tractor approaching the farm gate. Gio and I navigated on foot down a steep bank and through the mud, going around the side of the barn that lists alongside the old farmhouse. This time, I wanted to avoid Rachel’s partner, Granger Forbes. Last week, when we drove all the way out to Green Acres in an effort to meet with Rachel, Granger told us in no uncertain terms that Rachel would never agree to speak with us.

Rachel Walczak never returned my countless phone messages, either. And I really need to interview the lead detective who worked the twenty-four-year-old Leena Rai murder case. She’s key. Without Rachel, our podcast on the brutal sexual assault and killing of the fourteen-year-old Twin Falls resident will fall short of maximum punch.

Wind gusts. A cloud of drizzle kisses my face, and I shiver in the fresh bite of cold. It was a day just like this—same month—that Leena’s battered body was found by Rachel’s team in the dark water beneath Devil’s Bridge. The tractor starts a wide turn.

“She’s heading for the barn. Come!” I say. “Let’s head her off there.” I begin to pick my way quickly across the wet field. Mud sucks at my Blundstones. Gio curses as he follows in my tracks.

“She obviously doesn’t want to talk to us!” he calls out behind me. “Or she’d have returned your messages.”