Her Last Word(86)

Ricker’s face darkened. “We’re waiting.”

“Kaitlin’s coming, right? I want her to see this. This could have been her,” Hayward teased.

She tipped her chin up a notch. “Let’s do this.”

“Can I have a cigarette?” Hayward asked. “I think better when I smoke.”

Quinn mimicked a pout. “Sorry, fresh out.”

“Come on,” Hayward coaxed. “There’s got to be a cop here who’s got smokes.”

Blackstone shook his head. “I don’t smoke.”

Ricker shrugged, held up empty hands.

Adler strode back to the cops and after a quick survey returned with a crumpled pack of Marlboros. He fished out a cigarette and a lighter from the pack and lit the tip. Hayward’s cuffs rattled as he accepted it. When he raised it to his lips, his hands trembled slightly.

“Nervous?” Kaitlin asked.

He took another pull. “Being around you always makes me weak in the knees, girl.” He took two more drags and then threw it down and ground his foot into it. “You’ve got more in that packet, Detective?” Hayward asked.

Adler tucked the packet in his pocket. “I do.”

Hayward seemed to understand he’d danced up to the line. Another minute and Adler would transport him back to jail. “Sure. Why not?”

“Where to?” Adler snapped.

Hayward nodded toward the graveled road ahead. “About a quarter mile up that way on the other side of the barn.”

“Let’s go.” Adler took him by the arm and hauled him forward.

Hayward started walking. “Showtime!”

Even with the cool breeze, Kaitlin quickly started sweating as she struggled to keep pace. If Adler had slowed up for her before, he didn’t this time. And she was glad. She didn’t want to slow him down. The priority was finding Gina.

“How you doing, girl?” Hayward glanced back over his shoulder at her.

“What’s taking you so long?” Kaitlin refused to show Hayward any weakness.

Hayward laughed. “Don’t pass out on me.”

The dirt road doglegged to the right, but Hayward turned left down a well-worn dirt path made by hunters, farmers, and most likely, moonshiners.

“When’s the last time you were here, Hayward?” Adler asked.

“I’ve been here a few times in between stints in prison. Last time was in mid-January.”

“Why return?” Adler asked.

“To see if Gina was still here. I always liked her. That hasn’t changed. No one else knew where she was, but I did. And that made it special between us.”

Kaitlin sympathized with the officers’ feelings of anger and frustration. This was a joke to Hayward. A parlor game.

Hayward ducked under a branch and pushed through the thicket of trees. “Good thing it’s early in the year. The bugs will eat you alive in the summer. One time I was here I got a terrible case of chiggers.”

Kaitlin pressed her hand to her side, keeping a sharp eye on the ground. As “fast” as she moved, Adler, Quinn, Ricker, Blackstone, and Hayward were putting distance between them. She wasn’t sure how much farther she could walk when Hayward pushed through to a small clearing.

In the center was the barn. Once it had been painted red, but in the last decade, sun, wind, and rain had stripped most of its color.

Hayward’s smile turned electric. He counted off fifty paces from the north corner and stopped at a patch of ground under a collection of young oak trees.

The untrained eye wouldn’t notice the sparse patch of vegetation or the slight dip in the land. A small part of her had hoped Gina had somehow survived, but Adler’s and Quinn’s deepening frowns telegraphed what she’d known in her heart for fourteen years.

Gina was really dead. And they were looking at a shallow grave.



INTERVIEW FILE #24

RETIRED FORENSIC INVESTIGATOR

Sunday, March 4, 2018

Sam Weston has been retired from the Richmond City Police for three years. He lives in the country now, and his small ranch-style house looks out over a pond. He’s feeding his two dozen chickens as we talk.

“The problem with that Mason scene was the weather. Right after the 911 call came in, there was a hell of a rainstorm. It was a real gully washer. The river rose, and part of the street flooded. The entire riverbank was immersed with rising water and debris.”

“Were you able to collect anything of use at the abduction site?”

“Not at first. Everything looked like it had been through a car wash. But we stayed out there for several days. Finally, one of the investigators found part of a green dress a quarter of a mile down the road. It was stuck on a tree branch. We bagged it and took it back to the lab. Gina’s mother said the fabric looked like the dress her daughter had been wearing. We did DNA testing on the fabric, and some of it matched Gina and some did not.”

“There were two blood samples on the cloth?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever identify who the second sample belonged to?”

“We thought it might be Hayward, but it wasn’t a match. We compared it to several other known sex offenders in the area, but in the end, we never came up with a match.”

“Someone else was on that road?”