After retrieving a brush and a round two-ounce container of powder from his backpack, Jimmy gently dusted the left side of the trunk with a steady twirling motion, then blew the powder clear, leaving the faint outline of a one-foot-diameter circle, two eyes, a dot for a nose, and a downcast mouth.
Without a word, Jimmy photographed the image from multiple angles using different filters. We’ll need those images for court, to prove the case is linked to the Sad Face Killer. Without them, all we have is my word, and I can’t exactly walk into court and say I saw a sad face on the victim’s car, an image that everyone else missed.
“How’d you see that?” the tech had stammered.
“Lucky, I guess,” Jimmy replied. “The light was reflecting oddly … just a hunch.”
After Susanville, we flew to Medford, Oregon, where Dany Grazier was kidnapped eighteen months ago. Finding nothing on her car, we headed south again to Yreka, California, and caught a ride with Special Agent Janet Portenga of the U.S. Forest Service. Fifteen miles into the Klamath National Forest we came upon a patch of dark forest where Dany’s body was found. Sad Face’s shine was all over the place, including a detour through the brush to a pine tree forty feet from the body dump where he had carved a sad face into the trunk.
Jimmy documented it with his camera, each click of the shutter sounding loud and inappropriate; offensive. It’s one of many sounds left in the wake of a homicide. They grate on you after a while.
Then it was northwest to Brookings, Oregon, for Erica Overdorff—another of the still-missing. Then to Crescent City for Jennifer Green and south to Eureka for Leah Daniels, which had led us to this miserable patch of fetid-green northeast of Weaverville in the Trinity National Forest on a peak overlooking Trinity Lake.
The forest here is oppressive.
The warm June air has spent the afternoon baking last winter’s leaves where they lie, brewing a musty, earthy stench of decay that settles between the trees and presses in from all sides. The heat sucks the moisture from my brow, my neck, my face, leaving my skin feeling slapped and raw.
Despite this, my mind is not on the forest. Instead, I stare at a lone tree at the edge of a high bluff that drops off steeply to the water below. It’s a tree little different from the others around it, except this one has a special color of shine around its base.
There was something about Leah that Sad Face liked, I can tell that right away. She’s still dead, of course, but he took extra care choosing a dump site and positioning her body. He could have just dumped her in the woods like the others.
He didn’t.
I see where he leaned her up against the tree not far off the well-traveled trail, ensuring she’d be found quickly. He faced her toward the lake, perhaps so her dead eyes would have something pleasant to fix upon.
He sat next to her for a spell.
Maybe he leaned against her; maybe he held her.
The shine isn’t all that clear.
Hikers found her early one April morning two years ago. Rigor indicated she had been dead less than twelve hours; lividity showed that she’d been killed elsewhere and had spent several hours on her side before being propped upright against the tree. She had on the same clothes she’d been wearing when she went missing eight months earlier, and her unmolested purse was resting in her lap.
Whatever goodwill she had earned with Sad Face, it only went so far. In the end, he choked the life from her just like the others.
It’s a quiet flight back to Redding, Jimmy and I each alone with our thoughts. We wear headphones so we can talk back and forth above the rumble of the Cessna’s engine, but few words are exchanged. Jimmy is working something out in a notebook that he’s been scribbling in all day, and I spend most of the flight thinking about Heather and our dinner together just a few nights and so long ago.
Tomorrow’s schedule should be easier.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
June 27, 7:40 A.M.
Jimmy’s reading the morning paper and eating scrambled eggs washed down with coffee while I nibble at a sesame seed muffin and sip orange juice. The food is good … for a complimentary hotel breakfast.
Halfway through my muffin, Marty bounces in, shoots me a big grin, and makes a beeline for the coffee. I pray he goes for decaf, but he plants himself in front of a dispenser of full-strength French ground and tops off his one-liter thermos, followed by a sixteen-ounce paper cup. Stirring cream and sugar into the cup, he plops down in the seat next to me, still grinning.
“How was San Francisco?” I ask politely.
Out of the corner of my eye I see Jimmy slump in his seat, burying himself deeper in the newspaper as he slowly lifts the top edge up to obscure his face. Jimmy thinks that Marty is too loquacious. Or, in his words, He doesn’t know when to shut up.
“Greeaat!” Marty purrs, smiling ridiculously like some kid on a candy binge.
I hope it was great, I think. We didn’t get our crab till almost eleven last night.
He starts babbling on about how amazing the aquarium was, which doesn’t surprise me since he’s visited close to fifty in the time I’ve known him. He once told me his goal is to visit every major aquarium in the country. As he rambles on … and on … and on … I realize he’s not talking about the Aquarium of the Bay by Pier 39, he’s talking about the Monterey Bay Aquarium two hours south of San Francisco in Monterey.
“Whoa. I thought you went to San Francisco.”
“I did.” He smirks. “But I started in Monterey. I rented a little convertible, visited the aquarium, and cruised Seventeen-Mile Drive with the top down. Then I flew to San Francisco.” He leans toward me. “That way I scored two aquariums in one day—and I still remembered to bring back crab,” he adds with a wink.
Yeah, at eleven o’clock!