Vanished - A Mystery (Dixon & Baudin Book 1) Read online

  “Who do you think that guy was in Jessop’s office?” Baudin said.

  “I don’t know. Maybe someone from the sheriff’s office.”

  “He ever done that before? Bring in a stranger and handed a sheriff’s case to you?”

  Dixon shook his head. “Not really. The sheriff sends us the more complex cases ’cause we got better resources, but I ain’t never seen that guy before.” He looked at Baudin, who had the same gaze of concentration he’d had in Jessop’s office. “I ask you somethin’? Why here? Why’d you move from LA to Cheyenne?”

  “I thought you needed your space and didn’t want to get to know me.”

  Dixon was silent. “Yeah, well, who says I do? I’m just curious.”

  Baudin grinned. “Maybe I just like how nice and welcoming everybody is.”

  They didn’t speak again until they got to a fence. Dixon got out and pushed the call button for the intercom on the gate. A surly male voice said, “Who is it?”

  “This is Detective Kyle Dixon with the Cheyenne PD.”

  The man sighed. “There ain’t enough of you up here already? You gotta bring more?”

  “The quicker we get in, the quicker we get out, sir.”

  The man paused. “Fine.”

  The gate clicked open with a groan of metal. Dixon pushed it open all the way, allowing Baudin to pull the car through. The property was at least an hour’s drive from the nearest gas station and forty minutes from any other houses. This wasn’t a place people moved to when they wanted strangers wandering on their land.

  Dixon got back in the car, and they took a paved road up a winding hill. At the top of the hill stood a ranch house and a barn, and several fences penned in dogs and livestock. A man in a black Navy cap stood with a bloodhound by his legs. His clothes were dirty, as was the beard that came down past his neck.

  “You Brett McCabe?” Dixon asked.

  “Your friends are down that trail about fifteen minutes. Then you take the first dirt road you see to the end. You’ll have to walk up a ways. Ain’t no roads past that.”

  “We’ll be fine. Thank you for your help.”

  The man grunted and turned around, the dog following.

  The dirt trail looped around the property. Massive trees and fields of golden weeds dotted the landscape. A green shed, probably a watershed, stood out from the fields like paint on canvas. Just past that was another dirt road.

  “Always wanted me a place like this,” Dixon said. “Place to raise a family and have the rest of the world leave you the hell alone.”

  “It’ll always find you, even in the boonies. That’s why we’re here.”

  The road ended after a quarter of a mile, and on a far hill they saw two sheriff’s cruisers and a van with a logo Dixon couldn’t make out on the side. He glanced at Baudin, who tapped the snake on the rearview as he got out of the car.

  6

  The house was spotless. Hillary Dixon took a lot of things out on housecleaning. Whenever she felt stressed and anxious, cleaning was what she turned to.

  Randy had slept most of the morning, only waking up once to feed and then lying quietly in his crib, staring at his mobile. He wasn’t a fussy child and didn’t require the effort Hillary had seen other children need.

  After a shower, she leaned against the counter in the kitchen and sipped chamomile tea, staring blankly at the clean linoleum floors. The only thing on the agenda for the day was to pick up formula and batteries for the remote. Though they lived on only one income, in a place like Cheyenne, a steady paycheck and government health insurance was enough, and they didn’t worry about making ends meet. Every other year they got to take a real vacation, and once a week they got to eat out at a decent restaurant. It was more than Hillary had had growing up.

  The teacup was at her lips when she heard a knock at the door. She put the cup down on the counter and crossed the kitchen to the front room. Looking out the peephole, her heart dropped. She didn’t move for a moment and then pulled away and put her back against the door, losing her breath to the panic that grabbed her.

  “I know you’re home,” a male voice said through the door. “I saw your car in the garage.”

  She closed her eyes, trying to steady her heartbeat. In a flash of resolute anger, she turned and opened the door.

  The man was lean and handsome, with sandy hair. He smiled.

  “It’s good to see you,” he said.

  “I told you never to come here. And you can’t call and hang up anymore,” Hillary said, the door held in front of her like a shield.

  “You don’t answer your cell when I call. You don’t have to see me if you don’t want to. It’s a free country. But he’s my son. I have rights.”

  “We agreed that—”

  “We didn’t agree on anything,” he interrupted. “You told me how it was gonna be, and I said yes to make you happy.” He gently pushed open the door and stepped inside far enough to lean against the doorframe. “Are you happy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bullshit. You look me in the eyes and tell me you love him. You look at me right now and tell me that, and I’ll leave and never come back.”

  “I love him,” she blurted out but couldn’t meet his eyes.

  “I call bullshit again.”

  She sighed and looked down, noticing for the first time that her hands were trembling. “What do you want from me, Chris?”

  “I want to spend time with you. With him. I don’t want him growing up not knowing who his real father is.” A car passed by on the street, and he looked back at it. “I know I probably can’t be with you. But I can be close to you.”

  Her eyes widened. “What are you talking about?”

  “I rented an apartment in the duplex across the street.”

  She shook her head. “You couldn’t be that stupid.”

  “Why am I stupid? Because I want to see my only child and the love of my life?”

  “He’ll kill us both.”

  “Fuck him. You told me yourself he doesn’t talk to you anymore, that it feels like you guys are roommates. Just leave him.”

  “Get out.”

  “Hillary, please. I just want—”

  “I said get out,” she hissed.

  He hesitated, running his tongue along his lower lip, and then stepped out. She shut the door, leaned against it, and slid to the floor, the warmth of tears flowing down her cheeks as she wept.

  7

  Dixon opened the sunglasses case he carried in his breast pocket and slipped on his crimson-tinted glasses. Baudin squinted from the morning sun, his hands on his hips as he watched the scene in front of the two sheriff’s office’s cars.

  “Shit,” Dixon said. “You seein’ what I’m seein’?”

  “I am,” Baudin said.

  “Shit.”

  The grass was soft underfoot, but the heat was pronounced. Dixon knew that if he was out in the sun for more than ten minutes, he’d be sweating, and he hated sweating in a suit. He took off the coat and tossed it onto the passenger seat before loosening his tie. His Cheyenne PD detective’s badge was clipped to his belt, and he noticed that Baudin wore his on a thin chain around his neck—not a lanyard but an actual chain.

  Dixon was five or six paces ahead when he noticed Baudin hadn’t moved.

  “You comin’?”

  Baudin exhaled and set off through the grass. Dixon was just ahead of him, his eyes on the scene up the hill.

  The climb was grueling in the heat, and within a minute Dixon felt a trickle of sweat on his head. The drop that rolled down his scalp and over his neck gave him a dull, sick feeling.

  When they reached the top of the hill, they saw that the squad cars had taken a dirt trail on the other side of the hill that wasn’t visible from where they were. Dixon swore silently at himself. He should have insisted they drive around first and find how the sheriffs had driven up the hill.

  Two sheriff’s deputies and a forensic tech stood in the shadow of the thing they were a
nalyzing. Between and a little behind them was a light tan wooden cross. Eight feet high and probably six feet across, a young woman hung from it with massive nails sticking out of her hands and feet.

  “Ho-leey shit,” Dixon mumbled.

  The woman was nude, her flesh already a putrefied off-green. Her eyes had sunk back into her head, which leaned to the side as if the neck were nothing more than melted rubber.

  Her stomach had been cut open, and part of her intestines hung down, swaying lightly in the breeze. The rest was flopped on the ground in front of her. Dixon could see the vacant stare of her green eyes from where he stood, as if she weren’t dead but hadn’t noticed the men around her.

  She’d been wounded several times—vicious attacks that took flesh with them. Her breasts were completely gone, leaving ragged, gaping wounds in their place. Several fingers and toes were missing, as were her ears. Hanging out of the wound in her belly was a blackened organ he didn’t recognize. Dixon wondered whether that was how organs really looked, or if rotting exposed to the air made organs look like that.

  A sheriff’s deputy walked up, tipping his hat back with his thumb. “Detective.”

  “What is this, Caleb?”

  He looked up at the body. “Hell if I know. But she been out here a while. You see ’em things in her wounds? In the breasts and such? Them’s mushrooms. She been out here so long mushrooms is growin’ all inside her body.”

  Baudin went to stand within a foot of the body and stood gazing at it.

  “Who called it in?” Dixon said.

  “Anonymous. Some hitchhiker who said he didn’t want no part of testifyin’ or any of that. Just said there was a body up here and to come have a look-see.”

  Dixon and the deputy slowly walked up to the cross. Dixon had a vision of his Savior just then, hanging dead on a cross in Golgotha. He pushed the thought away, instead focusing on Baudin, who stood at the body’s feet, staring up at her privates.

  “The genitals are missing,” Baudin said.

  The forensic tech, a man in a blue jumpsuit and plastic gloves, crouching down over the organs, said, “Might be in this here,” pointing with his chin to the mound of organ and tissue oozing at the foot of the cross.

  “What else is missing?” Baudin asked.

  “Won’t know that until the autopsy.” The tech rose and mopped the sweat off his brow with the back of his arm. “Body out in the elements for even a day compromises the evidence. This thing been out here for weeks. Don’t think I can pull much from it.”

  “It’s not a thing,” Baudin said softly.

  The tech didn’t reply. He turned to the deputy and said, “That’s it for me. Ben was already out here and took all the measurements and photos. We’ll have everything processed and ready in a day or so, Deputy.”

  “Don’t tell me. This is Cheyenne PD now.”

  Dixon said, “What you know about that, Caleb? Why they bring us in? You got murder people, same as us.”

  “Beyond my pay grade, Detective.” He looked up once more at the body. “But I sure as shit am glad they did.” He turned. “Coroner’s people will be out shortly.”

  Dixon stood a long time. The body no longer looked human, as if it had never been human. His uncle had told him something once about skinning and cleaning a deer, and the line kept running through his head: Turn her inside out.

  Baudin snapped some photos of his own on an iPhone. Then he walked back about ten paces, taking in the entire scene.

  “He’s an amateur,” Baudin said.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Look at the hands. The body’s weight is making the nails rip through the palms, and the hands are almost loose. You don’t crucify people by nailing their hands. You have to nail into the wrists. If he’d done it more than once, he’d know that. Some of the paintings of Jesus show him crucified through the hands. If he was a real person who was crucified, they would’ve showed wounds in the wrists.”

  “Christ was a real person.”

  “You there to see him?”

  The two men glared at each other a moment before Baudin looked back at the body. “But he’s learning. The next one’ll be much cleaner.”

  Dixon ran his eyes over the mutilated body. Now that it’d been pointed out to him, he could clearly see the gaping red hole where her genitals should have been.

  “You ever seen anything like this?” Dixon said.

  Baudin was quiet before saying, “No.”

  8

  Several hours passed before the crime scene was fully processed. The forensic techs had done a decent job, but Baudin insisted he and Dixon process as much as they could themselves. They walked the perimeter, analyzed blood trajectory based on droplets on the ground, and searched the surrounding area for any additional evidence. The one thing they could say for certain was that she was alive before she was crucified. The hands and feet had large bruises in the centers where the nails had gone through. She had to have been alive for bruising to occur. Someone wanted her to suffer before she died.

  Dixon had pit stains and a ring of sweat around his collar. He wished he’d brought a bottle of water with him.

  The coroner’s people didn’t get there until after lunchtime. By then, Baudin and Dixon were sitting in the car with the air conditioner running. Not a single word was exchanged, not until Baudin rolled his window down to smoke.

  “That’s a disgusting habit,” Dixon said.

  “We all got ’em.”

  “My dad died of lung cancer. Fifty-eight years old. Them last few years he was coughing up blood every fifteen minutes.”

  “Did he stop smoking?”

  Dixon sat quietly. “No.”

  Two assistants and the coroner himself were going to take care of the body. The coroner, a man named Gil Rothfield, had just pulled up. He walked over and knocked on Dixon’s window.

  “Dude creeps me out,” Dixon said.

  “Why?”

  “Wait ’til you meet him.”

  They got out of the car, which they’d driven up the hill to where the deputies had parked, and followed the coroner.

  Gil whistled through his teeth when he saw the body. “Hot damn. They did a number on her, didn’t they?”

  Baudin said, “Anything similar to this come through the past few years? Cutting off the breasts and genitals specifically?”

  He shook his head and spit a glob of green and brown on the grass. “No, I’d remember somethin’ like this. Most of the killin’s we get are suicides. Shotguns under the chin, mostly. Had this one where the damn fool put it to the side of his head and blew half his face off but lived. And he got to walk around lookin’ like hamburger meat. Then he finished it off with pills.”

  Baudin watched while Gil ordered his two assistants around. “You a pathologist?” Baudin asked.

  “Nope. I was a family doc. Elected coroner in 1989 and ain’t lost an election since.”

  The assistants brought out a ladder from the back of their van. Dixon thought it’d be better to lay the cross down, as the body could fall apart, but Gil did as he pleased. One of the men climbed the ladder and looked the body over. The other assistant grabbed the body’s legs as the one on the ladder pulled the hands off the nails.

  They lowered the body, rigid as plaster, into a black zippered bag lying on a plastic board. They tucked the feet in first and then pulled the rest of the body inside. Dixon watched them pull the zipper all the way to the top, and the girl wasn’t visible anymore.

  “How long for the autopsy results?” Baudin asked.

  “Six weeks, mostly.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “You want me to work faster, get me a faster lab. Otherwise you gots to wait six weeks.”

  Dixon could see Baudin’s face flushing red, so he stepped in and said, “How ’bout just a preliminary report, Gil?”

  “Oh, that won’t be no trouble. Two days, tops.”

  “Can you get one of the dentists in there today so we c
an ID her?”

  “Will do.”

  Dixon glanced at Baudin, who looked away, back at the cross that was casting a shadow across the black bag.

  The drive back felt longer than the drive out. Dixon stared at the emptiness of the passing landscape and decided it could’ve been any desolate planet. Maybe Mars—wouldn’t have looked any different: only rock and dirt for as far as he could see.

  “You hungry?” Baudin asked.

  “I could eat.”

  There was a diner at the next exit, a dirty-looking place Dixon had never been to but had seen several times while driving by. Baudin pulled in and parked up front. They got out, and Dixon opened the diner’s door for him.

  The hostess was an older woman and the only person in the place other than the cook. Soft country music was playing. They sat at a table by the window. Dixon looked at a menu, which consisted of sandwiches and grilled meats, and decided the safest bet would be a turkey sandwich with fries. There was no way to screw that up.

  He looked at Baudin, who only glanced at the menu and then set it down. He was staring out at the freeway, rubbing his hands together. Dixon ran his eyes down the tattoos on Baudin’s arms. One was of a samurai with a skeleton face. Another was an American soldier bent in prayer, empty boots next to him.

  “Were you in the service?” Dixon asked.

  He nodded. “Infantry in the second Iraq war.”

  “Iraqi Freedom, right?”

  He scoffed. “That war didn’t have anything to do with freedom.”

  “Sure it did. We were attacked.”

  “Not by Iraq. Besides, we knew about it.”

  “About what?”

  The waitress, who was also the hostess, came by and asked for drink orders. Baudin ordered a coffee, and Dixon asked for a Sprite.

  “September eleventh,” Baudin said when the waitress left. “We knew about it.”

  Dixon was quiet. “Shit on me, you are a damn truther, aren’t you?”