Blind Sight Read online

  “Not now.” Garcia was preoccupied with navigating. Traffic downtown was a mess. It was the first storm of the season, and after eight months of being spoiled by clear roads drivers had to learn how to maneuver in the snow again. It didn’t get any better once Garcia steered onto Interstate 94 heading west. When they came to a dead stop behind a semitruck, Garcia glanced at his passenger. “Go ahead.”

  “She would have been pretty far along when she took off, but there’s nothing about her pregnancy in the stuff from the St. Paul cops. Didn’t her parents know?”

  The semi rolled forward a few car lengths and Garcia followed. “She could have kept it from them. Bulky sweaters and such.”

  “Runaways go to big cities. Plus, she was an artsy-fartsy film student. Wouldn’t she head for someplace more bohemian than northern Minnesota?”

  “Boyfriend from up there?”

  “No mention of one in the report.”

  “Some body got her pregnant,” said Garcia.

  “Where’s the body right now?”

  Garcia told her the girl’s remains were at the local hospital. They’d have time for a look before the Ramsey County ME’s wagon arrived for transport to the Twin Cities. The crime scene itself was buried, because the hunter was so rattled he’d had trouble leading the law to the body. By the time they got to the remains, they were under a drift. No footprints, because the ground had been frozen. Nothing in the snow, because the stuff had just started to fall when the hunter made his grisly discovery.

  Beyond downtown Minneapolis, traffic thinned. They listened intently to a radio report on the killing.

  “The body of a sixteen-year-old girl was discovered by a bow hunter in Paul Bunyan State Forest last night. Authorities are not commenting on a possible cause of death, or speculating on how long the body had been in the woods. The Ramsey County Medical Examiner is conducting the autopsy. The young woman’s name is being withheld until relatives can be notified. In other news …”

  “No missing fetus, no pentagram, no senator father,” observed Garcia.

  “Details will come out,” Bernadette said. “Media’s tied up with the storm and the fender-bender count right now.”

  “Speaking of benders, how’d you get home last night?”

  She didn’t want to talk about it, and the radio gave her an out. “The weather,” she said, turning up the volume.

  “… and parts of the Twin Cities could see fifteen to eighteen inches. Northern Minnesota may get slammed with up to two feet by the time this storm system pushes its way across the Midwest. The Minnesota Department of Transportation is asking drivers to give their plows plenty of…”

  “I’ve never dealt with a crime scene in the middle of a blizzard,” she said.

  “Me neither.”

  They came up on a roadside yard littered with miniature windmills and a homemade billboard: WINDMILLS AND WINDMILL PARTS WANTED. “It’s almost like someone timed it with the weather,” she said as she looked out at the windmills’ blades, frantic arms reaching up from the drifts. “The body, possible evidence, all of it harder to get to because of the storm.”

  “More likely, they lucked out.”

  “Question: What’s worse, a lucky homicidal maniac or a smart one?”

  “I’d rather come up against a smart maniac,” he said. “Good luck can be harder to beat than brains. You can’t outthink good luck.”

  “But sooner or later luck always runs out.”

  In the tiny town of Motley, Garcia turned in to a gas station to feed the beast. “Here’s your chance to stock up on munchies,” he said, hopping out of the truck.

  “Grab me some candy.”

  Garcia went inside to pay and came out with a fistful of bars. “Emergency provisions,” he said, handing her one and dropping the rest into the storage compartment between them.

  As Bernadette unwrapped her chocolate dinner, she glanced across the street at a small grocery store. “Shouldn’t we buy some real food?”

  “Ed’s got stuff in the freezer,” he said, getting back on the road.

  “I feel funny about sponging off him.” Garcia’s cousin was a homicide detective with the St. Paul Police Department, and although Bernadette didn’t know him well, she was certain that he disapproved of her and her unique talent. Most cops wrote her off as a freak.

  “Don’t worry about it, Cat,” said Garcia. “I do plenty of work around his cabin. He owes me big-time.”

  Garcia hung a right onto Minnesota 210 and steered the truck over the Crow Wing River. A block later, he hung a left onto Minnesota 64 heading north. They plowed past a logging company, its lot loaded with trucks carrying logs. This was a big lumber area.

  The snow was coming faster and thicker, and even the beams of the monster truck couldn’t completely punch through the curtain. There were no other cars behind or ahead of them. The forest came up on both sides of the highway. “I didn’t realize Paul Bunyan was so big,” she said.

  “More than seventy thousand acres. There’s a north section and a south section. Highway 200 cuts between them horizontally. North is kind of flat and has more pine trees. South—where the Dunton girl was found—is hilly. Aspen trees. Ponds.”

  He slowed and took a right down a rough, narrow road. Trees scraped against the sides of the truck. Garcia activated the truck’s high beams. They came to a T in the road, and Garcia hung a left. He drove with confidence until they came to a fork. The truck lurched to a halt. “Hmm.”

  “Anthony?”

  “Let’s take a chance,” he said, and steered the truck to the right.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Titan came up over a hill and Bernadette saw deputies milling on the road ahead of them. “Hallelujah,” she said.

  “It wasn’t that scary.” Garcia pulled the truck to the right and put it in park. “I knew where I was going the whole time.”

  “Sure you did.” Her side of the truck was buried in the brush. To extricate herself, she had to force the door open and drop onto some bushes.

  A trio of deputies stepped into the middle of the road as Garcia and Bernadette approached. The middle guy examined the agents’ ID wallets, handed them back, and thumbed over his shoulder.

  “You’ll come to a large clearing with a metal stand mounted to a tree. Behind that is a deer path. Follow it. You’ll come to a smaller clearing and then … well… You’ll know you’re in the right place. At the edge of the water there’s a big canopy thing.”

  Bernadette didn’t think a north-woods sheriff’s office would have its own tent. “Did the BCA boys leave it behind?”

  The deputy dragged a gloved hand across his dripping nose.

  “We borrowed it from one of the bars. They use it for wedding receptions.”

  “I take it our other folks haven’t arrived,” said Garcia. They were going to be joined up north by the Evidence Response Team, experts in crime-scene processing, and some agents from the Minneapolis office.

  “Not yet,” said the deputy, wiping his nose again.

  As she and Garcia hiked, Bernadette looked up into the sky and blinked through the snow. The sun would be down soon, and a difficult crime scene would become next to impossible.

  They heard the tent before they saw it. Its sides and roof were vibrating furiously in the wind, and the whole thing looked ready to launch into the sky with the next gust. The white walls were lined with arched clear plastic windows. In a noble attempt to establish a secure perimeter, police tape had been tied to the half circle of trees surrounding the shelter. The yellow ribbons whipped around and flapped like kite tails. A deputy was trying to tie an errant end to a tree when the other end came undone. Three other deputies were standing at a corner of the tent, talking and moving their feet around, undoubtedly trying to keep from losing feeling in their lower extremities.

  Garcia and Bernadette stood along one side of a stretch of yellow with their identification wallets open. The police-tape deputy came up to them and reached over to untie the
ribbon. The thing came undone by itself and flapped in the wind. “God bless it,” sputtered the frustrated deputy, a young guy with red ears and cheeks. He chased the wild end.

  An older deputy—a heavyset man with gray hair poking out from his hat and a frosty gray mustache—came up behind th young man and put his hand on the guy’s shoulder. “Give it up, Billy No one’s in the woods tonight except for us idiots.”

  “Is the sheriff around?” asked Garcia, extending his hand.

  “You must be Antonia,” said the guy, shaking Garcia’s hand and grinning broadly through the frozen facial hair. “Everyone speaks highly of your angling skills. I’m Marty Martin.”

  Antonia. Bernadette liked that, and suppressed a chuckle.

  “Where is Seth?” asked Garcia.

  “He was here a minute ago. Probably left to take a—” Martin stopped himself as he noticed Bernadette. “To use the facilities.”

  Bernadette extended her hand and Martin took it. “Bernadette Saint Clare.”

  “Oh,” he said flatly. “Heard about you, too.”

  Bernadette didn’t want to know what he’d heard. She looked past him at the tent. “Can we get a gander before it goes dark?”

  Martin moved to one side. “It’s your show.”

  The two agents stepped up to the shaking walls. Since the frozen ground didn’t allow staking the shelter, it had been anchored with a series of weights. Bernadette used the tip of her boot to kick the snow off one of the lumps. Ice-cream bucket filled with concrete. “This seems—I don’t know—extreme.”

  “Desperate might be a better word,” said Garcia.

  They each took a window. The interior was well lit, but there wasn’t much to see since the body had been removed. Evidence-eradication gremlins—the nickname fondly given to first responders—had done their job. There were boot prints everywhere, the indentations muffled by a layer of snow before the tent could be erected. Garcia had said there had never been any perpetrator footprints. Still, the crime-scene guys were going to get their DNA shorts in a bundle. As it was, they weren’t going to like dropping into a case after the BCA. She saw a concave area, where the body must have rested before it was lifted out of the snow. Splotches of red against the white. She’d expected more blood, but maybe the bulk of it had been buried by the time the shelter was put up.

  Bernadette could often tell at first glance if a crime scene would surrender anything useful, and her gut told her this snowy mess was going to produce little. In fact, the entire spectacle—the tent and the police tape and the shivering deputies planted in the middle of a blizzard in the middle of a forest called Paul Bunyan—seemed absurd. Ludicrous.

  She stepped away from the window, and Garcia did the same. He apparently shared her thoughts but expressed them more succinctly than she could have. “Not feeling it.”

  “Neither am I,” she said.

  “Let’s go to the hospital.”

  “You don’t want to wait and meet our CSI stars?”

  “They’re big boys,” said Garcia. “They don’t need me watching them play in the snow.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Crow Wing Lakes Memorial, a one-story, U-shaped brick building, was halfway between the tiny towns of Nevis and Akeley Garcia turned in to the hospital parking lot, which was already plowed and sanded. There were a handful of other vehicles. Before jumping out, Bernadette took Lydia’s photo from the file and tucked it inside her jacket.

  A gust of wind slammed their backs. Hunching their shoulders, they hurried to the double glass doors of the front entrance. As soon as they stepped through, a thirty-something man greeted them with a stethoscope draped around his neck. He had short sandy hair and blue eyes framed by wire-rimmed glasses. Tall and thin, he wore a lab coat that was too short at the sleeves and too roomy in the shoulders. When he spoke, he folded his hands in front of him, giving the appearance of a giant praying mantis. “Dr. Sven Hessler,” he said with a nod.

  “Assistant Special Agent in Charge Anthony Garcia.” He extended his hand and Hessler accepted it. “This is Agent Bernadette Saint Clare.”

  Bernadette shook the doctor’s hand.

  “Cold out there,” Hessler said.

  “Sure is.” Bernadette pulled her gloves tighter over her fingers. She kept them on to avoid surprise sights while on the job.

  “I could have someone make a fresh pot of coffee,” Hessler offered. “We’ve got some cake back in ER. One of the nurses had a birthday.”

  “Not this time of night,” said Garcia. “Thanks anyway.”

  “Let’s use the stairs,” Hessler said, leading them down a hall past the elevators, his lab coat billowing behind him.

  “Thank you for taking the time,” Garcia said.

  “You expect this stuff in the cities,” said Hessler, using the term rural Minnesotans used for the Twin Cities area. “I never thought I’d see anything like this up here.”

  “You from this neck of the woods?” Garcia asked.

  “You betcha. Happy to come back and serve my people.”

  The trio jogged down a flight of stairs, and the doctor pushed open the door to the hospital’s lower level. Hessler led the way past a dark laundry room and a couple of janitorial closets. The hallway was long, narrow, and poorly lit. It smelled of mildew and pine-scented floor cleaner. The floor was covered in gray linoleum and nothing decorated the white walls, but hanging from the ceiling tiles were paper snowflakes suspended by nearly invisible string. As they fluttered from some random draft, they resembled little ghosts dancing in the dimness.

  “We’ve got pretty much everything,” said the physician, sounding like a salesman. “State-of-the-art diagnostics, including an eight-slice CT scan, MRI, and mammography Top-notch surgical suite. Besides the usual bowel resection and hernia repair, we can do cancer surgery and ortho surgery. C-sections and hysterectomies. Our radiology department—”

  “You have obstetrics services?” interrupted Bernadette.

  He stopped in front of a door. “Certainly.”

  “Did one of your doctors have this girl as a patient?” she asked.

  “I’m not… I don’t know. There are a couple of women’s clinics in the area, and their physicians have privileges here. Whether any of them saw this young woman …” His voice trailed off, and he buried his hands in his lab coat. “I don’t think I should be talking with you about it. We have a legal department.”

  “You do have everything,” Garcia said dryly.

  “I’m not trying to be evasive.” Hessler dug into his coat pockets and produced a key attached to a yellow rabbit’s foot. “I don’t know anything. I wouldn’t have even brought you down here, except Sheriff Wharten called and told me to.”

  “Appreciate the cooperation,” Bernadette said.

  “Not much of a morgue,” Hessler warned, as he shoved the key into the door’s lock and turned the knob. “Two drawers. Don’t use it much. Usually the funeral home comes by and takes the remains. These circumstances were highly unusual. Unfortunate.”

  Hessler pushed the door open and flicked on a light. “Watch your step.”

  “What’s with the boxes?” Garcia asked. Cardboard cubes were stacked along the walls to the right and left of the door. Most of the cases contained cafeteria supplies: Styrofoam cups, paper napkins, drinking straws. There were also giant cans of food: peas, pudding, beans.

  “Space is at a premium,” Hessler explained. “We usually use this room for storage.”

  Bernadette frowned. “Can anyone stroll down here and let themselves in?”

  “No,” Hessler said quickly. “When the room is in use as a morgue, the door is locked and the key is kept by the nursing supervisor.”

  “Let’s get comfortable,” said Garcia, pulling off his jacket and tossing it over a case of toilet paper.

  “Good idea,” said Bernadette, throwing her jacket over Garcia’s. She yanked off her leather gloves and snapped on the latex.

  “Which drawer?” asked Garcia
as he slipped on a pair of work gloves.

  “Uh … I don’t know,” Hessler said sheepishly. “I haven’t actually seen the body.”

  The two agents walked up to the pair of waist-high metal squares planted in the middle of the wall opposite the door. The drawers had handles, and sat side by side. They could have been a set of built-in file cabinets. Bernadette opened the hinged door on her side, to their right. She grabbed the edge of the slab inside and pulled it out partway. Empty. “Try door number two,” she said, sliding the slab back inside and snapping the door closed.

  Garcia opened the hatch on the left, hooked his hand under the slab, and pulled it out. The tray contained a black body bag. The bump at the top of the sack indicated that the corpse had been placed feetfirst. “You want to leave the room, Dr. Hessler, or are you okay with this?” Garcia asked.

  “I’m a medical professional,” Hessler said indignantly. Still, he stayed behind Garcia and Bernadette.

  Reaching down, Bernadette started unzipping. The bag fell open just past the girl’s chin. Bernadette inhaled sharply and withdrew her hand. “It’s gone.”

  “What’s wrong?” asked Hessler, looking over their shoulders. “What’s gone?”

  Bernadette shook her head slowly. “So that means—”

  “Let me make sure,” said Garcia, gently picking strands of hair off the young woman’s forehead, to get a clear view of her flesh.

  “What happened to it?” asked Bernadette.

  Garcia leaned close to the girl’s forehead and sniffed. “Antiseptic or disinfectant. That’s what they used to take it off.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Hessler, coming up next to the slab and standing alongside it with a quizzical look. “Take what off?”

  “A pentagram,” said Bernadette. “She had a pentagram on her forehead.”

  Hessler took a step back and folded his arms in front of him. “I didn’t know that. I didn’t hear anything about a pentagram.”