EXCERPT FROM SIX MILE CREEK

A couple of kids who’d skipped school to walk down in the woods and smoke a joint ran across Gitana Camarena’s body lying next to Six Mile Creek. She had been dead for a while.

Within an hour, we had sealed the area, and the section of the Morgan Highway appending the creek was closed to through traffic. Both of the Prosperity police cruisers sat by the side of the road, their lights flashing in near-unison with that of the ambulance that had been summoned to remove the body to the medical examiner’s office in Morgan.

As it happened, Neerjah Patel was on rotation again with the Sheriff’s Department. Since Prosperity had such a small police force, and a limited operating budget, we had a reciprocal agreement to share services with the Sheriff in Morgan, who handled most investigations out in the county.

Neerjah knelt next to the body, and inserted a long needle thermometer into the right side.

“She’s been dead at least a day and a half,” she announced. She reached out and gently grasped each side of the girl’s head.

“We have rigor, but I can move her head readily. I can feel bones grating. I’d say cause of death was a broken neck, but we’ll know more following the post in Morgan.”

Neerjah and I were alone on the east bank of Six Mile Creek with the body. I had taken care to keep everyone else back up at the road, in an effort to avoid contaminating the scene. The Sheriff was sending a CSI team in from Morgan. I could hear their siren in the distance.

A small crowd had begun to gather at the roped-off area on the Morgan Highway. I keyed my walkie-talkie.

“Slim, I want those people as far away as you can get them,” I said.

“Ten-four.”

“This one didn’t kill herself, Judd,” Neerjah said. “And I’d say she wasn’t killed here.”

“That was my thought. Someone dumped her here, hoping she wouldn’t be found for a while.”

“She looks like she was a pretty girl,” Neerjah said. “Any idea who she is?”

“No. We haven’t found any identification in the area. She’s Hispanic, which might make things even more difficult. If she’s illegal, we won’t have much to go on. We’ll just have to wait for a missing persons report to match up with her.”

“Shouldn’t take long. Everybody in town will know we found a body by the end of the day. You’ll probably be flooded with calls from anxious parents wondering whether she’s their daughter.”

The wail of the siren ended abruptly as the crime scene guys pulled to a stop up on the highway.

Moments later, I heard two of them picking their way down through the trees toward our position. I turned and waved.

I recognized the man. He was a former deputy named Clark Ulrich. I’d never seen the woman before.

“Clark,” I said, extending my hand as he walked up.

“Judd. Good to see you, except for the circumstances.”

He nodded toward his partner.

“Sharon Counts,” he said. “Chief Wheeler.”

I shook her hand. She was plain and thin and very serious-looking. Her hair was pulled back in a severe bun, and she wore very little makeup. I could make out the lines on her forehead and under her eyes. I could recall seeing pictures of Okies during the Dustbowl days who looked a lot like her.

“So, what do we have here?” Clark asked.

Neerjah took over.

“Teenaged Hispanic female. Time of death probably sometime during the last forty-eight hours. Hard to say for certain because of exposure, but rigor has set in. Looks like a fracture of the second or third cervical vertebra. She was probably killed somewhere else, and dumped. We’ll depend on you guys to confirm that.”

“Okay,” Clark said. “If you and Chief Wheeler can step off about thirty or forty feet, we’ll do our magic, and then you can transport the body.”

Neerjah and I watched for an hour as they photographed, marked, and drafted the entire scene. They bagged and logged a number of articles – mostly trash, as far as I could tell from a distance, but you never know what will turn into a clue down the road. Finally, they roped off a perimeter about sixty feet across, by wrapping yellow crime scene tape around various trees.

It gave me a lot of time for a little bit of self-torture, as I surveyed the scene. The very path we had scrambled down from the highway had a history. I could recall the night it had been carved from the living forest. For a long time after, it had been a red clay scar leading from the road to the creek, a freakish eight-foot wide swath of naked soil on which nothing would grow.

I don’t know when it happened, but slowly the flora had finally returned. The gash of dirt was closing from the sides. Fall leaves of every hue had covered the mud and the tire tracks. For the casual observer, it looked for all the world like any other forest path.

I saw it for what it was – the dividing line between one life and another.

“We think we got everything,” Clark said, as they trudged back up the hill to us. I willed myself back into the present and turned to face him. “It would be nice if you could see to it that nobody gets inside that perimeter, though. We might need to come back at some point.”

“I can’t promise,” I told him. “We only have three officers in this town, you know. We can keep an eye on the area during patrol.”

“Probably about all I can ask for,” Clark said. “You can remove the body now.”

Neerjah called for the ambulance personnel to come down with a stretcher, since the hill was way too steep and uneven for a gurney. Together, the four of us rolled the body onto the stretcher and each took one corner for the trek back up the hill.

Once they had the body in the ambulance, Neerjah signed off on the transport, and let them go.

“I’ll give all the information I have to the ME,” she told me. “You should hear something in a day or so. If you put a call in to Billy Wade, you might be able to speed things up a bit.”

“Can you ask the ME to put a priority on identification?”

“Goes without saying. I want to know who that little cutie was as much as you do. Her family may be out there worried sick.”

She climbed back into her car and drove off toward Morgan.

I keyed my radio.

“Slim, Stu, go ahead and open up the highway. We’re finished here,” I said.

I climbed into the new cruiser, and headed back to the barn. The paperwork on this one was going to be back-breaking.