Excerpt: Precocious by Design

Chapter 1
Monday morning

Lieutenant Lloyd Timmons followed the patrol officer down the sparse trail below the highway. “Who found the body?” he asked.

“A couple of geocachers,” the officer replied. “It was kind of convenient, actually. Once they figured out they’d stumbled on a crime scene, they marked the GPS location and moved away. It made it really easy for us to find it.”

“Where are they now? They did stick around to answer questions, didn’t they?”

“They’re up in one of the patrol cars. I don’t get the idea they wanted to be near the body.”

They stepped over a dead sapling, and skirted a copse of bushes. Around the other side, the crowd of officers revealed their destination. The breeze carried the other clue to the proximity of the body, and he fought the gag reflex. His first partner on homicide had told him he’d get used to the smell eventually, and after fifteen years, he was still waiting.

The coroner was already there, and the young man looked up as he approached. “Timmy,” he greeted pleasantly. “They put you on this one, huh?”

“Mike, how many times have I told you not to call me Timmy?”

He smirked. “I quit counting long ago, but you still give me such a great scowl when I do.”

Shaking his head, he reached in his pocket for a hanky to press over his nose. The aromatic paste he’d infused into the cloth helped block the smell, without remaining stuck below his nose the rest of the day. “So, what do we have?”

Mike pulled a few branches in a dense shrub to one side to reveal the body. “From the looks of it, I’d say she was thrown from the side of the highway and landed here. The only footprints we found on arrival matched those of the two guys that called it in, and were fresh this morning. She’s been here, however, since either late Friday night or early Saturday morning, and there’s no perimeter branches disturbed to indicate she was brought in from ground level.”

The nausea went beyond just the smell. The body was that of a young girl, and the naked skin was the sickly gray of early decomposition. “How about cause of death?”

“We’ll need to verify this, but she has strangulation marks on her neck. Some of the wounds appear to be post-humous, probably from her landing in the brush, but since we were waiting on you to get here before we moved the body, we haven’t checked for other wounds that might not be apparent yet.”

“She’s naked, so I’m betting sexual assault.”

“Yeah, that was my first thought, too. This has all the appearance of a child abduction, and the perp probably thought this was a good spot to dispose of the body where it wouldn’t be found very soon.”

“He got done with her, and just threw her away,” Lloyd said. Lord, let me catch this guy, please. Let me keep him from ever putting another child and another family through this hell, he prayed.

“Are you okay?” Mike asked.

“To be honest, no,” Lloyd said. “But I don’t want to ever be okay with something like this. I think if I ever get to the point where a case like this doesn’t make me sick, or make me angry, then it’s past time to retire. A man shouldn’t be able to see this and not feel revulsion that anyone could do this to a child.”

“You’re probably right, but I’m too young to retire.”

“Go ahead and get her out of there; I’ve seen enough for now, and any other clues I’m likely to find here are probably going to be easier to find with her out of the bush.” He turned back to the patrol officer. “Where are those guys that found the body?”

“Back the way we came,” she said.

He followed her back to the patrol car, where one of the young men sat with his face buried in his hands.

“I’m Lt. Lloyd Timmons; I’m the homicide detective assigned to this case,” Lloyd said. “You’re the guys who called this in?”

“Yeah,” the other man said. “Stan was ahead of me and saw her, and when he told me what was in the bush, we marked the location and got out of there.”

“What were you two doing down there this morning?”

“Looking for a geocache. There’s a multi-cache down there, and we were on our way to the second part of it.”

“Geocache? What’s that?”

“It’s kind of like a high-tech treasure hunt. Other geocachers hide a container in a location, and then post the GPS coordinates for the container. We use our GPS receivers to find the location, and then ferret out the hiding place. It’s actually a lot of fun.”

“Did you guys disturb anything around the body?”

“Are you kidding? The smell was pretty bad, but we figured it was probably just a dog or coyote or something. When he saw it was a person, Stan almost puked.”

He placed a gentle touch on the sitting man’s shoulder. “Are you going to be all right?”

Stan nodded. “Yeah, I think so. Man, it’s not like the movies or television, is it? It always seems the cops have such an easy time dealing with this stuff on T.V. that you never think about how awful it really is.”

“Maybe if more people thought about how awful it is, they’d give me less to do,” Lloyd said. “Did you see anything else in your wandering that might have been connected to this? Loose clothing, maybe, or a blanket she might have been wrapped in?”

Both men shook their heads. “No sir; nothing but the normal kind of trash that ends up near the road, and what I noticed looked like it had been here a while.”

“I hate having to ask this, but you’d be surprised how often it really happens. You boys didn’t decide to pick up some souvenirs at all, did you?”

They gave him incredulous looks. “Are you kidding?” Stan asked. “I don’t want any reminders of this. I’m going to have nightmares about this for a long time as it is, without keeping some kind of sick memento.”

“Like I said; I have to ask. It’s happened before, and valuable clues have been lost because someone thought it would be cool to have something from a real crime scene.” He pulled his badge holder out and removed two of his cards. “You might also be surprised how often someone remembers something important a day or two later. That’s my number and my e-mail. If either of you think of anything else, even if it doesn’t seem important to you, please don’t hesitate to call or message me.”

They took the cards and looked them over. “Yes sir, we will.”

“Thanks,” he said. He walked up to the highway, and down along the shoulder until he could see the bush and the various officers right below. The area was already cordoned off, and officers were in the process of searching for anything that might be related to the crime.

One of the officers approached him. “Are you the detective on this case?” he asked.

“Yeah, I got this one,” he answered. “You got something for me?”

“Tire tracks,” he said. “Like someone getting heavy on the accelerator pulling out from the shoulder. It might be just a coincidence, but they’re fairly fresh tracks, and they line up well with a spot someone might have parked to throw the body over the side.”

“You’ve photographed them already, I assume?”

“Yes sir, and made all the measurements.”

“Anything else?”

“Not yet; we found a partial shoeprint from where someone had stepped in an oil puddle, but we determined it’s much too old to be related to this crime.”

“Okay, and thanks. Let me know if you find anything else.” He stood by the guard rail directly over the bush, and pantomimed the various positions someone might have stood in to throw a body over. It would have been dark, he reasoned. This road gets too much traffic during the day, but late at night, it would not have been difficult to stop when no other cars were visible, toss the body, and get moving again before anyone would have seen. He probably could not see what was below, and probably didn’t care. He gauged the distance from the edge of the road to the bush below. He must have either been very strong, or he had help to throw the body. If he’d just dumped the body over the side, she would have landed straight down in those weeds.

Closing his eyes, he uttered another prayer. Father, You told us to love our enemies, but how do we love someone who would do this?

So much for his earlier hope of having a quiet, routine Monday.