Copyright © 2021 by Robin James Books
All Rights Reserved
Chapter One
It was in his eyes. I didn’t need to ask who found the body. Deputy Austin Rankin stood apart from the other cops as I approached the barn. Someone had put a paper cup in his hand. He merely picked at the rim but didn’t drink from it.
He was fresh-faced with the pale complexion of a true ginger. Three days of searching in the bright, April sun had left his cheeks apple-red. He met my eyes and that’s when I knew. They might have been blue, or green, but now they seemed colorless, haunted, sunken into his young face. There would be times in his life where a smell or a sound would bring him back to this particular spring when he was little more than a rookie and had the rotten luck to be the nearest responding unit when Jan Gunderson’s eight-year-old Bluetick Coonhound found something Jan knew shouldn’t be there. A freshly dug hole in a little-used part of Jan’s tree farm just two miles from here. Inside that hole, the horrors would live with Deputy Rankin for the rest of his life, let alone his career.
“Mara!”
“Be right there,” I answered back, pulling the end of my cardigan closer around me. I walked up to Rankin.
“You okay?” I asked, putting a motherly hand on his shoulder.
“Yeah,” he said, though we both knew it wasn’t true. We stood in the shadow of the barn. It loomed over us just like the evil we both knew happened inside of it.
“I ... I knew her,” he said. “Haley. My kid brother, Alex. They were in the same class. They were in Spanish club together, I think it was. She was at my house.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. It seemed like the only thing. It seemed woefully inadequate.
“You coming, Mara?” Lieutenant Sam Cruz stood just outside the shadow. He would walk me through what the lead detective had found so far.
“Get some sleep if you can, Rankin,” I said. “You’ve done all you could do.”
He nodded, his breath coming hard, as if he couldn’t get enough air. No. It wasn’t that. It was the air itself. Thick. Ominous. I wanted to walk out of the shadow and away from this place.
Sam put a hand on my back and guided me toward the barn. I left Austin Rankin behind. I’d see him again. Already, my lawyer brain knew he would make a compelling witness when the time came, if he could keep it together. If we all could.
I walked with Sam toward the barn. At least a dozen vehicles lined the rural highway to the east. The Maumee County sheriffs, the medical examiner, Ohio BCI all had a presence here. Cruz lifted a strand of yellow crime scene tape and guided me in.
I took a breath and held it, feeling a little of what likely afflicted Deputy Rankin. It had all happened here. Everything the killer had done to college student Haley Chambers. Her monster had breathed this air. Calvin Emmons. Now we knew his name too.
“Any word on the actual cause of death yet?” I asked, stalling for time. My feet didn’t seem to want to move.
Cruz shook his head, pausing with me. “She was found with her hands bound behind her. Tied together with grocery bags. He put her in the hole feet first. Dug six feet down so she had about half a foot over her head.”
“Was she ... do we know if she was alive when he did that?” The thought of it. Being buried alive, bound like that. Helpless.
“Don’t know yet. Her shoulder was dislocated. They could see that plain enough when they pulled her out. Also, both of her thumbs were broken. You could tell that on sight too.”
Detective Brody Lance stood in front of us. He was new to the detective bureau. Brought in to replace Sam when Sheriff Clancy promoted him to lieutenant. So, a rookie too. Just a different kind than Rankin. Lance slid the heavy wooden barn door open.
Sam took a breath, preparing to speak. This time, I was the one who put a gentle hand on his arm. This was Lance’s job now. His case. Old habits die hard.
Lance cleared his throat. He pointed to a taped-off square in the corner of the barn. I stepped over to it. A single hanging light illuminated the space.
“The victim, as you know, was Haley Chambers. Twenty years old. A student at Maumee County Community College,” Lance started, running me through the investigation so far. “She lives with her mother and stepfather about three miles north but still here on Kidman Road. She was last seen a week ago on April 2nd. With her boyfriend, Dylan Woodhouse. They just paved that portion of Kidman and Haley liked to rollerblade. Her mother said she left around five o’clock and never came back. The boyfriend said he left her at the end of her driveway a little before six.”
“When was she reported missing?” I asked.
“The mother called 9-1-1 just after nine p.m. It was full dark by then and she’d called the boyfriend and a few of Haley’s friends. Nobody had seen her. The girl wasn’t answering her phone. They went looking for her around seven and turned up nothing. That’s when they called it in.”
The rest I knew. Haley’s family and friends coordinated with the sheriff’s department and started searching the soybean fields and surrounding woods along Kidman Road. It went on for days.
“Deputy Rankin received a call from Jan Gunderson out at his tree farm three days ago. One of his dogs kept going out to a spot in his western-most field. Digging. Gunderson finally followed him out there and found a hole with what looked like a foot sticking up. He called it in. Deputy Rankin was first on scene.”
I looked out toward the road. Rankin wasn’t there anymore. I hoped he’d taken my advice and went home if he could.
Lance took a breath and continued. “One of the search teams found a tee shirt belonging to the victim hooked on a tree in the wooded area behind the boyfriend’s house. We questioned the Woodhouse kid. His story checked out initially. After he left the victim’s house, he met up with some friends to grab dinner. But he couldn’t account for his time from about eight p.m. until ten.”
“Two days ago, Dylan Woodhouse was your main person of interest,” I said. I’d seen the impassioned pleas from Haley’s family on television. The boyfriend’s family had stood beside them. “So how did we get here, Detective?” I prayed it was solid. I prayed he hadn’t missed any steps that would torpedo this case before it truly got started.
“Yesterday, we got a tip from another search team member. He came forward and said they’d searched the woods behind the boyfriend’s house including the area where her shirt was found about an hour before Haley’s tee shirt was found. He swore up and down it wasn’t there. Our deputies kept detailed logs of who was supposed to be searching where and when. When they started questioning the second search team’s members, one of them remembered Cal Emmons was in his group and insisted they go back to the boyfriend’s woods. Emmons was adamant. I figured it was worth me asking a couple of questions anyway. His wife told me I’d find him working over there at the garage.”
Lance pointed to the west of the barn; the red and white neon lights of a business sign glared. Emmons Garage. They mostly did small engine repairs. I had passed by it a thousand times. A family-owned business that had been in Waynetown for at least fifty years. I’d never met Cal Emmons, but I knew his wife.
“You think Emmons planted it?” I asked.
“It’s my working theory,” he said. “As soon as I came out here, I noticed that a blue Mercury Sable wagon was parked at a kind of weird angle. Dirt caked on the wheels. I don’t know what made me stop, but it’s got mismatched tires that fit the description of the ones found leading away from Haley’s burial site. Anyway, when I interviewed Emmons initially, he kept changing his story. Bragged about finding the shirt. Then insisted another guy in his group found it. Then he lied about where he was the night Haley Chambers went missing. Said he was out here working in the garage.”
It certainly sounded solid. Lance had gotten a search warrant from there and here we were.
“We think he brought her here,” Sam said, his voice dropping an octave. “First.”
I stepped forward, careful to stay within the boundaries of the tape. Lance led the way. It was an old barn with high, wooden rafters and hay bales in the loft above. It had normal things inside of it. A lawn tractor. Hoses. Garden tools. Two classic cars with the engines torn out.
Lance went ahead of us and opened a door in the back. I might not have noticed it myself. Farm implements hung from it. It would have looked just like any other wall to me. But the door opened to another small, square room.
My pulse raced as I followed Lance inside. There was a wooden bench in the center of the room. Ankle and wrist shackles were bolted at all four corners of the thing.
“We’re waiting for labs,” Lance said. “But that staining on the bench is blood. We’ve got hair and nail samples as well.”
“He brought her here,” I whispered. “He ... tortured her here.”
There were plastic bins stacked along one wall, red and green, the kind they sell at Christmas time.
“He had costumes in here,” he said. “Maids. Nurse’s uniforms, that kind of thing. Duct tape. Plastic grocery bags. Um ... toys.”
“You think he kept her here for a while,” I said. “Hours maybe?”
“Yes,” Lance said simply.
“While they were out searching,” I whispered. “My God. While her family and the whole town was out there searching, she was here.”
I walked out of the room. I couldn’t stand breathing the air in there anymore. My heels sunk into the ground. Panic seized my heart. My shoes would be caked with the dirt from this place. It might never come out.
“She was here,” I whispered as we walked back outside. To the east of us, the soybean fields stretched just to the edge of the Emmons’s property. Kidman Road ran north and south right through the rural heart of Waynetown. If I kept walking a couple of miles, I would pass right by Haley Chambers’s house. Did she know Emmons? Had he stalked her?
“The search teams went through there,” I said, pointing to the fields. I felt Sam’s steady hand at my back again. “They were calling her name. She would have ... she might have heard them while he …”
I couldn’t let my mind go any further. I would have weeks, months to comb over every aspect of this case. Haley Chambers couldn’t cry for help as her monster kept her bound. Help would have come so close. Just a few hundred yards away.
Helpless. Hopeless. Her screams silenced forever. Except through me. As I walked away from the barn where she might have been murdered, I knew I would do whatever I could to give Haley Chambers her voice back. Even as the dirt from her hell clung to my clothes.
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