Chapter 6 #2
I moved to the driver’s side door and pushed on the frame to open it wider. It creaked on rusted hinges, but it opened wide enough for me to get a good look inside.
Oscar stepped close, looking over my shoulder. “Looks undisturbed,” he said.
I grunted in agreement. If the interior had been rummaged through, there would’ve been fingerprint marks impressed into the mud and other obvious signs of intrusion. The silt and mud caked onto every inch of surface area appeared undisturbed.
“We’ll need to tarp it,” I told him.
“We passed a hardware store on the way here. I can head there now and call our boys on the way to come take it to either Salt Lake or Billings.”
“Call the Salt Lake guys. Billings is closer, but Salt Lake’s gonna have the better crime lab.”
“I’ll need Harrison or maybe even Director Gaston to get that okayed.”
Even within branches of the Bureau, jurisdictions were fiercely guarded.
“Do it,” I told him. I would’ve made the call, but I’d quit the Bureau, which meant Oscar had more pull than I did these days, and while I could’ve called Brice and asked him for a personal favor, which would’ve been immediately granted, I had too much respect for Oscar to circumvent his authority.
“On it,” he replied. “I’ll start with Harrison and go up the chain from there.”
He walked away to make the calls while I bent down to pick up the stick he’d been using and began poking at the interior of the cab, using my flashlight to go slowly back and forth, looking for anything that might jump out at me.
I jabbed at The Carry-On a couple of times, and something deep in my gut told me to look more closely at it.
It was the kind of feeling that Abby would describe, whenever her intuition was trying to get her attention.
I ignored the visceral feeling for a few moments, but I couldn’t shake the certainty that if my wife were here, standing next to me, she’d tell me to stop ignoring my intuition and follow the advice it was giving.
So, I took out my phone, took several photos of her handbag lying awkwardly in the back seat, then reached for it and pulled it clear.
It was soaking wet and heavy as hell, but I managed to pull it out. Pocketing the flashlight, I held the bag at arm’s length, tipping it down to let all the water drip out.
Oscar’s bootsteps behind me sounded hurried, and I knew both that he’d seen what I was up to and knew that I was committing a cardinal sin by disturbing a crime scene, but I had to know where my gut was trying to point me.
He didn’t try to stop me, or yell at me to put the bag back, for which I’d thank him later. He watched me do the thing he was trained not to do. But this was my wife we were talking about. There was no way I could ignore what I was feeling pushed to do.
Bouncing it a little to get the last of the water out, I opened it to inspect the inside, taking out my flashlight again to train the beam to the black interior. The thing smelled god-awful, but I wasn’t about to stop giving it a closer inspection.
The handbag hadn’t suffered any damage besides being ruined by submersion in river water for the past thirty to sixty days. For a long, tense moment, it seemed like I’d contaminated the crime scene for nothing.
I used my hand to swipe around the suede interior and was surprised to find it empty.
Abby didn’t carry a lot in The Carry-On, and I knew that because I’d seen her both pack it and unpack it most every day of the previous summer.
She’d tote her laptop, her phone, a hairbrush, some makeup, a baggie filled with snacks—goldfish crackers, trail mix, whatever she was in the mood for that day—and that was about it.
She didn’t carry a wallet because she had a small magnetic credit card holder that attached to the back of her phone, so on most days that she wasn’t getting one over on us in the conference room, she packed light.
She always told me that the bag was fashion over function.
Still, I’d expected to find something of hers inside, even though I knew that her phone had either been destroyed or turned off shortly after she’d left the grocery store.
The last ping from it had put her in the parking lot of the campground grocery store.
Before we flew out of Austin, she’d made a point to leave her laptop at home, so it wouldn’t have been inside the handbag anyway.
There was a flash of a memory that swirled up from the depths.
The day she went missing, right before leaving the cabin, Abby had made a point to pack herself a snack of trail mix for the ride to the store, but I couldn’t remember if there were any other personal items she’d tossed inside the bag before she headed out.
Whatever had been in there could’ve floated out of the interior and become lost among the muck inside the Tahoe, I supposed.
To be thorough, however, I unzipped the small inside pocket toward the top of the bag.
I was surprised to find something squished into it.
“What’s that?” Oscar asked as I began to tease it out of the pocket.
“Don’t know yet.” And then I did. “It’s just a baggie. Abby took some trail mix for the road when she left to go to the store.”
I pulled out the baggie to show him and was shocked to see that it was sealed tight, the interior protected from the water.
Within the baggie, I realized there was a piece of scrap paper bearing small brown smudges.
I recognized the sight of dried blood immediately.
After wiping my gloves on my pants, I very carefully unlocked the zip closure of the baggie, opened it, and retrieved the paper.
I then just as carefully unfolded it and saw that it was a receipt for the grocery store.
On the receipt were all the items Abby had intended to purchase that day: a couple of cans of soup, bread, butter, cheese, potato chips, pickles, milk, eggs, bacon, and bananas.
That, however, wasn’t the most shocking thing about that scrap piece of paper.
When I flipped the receipt over, I saw that the paper wasn’t simply smudged with blood.
The smudges were letters, written perhaps with Abby’s own blood. In clear, rust-colored lettering the note read:
I’m alive