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Bones of Dead Man's Bluff

 

MARCH, FOUR MONTHS AFTER ELECTION

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With the spring thaw delayed, the water levels on Lake of the Ozarks and Osage River remained low. If they waited until April, the lake would rise with snowmelt, the dam would release water, and the river would surge.

 

Lieutenant Charlene Ralls—Charlie—argued against it, but Major Taney insisted on one more check of the riverbank and rocks below the cliff while the water level was down. Just to check it off the list and put the case back in the cold files. They’d checked already, twice over the past few months, but the water had been higher then.

 

Charlie’s team, including some sheriff’s deputies and a group of volunteers, searched the banks of the Osage for the impossible. Again. A body that fell along the shoreline forty years ago would be long gone, one way or the other. Perhaps at the bottom of the Missouri River by now, or the Mississippi, or buried in the sands under the Gulf of Mexico.

 

If it remained anywhere near here, it would be miles downstream, dissolved, any bits of bones scattered and buried under thirty feet of water and five feet of silt. But she had her orders. Mostly she sat in the van and took messages from the team, checking off sections of the map on the screen in front of her as they cleared each area.

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They would only search the shoreline, searching underwater being useless. It was all beyond useless.

 

Charlie had been through this many times before. Needle in a haystack didn’t even come close to describing it.

 

Her team had often discovered bodies—recent deaths, clothing still visible, hair still attached to the scalp. Dogs found the scent. Humans recoiled at a stench that alerted them they were close.

 

There would be no scent to catch from this one.

 

It broke Charlie’s heart. Her little brother had never been found. Only his tricycle, six blocks from home, which sat in the middle of the sidewalk in an upper middle-class, suburban subdivision—nice homes with three-car garages, maybe a boat or an RV on a pad next to the garage, manicured lawns. They’d found the trike sitting right under a Neighborhood Watch sign.

 

She’d spent years searching with her parents. She’d continued the search after they’d given up and divorced, after her mother’s overdose on pills prescribed by three different doctors.

 

Charlie had never given up. She’d redirected her search to help others. Fortunately, the highway patrol had dropped its minimum size requirements a few years before she’d applied. After six years as a trooper, she got her prized assignment to the Missing Persons Unit, which she soon discovered was all boring computer work to coordinate efforts between other law enforcement agencies. Managing databases. Reading and filing reports written by others. Two years of that before they assigned her to the IPC team: Interdiction for Protection of Children. She had a master’s in forensics to go with her criminal justice degree, but she didn’t protect any children.

 

She just tracked down their unprotected remains.

 

In five years, she’d moved up the ranks to supervising her own team, but had yet to reunite a missing child, alive, with the family. By the time cases got to her, it was too late to save one.

 

She couldn’t take it any longer. Three months ago, she’d enrolled in night courses in real estate.

 

Another message. Another section checked off. They’d covered this section before, but when the water levels were up. Six more sections to search, two more to recheck.

 

Her radio buzzed. “Lieutenant, we’ve got a volunteer who thinks he sees something, but he can’t get to it. Sending a deputy down to take a look.”

 

Nothing. He’s got nothing. We’ve checked that section twice already. “Go ahead. Let me know when it’s cleared.”

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They could wrap up this cold case before dark, search for something warmer, like the fifteen-year-old runaway in Springfield last month, or the nine-year-old who never got off the school bus in Columbia last week. They’d already given up on the missing girl in St. Louis, and that was only two years ago.

 

“Lieutenant, you might want to get down here. There’s something... we’re not sure what, but we can’t reach it.”

 

“Why do you need me?”

 

“Under a ledge. Too tight. You might be able to fit.”

 

These guys might be more useful if they’d lose their beer bellies.

 

Charlie left the warmth of the van and traipsed carefully across the gravel parking lot, down a trail to the water’s edge. She made her way along the slick, nearly frozen mud shoreline, flanked by trees, to where a rock outcropping made her footing even less secure. She climbed over on hands and feet, four-legged, before she could stand up and walk again.

 

Great place to break a leg.

 

The steep hill along the shoreline shifted to a cliff. The cliff. Dead Man’s Bluff. The one they’d searched before—more than once—but the river was lower now, so there was a chance. Charlie pushed any optimistic thought out of her head.

 

“What do you have, Deputy?”

 

“That little shelf of rock sticking out there.” He pointed. “Underneath.”

 

Underneath would have been underwater the last time they’d looked here... and the time before that.

 

The deputy walked to the shelf, just big enough to stand on but maybe not thick enough to hold the weight of a couple of these fellows. Charlie followed until the deputy squatted down and aimed a flashlight underneath into a small crawlspace, maybe eighteen inches high, six to seven feet deep, about five feet wide. The whitewashed rocks were covered in dried silt and dead algae.

 

Charlie got down on all fours and looked. “What is it I’m supposed to be seeing? There’s nothing here.”

 

“On the left, way in the back.” The deputy focused the beam. “That round rock.”

 

“And?”

 

“Could that be a skull?”

 

Charlie remained silent, staring intently—just a rock, a round, slightly oval rock. Not jagged and broken like the other rocks, but the same color.

 

“Can you reach it with the grabbers?” Charlie asked.

 

“Nope, just out of reach. You think you can shimmy in there and see?”

 

The idea of shimmying in there did not appeal to her. At least it was too cold to run into any water moccasins... she hoped.

 

She stood and looked around at the more than half a dozen officers and volunteers who’d gathered. Not a single one of them would fit, most of them not in good enough shape to jog around the block without requiring medical intervention. One volunteer with a yellow safety vest pulled over his Carhartt coat looked like he might fit, but he had to be at least seventy years old.

 

“Fine.”

 

She removed her hat, jacket, and gun belt and handed them to the deputy. The frigid breeze knifed right through her uniform as she pulled a scrunchy from her pocket and tied her hair back.

 

She lay down, then looked back. “Someone got a headlamp I can use?”

 

The headlamp interfered with the scrunchy, so she stuffed the hair tie back in her pocket and positioned the headlamp to keep the hair out of her eyes.

 

She crawled on her elbows and belly at first. When the space tightened, she could only slither like a snake, a wounded snake, her arms extended in front. If she raised her head to see where she was going, she bumped it against the ceiling. If she lowered her head, her chin scraped on the rocks. Her butt dragged across the underside of the ledge with each nudge forward. She dug her fingertips into the loose rock and silt to pull herself a few inches at a time.

 

She’d never really been claustrophobic before, but it kicked in out of nowhere. She stopped to control her breathing, calm her nerves. Only a couple more feet to go. It still looked like a round rock.

 

Waste of fucking time.

 

She hit the narrowest part and could go no farther, the rock—the skull, the old softball, whatever it was—still out of reach.

 

She tried to turn her head to look back. Worst case scenario, they could still reach her feet and drag her out. “Hey, can someone pass me the grabber?”

 

It took some maneuvering, and a solid knock on the head that would raise a lump, but she got the grabber in front of her and stretched it toward the object. One of those grabbers they sell at Target for old people to pick up things they drop but can no longer bend over to reach, or to retrieve the sock that fell behind the dryer.

 

The prongs wouldn’t open wide enough to latch on. She tried to get the grabber to the side of the object, slightly behind, and inch it toward her a little at a time until she could get a better angle or drag it close enough to reach with her hand.

 

This is going to take hours.

 

Charlie slithered forward a little more, despite her brain screaming to get out. She repositioned the grabber and turned the rock. It didn’t come any closer, but it shifted a little.

 

She tried again. Shifted a little more, maybe an inch or two closer.

 

This might work. Then I can get the fuck out of here.

 

With the grabber barely able to reach behind the rock, she tried once more to drag it toward her. It didn’t come any closer, but it turned a little more. Turned just enough.

 

Just enough for Charlie to stare at an eye socket and a few teeth on the upper jaw.

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