Page 19 of Little Girls Sleeping
“Oh Cisco, what am I doing?” she asked the dog.
A couple of times she was tempted to turn around and head back to town. But there was always a reason to continue forward, and she kept to her personal pact. She remembered her drill sergeant at boot camp, who’d hammered at the new recruits never to give up. She pressed the accelerator harder and the car sped up the dusty road.
A sign indicated that Eagle’s Ridge was less than a mile ahead.
The road had been the victim of excessive rain from last season, leaving deep chuckholes in the surface. Katie and Cisco bounced, bobbed, and weaved for almost a half-mile. The Jeep was a champion at handling off-road conditions, never hesitating or grinding into a wrong gear, and they inched their way forward.
The GPS made a chiming sound, indicating that Katie had reached her designated area.
Cisco barked.
She pulled the Jeep into a flat area for parking, leaving the engine idling, and studied the map. She wanted to work in two- to three-mile quadrants, making it a strategic search instead of wandering around without any type of blueprint. The region appeared to be accessible—rated three out of five for hiking.
She cut the engine and got out of the Jeep. When she walked to the lookout point, she could see that the trees and rolling hills went on for miles. It was picturesque, but an immense amount of countryside to search. She knew there was a decent cell-phone signal due to the tower about thirty miles away, which gave her some relief in case something were to go wrong.
Cisco followed his team leader, but was more interested in some bushes and relieving himself than the beautiful view.
Katie encouraged herself with positive thoughts. Some fresh air and exercise would be good for her, without having to worry about enemy forces with bombs intruding on her walk. Her mind lingered on the possibility of having a panic attack, but she quickly dismissed that idea and concentrated on the vast forest.
Her cell phone rang.
Seeing the call was from her uncle, she decided to ignore it for now. He would want to know what she was doing and could sense in a second when she was being evasive. He was a great cop who could read people like an open book, and Katie didn’t want to be that book at the moment.
She returned to her car and loaded up the essentials in a small backpack. She calculated that each section would take approximately two hours, giving her enough time for three sections.
She retrieved her small field notebook, which had graph-like pages that enabled her to sketch her routes and indicate anything unusual or potentially useful in her investigation. She had used this type of technique in the army when tracking the enemy, and it was now a part of her investigative and deduction skillset.
After engaging the alarm lock on the Jeep and checking her compass, she set out on the first hiking trail, with Cisco walking to heel beside her. She opted to have him off the leash for convenience, but if something were to arise from other hikers or loose animals, she would leash him.
Katie enjoyed the solitude and the meandering walk up and down the trails as the day progressed. The previous year’s rain had helped the environment immensely, leaving everything lush and green. It was a clear, cool day, but the sun’s rays beamed down on them. She peeled off her hoodie and tied it around her waist, leaving her bare arms exposed in a tank top. It relieved some of the heat, but she had forgotten to apply sunscreen and knew she would be burned by the time she returned home.
The first quadrant of the search area didn’t reveal anything that would raise suspicions. Nothing was out of place or unusual. She noted her findings—gauging the possibility of locating anything of importance, which kept her mind alert and thinking forward—and made sketches of the trail as she walked.
Not knowing exactly what she was looking for, she slowed her pace to study the undergrowth to either side of the pathway. It was dense, almost impenetrable, and she decided it would be next to impossible for someone to dispose of a body there.
She kept heading steadily northeast. Glancing at the sky, she spotted several buzzards circling, reminding her that if Chelsea’s body had been dumped anywhere in the vicinity, the wildlife would take care of any evidence—even the bones would be scattered.
Unusual cleared brush caught her eye, and she stopped and studied some portions of upper and lower leg bones, femur and tibia, deducing they were from a medium to large animal—most likely a deer or cow. The rural area was brutal to every animal in the food chain. When she stood up, she took a three-hundred-sixty-degree view. Frustration welled up inside. Finding the remains of a body or a gravesite from four years ago was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Doubt clouded her objectivity and made her frustrated as she moved forward along the trail.
She finished two of the grid searches she had mapped out without coming across anything of interest. She stopped for some water, giving Cisco a well-deserved break as well. The breeze shifted direction, bringing a cooler temperature and relief from the heat. After walking for more than four-and-a-half hours, she felt fatigue beginning to set in.
The trail transformed into a steeper walk, much more so than she had imagined from her research. Rocks, loose gravel, and sand made each step unsteady, as if she was part skiing and part riding a skateboard. She had to stop and make Cisco slow down, not wanting him to hurt himself.
Mad at herself for not having realized that a number three trail would turn so quickly into a full stage five, she moved forward with caution, contemplating whether to turn around. She peered ahead down the steep slope, straining her already stiff neck. It was clear that this particular hiking path hadn’t been travelled in quite a while; it was heavily overgrown, making it even more difficult to negotiate.
She took one step… two… and on the third step her right leg slipped out from under her body, like walking on ice, followed by her left leg, leaving her to flail her arms in an effort to stop the momentum. She let out a garbled yell as she slid downward, hitting several protruding rocks. Reaching her hands out, she tried to grab anything that would stop her, but it was not until she slammed into a large dead bush that she came to a halt.
She moaned, winded and dazed. For a moment she couldn’t breathe; the same feeling as when she’d had the wind knocked out of her after a large bomb blast. At least her backpack had helped to protect her and had eased some of the bumps and scratches on the way down.
Cisco barked incessantly from above. He must have been trying to get to Katie, because fine dirt and gravel sifted downward, covering her body. He continued to bark, deep and rapid.
Taking a breath for the first time in a couple of minutes, Katie was able to yell up to him. “Stay… Cisco, stay…” she told him. “Bleibe, Cisco,” she repeated in German.
Trying to maintain focus, she concentrated on examining her body, running her fingertips along her arms and legs. She quickly assessed that nothing appeared to be broken, though there were some scrape she was bleeding from her left wrist and the right side of her leg, and she tasted some blood in her mouth.
“Well crap,” she muttered, irritated that she hadn’t been watching where she was going.
She was lying in a flat spot resembling a nest on the side of the hill. Sitting up, pain radiated from her legs to her lower back. With a few more groans, she managed to stand, wobbly at first before the ground became solid and steady under her feet.
