CHAPTER 8

RYAN AND I got coffee before plunging into the Nance file. We wouldn’t drink it. The stuff tasted like liquefied dung. It was a ritual, like sharpening a pencil or straightening a blotter. Meaningless action as prelude to the real show.

We started with a section titled Summary of the Crime.

On April 17, 2009, at 1620 hours, Elizabeth Ellen “Lizzie” Nance, eleven, left the Isabelle Dumas School of Dance, located in the Park Road Shopping Center, heading for the Charlotte Woods apartment complex on East Woodlawn. A motorist reported seeing a child matching Lizzie’s description at the intersection of Park and Woodlawn roads at approximately 1630 hours.

Lizzie lived with her mother, Cynthia Pridmore, thirty-three, and sister, Rebecca Pridmore, nine. Cynthia Pridmore reported her daughter missing, by phone, at 1930 hours. She reported having contacted the school, several of Lizzie’s classmates, and her former husband, Lionel Nance, thirty-nine. Pridmore said she and Nance repeatedly drove the route between the school and the home. Said her daughter could not be a runaway. An MP file was opened, with Detective Marjorie Washington as lead investigator.

On April 30, 2009, a groundskeeper, Cody Steuben, twenty-four, found a child’s decomposed body at the Latta Plantation nature preserve, northwest of Charlotte. Medical examiner Timothy Larabee identified the remains as those of Lizzie Nance. The case was transferred to the homicide unit, with Detective Erskine Slidell as lead investigator.

Lizzie Nance was a sixth-grade student with no history of drug, alcohol, or mental issues. A low-risk victim. Cynthia Pridmore was a legal secretary, twice divorced. The second former husband, John Pridmore, thirty-nine, sold real estate. Lionel Nance was an electrician, unemployed at the time of his daughter’s disappearance.

Neither of the Pridmores had an arrest record. Lionel Nance had a 2001 arrest for public drunkenness.

Witnesses who knew the victim all stated that the person responsible had to be someone she knew or someone she trusted. Witnesses all doubted Nance or either of the Pridmores was involved.

We skimmed a few newspaper articles. It was the usual bloodlust frenzy. The disappearance. The search. The angelic little face with the long brown hair. The headline screaming that the child was dead.

I was still reading when Ryan leaned back in his chair. I laid down the page. “You okay?”

“Rosy.”

“Move on to crime scene?”

“Sure.”

I exchanged the folder we had for the crime scene search report.

CSS arrived at 0931 hours, 4/30/09. The site was an open field surrounded by woods, an unsecured area, but one not normally visited by the public. The body had been left fifteen feet north of a small access road.

The victim lay faceup, clothed, with feet together, arms straight at the sides. There was little damage attributable to animal activity. Some debris had accumulated on the remains (leaves, twigs, et cetera, collected by CSS), but no attempt had been made at concealment or burial.

Fingerprinting was impossible due to decomposition, but both hands were bagged. Photographs were taken of the victim and the surroundings.

The detailed report of each crime scene tech followed. Leaving those to Ryan, I moved on to the section labeled Evidence/Property Recovered/Analyzed.

Each article had been entered into a grid. The five columns were headed: Control #. Item. Location. Type of Collection. Results.

The rows contained pitifully few entries. Photographs, forty-five. A soda can. Leaves. Bark chips. A rusty battery. Hair. A weathered sneaker, woman’s size ten. The hair was Lizzie’s. The can, battery, and shoe were negative for DNA or latent prints.

I must have made a sound. Or Ryan caught something in my face. “What?”

“Katy took ballet when she was a kid.” I was referring to my daughter. “She carried her slippers in a bag and wore street shoes to and from class.”

Ryan cocked a brow. I rotated the property log so he could read it. When he’d finished, “Where are the kid’s dance shoes?”

“Exactly.”

“None of the CSS techs refer to shoes. Nothing on a bag or backpack.” Ryan rolled his head, trying to release tension in his neck.

“How about you take the witnesses and I take the autopsy report?” I suggested.

“You don’t have to protect me.”

“I’m not.” I was. “Interviewing is closer to your skill set.”

The section labeled Witnesses was ten pages long. Standard. When a child was murdered, the cops talked to everyone who ever intersected the kid’s life.

The interviews were listed in chronological order. The first was that of the groundskeeper who discovered the body. He’d been questioned by Slidell.

I turned to the section labeled Medical Examiner’s Report.

Elizabeth Ellen Nance. Victim is described as an 11-year-old white female, 57.5” in height, slender build, brown hair. Autopsy conducted on 5/1. Remains are partially skeletal with putrefied tissue remaining on the cranial posterior, torso, limbs, and feet.

The body is clothed in a green wool jacket, black leotard, black tights, pink cotton underwear, and blue plastic shoes. The panties appear to be in place. All clothing is heavily soiled. No bloodstaining is observed.

The body shows no evidence of sharp or blunt force trauma.

There is no fracturing of the skull, internally or externally. The skull base is intact. The facial bones are intact. The dentition is present and intact except for two right maxillary incisors that appear to have been lost postmortem.

The hyoid wings are not fused to the body. What remains of the laryngeal and tracheal cartilages is intact. Observation of aspirated blood in the upper airway or bronchi is not possible. Observation of obstruction of the airways or bronchi is not possible.

Parallel grooving on two right medial hand phalanges is consistent with rodent scavenging. Two right distal hand phalanges are missing. Neither hand shows trauma consistent with defensive wounding.

A number of fine hairs and/or fibers are observed on the ventral aspect of the right forearm. A sampling of these was taken by the crime lab.

Decomposition makes it impossible to determine if there is trauma of the external genitalia or fluid deposit or any other extraneous material around the genitalia or in the pubic area. The flesh of the lower torso in the area of the lower abdomen and thighs and legs is putrefied, but the bones show no fractures or other trauma.

Submitted for evidence:

1. scalp hair

2. bags removed from right and left hands

3. right- and left-hand fingernail remnants

4. clothing and evidence sheet in which the body was wrapped

5. hair/fibers collected from the right forearm

Blood ethanol and carbon monoxide levels: undetermined

Manner of death: homicide

Cause of death: undetermined

Such a pitifully small amount of information.

The clock said 1:10. Ryan was still wading through interviews.

“Anything?” I asked.

“Kid’s uncle sounds like a punk, but no.”

“Grab some lunch?”

We rode in silence to the basement. I got a salad. Ryan went for a pizza slice that had been waiting awhile for a buyer. We took our trays to a table by the back wall.

“This civilian review system is good.” My attempt to open conversation.

“Seems so.”

“The investigation was thorough enough. The cops just had nothing to work with.”

“Not unusual with stranger abductions.”

“A stranger abduction but no sexual assault?”

“That’s what the ME concluded?”

“He left it undetermined. But the clothes were undisturbed, so he felt pretty strongly there’d been no rape. Cause of death was also undetermined.”

We ate without speaking for a few moments.