He grinned back at her as he pulled the building’s heavy glass door open so she could walk on through. “Tough call. You make it.”
She never got the chance to—stepping out into the bright sunlight and baking heat of the parking lot, they were swarmed by a crowd of shouting, microphone-and-camera-wielding reporters.
Charlie blinked in surprise. Her hand automatically went up to shield her eyes from the sun, then stayed in place to hide her face from the cameras. A police cordon had successfully kept the media away from their house, as well as Central Command and the crime scene area—except for yesterday’s one breach, which meant that they, or at least Charlie, hadn’t had to deal with an onslaught like this since. But here the media was again, surrounding them in a shoving, shouting ambush.
Tony’s arm wrapped around her waist and he pulled her protectively close as they made their way through the pack. Charlie appreciated the gesture, and not just because she was rattled by the aggressive tactics of the media. At some point, she thought, this relationship might have some real potential. All it needed was a chance.
“Agent Bartoli, any fresh leads?”
“How are Bayley’s friends holding up?”
“Can you give us an update on the status of the investigation?”
“Does this feel like déjà vu all over again to you, Dr. Stone?”
The last question, yelled by a male reporter, made Charlie drop her hand from in front of her face and look at him sharply. Something about it struck her as wrong. Watching her avidly, thrusting his microphone in her direction, the reporter surged forward until he was just feet away. He was fifty-ish, portly, with a bad toupee and a shark’s smile. The right age …
A shiver ran down her spine.
Dear God, am I starting to see the Boardwalk Killer in every age-appropriate male?
“Any identity on the body yet, Agent Bartoli?”
Tony’s arm around her tightened. Charlie could feel the sudden snap of tension in his body. He frowned at the reporter who’d asked the question even as he continued to propel her toward the SUV, which was now only a few parking spaces away.
“What body are we talking about?” Tony called back warily.
“The one found about half an hour ago out at Jockey’s Ridge. Jesus, didn’t you hear? Security’s tighter out there than at the White House, and nobody’s saying anything, but I sure thought they’d let the FBI know.”
Another reporter yelled, “Can you confirm it’s Bayley Evans?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Jockey’s Ridge is the tallest natural sand dune on the East Coast. Located in Nags Head, the park surrounding it comprises 426 acres. Part of it is maritime forest. Except for some tall grass and a few scrubby bushes, the rest is rolling waves of white sand that reminded Charlie, as she stood near the end of the weathered, 384-foot-long boardwalk, of a picture she had once seen of the Sahara. It was evening by that time, past nine p.m., which meant the sun was hanging low in the west and long shadows stretched out everywhere, but the temperature was still so hot that even the wind blowing off Roanoke Sound felt suffocating.
The sand was thirty degrees hotter.
A young woman’s body was buried in that sand, in the shadows beneath the raised end of the boardwalk, beside one of the sturdy pillars that elevated the decklike platform into a scenic overlook providing a clear view of the dunes and the choppy blue waters of the Sound below. Charlie stood near enough to the burial site to smell the chemicals that were being used to preserve the more perishable bits of trace evidence being painstakingly lifted from the sand. She could see the shape of the body being revealed by the sand’s slow removal. She could see the horrible brown discoloration that clumped the once-white sand together in places so that it resembled coffee grounds.
Just thinking about what had caused that brown discoloration made Charlie’s chest feel tight. Blood, of course, although she tried not to let herself picture what terrible injuries the victim must have suffered to have lost so much. If she did, if she let herself dwell on what lay beneath that sand, she would have to leave the scene, and there was still too much for her to do. Determined to combat the physical symptoms of PTMD (Post-traumatic Murder Disorder, a too-cute label for a potentially disabling, way personal syndrome she had just identified in herself and named), which were threatening to make themselves an issue, Charlie took a sip from the bottle of water someone had handed her not long after she and Tony had arrived at the crime scene. The water, which was tepid, unfortunately didn’t help. Whether the heat and thick humidity were to blame, or whether it was something else, Charlie was finding it hard to catch her breath as she watched the North Carolina Bureau of Investigation (NCBI) crime scene analysts at work. They were carefully removing the sand from a grave-sized area above and around the body and depositing it and anything they found in it in plastic bags for later laboratory analysis. The crime scene had already been measured, photographed, video-recorded, and visually searched by every group of investigators on the scene, from the NCBI to the local Nags Head police. Tony, Crane, and Kaminsky had made their own record. Now everyone waited for enough of the sand to be removed that the body could be lifted from the ground.
Official identification had not yet been made—the body had not yet been completely uncovered—but Charlie, and the others, had little doubt it was Bayley Evans.
Strands of the victim’s long blond hair were mixed with the sand. The color and length matched Bayley Evans’. A bloodstained hand and arm up to the elbow were just visible beneath the thin layer of sand that remained on the corpse’s right side. Clearly they belonged to a teenage girl. Apparently a handful of her hair had gotten pulled up through the sand somehow as she was being buried, so the ends had been lying on the surface. The hair had been spotted by a woman with a dog, which had led to a little digging and a horrified call to the police.
Now here they all were. So many law enforcement types were on the scene that Charlie had long since given up trying to distinguish one group from another. NCBI investigators, Sy Taylor and the other local FBI agents, the FBI Special Circumstances team of Tony, Crane, and Kaminsky, the medical examiner and his team, the local Nags Head police department, Haney and the cops from Kill Devil Hills, the Dare County sheriff and his deputies, and numerous other officials who Charlie couldn’t even begin to identify all milled around doing whatever it was that they were supposed to do. It was a crowd scene of investigators, nobody was happy about the presence of the others, and to the obvious chagrin of everyone else, NCBI currently had jurisdiction.
The shocked-looking woman who’d found the body now huddled with two friends just inside the barrier of uniformed officers and crime scene tape that was holding the growing crowd of gawkers at bay. The media was out in full force, with their reporters and camera crews set up as close as they were allowed, all broadcasting the proceedings as the on-camera talent gave real-time updates to the viewers at home. Overhead, a news helicopter circled, the sound of its beating rotors punctuating the jumble of voices and equipment and other ground noise with a steady thump-thump. The parking lot at the far end of the boardwalk was packed with vehicles, from police cruisers to an ambulance to the TV stations’ satellite-sporting vans. Even as Charlie glanced in that direction, she saw the medical examiner’s van bumping over the firm-packed sand beside the boardwalk, toward the grave. Charlie was almost sure that meant the body would soon be lifted out of the ground.
So far, Bayley Evans’ phantom had not appeared to her. Charlie hoped and prayed that it was because her soul had already found its way to eternity and was at peace.