Dr. Feist said, “Wrapped as thoroughly and tightly as she was in plastic immediately after death, then buried beneath a house, she wouldn’t have been exposed to oxygen. The conditions would not have allowed for insects and bacteria to use the body as a host. The normal decomp process would have been stunted.”
Gretchen stopped taking notes and pointed the cap of her pen to the jacket. “It looks like she might be a teenage girl.”
“Yes,” Josie breathed. “Looks like she went to the same high school as me.”
“Is there a year number?” Gretchen asked.
Hummel continued to take photos as Chan used gloved hands to probe the sleeves of the jacket. “Here’s a patch for state baseball champions for…” She brushed some dirt away from the patch. “The year was 2004.”
Josie felt as though something was crawling up her neck into her hair. She brushed a palm down over her scalp.
Gretchen looked at Josie. “Was that the year you graduated?”
“No, I graduated in 2005; 2004 would have been my junior year.”
Chan came over to Josie’s side and probed at that sleeve. “There’s a number here. Twenty-seven.”
The crawling sensation continued, working its way all over her skull. She clamped both hands over her head.
“Boss,” Gretchen said. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Josie said. “What else do you see, Chan?”
Chan leaned in. “It’s another patch. A baseball with flames behind it.”
Now Josie felt as though someone had poured cold water over her head. She tried not to flinch. She remembered the baseball state championship during her junior year. She’d been there when they won. Cheered them on. She remembered the blue and gold jackets the team received that year. Each jacket had the player’s number on one sleeve and the championship patch on the other. Only one player had had the patch with the flaming baseball. He had died in Josie’s arms five years ago during the missing girls’ case. It couldn’t be his jacket, could it? But how? How had it gotten there? And who was the girl who had been buried in it?
Dr. Feist said, “I’ll confirm her age range once I do a full autopsy. The first order of business will be to get these clothes off her and take some x-rays.”
Gretchen turned to Josie. “Did any girls you went to high school with go missing?”
“No,” Josie said. “And the missing girls’ case turned up all the girls who had been missing in the town—the county—going back decades.”
Gretchen frowned.
Josie felt lightheaded. “Can we—can we get back to the station? Maybe we can run down some information while Dr. Feist does the autopsy.”
Gretchen didn’t question her. She put her notebook and pen away and thanked Dr. Feist and Ramon. “Good idea, boss. We’ll talk to the owner of the house, and maybe we can get some yearbooks from Denton East.”
Hummel said, “Chan and I will stay and get the clothing and anything else relevant tagged and bagged.”
“Great,” Josie said. “Hummel, can you upload the photos of the clothing to the file as soon as possible?”
“You got it, boss.”
Four
Josie flinched at the pungent, earthy odor that lingered inside her vehicle as she climbed into the driver’s seat. She couldn’t wait to get home and take a hot shower even though it would be her second one before lunch time. Before she could turn the keys in the ignition, Gretchen placed a hand on her arm.
“You want to tell me what’s going on?”
Josie’s shoulders slumped. She looked at Gretchen and opened her mouth to speak and then closed it. Confusion clouded her mind. How could she explain the jacket? Was it the same one? It had to be. There was no other explanation. Her mind reached back to high school, sifting through memories.
“Boss,” Gretchen said. “You look like you saw a ghost.”
I did, she wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come.
Gretchen said, “Start with the facts. With what you know.”
Josie gave Gretchen a pained smile. That made it easier. “You remember Ray? Well, I know you never met him, but you do remember who he is, right?”
“Your late husband,” Gretchen answered easily. “Of course.”
Josie nodded. She looked out the windshield at the valley below the hospital. Where once the lovely brick buildings of the city’s main street had stood tall, now they were mired in murky brown water. “We were high school sweethearts,” she said. “We met when we were nine. I lived in a trailer park, and he lived in the development behind the trailer park. We used to meet in the woods between the park and the back of his house. Our freshman year, the friendship turned into more. We were together all of high school, including junior year. That year Ray was a pitcher for the baseball team.”
Gretchen said, “The very team that won the state championship.”
“Yes,” Josie said. “He was very good. He was being scouted. He actually went to college on a baseball scholarship. He was scouted there as well, but he only ever wanted to be a police officer, so he never pursued it.”
“He was on the team. They had letter jackets, and when they won the station championship that year, they were given special championship patches,” Gretchen said. “And his number was twenty-seven, wasn’t it?”
Josie nodded. Below them, she counted three rescue boats buzzing through the submerged streets of the city.
“The blazing baseball patch?”
“Ray got into a fight—over me—he was defending me. It was something stupid. He was a hothead. Hell, so was I. He tore his jacket. He’d just gotten the championship patch put on. He was pretty upset. Those jackets were expensive to have replaced completely. But his mom said it was no problem for her to sew it up. She did but it looked terrible, so she found the blazing baseball patch to sew over top of the tear. She said—”
Unexpectedly, Josie felt tears sting the backs of her eyes remembering the look on Ray’s face when his mother gave him the jacket and said the words to him: I’m so proud of you. Their childhoods had been so full of trauma, abuse, guilt, and shame. Something as simple as hearing those words from his mother had been like winning the lottery for Ray.
Josie swallowed her emotion and continued, “She told him she was very proud of him.”
“Ray would have been the only one on the team that year to have that patch on that sleeve, then,” Gretchen said.
“Yes.”
“But the body in the morgue right now does not belong to Ray.”
“No,” Josie said, her voice coming out huskier than intended. “I buried him five years ago. I don’t know how his jacket ended up on the body of a girl buried under a house on Hempstead. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“There’s no chance that one of the other pitchers on the team saw Ray’s awesome blazing baseball patch and got one for himself?”
Josie looked at Gretchen. “And changed their number to Ray’s?”
“Okay, then what happened to the jacket? Do you remember him losing it? It getting stolen?”
Josie closed her eyes, trying to think back, but her memories from high school seemed light years away now, like someone else’s life. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. It was summertime right after they got the jackets—I remember that, because it was so hot. He wore his anyway for awhile. I guess I didn’t ask questions when he stopped wearing it because I just assumed he put it away for the summer because of the heat.”