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“For as long as I live, I’ll never forget it,” Kim started. “At first we thought it was a joke. When you see something like this, it makes you appreciate what’s important. It was just so horrible. I mean, neighbourhood kids play in that park.”
“I hope they catch the monster who did it,” Helen said. “I’m calling my home-security company to make sure they keep an eye on my house.”
“Can you walk us through how you found her?” Gannon asked.
“We take a regular morning walk in that area and spotted it. Her,” Kim said. “At first she looked like a mannequin, entangled in shrubs and small trees. We didn’t get too close once we realized what it was.”
“Can you tell me exactly what you saw?” Gannon asked.
“We’d heard stories about what happens in there at night, which I never believed until now. We saw condoms and hypodermic needles,” Kim said.
“She was in a shallow grave,” Helen said. “We saw dark hair, an arm bent over a head in a swimmer’s posture, like she was breaking the surface of the earth.”
After they finished, Gannon dropped Brandy off at the scene to keep vigil until they removed the body.
He had to get back to the newsroom.
This was shaping up to be a grisly homicide, he thought, settling in at his desk. While eating a club sandwich from the cafeteria, he checked regional and state missing-person cases posted online, using the detective’s description of a white or Native American woman in her twenties as his guide.
So many of them fit the general description, he thought, wondering if there was any chance this was linked to that tip he wanted to chase about a missing woman from Vermont or Connecticut. He stared into their faces, reading their information.
Was he staring at the unidentified victim near Ellicott Creek? Who was she? And how did her life come to an end there? She was someone’s daughter, maybe someone’s wife or sister?
He was pierced by a memory of his sister, Cora.
And what became of her life?
He couldn’t dwell on that now and forced himself back to his story.
“Do we have any idea who she is?” Tim Derrick, the assignment editor, had a habit of sneaking up behind reporters and reading over their shoulders.
“Not yet.”
Gannon clicked onto the latest news release from the investigators. He touched his pen to the words “unidentified female, in her twenties.”
“She was sort of half buried in a shallow grave,” Gannon said.
“Cripes,” Derrick said. “Well, we’ve got strong art from the air and the walkers. Front will take your story. Give us about twenty-five inches or so. Make sure the Web people get it.”
“Sure.”
Derrick patted Gannon’s shoulder.
“And nice work.”
“Hey, Tim. Anything more to the rumors going around about more cuts?”
Derrick stuck out his bottom lip, shook his head.
“The way things are in this business, those rumors never go away.”
A few hours later, as Gannon was giving his story a final read through, polishing here and there, his line rang.
“Hi, Jack, it’s Brandy.”
“How you doing there?”
“The medical examiner just moved the body. I got some good shots and sent them in to the photo desk.”
“Thanks, I’ll have a look.”
After he’d finished his story Gannon joined the night editor at the photo desk where he was reviewing the news pictures with Paul Benning, the night photo editor.
“It’s all strong.” Benning clicked through the best frames as he worked on finishing a milk shake.
Here was the sharp overview showing a brilliant yellow tarp isolated like a flag of alarm amid an all-consuming forest, Gannon thought.
Here was the medical examiner’s team, grim-faced with a black body bag strapped to a stretcher, loading it into a van.
Here were Helen Dodd and Kim Landon, tight head shots, shock etched in their faces. Here was Kim, looking off, eyes filled with worry.
“Go back to the aerial,” Gannon said.
Benning sucked the remnants of his shake through a plastic straw.
“You see something?
“Maybe. Can you blow it up?”
Benning enlarged it.
Click after click drew them closer to the tarp and a fleck of white near the left edge. Click after click and the fleck grew, coming into focus as a hand.
The woman’s hand, reaching from the tarp.
Reaching from her grave, as if seizing him in a death plea to tell the world who did this.
Before they did it again.
4
Some thirty-six hours after it had been removed from its shallow grave, the body was autopsied at the Erie County Medical Center, on Grider Street off the Martin Luther King Expressway.
Death was classified a homicide.
Using fingerprints and dental records, the dead woman’s identity was confirmed as being Bernice Tina Hogan, aged twenty-three, of Buffalo, New York. The facts of her death were summarized in a few sentences in a police news release.
Nothing about the pain of her life, Gannon thought as he worked on a long feature about her. After her name had been released, some of her former classmates had contacted him at the paper.
“Bernice had a hard life,” one friend told him.
Bernice never knew her real parents. She’d been told she had some Native American blood, maybe Seneca, and had been raised, for a time, on a reservation. Maybe Allegany, or Cattaraugus. She wasn’t sure. Bernice had never been sure about much in her short life, her friends told him.
Some sent him photos.
She stood stiff and shy in obvious embarrassment; a heavyset girl with low self-esteem who’d been abused by her foster father, who also beat her foster mother.
At first she’d overcome it all. Bernice did well in school, going on to study nursing at Buffalo State, nearly graduating before she was drugged and raped at a party.
“After that happened she was so brokenhearted. It was like she just gave up. She began missing classes,” one friend said.
Bernice had grown addicted to crack. Few people knew that she’d slipped into prostitution as she descended down a path that ended in a makeshift grave under a thicket of twisted maple near Ellicott Creek.
Gannon wanted to talk to Bernice’s family, but no one knew who her foster mom was, or where she lived. So he made a lot of calls over the next few days until he got a lead.
“You didn’t get this from me, but her name is Catherine Field,” a source at the city’s Social Services and Housing Department told him.
Catherine Field was a widowed fifty-nine-year-old diabetic who lived alone on welfare in an older section of the city west of Main. Gannon had gone to the address several times but in vain.
No one was home.
But he refused to give up trying to find her.
Maybe today would be different, he thought as once again he rolled by the home where Catherine had raised Bernice. It was a small two-story frame house built with the optimism that had blossomed when the Second World War ended. Now, with its blistering paint, missing shingles and sagging front porch, it looked more like a tomb for hope.
It sat among the boarded-up houses near a vacant lot where several old men leaned against an eviscerated Pinto and passed around a bottle wrapped in a paper bag.
Memories of his sister rushed at him before he turned his attention back to the story and the house, eyeing it intensely as he drove by. His hopes lifted when he saw a woman in the backyard.
This time he parked out of sight down the block and approached the house from a different street, coming to the back first, where he saw a woman in her fifties, tending a flower garden near the rickety back porch.
“Catherine Field?”
She turned to him, the toll of a hard life evident in the lines that had woven despair on her face. Her red-rimmed eyes stared helplessly at him.
“You are Catherine Field, Bernice Hogan’s foster mom?”
“Who are you?”
“Sorry,” Gannon fished for his photo ID. “Jack Gannon, a reporter for the Buffalo Sentinel.”
As if cued, breezes curled pages of the News and the Sentinel that were on a small table between two chairs. Also on the table: a glass and a bottle of whiskey that was half-empty.
“I’ve been trying to reach you,” he said.
“I was burying my daughter.”
“I’m sorry. My condolences. There was no notice of the arrangements.”
“We wanted to keep it private. My brother had a plot, a small cemetery on a hill overlooking an apple orchard.”
“Where is it?”
“I don’t want to say.”
“I understand. May I talk to you about Bernice?”
“You can try, I’m not in good shape.”
She invited him to sit on the porch. Gannon declined a drink. Catherine poured one for herself, looked at her small garden and spoke softly. She told him that Bernice’s mother was a child, fourteen years old, when she gave her up for adoption.
But Bernice was never adopted. Instead, she was bounced through the system. Catherine and her husband, Raife, a carpenter, became Bernice’s foster parents when Bernice was eleven. By then Bernice was aware that she’d been given up for adoption.
“I loved her and always felt like her mom, but she chose to call me Catherine, never Mom. I think it was her way of emotionally protecting herself because she’d had so many ‘moms.’ No one could ever really be her mother.”
Not long after they got Bernice, Raife started gambling, and drinking. He became violent and abused Bernice and Catherine before she left him.
“I’ll spend my life regretting that I didn’t do more to protect her.”
Catherine considered her glass then sipped from it.
“She was such a bright girl. Always reading. I was so pleased when she left home to get her own apartment and start college. So proud. She was on her way. She volunteered at a hospice in Niagara Falls. I just knew she was going to make it. Then the bad thing happened.”
“Her friends told me about the party.”
“They think someone slipped something in her drink. She never overcame it. She turned to drugs to deal with it. She wouldn’t talk to me or anyone, but I heard that when she ran up drug debts, she turned to the street.”
Tears rolled down Catherine’s face.
“When was the last time you saw, or talked, to her?”
Catherine wiped her tears and sipped from her glass.
“She called me about a month ago and said she was going to try to get clean, try to get off the street. Some friends were trying to help her.”
“Did she say who those friends were?”
Catherine shook her head.
“You can’t print anything I’ve just told you.”
“But I’m researching your daughter’s death for a news story. I have to.”
“No. You can’t print anything.”
“Catherine, I identified myself as a reporter. I’ve been taking notes. This tragedy is already public. Now, did Bernice say anything about anyone possibly harming her?”
“I’m not supposed to say anything. They told me not to talk to the press.”
