Page 6 of Water's Edge

I gave him a stern look. I am running out of patience.

“Anyway, I came up to the little cliff, bluff, whatever.” Boyd has warmed to the subject. “It was only, like, thirty feet high, but it was sheer, man. I mean, it was straight down: ‘Do not pass GO, do not collect $200,’ if you know what I mean.”

He gives other expressions of this stupidity and I let him talk until he runs out of “likes” and “you knows” and appears to be wrung dry as far as skirting the subject.

“I was going to climb down. I left my climbing gear back in the car, but it looked like I could make it. Then I saw I didn’t have to. Someone left a perfectly good rope tied off to a tree. It was coiled up and I almost tripped over it. I pitched it over, checked the knot, and over I went.”

“The body,” Ronnie says.

I can see she is getting impatient too.

Good girl.

“So I got down to the bottom and there’s a bunch of big rocks and a tiny strip of sandy beach. I pulled on the rope to make sure I could climb back up. I didn’t want to fall down in those rocks. Some of them are sharp. Anyway, I was about to climb back up and I saw what looked like a foot sticking out between the rocks. I couldn’t see any way to get to this beach except by climbing down. I thought maybe the person had fallen off the cliff. At the same time I wondered how they could have, ’cause the rope was coiled up at the top of the cliff.”

He stops and looks at us.

“Aren’t you going to take notes?”

“I have a very good memory,” I say. “Go on.”

He sighs. “Okay. Fine. I go over and look and it’s a woman. She ain’t moving and looks banged up. I thought maybe she had fallen but then I see she’s not wearing anything but her panties and a bra. So I think maybe she tried to swim to the beach and got tossed up on the rocks. I climbed back up and called 911. Then I thought maybe she needed help and I got in my car, but it wouldn’t start. Then the officer showed up and he called for a deputy and, well, here we are.”

I question him again, walking him through his story. It doesn’t change. He climbed down, saw the body, climbed up, and called 911. Boyd swore he didn’t touch anything or take any pictures, although I don’t believe him, because he still has his phone. He’ll probably hightail it back to campus and show pictures to his buddies or sell them to the news media.

I say to him, “So when CSI gets here and takes fingerprints and collects DNA samples, yours won’t show up anywhere?”

He swallows and I hear his Adam’s apple click in a dry throat. He shakes his head. “I don’t think so. You can’t get fingerprints off a rope and that’s all I touched. Honest to God. And the rocks where I was climbing down.”

“We have a new technology that’s called Touch DNA. You probably heard about that in class.”

He stays silent.

“And it’s what the name says. When you touch something, part of your DNA gets on the item, body, whatever. Then, using the FBI and Homeland Security database, we can then trace it back to the person through family lineage and down to a specific individual.”

Boyd stops chewing on his beard and begins rubbing the side of his face.

“Well, to tell the truth, I might have walked out in the water to see better. But it was too deep, and I didn’t want to get that wet. I didn’t never touch her, I swear.”

The bottom half of his jeans are still damp.

My rule of thumb is that when someone says, “I swear,” what follows is going to be a big fat lie. I believe he didn’t touch the body but maybe he took pictures. Maybe even a selfie. People are sick. I should know.

“Can you let him sit in back of your car?” I ask MacDonald.

MacDonald does so reluctantly.

As he is getting in the back seat Boyd says, “I’ll give a full statement to your partner, Detective Marsh.” He smiles at Ronnie. She smiles back, turns to face me, and scowls.

“I’ll take his statement if you like, Detective. They taught us how at the academy. I’ve got a voice recorder on my cell phone.”

I’ve used my phone recorder to take confessions too. But the person giving the confession didn’t know I was recording them. Tricking them didn’t bother me.

MacDonald is cold. I need to turn on the charm.

“I’m Megan,” I say. “Can I call you Mac?”

“No. It’s State Patrolman MacDonald.”

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