Page 50 of We Are All Guilty Here

“Madison got the prescription for birth control pills from Dr.Carl so that Cheyenne could take them.” Emmy saw his curious look, but she knew he could easily figure out the source. “The first time Madison filled the prescription at the pharmacy was on September fourteenth. My guess is that Cheyenne waited a few weeks, then started on the first of October.”

“Took some time to be talked into it,” Gerald said.

“Maybe,” Emmy hedged, because she knew how idiotic teenagers could be. She’d started having sex with Jonah a full three months before a pregnancy scare had sent her running to the Planned Parenthood over in Clayville. Celia had driven her so that her parents wouldn’t find out.

“Sheriff.” Michael was rolling the loose crime scene tape around his hand like a bright yellow mitten. “Ready when you are.”

Emmy looked down at the ground as they walked along the track. There were drainage ditches on both sides, heavy rocks covering the French drains that diverted the water toward a retaining pond. Terrell kept the grass cut close to the ground to discourage snakes from scaring the horses. The fence to what was called the back hundred, a grazing area for his dairy cows, was fifty feet away. Emmy could see the rolling hills beyond, then the rise where the farmhouse was situated like a crown in the Clifton jewels.

She told her father, “Taybee and her family were at the river basin last night. The field hands would go home at four. No one would’ve been looking back here between seven and eight.”

Gerald nodded, but he told Michael, “Ready.”

“Yes, sir.” Michael unzipped his suit as he talked. “The FBI is handling the identification on the tire and shoe prints. They said we’ll have those back by the middle of next week. But this is definitely the area where the struggle took place. We’ve got the bike traveling from a westerly direction. We lost the impression about forty yards down, but you can see how the bike meandered back and forth across the road.”

Emmy saw the lazy curves and thought about Cheyenne pedaling her bike, arms out at her sides, tilting her body left, then right like an airplane, thinking about what she was going to do with the older man now, how much fun she was going to have with Madison at the park later.

“The car came from the west, too,” Michael continued. “We picked it up at twenty feet. There are a lot of farm vehicles that use this track, so it’s impossible to pick it up before then. What we know is that the driver came to an abrupt stop here. He got out of the car. These footprints are a man’s size eleven. I would guess some kind of hiking or work boot, but the FBI will confirm that. Now, if you’ll follow me down here.”

Gerald stayed on the road as Emmy followed Michael into the drainage ditch. The gravel shifted under the thick soles of her boots. Dust clouded up into her mouth. She coughed.

“There.” Michael pointed back at the road. “You can see that divot better from this angle.”

Emmy had to use both hands to shield her eyes from the sun. She squinted at the packed clay. She only noticed the indentation because Michael had told her to look for it. She shook her head, because this wasn’t at all how she had imagined it. “Are you saying the car hit the bike?”

“Yes.” He pointed a few feet back from the divot. “That’s where the impact took place. This is where the bike went down.”

Emmy climbed up to the road to get a better look. She had worked dozens of bike accidents on patrol. She went to one knee, trying to read the scene. The bike pedal had hit the ground first, acting like an anchor, then momentum had taken over and swung the rear tire around.

She remembered, “The rim of the back tire was bent. The chain was hanging off.”

“I believe the left front bumper of the car tapped the rear wheel. The impact bent the rim and sent the bike flying. And the cyclist.”

The image in Emmy’s mind changed from a carefree Cheyenne making lazy curves on the road to a terrified girl frantically pedaling her bike back and forth as she tried to outmaneuver a speeding car.

Michael said, “He wasn’t driving fast, maybe fifteen miles per hour, but it’s a 2,000-pound vehicle versus a 20-pound bike carrying a very small girl. She was knocked to the road here, then rolled into the ditch there.”

Again, Emmy played it out in her mind. The terrified lookon Cheyenne’s face as she heard the car inching closer. The shock when the bike was tapped. The horror as she flew through the air and landed on the gravel, then rolled into the low point of the ditch.

She asked, “Did you find any other part of the gold necklace?”

“Nothing, but this is where the Highway Patrol found it last night. Absent a body, it’s hard to tell if it was yanked from her neck or if the impact broke it off.”

Emmy saw something else. Three round patches of gravel had been scooped from the ditch. “Was there blood on the gravel?”

“Yes, we found spatter from the impact, and several drops where she was either carried or crawled back up to the road. I would assume the blood came from her nose and mouth. Maybe some road rash. We’ll run it for DNA back at the lab just to make sure it’s hers. Excuse me, I have to take this.”

Michael was answering his phone as he climbed out of the ditch.

Emmy turned to her father. “This changes things, Dad. The kidnapper just drove up and hit her bike. He wanted to scare the shit out of her. Maybe kill her right then and there.”

“Yep.”

“What the hell were they involved in?”

Gerald looked up the road. “How’d she get here?”

Emmy looked up the road, too. She needed to get her bearings. She took out her spiral notebook and drew three horizontal lines, then overlaid them with three vertical lines spaced out at equal intervals to indicate the backroads.

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