“We’ll leave as soon as we can,” the woman said thickly.
“And how do you think you’re going to do that?” Wylie shot back. “Your truck is totaled, the roads are impassable, and you are hurt.”
“We’ll manage,” the woman said shortly.
“Well, once the phone works again, we’ll call 911. They’ll get help out here as soon as they can.”
“No, no police,” the woman said and for the first time Wylie saw true fear on her face. “If you do that, we’ll leave. We’ll leave right now.” The woman pushed the blankets aside and tried to get to her feet but was too weak.
Wylie shook her head in frustration. “Never mind. We can’t call anyone right now anyway. We’ll worry about that later.”
All they could do now was wait out the storm. But in no way did Wylie trust the woman. There were too many unanswered questions. Wylie threw the last remaining scraps of wood into the fireplace and sat on the floor, facing the sofa where the woman and boy were cocooned. She watched over them, hand in her pocket, fingers wrapped around the loaded gun.
23
August 2000
Three hours after the Blake County Sheriff’s Department requested their assistance, Agent Camila Santos sped down the dusty gravel but slammed on the brakes when she crested a hill to find a tree growing in the middle of the road.
“What the hell,” Santos exclaimed as her passenger, Agent John Randolph, braced his hands against the dashboard. The black sedan fishtailed and skidded to a stop.
The two Iowa Department of Criminal Investigation agents stared up at the massive tree. “Damn,” Randolph said. “That’s not something you see every day.”
Santos inched the sedan around the scaly gray-green trunk of the eighty-foot tree. “They need a warning sign or something,” she agreed.
They crossed a small creek, rounded a corner, and the house came into view. At first glance, it looked like dozens of other white farmhouses they had seen on their trip from Des Moines to rural Blake County, but the flurry of activity ahead let the agents know they were in the right spot.
Santos slowly drove past dozens of parked vehicles and small teams of searchers wading through the tall grass in the ditches that lined the road. The searchers, grim-faced, paused to watch them creep past. “Hope they didn’t trounce all over the crime scene,” Randolph worried.
“Double murder, two missing kids, everyone has to be in a panic,” Santos said as she pulled up behind a rusty Bonneville parked on the side of the road. “I was assured that the sheriff here has everything under control.”
“Why are you stopping here?” Randolph asked, not relishing the long walk up to the crime scene in this heat.
“I want to get the lay of the land,” Santos said as she stepped out into the hot glare of the sun and surveyed the surroundings.
The only buildings in sight were the ones on the Doyle property: a house, a silo, a large barn shedding red curls of paint, a few other outbuildings. Surrounded on all sides by mature cornfields. Remote, isolated.
Santos, compact and strong, like a gymnast, was a twenty-year law enforcement veteran who joined the Iowa Department of Criminal Investigation in 1995 after relocating to Des Moines from Kansas City. She quickly rose in the ranks and was the lead investigator on many high-profile cases that included murders or missing persons. This case had both.
Randolph was the younger of the two, wore a suit jacket and red-and-blue-striped tie. His dress shoes were polished to a high sheen that wouldn’t last long on these dusty roads.
Randolph was so much taller than his counterpart that the woman had to crane her neck to look up at him. But there was something commanding about the way Agent Santos held herself, the cock of her chin, the set of her mouth. She was clearly in charge.
Crime scenes have a pulse all their own and when managed effectively hum along at an efficient, steady pace. Everyone from deputy to crime scene investigator, to detective, to forensic specialists, to the coroner knew their role.
Santos was assured that the main crime scene—the house, the outbuildings, and the Doyles’ cornfield were all secure and being searched only by law enforcement. This was key. But the area outside the crime scene perimeter was important too.
Normally, volunteer searches were not activated so quickly, giving law enforcement more time to get a sense of what happened and keep the distraction of managing those with good intentions at a minimum.
Yes, the locals had organized quickly, but Santos also knew that volunteer searchers could be invaluable in situations like these, especially when the search area was vast and manpower limited. Local folks knew the terrain, knew the nooks and crannies that outsiders wouldn’t be familiar with.