The Sixth Way to Kill

On the medical examiner's table was my sister's body, shrunken down to nothing. She had died of thirst. Three full days at the bottom of an abandoned mine pit.

Her canteen was sitting right next to her hand. It was full. She never touched a drop of it. I was nineteen that year. Ten years later I had a PhD in criminal psychology.

I went over every inch of that pit. I ran those three days a thousand times in my head. And then I found something.

The person who killed her had been sitting at our kitchen table the whole time. Chapter 1 April 12, 2016. A Tuesday. My sister's twelfth birthday.

She was starting middle school that fall, and my mom said twelve was a big one and we were going to do it right. That was the day it happened.

I was in college on the other side of Kellerton, and I'd come home that morning just for her birthday. It was also the day her sixthgrade class had a field trip out to Lion Ridge.

My mom hadn't wanted to let her go. Clara had been asking about Lion Ridge for months. So we moved the birthday dinner to the evening.

Mom packed her a sun shirt, a hat, water, and snacks, and told her to be back early. "Nobody eats the cake without me.

And don't put the candles in until I get home." Clara said it to both of us on her way out, twice, like we couldn't be trusted. "Hey. They say there's this flower up on Lion Ridge.

Cliff columbine." "Can I bring you a few to press for bookmarks?" She snuck a look at me when she said it. Careful. Trying to get back on my good side.

The night before, she'd been messing around on my laptop and deleted the biochem paper I had bled over for two weeks.

Biochem was the one class I hated more than anything on this earth.

I was sitting there starting the whole thing over from scratch, and I didn't look up. "You said it, not me." "Don't come back until you've got them." The truth is I didn't care about the bookmarks.

I was just mad and I wanted her to have to work for it. None of us knew that morning what cliff columbine is famous for around here. You look at it. You don't pick it.

Nobody picks it. "She went off that cliff getting flowers for me.

I didn't find out until after she was dead that they only grow on the steepest face of the rock." "For years afterward I kept doing the same math.

If I hadn't said don't come back until you've got them, would she still be alive?" That's what I told Ellsworth, ten years later. My doctoral advisor.

It had been ten years and I still couldn't get through it without falling apart. "How long before they found her?" Ellsworth pulled a tissue and handed it over. "Three days. "I remember it exactly.

It was early morning. The sun came down on her face and her face was shrunken and the light on it was warm. "My mother went down on the ground right there.

My father had a heart attack. "So it was just me.

Sitting with her." The coffee pot on the counter made a small sound, and in that deadquiet office you could hear every bit of it. "For what it's worth, most people who go missing on a mountain never get found at all.

That's something." Ellsworth got up, poured a cup, and slid the warm mug across the desk to me. "Dinah." He wasn't looking at me.

He was looking down into his coffee. "You said she died of thirst." "So what about the water she carried up there?" I lifted my head. "Full." "She never drank any of it." Chapter 2 "They had a few hundred people on that mountain.

Police, my parents, family, friends, my father's students. The ones who'd graduated and the ones who hadn't, all of them.

And a lot of people from the town at the bottom of the ridge went up on their own." "The police took the spot where she disappeared as the center of a circle, pulled every camera they could pull, and canvassed every town inside six miles." The moment they found her body, my mother came at me and got both hands in my shirt and screamed into my face. "You knew it was her birthday and you cursed her anyway!

How does somebody get that ugly inside!" My father taught middle school.

He came across the room and slapped me three times, and then he stood there pointing at me. "Half my life teaching other people's children, and I raised something this cold.

Why is it not you? Why is it not you lying there?" He announced it in front of everybody. As of that day he had no second daughter.

People were looking at me like I was garbage, and I didn't move away from any of it. I didn't defend myself. I stood there and took the hands and the words.

Because I thought so too. I thought I had talked my own sister into her grave, and I had it coming, and I wasn't worth mourning.

I pushed the burn in my throat back down and kept going. "Everybody assumed it was an accident.

Until the autopsy came back." "It wasn't hypothermia." "It wasn't an animal, or a snake, or anything that bites." "And she didn't die of the fall." "Ten years, and not one person has been able to explain what killed her." Ellsworth had been stirring his coffee.

He stopped. "What did, then?" "Thirst." "Dehydration deaths aren't unusual for someone lost in the backcountry." Ellsworth tapped the side of his cup. "What if there was water in her canteen?" I held his eyes and said it one word at a time. "Is it possible somebody took her water before she died?

And then put it back afterward, because they didn't want to be held responsible?" Ellsworth looked at me while he said it. I shook my head. "Three people found her.

My father, one of my father's students, and a man from search and rescue. And when they worked the scene, there were three sets of prints down there.

There was never a fourth." "Classmates? Teachers? What were her relationships like at school?" "She was a good student. Easy to get along with.

Nobody in any of those interviews turned up a grudge, or bullying, in either direction." I made myself go back and get all of it. "And the water itself came back clean, I assume." I nodded.

Something moved in Ellsworth's face and stayed there. "Was there an autopsy?" "There was. I was a sophomore studying forensic science.

When the report was released to my family, I read every page alone." "I understood enough to know exactly what had been done to her." "Her body had every classic finding for death by thirst." Ellsworth put a hand on my shoulder. "That's a lot to have carried." Nobody knows what it is like to read, in clinical detail, how somebody took your sister apart.

Every incision lands somewhere on you. It goes past the point where anything still registers.

I did not produce a single tear. "So that's why you left forensics for clinical medicine." Ellsworth turned a page of my file and looked at me with something soft in it. "Yes.

It broke something.

I have never been able to pick up a scalpel since." "After that I moved to clinical medicine and went through every stress response and every dehydration mechanism the human body has, one at a time." "And then I applied to your program." I set the mug back down on the desk. "Professor.

It's been ten years." "A twelveyearold with all ten fingers worn raw and two fingernails torn off at the root." "Why wouldn't she drink the water?" Chapter 3 "So you applied to my program in criminal psychology to get me to reopen a tenyearold case with you." Ellsworth looked at me like he wasn't sure he'd heard it right.

There's a joke in the field that getting into Ellsworth's program is harder than winning the lottery. I'd guess that was the first time anybody had given him that reason. "Yes.

Becoming your student was how I got in the room with you.

More than that, it's how I earned the right to have this conversation. "You're the most respected criminal investigative specialist in the country.

You are the authority in criminal psychology. You've closed more cold cases than anybody can count. "I'm asking you to help me find out what happened.

I need to know whether my sister died by accident or whether somebody killed her. "I need to know why a girl with water right there died of thirst. "If it was an accident, then let her rest.

If somebody did it to her, I will spend the rest of my life making them answer for it." I was trying to hold my voice down, and the last part came out close to a shout.

After Clara died, my mother killed herself. My father lost his mind and went into a hospital. A family that had been fine was simply gone.

Every dream I've had in ten years, I'm trying to get my arms around my sister and ask her why she wouldn't drink. And to tell her I'm not mad about the biochem paper.

And that she can forget the flowers. She can forget all of it. She just has to come back. If she came back, the family came back. That was never going to happen.

Ellsworth was quiet a while. Then: "Walk me through the autopsy findings." "Extreme desiccation.

Skin dry and wrinkled, close to leather." "Eyes partly open, globes collapsed from fluid loss." "Blood concentrated. The lividity was dark and it was in the wrong places.

Blood in the heart and the great vessels was dark red and thick. Body cavity fluid markedly reduced." I've spent more sleepless nights on that report than I can count.

It's inside me now. Saying it out loud put the room back in front of my eyes. Ellsworth stopped stirring. "April, on Lion Ridge.

Overnight temperature at the bottom of an abandoned pit usually runs under fifty degrees.

A twelveyearold down there for three days should have died of hypothermia." I took a breath. "That's the strangest part of the whole autopsy." "When a body goes into severe hypothermia, the lining of the stomach and intestines throws a stress response.

Hundreds of dark brown bleeding points. In forensics they're called Vishnevsky spots. My sister's report shows her stomach lining without a single one of them.

She had no cold response of any kind." Ellsworth's eyes came up sharp. "No hypothermia. And instead you're getting heat findings?" I nodded and I couldn't keep my voice level. "Yes.

The ME's conclusion was that the immediate cause of death was multiple organ failure from extreme dehydration. Death by thirst. "And here's the part that keeps me up.

Her organs showed severe findings for dehydration fever. "When a body runs that dry it can't produce sweat. The whole cooling system shuts down.

She was inside an oven she couldn't see, and her own body temperature cooked her to death. "As for why she didn't freeze—" "I spent a night at the bottom of that pit myself." "It isn't cold down there.

Not at all." Chapter 4 I opened my bag and spread a yellowed geological survey across his desk. "I pulled the geology on Lion Ridge.

That pit is only about a hundred feet deep, but the bottom of it sits on an active geothermal fault. "The fault holds the floor of that pit at about seventyseven degrees yearround.

No wind. It's a warming box." Ellsworth's gaze tightened. He stared into his coffee and tapped a knuckle on the desk. You could hear the clock.

After a long time he asked, "Toxicology and differential?" "Blood tests showed sharply elevated sodium and hematocrit. Vitreous chemistry supported severe dehydration.

She'd been completely blind for at least a day before she died. "No biological or mineral toxins. Only minor surface abrasions.

Force injury was ruled out." I got it all out in one breath. "Any sign of sexual assault?" I shook my head. "None.

But there's one thing I've never been able to get past." Ellsworth tipped his chin at me.

Go on. "The autopsy and the scene both put her death somewhere between the afternoon and the night of the third day. They found her the next morning, right at first light.

That's too clean. It's like — it's like—" "Like somebody sat and watched, waited until she was all the way gone, and then let you find her?" Ellsworth didn't blink. "Yes.

She was found very conveniently." I nodded slowly. "For three days she went through the worst of that dehydration fever.

Three days without water is about the limit for a grown adult. She was twelve.

Whoever did it timed it so there was no chance she'd survive." "How was it classified?" "Because nobody could explain the cause of death, it stayed ruled accidental.

Detective Delgado wouldn't sign off on it. He said there were too many open questions and calling it an accident was lazy. Then somebody floated that she'd done it to herself.

Refused food and water.

Except there was food in her mouth—" "There was food in her mouth when they found her?" Ellsworth cut in. "Yes." I nodded, and my eyes were burning. "A full mouth of it.

The snacks my mother packed her that morning." His face went another degree harder. "And in her stomach?" I shook my head. "Nothing.

Empty." His hand closed around the coffee cup. "Were there climbing marks on the walls? Soil on her clothes, her shoes, her socks?" "Yes. All ten fingers worn raw.

The nails gone off the left middle finger and the right index.

Both of them, all the way." My eyes went hot and I forced the ache back down. "She still had a few dried cliff columbine in her fist." "Those were for me." Ellsworth held my eyes and gave it to me one piece at a time. "No hypothermia.

Dehydration fever, which is backwards." "A full canteen." "A mouthful of food she never swallowed." "Dinah." "Somebody killed your sister." My heart pulled in on itself and I nearly lost the cup