“Exactly.”
“On it.”
“Let me start over here,” she said, indicating the left side of the house. “And you can start the other side.”
The detectives went to opposite sides of the structure. Katie walked to where there were still some exterior walls leaning inward. What she remembered last time was a deliberate-looking pile of broken beams and other miscellaneous pieces of wood. It could have been made months ago or a decade ago, but she put on heavy leather work gloves and began lifting each beam one by one. She studied the ends and scanned them to see if there was any indication of them coming from other sources.
She could hear McGaven making noise as he moved things around on the opposite side. Restacking the beams, she searched along what was once the groundwork of the house. It was old enough that there wasn’t a sturdy cement foundation. The house had been built up off the ground, the remains of the flooring long since rotted away. Katie studied what was left of the porch and sides. Many of the pieces of wood were disintegrating and filled with bug nests. She made sure there wasn’t anything lurking that could be dangerous, like certain venomous snakes.
She decided to mark what she thought was the perimeter of the house with some of the beams to give her a visual representation. She imagined it was at one time a nice farmhouse on beautiful land. Mr. and Mrs. Collins were married and then had a child. It was a dream for most, but this dream had turned into a nightmare, with everyone ending up murdered. Dark secrets still remained like ghosts around the property.
“Katie! Found something!” said McGaven on the other side.
Her immediate irrational thought was that McGaven had got caught in another hole. She ran over and did see her partner standing near what looked to be a hole, but not one large enough for a body. It seemed to have been dug underneath thehouse. She saw where McGaven had removed pieces of the structure and rotten portions of the flooring.
“What’s up?” she said.
“I think I might’ve found something.” He carefully bent down near the hole. “Look at this,” he said.
She bent down to take a closer look. “It looks like someone dumped all this stuff and buried it under the house.” It seemed odd to her until she saw part of a broken wooden baseball bat. “Is that…?”
“I think so.”
Katie was amazed. “We couldn’t get that lucky.”
“It’s not luck. It’s solid police work.”
“It could be proven that Bruce Collins killed his wife and daughter from blood and maybe fingerprints. But… what’s the motive besides domestic abuse? There’s got to be more to this seeing as others were also willing to kill.”
“I’ve been thinking about that too. There’s still something missing…”
Katie stood up. “John is absolutely swamped. He and Eva are working some serious overtime.Weneed to process this as a crime scene—by the book.”
McGaven agreed and they went back to the Jeep to gather everything they needed and pulled on gloves. McGaven cordoned off the area as per Katie’s instruction, while she took photographs, first of the overall area, and then medium to close-up shots. She had sent a text message to John informing him of what they were doing. When they had gathered everything, they would bring the chain of custody with the evidence back to the forensic lab.
Once the preliminary tasks were completed, it was time to retrieve evidence and bag or contain it appropriately.
“You should bring the stuff out,” said McGaven.
“You don’t want to fall in a hole again?” shesaid, smiling.
“In a word… no.” He had the digital camera ready to document each piece.
Katie was excited. This was the first new piece of evidence they might be able to connect to the chain of events of what happened to the Collins family. With her gloves on, she reached her hand to the wooden bat. It was clear it had deteriorated over the years, but there were still signs of a dark substance—hopefully blood.
McGaven laid out a small tarp and Katie gently set down the bat piece. Photos were taken. She could see there were possibly a couple of hairs embedded into cracks. She tried not to think about if they had belonged to Misty. The description from the Young brothers about the screams they had heard made her shudder.
“That looks like blood,” said McGaven.
Katie nodded. As McGaven carefully rolled the remnants of the bat and sealed the ends, Katie pulled out from the hole what appeared to be some fabric. It had been ravaged by bugs and the soil had made it disintegrate some, leaving it full of holes. McGaven documented it and then Katie secured it into an evidence bag.
The detectives continued their procedure of documenting and bagging the evidence. It was clear the clothing, towels, and the bat had been buried. Once done, they searched closely the entire taped-off area, but there was nothing else of interest.
Katie decided to walk the immediate zone around the house and then the empty space where the barn would have stood. There was a faint foundation that would have been installed later than the farmhouse. She casually walked around the remaining foundation, but there was nothing that caught her eye. She saw where fencing had been put around the hole McGaven had fallen into and where Mr. Collins’s body had been found. She estimated the distance to be about forty feet directly in line with the hole that had been dug under thehouse. It made her wonder if the person who killed and dumped Bruce Collins might have been the same person who buried the evidence connected to Meredith and Misty Collins—and what that would mean.
Katie looked back at the remains of the house. McGaven was loading up the evidence in the Jeep. Cisco whined a few times from the car to make sure she hadn’t forgotten about him.
Looking back at the fields, which were partially cleared after the body had been found, Katie walked around the area in a spiral pattern before branching out. Over to the left part of the property, near a grouping of trees, she saw what appeared to be areas of disturbed ground. She walked farther and realized there was a line of trees, dense, taller than surrounding ones, where holes had been dug. Her immediate thought was that there were more graves, but upon closer inspection they were too small. It was as if someone was either burying something or looking for something. But what? And why? She couldn’t tell how old these holes were. They could have been fairly recent, which was her initial impression.
