Breaking through the thick concrete slab took three full hours. The specialists worked slowly and carefully. Every strike of every tool was recorded on camera.
When the slab was finally opened, two bodies were found underneath. A young man and a young woman. They were dressed in summer clothes typical of the mid-1990s.
The victims wore plain jeans and T-shirts. Around the woman’s neck was the same chain with the gold letter “A.” On the man’s wrist was a black plastic digital watch.
Its display had stopped forever at 2:34. The exact date was no longer visible. Medical examiner Dr. Irene Bell had worked in the county morgue for more than twenty years.
She had seen just about everything in that time. But during the examination of these remains, she had to step outside for air more than once. It wasn’t only the odor. It was the condition of the bodies.
The woman lay on her side, her arms pulled tightly to her chest. The man was face down, one arm stretched forward as if he had been trying to reach something. They were classic defensive positions.
Dr. Bell wrote a detailed report. The exam found blunt-force trauma to the skull, but the injuries were not fatal. Death had come from asphyxiation and crushing pressure.
In other words, the concrete had been poured while the victims were still alive. How long had they remained under that slab? Minutes? Longer? No one wanted to speculate.
Dr. Bell left the grimmer possibilities out of her formal report. Some things are better not pictured too clearly. The victims were identified fairly quickly through old missing persons records.
They were twenty-six-year-old software engineer Daniel Reed and twenty-three-year-old bookkeeper Anna Reed. The newlyweds had married in April 1995. They vanished in June of that same year.
The missing persons report had been filed by Anna’s father, Victor Sullivan. At the time, the case had been handled by the local sheriff’s office. In 1997, the investigation was closed with no evidence of foul play.
The reason was a letter from Anna saying they had left the country in a hurry. After that, the family stopped pressing for an active search. The file ended up in storage.
It sat there for eight years. Everything changed when Mike Carter decided to insulate the floor in his cabin. Detective Sergeant Sam Walsh was assigned the reopened case the day the bodies were found…
