Don’t Look Behind You

were those of a person who never wanted to be found.
    Sometimes people whose lives are in turmoil step out of their own identities and leave broken hearts, financial problems, and stunted dreams as they seek to escape that chaos. Occasionally, they start over with a different name. Sometimes they commit suicide. If they are peripatetic travelers, as one of the vanished characters in this true case was, the reasons for their disappearances don’t necessarily have to be horrific.
    But in this case, they were.

PART ONE
PUYALLUP, WASHINGTON

Chapter One
    It was midafternoon on a very warm day—June 4, 2007—when bulldozer operator Travis Haney paused to wipe the sweat from his forehead. He’d been demolishing an old farmhouse and leveling the topsoil on Canyon Road East in Puyallup (pronounced Pew-AL-up), Washington.
    It was a prime spot for a shopping mall in the Summit district of Pierce County.
    The Washington State Fairgrounds were close by, and land surrounding Puyallup was known for its rich soil and never-ending acres of daffodils.
    But just as the Kent Valley had been paved over to make room for the burgeoning Boeing Company and the parking lots, apartment houses, malls, and other businesses necessary to meet the needs of a startling influx of new residents, Puyallup’s daffodils were beginning to disappear, along with the small truck farms and strawberry fields in the valley.
    It was dismaying to see the rich loam of the area buried under cement. But progress was progress.
    The tall yellow home that had once stood on this particular piece of property was probably built more than a hundred years ago. The house had been empty for a while, but even without care, many of the old-fashioned roses, lilacs, and other familiar perennials had managed to survive among encroaching weeds. The house was slowly dying. Its front porch sagged; some windows were broken and seemed like dead eyes staring out as the demo teams moved in.
    There had, indeed, been a ghostly presence surrounding the house, which no one wanted any longer. Workers didn’t notice it much in the bright sunshine of summer days, but they certainly did as the sun began to set. In June, in the Northwest, that doesn’t happen until almost 10 p.m.
    The house itself was gone by June 4; all the splintered boards and walls with a dozen layers of wallpaper had been hauled away to landfills.
    The last thing Travis Haney was thinking about on this Monday afternoon was hauntings and bizarre secrets. He moved the ’dozer close to the fence on the west/northwest section of the lot, idly glancing at the dirt the blade turned up.
    And then a black plastic trash bag rose up through the disturbed earth. Haney lowered the bucket again and the next scoop brought up the rest of the bag. He dumped it onto a pile of dirt. He could see that it was torn. Curious, he hopped down from his perch and opened the bag along one side.
    There were bones and rotted clothing inside and some tattered twine that might have been used to tie it all up.
    Finding bones wasn’t particularly unusual for crews who were demolishing buildings and houses and rearranging dirt. Haney mused that these bones must have been in the bag for a long time. They could have been the bones of a dog or even a small farm animal. The presence of shreds of cloth, however, made him wonder if whatever had died here might have been a human being.
    Travis Haney called his father, Matt Haney, who was the chief of police of Bainbridge Island just across Puget Sound. Matt told his son to call 911. There was probably an explanation that wasn’t ominous, but Travis’s discovery should be reported.
    Just in case. Because you never know.
    Pierce County deputy Jason Tate responded to the address on Canyon Road, arriving at twelve minutes to four in the afternoon. As he headed toward the man standing next to the excavating equipment, he saw that construction had begun on some commercial buildings in one section of the property. There were a few people standing by, apparently curious about what Travis Haney had found.
    Deputy Tate peered into the bag of bones. He wasn’t an expert, but he suspected they might very well be human bones. He contacted the Pierce County sheriff’s dispatch and requested that the forensic unit respond.
    Adam Anderson arrived first. After studying the bones, he tended to agree with Tate. The remains
did
appear to be human. Anderson’s supervisor, Steve Wilkins, headed out to the scene as the