Authors: Jan Burke
Tags: #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Fiction, #Detective, #Fiction - Mystery, #Serial Murderers, #Suspense, #Mystery, #Mystery & Detective - Women Sleuths, #Kelly; Irene (Fictitious character), #Women journalists, #American Mystery & Suspense Fiction
Behind me, I heard Ben ask, "And what if this is some other victim, Detective Thompson?"
Thompson hesitated, then said, "Fine, but let's not dawdle, all right? We aren't going to be able to stay up here forever."
Ben simply walked off. From one of his duffel bags, he pulled two rolls of screen, one about one-quarter-inch mesh, the other about half-inch. David helped him use these and two sets of support pieces to build two sieves.
Bingle occasionally called out to David, and in Spanish, David answered, "It's okay, Bingle. Stay with Irene." Invariably, I'd get a quick kiss from the dog in response.
Whenever I looked over at Parrish, he was watching me, a knowing smile on his face. I repressed the urge to quickly look away, to show how uneasy I was under his scrutiny. But I was always the first to break eye contact, and once, when an involuntary shiver went through me as I turned away, I heard him laugh softly.
With Andy's help, the anthropologists carefully scraped the surface level of the soil inside the markers away, and put it through the two sieves. They continued in this fashion, a few centimeters at a time--over Thompson's impatient protests. Although they didn't seem to be getting anywhere at first, before long I saw more clearly defined edges of the oval they had marked with the flags. The smell was getting stronger.
Ben took a moment to stretch. When he came over to say hello to Bingle, I said, "You wouldn't happen to have any of that smell compound with you?"
"I don't use it."
"But how can you stand--"
"For professionals who deal with it all the time--well, I suppose it's a matter of personal preference, but I don't recommend using any compound to cover up the smell. Try to deal with it the way nature designed you to deal with it."
"What do you mean?"
"Sooner or later, after your brain has received the message from your olfactory cells that something bad is out there--and received it again and again--the signal stops registering. There will be residual odor on your clothes and you'll smell it again later, when you aren't so near the grave."
"Charming."
"You'll smell it later no matter what you do now. But if you use something that will open up your nasal passages, it will continue to stimulate your olfactory cells--which will keep you smelling decomp throughout the day. It may also result in your brain connecting the good smell to the bad."
"You mean that every time I use anything with a menthol or camphor or eucalyptus odor--"
"Yes. Your brain might add decomp to the mix."
I looked over at David. He had used the smell compound, why shouldn't I?
"Of course," Ben said, "I don't expect you to be able to handle this situation at all, so do whatever you need to do."
That settled it, of course. David obviously thought I was a fool, but didn't say so--he just checked in with me every so often to see how I was bearing up. He offered the smell compound to the others; Ben and I were the only ones who didn't take him up on it. As he was passing it around, he pointedly skipped Parrish. Parrish just grinned and drew a deep breath.
"Move him back to the camp," Thompson ordered the guards.
The excavation went on, now even more slowly, as the sides of the grave were carefully uncovered. Ben focused on defining the grave's edges with painstaking care; David gently scraped away at the inside layers; Andy sifted for objects that might have been missed, bagged certain portions of the removed soil, labeled it, and made notes as needed.
From time to time the odor from the grave would suddenly seem worse. Ben would look over at me, smirking. I smiled back, taking satisfaction in knowing that whenever he looked over at me like that, he must have just gotten a beak full of it, too.
Flash continued to videotape the process, and to take still photographs at Ben's or David's request. Ben and David had a second camera, and took some photos on their own.
"Why are you photographing the edges of the grave?" I asked Ben.
He hesitated, then said, "Possible tool marks."
"From the shovel that was used to dig the grave?"
"Perhaps."
"If you know who did this, why do you need to gather evidence?" I asked.
"We don't necessarily know who made this grave," he said. "We have to treat this site as we would any other. Objectively."
"But Parrish has confessed--"
"Confessions can be recanted. Convictions are appealed. Deals fall apart, Ms. Kelly. We never know what we may need to prove, what evidence may become important. So we work carefully." He paused, then added, "The rules of evidence are much stricter in courtrooms than in newsrooms."
I turned away to keep him from seeing me grit my teeth.
After the first few layers of earth had been removed, a layer of large rocks appeared, scattered over the pit. When Thompson asked about them, Ben, not stopping his work, said, "My guess is that they were supposed to discourage carnivores from raiding the grave."
"Coyotes?" Thompson asked.
Sheridan looked up. "Yes, we know he's thought about coyotes."
Once the rocks were removed, the slow, scraping process began again. David was working on the portion near the center of the grave when he suddenly said, "Hold up."
Ben and Andy stopped what they were doing and began to focus on the area where David had been scraping soil away. They stepped back a little, and called Flash in to take a few photographs. After a moment, they called Thompson over.
I stood up and moved a little closer.
The object of all this scrutiny was a tuft of dark green plastic. Soon we would all come to realize what the forensic anthropologists already suspected.
This was a shroud.
** CHAPTER 9
WEDNESDAY MORNING, MAY 17
Las Piernas
Frank Harriman hung up the phone and turned to his wife's cousin. "The lawyer's back--he's in the hospital." He drew a deep breath, let it out slowly. "Courtesy of his client."
"What happened?" Travis asked.
"Parrish stomped on Newly's foot. Caused multiple fractures. They had a tough time getting him back out--fainted a couple of times from the pain."
"She'll be all right," Travis said, knowing where Frank's concern lay, repeating a refrain that might have been wearying had Frank not needed to hear it.
"All the guards right there," Frank went on. "Watching him! And he still manages to injure his own lawyer." He paused, shook his head. "She shouldn't have gone up there."
"You couldn't have stopped her."
"She shouldn't have gone," he repeated, not listening, pacing now.
"Frank," Travis said.
But he was lost in unpleasant memories. He was thinking of the day they found Kara Lane's body, of what had been done to her. His pacing came to a halt when he thought--ever so briefly, but far, far too long--about the possibility of his wife being at Parrish's mercy, in as much pain, as much afraid, as much alone as Kara Lane had been in her last hours. He felt his stomach pitch.
"Frank," Travis said again.
He looked up.
"She's still surrounded by lots of other people. You know they'd kill him before they let him harm her."
He didn't answer. How could he explain this kind of foreboding? He knew it to be something more than simple fear for her welfare. It was the kind of uneasiness he sometimes got out on the job--instinct, gut feeling, the heebiejeebies--call it what you will. No cop worth a damn ignored it. Right now, it was irritating the hell out of him. He believed in it, trusted it, even though he couldn't have testified about it in a court of law . . .
"You've got to find something to do with yourself," Travis was saying. "You can't just sit here, getting more and more freaked out about this. Find something to occupy your time."
Lost in his thoughts about Parrish, for a moment Frank merely stared at Travis. The suggestion that he keep himself busy--which had at first seemed ridiculous--began to take hold, and now made perfect sense.
He reached for his car keys.
"Where are you going?" Travis asked.
"To visit Mr. Newly in his sickbed."
** CHAPTER 10
WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, MAY 17
Southern Sierra Nevada Mountains
J.C. caught up to us again when about half of the plastic had been uncovered. If he was weary from the additional hiking he had done or by difficulties in helping Phil Newly to the plane, he didn't show it.
Bingle noticed J.C.'s presence at the other end of the meadow before I did. Because I had been watching the dog, I caught the change in the focus of his attention before the others did. During the last few hours, I had been spending much of my time ensuring that Bingle didn't sneak closer to the open grave--after he made one nearly successful attempt, David taught me how to say "VQuedate!"--which means "stay"--in a tone of voice that Bingle would obey.
"You can also say, 'No te muevas,' " David said. "If you say it in a no-nonsense tone of voice--let him know you mean what you say--you'll get him to set aside his other impulses, even the ones that tell him he was on to something really great and now we're having all the fun. He'd like to join in, but his notions of amusement wouldn't be too helpful for our purposes."
I shuddered.
"I know, I know," David said. "But in order to do this kind of work, he has to be interested in that smell. He behaves himself for the most part, but the trouble is, Bingle tends to feel a little proprietary about his finds."
Now, as J.C. approached, Bingle's ears were pitched forward and he watched the ranger closely. Dogs--natural hunters--see motion better than detail, and Bingle's body posture said that he was on guard against this approaching figure. Eventually he must have managed to catch J.C.'s familiar scent--although how he could do so over the increasingly intense smell of the grave, I'll never know--because suddenly he let out a happy bark of welcome.
For a time, work stopped as we greeted J.C. and caught up with one another. He applied some smell compound as he listened to the story of Bingle's find, and praised the dog, who was happy to bask in his attention.
He had seen the coyote tree, and his disgust over it was plain; he was all for bringing charges against Parrish for it. "Not a big deal to someone going down on a double murder rap, I suppose, but still--" He shook his head, as if ridding himself of the memory of the tree. He bent down to pet Bingle. "So you've found Mrs. Sayre, eh, Bingle?"
"We don't know who or what this is yet, J.C.," Ben reminded him, handing him a pair of gloves. "We haven't even opened the plastic."
"Well," the ranger said, looking amused, "the plastic seems to rule out an American Indian burial site, and I can tell you that there aren't any legal cemeteries in this meadow, and no hunting allowed here, either. So whoever or whatever it is, it doesn't belong here."
"When will the plane be back?" I asked him.
"Tomorrow, weather permitting. Some rain in the forecast, so they might be delayed a day or so. Did you bring rain gear?"
I nodded.
"We'd better get back to work," Ben said. "The last thing I want to cope with is a flooded site."
J.C. had apparently done this work before, but even with his help, things could only progress at a certain pace. Eventually, the top surface of the plastic was uncovered. It was a dull, dark green. It appeared to be of a heavier gauge than the plastic used to make trash bags, more like the type used for ground cover by landscapers.
Thompson paced, muttering none-too-quietly about guys who think they're working on a pharaoh's tomb instead of a crime scene; about wishing to God he could bring in a backhoe; damning Parrish's hide for picking this place out beyond East Jesus to bury a body--and other unhelpful remarks that made life a little less pleasant for everyone within earshot.
Ben didn't gratify Thompson with a response. He walked over to him, though, while Andy, J.C., and David stood back from the grave to allow more photographs to be taken of the lumpy plastic.
"We want to dig down a little more on the sides," Ben told the detective, "just to see if we can find the edge of the plastic. We'd prefer to keep it intact. But if we can't find an edge, we'll go ahead and cut it open."