Authors: Allison Brennan
“What do you want me to do?” Sean asked.
She hadn’t wanted Sean to come down with her. He still wasn’t one hundred percent after his fall, and though he tried to hide the pain she knew his leg hurt. However, now she was relieved she wasn’t alone in the dark, frigid space. It seemed ridiculous to be scared of something that wasn’t even here. It was like being in a haunted house. Purely fiction, the imagination creating all sorts of implausible outcomes because of fear.
She gestured to the alcove. “She was right there.”
Their breath was visible. Though nearing fifty degrees topside, it was still below thirty here underground.
Why would someone keep the body in the mine
?
To store it
.
Down here it was as cold or colder than the crypt at the morgue. A body would decompose slowly or, if frozen, not at all.
Sean took her hand. “Do what you need to do,” he said.
She closed her eyes. She wanted to see the woman as she had been, the unique and musty scents of the cave triggering Lucy’s memory.
Her hair had been limp and darker than true blond, but that could have been because of the moisture. The skin had been only slightly molted, very pale, showing no obvious physical decomposition. But in these cold environs, the body could have been there a week or for months.
“She was laid out straight, flat on her back,” Lucy said, glancing at Sean. “Her arms were crossed over her chest. She wore dark slacks—not jeans—and a very dirty white blouse. No jacket or sweater.”
“Odd for this climate.”
Lucy nodded. “Her skin tone was almost identical to the corpses in the cold storage room at the morgue, but given her clothes, it stands to reason she was killed in a warm place, or at least not outdoors. I can’t see why the killer would have removed her coat, but not her other clothes, unless there was something on it that would identify him.”
“What about her shoes?”
Lucy sighed. “I didn’t look.”
“You saw them—you just don’t remember. Close your eyes again.”
She did, but didn’t know how this would help. She hadn’t made a conscious observation about the dead woman’s shoes, and she didn’t want her imagination conjuring something.
But as she mentally assessed the body as she’d seen it, she realized she
had
seen something. “Dark. Flat. No shoelaces. Loafers maybe, some sort of slip-on.”
“Good,” Sean said.
She smiled, pleased that she’d remembered the detail.
“Last night you said something bothered you about her hands. What?” Sean asked.
Her arms had been crossed … but something else was there, something had caught Lucy’s attention.
It hit her.
A flower
.
Lucy opened her eyes. “I didn’t really register it before, but there was a flower on her chest, between her hands. Not in her hands, but laid on her chest, the stem tucked under her wrist. It wasn’t big, and it was shriveled and brown, but I was too distracted to notice more.”
“Distracted how?”
A chill went down her spine. “The maggots. In her mouth.”
Sean ran his hand up and down her back. “You didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t want to think about it.”
“What kind of flower?”
“It looked more like a weed, all dried out like that. But it’s clear—someone intentionally placed it on her chest.”
“As if visiting her grave.”
She shivered. That meant nothing—the killer might never have come back after leaving her here. He could have killed her and left the flower as a sign of remorse or part of some sick ritual. She wouldn’t know until she knew more about the victim herself.
She inspected the area closely with her flashlight. There didn’t seem to be any trace of bodily fluids or signs of blood or struggle. That didn’t mean they weren’t there, only that they weren’t visible to the naked eye.
However, where the woman’s head had been, Lucy spotted several strands of dark blond hair.
“Sean!”
He saw them, too. “Do you have plastic bags?”
“I can’t tamper with evidence.”
“I didn’t see any crime scene tape up. Or warning sign. And where are the cops?”
True. After talking to Deputy Weddle yesterday, it was clear that the Sheriff’s Department wasn’t taking Lucy’s statement seriously. Maybe they believed her, maybe they didn’t, but Sean was right: they weren’t here searching for evidence, nor did they blockade the area off.
She handed Sean her flashlight. “Shine the light there—I’m taking a few pictures.”
Though she had no cell phone reception, the built-in camera took photographs just fine. She snapped several of the area, then zoomed in on the hair. She wished she had a high-end digital camera for better quality, but her phone would have to do.
“Her head rested here,” she said.
Emboldened, Lucy gave the alcove a thorough examination, taking more pictures, before moving on to the area surrounding the slab. There were faint footprints in the hard-packed dirt, but there was no telling which ones might have belonged to the men yesterday or to whoever removed the body. A serious police investigation would get impressions and compare the footprints to those of the two rescue workers, as well as hers and Sean’s. If one set didn’t match anyone, it might lead to the person who had moved the body.
“A dead body isn’t easy to carry,” Sean commented.
“But not impossible. He was strong, or had a partner. There are no drag marks—dragging her body would be noticeable, even on this hard floor. If we assume she was here for a while and frozen—”
“It’s still twenty-eight degrees here, and it’s already nine,” Sean said, looking at his phone.
“Can you get historical data when we get back up?”
“Absolutely. What do you want? I’ll run it as soon as we get in the truck.”
“Temperature, high and low, for the last year,” she said, brow knitting. “I don’t know how to extrapolate it into underground temps, though.”
“I can write an algorithm for it, but it won’t be perfect. Underground, both heat and cold are retained, depending on the surface temps. You’d want a geologist to interpret the data, based on the location of this room, the type of rock, pulling in any data from when the mine was operational.”
“I’ll write down what I need if you can figure out how to get the information.”
“That I can do.”
“The maggots are important—if it was warmer, flies would breed and lay eggs at a faster rate. The maggots would turn into flies in days. But the cold inhibits them. They could have been dormant for weeks—months. It’s too cold down here for insect activity.”
“What are you thinking?”
She didn’t want to speculate, because she honestly had nothing to go on but conjecture. But Sean liked to brainstorm.
“This might sound stupid …” she began.
“Try me.”
“Under normal temperatures, the life cycle from egg to adult fly is twenty-four days. It’s very predictable. What affects their life cycle most are cold temperatures.”
“And it’s too cold here for a twenty-four-day life cycle?”
She nodded. “If she was killed here, then any flies would have remained dormant until the temperature rose.”
“I haven’t seen a fly down here.”
“Neither have I. It’s still too cold, but they
could
have been here at some point if there was a change in temperature. I’m not an entomologist, and this is all coming from a long-ago forensic biology class, but the larvae I saw in her mouth were about three days old. They wouldn’t have gotten to the pupa stage for another five to six days.”
“So you think she could have died three days ago?”
“Five days—three days before I found the body. If she was killed then, it wasn’t here.”
“Because there are no flies.”
“Exactly. The key point is that flies lay eggs within minutes of death,” Lucy continued, “so if she was killed in town, for example, the eggs would have been laid there.”
“So you think she died five days ago?”
“Possible, not likely—not based on her skin tone.”
“Can eggs be laid and then not hatch?”
“Yes.”
“So she could have been killed months ago, and only because it’s spring and the weather is warming the eggs hatched.”
“Exactly.”
“But not last summer, because they would have hatched long ago.”
She smiled. “You should be a scientist.”
He shrugged. “Well, I did go to M.I.T. I might not have been paying too much attention, but some basic knowledge seeped into my thick head.”
There was something about his tone that sounded odd to Lucy, almost regretful. She wondered what had happened back then that had him unusually melancholic. Before she could ask, Sean continued.
“A frozen body wouldn’t have been easy to move.”
“Quite right,” she agreed.
He shined his light slowly around the eerie space while Lucy looked more closely at the ground.
Yesterday, when she’d been down here with Hammond and Getty, the men had walked down each of the two tunnels for several yards. She considered it now, only because Sean was here with her. But Tim had warned them that there were cave-ins, holes, any number of dangers. And she had no idea where the tunnels led, or how to get to the main entrance from here. They could follow the tracks, but the dangers in the mine stopped her from suggesting it. Still the tracks were a clue. There was no evidence that the killer had moved the body up the mine shaft that Sean had fallen down. And the cart was missing. She wasn’t foolhardy—she wasn’t going to risk her life wandering down a deadly labyrinth without solid evidence.
“We should have asked Tim to take us to the entrance of the mine. The killer took the cart to move the body, he couldn’t have gone up the shaft.”
“When we’re done here”—he glanced around—“maybe we should go down the tunnels—”
“No,” she interrupted. “There are too many unknowns. We’ll go down a few feet, but that’s it.”
“What specifically are you looking for?”
“Anything that looks out of place. We should start where I saw the mining cart.”
They walked over to the narrow tunnel, just wide enough for a cart and little more. Its ceiling was low, just an inch taller than Lucy’s five feet seven inches.
Sean squatted, resting his weight on his good leg. “The tracks are freshly scraped, see?”
She saw the rust missing in gouges, possibly from the metal wheels of the cart. “How long ago, do you think?”
“Two days.”
“How about if you didn’t know I saw the cart here just two days ago.”
“I’d say these marks were made not more than a few weeks ago, at most. Seriously, the rust would have started to grow back. Not fully, but enough to lose that sheen.”
She took pictures of the markings and the track itself.
“Hammond followed the track down twenty feet,” she said, “and didn’t find anything. This probably leads to—” Something moved in the corner of her vision.
Lucy turned her head, dipping her flashlight to the packed dirt floor between the metal tracks. She sucked in her breath, stifling a startled cry, her stomach clenching painfully beneath her ribs.
On the ground, several maggots flopped slowly, stymied by the cold and lack of nutrients now that they had fallen outside of the corpse. Finally, solid evidence the killer had moved the body down this tunnel after Lucy’s discovery had been made public.
Her heart raced and she scanned the area with her light. About two dozen of the translucent white insects littered the path, some of them dead, some of them having moved much farther down the tunnel.
Sean whistled under his breath. “That’s pretty damn conclusive. I can’t believe they missed this yesterday.”
“They were looking for a body,” she said. “They weren’t thinking crime scene evidence.”
“They should have been.”
Lucy hesitated—she didn’t want to tamper with evidence. Quickly, before she could change her mind, she picked up three of the maggots with tweezers, then sealed them in a small plastic jar. She wrote the day and time and where she’d found them on the label.
The simple, methodical act of evidence collection calmed her more than her admonitions that she was a professional and shouldn’t get freaked out by bugs.
She turned around and swept the room again with her flashlight, from the angle the killer would have seen. The only reason the body had been moved was because it had been discovered. The dead body could have stayed down here forever, decomposing over the summer, until all that remained was a skeleton.
“Dozens of people knew I found the body,” Lucy said.
“Thanks to the quack doctor who you let sew me up.”
“That, and the Fire and Rescue and the Sheriff’s Department and anyone
they
told.”
They gave the ground one last going-over, and that was when she found it. Shriveled and brown, almost lost in the dirt, was the flower that had been on the woman’s chest, right next to where the cart had been. Lucy almost picked it up, but instead took a picture.
Sean watched her. “The flower?”
“Yes.” She packed everything up. “I’ll call Weddle and lay out our theories when we get back to the lodge and suggest he send someone down here ASAP. They can learn a lot from those little maggots. They may be able to get her DNA. Until we know the identity of the victim, where, why, and how she died will remain a mystery.”
They returned to the ventilation shaft. Lucy stared at where Sean had been lying, unconscious, at the bottom of the pit. It had been a long drop—he could have broken his back. It could have turned out so much worse.
Sean watched where Lucy rested her eyes, then looked back at her. Her expression was filled with loss. He’d thought that after Lucy’s nightmare last night, then her urgent lovemaking, she’d purged the fear that had grown after his fall and the tragedy that might have been. He realized by the stricken, desolate look in her dark eyes that she was still struggling. She’d merely avoided addressing her feelings, and he’d let her. Was he so scared of losing her that he let her skate by on something so fundamental? Was he strengthening her emotional barriers because he was too afraid to see her in pain?
She’d told him about her nightmare, her fear for his life, but he realized that he’d dismissed it as leftover from the shock of seeing him after the fall. There was far more to it than that. For the first time, he didn’t know what she needed. All he could do was reassure her.