Heartbreak Bay (Stillhouse Lake #5) - Rachel Caine Page 0,30

down the hill. “I’m going to need the scene commander up here, now.”

“Yes, Detective,” she replies crisply. “I’m sending him now. Y’all need forensics up there, too?”

“Absolutely,” I say. I think that’s the end of the conversation, but after a short pause she comes back.

“Did you find her?” She asks it tentatively, almost reverently.

“No,” I said. “Something else. No sign of our missing woman.”

She doesn’t respond this time. I wait, staring at that half-buried skull.

Who are you? I wonder who put him out here in the dirt too. And why the hell he’s so close to the drowned car in the pond. Because something—nothing logical, something deep at the base of my brain—is whispering that it can’t be a coincidence. We like things to make sense and be logical, we cops. I know this probably won’t mean a damn thing except some drunk hunter broke his leg and got eaten by the proverbial bear, but . . . still.

It’s connected. I know that, even if I can’t prove it yet.

My grid quickly turns into a crime scene, and after initial questioning by the scene commander—a TBI lieutenant, white and brusque, who demands to know why I partially uncovered the skull and doesn’t much listen to the answer because asking is enough to fill in the box on his mental form—I drop back to lean against a tree and watch from a distance. Their approach is pretty clean, all things considered, and it being an old crime, not a fresh scene, they don’t have to worry about footprints. Hairs and fibers, though, they do worry about, and everybody hovering over the skull ends up with forensic paper coveralls, or they don’t make an approach at all. A tech approaches me to gather hair and fiber samples in case I’ve shed on the dirt or skull, and I’m fine with that. It’s just protocol.

What isn’t protocol is the way the scene commander throws out opinions like he’s shaking off water. Probably a drifter. Out in these woods? Unlikely. Homeless folks don’t hang around in the woods by preference, and if he were homeless, he’d have had a pack, some kind of tent, something. There’s nothing I can see anywhere nearby. Some drunk who decided to sleep it off in the wrong place. Or a suicide.

Accidentally dead people and suicides don’t generally bury their own skulls. I know the skull could have gotten separated from the body by scavengers; could have rolled here from uphill, come to that, and gotten buried in mud naturally. I wonder if I should mention it, because not one of the people on scene is looking that direction yet.

I don’t. Instead, I head up the hill.

It’s a tough climb, friable rock shattering into gravel under my feet, slick vegetation nearly sending me down again, but I manage. I arrive at the top breathing hard, sweating under my jacket, and put my hands on my hips as I slowly turn a circle. Here at the top it’s still shady but not the same nightfall it was down below, and I don’t need the flashlight to identify the grave. It’s old, but not more than a couple of years, I’d judge. Shallow, and disturbed plenty by scavengers, which explains the skull tumbling down the hill. I don’t dig into the dirt this time, just observe; I don’t have to touch a thing to see three rib bones sticking out. Tattered fabric flutters in the wind.

I solemnly plant one of my neon flags, stand up, and key the radio. “Got something up the hill,” I say. “Looks like the rest of the body.”

From where I’m standing, I can see everyone stop, turn, and look up at me.

I don’t say anything else.

The TBI agent is on a slow boil now, not because I’ve found the body but because I’ve disproven his popped-off theories. I’m told to fall back and keep going with my grid search . . . although the bootheels of all those officers have left me with a mess that will make it ten times harder. I don’t argue. I slip and slide back down the hill, flick on the flashlight, and start where I stopped. There’s a lone deputy standing guard down there, roping off the area around the skull; we nod, and I keep moving. It’s another hour before I’m to the end of the pattern, and I report in what little I’ve come up with—couple more glass bottles, a plastic water bottle, and a shotgun shell casing