you. I’ve heard about you from a couple people in Washington. You’re welcome to everything we’ve got, but you ought to start by following Bob and Rae around the scene in the back.”
“I’ll do that,” Lucas said. “And thanks. I’ll try to help without getting in your way.”
They nodded at each other, and Rae said, “This way . . . Hey! Like your shoes.”
* * *
—
RAE CALLED the back lot a jungle, and it was, but now roped with crime scene tape and new-cut trails. The undergrowth was so heavy that Lucas worried about getting bit above the knee by a snake wrapped around a vine. He’d seen pictures like that—Garden of Eden pictures, with a snake encircling the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
He said that, and Rae said, “Garden of Evil. No good in here.”
Fifty yards back into the jungle, all of them yet un-snakebitten, they found a tall, skinny, weathered man wearing mud-caked white Tyvek coveralls, a baseball hat, and gum boots identical to Lucas’s. He wore a belt over the coveralls, with three holsters, one carrying a .40 caliber Glock, the second a plastic canteen, and the third a Marshalltown trowel.
Bob asked him, “What about six?”
“Doc’s down there taking DNA samples. It’s old, it’s all falling apart, we’re gonna box the skull, we can see some dental work. He says it’s male, for sure. We got one hand, but the flesh is gone, so there won’t be any prints. Barb thinks she’s got seven, by the back lot line, and Dave thinks he has eight. The dogs aren’t indicating, so they may be really old, and there’s so much organic matter on top that they get confused. Whatever, we’ll have to dig them out.”
Rae said to Lucas, “This is Cory Laird, FBI, he does old bodies. Cory, this is the marshal I was telling you about, Lucas Davenport.” They shook, Laird smiling and saying, “Clean hands. We all work with gloves, in case you’re worried. You need the tour?”
“Like to take a look,” Lucas said. “You got IDs on any of the bodies?”
“On two of them. We’re shipping the DNA scans everywhere, seeing if we can pick up the others. We think that most of them come from New Orleans, or the parishes right around New Orleans. We’re looking for relatives of missing people that we think might have been Deese’s targets, so we can cross-check the DNA with them. Deese worked for several different mob guys over the years, some of them are dead, so figuring that out has been complicated. My best bet is, we’ll get all but one. It seems like in these situations, there’s always one you can’t identify.”
Laird led them along the narrow but now well-worn path, and, behind Lucas, Bob said, “Newest body is only about seven or eight months old, a woman named Bailee Wheelwright, nicknamed Bill, who kept company with Rog Smith, who I told you about.”
“The lawyer, bail bondsman, loan shark.”
“Right. She was his best girl for two years, and Tremanty said they were having problems and she supposedly moved to Chicago and disappeared. He’d been looking for her, hoping she’d talk about Smith, but never made contact. Tremanty thinks that when they had their falling-out—she might have known too much about his operation—so . . . Deese. The body’s missing a strip of muscle from the back.”
They’d been stringing along the narrow track behind Laird, walking through shallow mud puddles along the way, around the larger trees, past deep excavated pits. Somebody had used a chain saw to open up pieces of the swamp, with the cut limbs stacked back in the heavier brush.
They took a new-cut side track to an isolated pit, where two people were working side by side in the hole, both dressed in Tyvek. A lunch-box-like container sat outside the hole, filled with cylindrical bottles with screw-on tops. The excavations had been cut wide enough to allow the men to stand on clean earth separate from the grave’s hole.
“All the digging is done with trowels, an inch at a time,” Laird said. “It takes a while.”
Peering into the hole, Lucas could make out a dirt-colored skeleton with some rags of clothing and skin and hair. The visible bones had collapsed on top of one another, the vertebrae, arm bones, and ribs crushed down over the folded leg bones, the skull on top. The only odor was that of swamp mud. The men looked up, and one of them said, “Where’s Larry?