“Shot in the back of the head, bullet passing through the brain and out through the left eye socket. Looks like the subject was kneeling, to get that angle. Or, the shooter could have been standing on a chair, but . . .”
Laird said, “Yeah?”
The other man in the hole said, “This goddamn mud gets on everything. Drives me crazy. You scrape it off and one minute later it’s back on.”
Lucas took the rest of the tour: two unexcavated suspicious depressions were pointed out, with Laird saying one was a sure thing, in his opinion, the other was fifty-fifty. “We’re more than halfway through and there are spots in the other half that we think would have been obvious choices for burials. So . . . it’s a big deal and getting bigger.”
Rae asked Laird, “You remember that case up in Minnesota a few years ago? The Black Hole?”
“Sure. Seventeen murders and a few old skulls stolen from cemeteries, if I remember correctly. Crazy guy living with a dead man. It’s a classic.”
“Lucas is the guy who broke that down,” she said.
“No kiddin’.” He looked at Lucas with raised eyebrows. “Glad to have you, then. I hope to hell we don’t have seventeen, though. That’s not a record I’d want to mess with.”
Of the six recoveries, including the one in the grave still being excavated, the means of death had been determined in five—all gunshot wounds to the head. “It looks to us, from what Tremanty’s uncovered, that Deese used a club to punish and guns to kill. Never straight-up fights. He favored ambushes.”
In the last one, the one that had got him arrested, the victim, Howell Paine, said he had answered the door and had been hit in the face and was on the floor before he even understood what was happening.
By then, he’d been unable to resist. He never would have known who his attacker was—the man had been wearing a ski mask—if his next-door neighbor hadn’t taken a picture of the attacker’s car, including the license plate. He’d also taken a bite out of the man’s leg, and the meat he’d spit out had matched the DNA of the meat still intact on Deese’s body. Tremanty had had a watch on anything Deese-related. Howell had been put under guard, in the hospital, and when he got out he was hustled into the Marshals Service Witness Protection Program.
“Never would have found this place if he’d gone to trial,” Bob said, tipping his head back to look up through the jungle to the skies. “If he’d been convicted, he might’ve gotten ten years, or fifteen, with the wrong judge. With Roger Smith’s influence, he might have gotten two, maybe none. But he would’ve gotten out. Now, since he ran . . . and we found this place . . . he’s looking at life, at a minimum. And the needle is a real possibility.”
Lucas looked around. “I’ve seen what I need. I want to look at Tremanty’s paper and maybe get a beer with him, if he’s the beer-drinking type.”
“He can be,” Rae said. “You’ve got to be careful, though. He’s pretty straight. He won’t want to hear about . . . unorthodox investigative techniques.”
On the way out, Bob suddenly blurted, “Snake!” and pointed at Lucas’s foot. Lucas levitated, and Rae and Bob fell out laughing.
Lucas said, “I won’t kick your asses right now. Revenge is best when it’s cold, and I’ve had time to think about it. Can you say ‘economy class’? Can you say ‘seventeen-inch seats’? ‘Motel 6’?”
“You wouldn’t fuckin’ do that,” Bob said. He looked at Rae. “Would he?”
Rae: “Who are you again?” And to Lucas: “Do I know him?”
“Best for you if you don’t,” Lucas said. He looked around his foot and back into the weeds and muttered, “Snakes . . .”
CHAPTER
THREE
Back in the house, Tremanty asked Lucas if he’d had a chance to look through the printouts that Bob had given him. “I can’t read in cars,” Lucas said. “I need to do that now.”
“There’s a spot upstairs,” Tremanty said. “Deese’s office. It’s cool, and there’s a decent chair in there.”
“Any guesses on how many bodies you’ll find?”
“I’m thinking ten, twelve. That’s only a guess,” Tremanty said. “What worries me is all the publicity we’ve been getting. By now, Deese knows for sure that we’ve found the bodies, so he’s gotta be digging himself in deep. He hasn’t had a lot of time to do