The Same Place (The Lamb and the Lion #2) - Gregory Ashe Page 0,90
few minutes of digging, and then Jem swore and pulled his shirt up over his nose and mouth. “Fuh. That’s awful.”
“That,” Tean said, dropping back on his heels, “is a human arm.”
26
Friday morning at eight o’clock, Tean was waiting in the lobby of the medical examiner’s office. People were arriving for work, some of them stopping to mingle, others moving with brisk strides. A young woman who looked barely old enough to have graduated college was lugging a briefcase almost as big as she was. Two guys in t-shirts and shorts were laughing, the sound echoing against the poured concrete and glass.
Once again, Tean and Jem had lost most of the previous night to questioning: first by the Heber City police, then the Wasatch County sheriff, and then, when Ammon and Kat had finally gotten there, to Kat.
The third time Kat had asked Tean to tell her step by step how he had come to find the arm, Tean had said, “Why isn’t Ammon doing this?”
“Detective Young is examining the scene. Let’s start at the beginning again: what prompted you to come back looking for the victim’s remains?”
So Tean told her for the third time.
“And it didn’t occur to you that your expertise might be valuable to the police, and you could have offered this same theory to me and Detective Young, and we could have come out here and searched properly?”
“Properly? I found the arm, didn’t I? And anyway, the two of you are too busy fitting Hannah for a prison uniform.”
Kat was short, but she had big, ropey muscles that even her baggy suit couldn’t hide. She fixed Tean with a look while she redid her ponytail.
“I realize that didn’t come out the way I intended it to,” Tean said.
“And this is why I’m in here,” Kat said as she worked a scrunchie into place.
Now, standing in the lobby, Tean’s eyes were gritty from another sleepless night, and a headache made his head feel hollow. When he’d crept out of the apartment that morning, Jem and Scipio had been tangled together on the couch again—Tean couldn’t decide which one had been snoring louder.
“Dr. Leon?”
Elvira Castorena came toward him, her dark skin a little ashy this morning, her hair frizzy in its bun. She tried to say something, put the heel of her hand to her mouth, and waved for Tean to come back with her. Like last time, Tean pulled on disposable PPE and met her in an autopsy lab. Joy’s torso was on a table again, and now the recovered arm had been set in place.
“I’m sorry to do this so early,” Elvira said after another huge yawn, “but by the time I got back from Heber, I was too amped up to sleep, so I stayed and got some work done. I wanted your professional opinion on this before I went any further.”
“They only recovered one limb?” Tean said.
“So far. Right now, I believe they’re getting a warrant to search the rest of the property.”
“Zalie didn’t want them to search?”
“No, you’d left her land. The arm was recovered on adjacent property.”
It took Tean a moment because he was so tired. “John Sievers’s land?”
Elvira mimed zipping her lips. It was a strange gesture because of the face shield, and it took Tean a moment to realize what she was doing.
Tean nodded slowly.
“How likely is it that a coyote would scavenge this limb,” Elvira asked, “carry it approximately half a mile, and bury it?”
“It’s certainly possible,” Tean said. He explained the same points he had communicated to Jem. “It might not be common, but it’s well within the range of possibility.”
“But it’s spring,” Elvira said. “The Heber Valley has plenty of wildlife. Why not just get a few pet dogs and cats from the city if it was really hungry instead of eating a corpse?”
“Well, I’m not sure the coyote would make much of a distinction between a pet or a corpse or any other convenient source of food—not if it was hungry, anyway. Although, just so you know, in the studies I’ve seen, pets actually seem to be a rare exception in a coyote’s diet. The bigger issue is competition. If cougars or wolves are taking prey, or if cougars are threatening the coyotes—they’re a coyote’s natural predator—then it’s even more likely the coyote would have seized any opportunity at an easy meal. Another source of pressure on that pack would have been Sievers, of course. He’s been taking a lot of coyotes in that valley.”