flowers. She’d want to be buried in a place like that little cemetery up on the hill in Golconda. You know the one. It’s planted with lilacs and black-eyed Susans and purple coneflowers. And, hell, you can see practically into the next county from there.”
That’s when I—naive and overconfident—had promised that someday my dog and I would find her for him.
Now, more than a decade later, maybe we had.
When we arrived, the two techs skirted the scene, taking photos, before ducking beneath the yellow crime-scene tape that Chad and I had put up the night before. Then they stood a little back from the crumbling edge, peering downward.
“Nasty,” the taller man observed.
“Very nasty,” his jowly partner agreed as he used the back of his latex-gloved hand to brush a trickle of sweat from his forehead.
They both insisted that processing the scene—even on a narrow ledge down inside a ravine—was their job. No offer of help that Chad or I made was going to change their minds. But neither turned his nose up at the safety harnesses Chad had brought with him or the quick lesson on rappelling I offered. Once down on the ledge, the taller man took photographs and the shorter took samples of soil.
Then we gathered up the bones.
With latex-gloved hands and more reverence than I’d expected, the techs removed the bones, one by one, from beneath the curtain of roots and passed each bone up to either Chad or me. We wore gloves, too, and carefully placed the bones in one of the boxes the investigators had brought with them. As routine as processing a crime scene must have been for the two men, they still seemed to feel sympathy for the victim. No matter that our victim was recently found rather than newly dead.
They freed the rib cage by cutting the roots around it, so we placed almost as much tree as bones in some of the boxes. As I handled the bones, I tried to identify them, hoping that I might be able to glean something about the identity of the victim from ribs and vertebrae, from the tiny bones that the investigators sifted from the soil and I recognized as being pieces of hands and feet. But what little I knew about the identification of skeletal remains I’d learned during a short session at a weeks-long training course for rookie cops. On the campus of the University of Illinois, I’d sat in a modern classroom at the Police Training Institute among students—mostly male and all as green as I was—who’d traveled from all over Illinois to learn the basics of law enforcement. Regarding bones, we’d learned mostly that it was our job to preserve the scene for more skilled investigators. That we would never be as skilled as the Illinois State Police’s forensic lab rats. They, with their books and charts and mathematical tables, could determine height by measuring a leg bone and age by looking at the seams in a skull.
For a couple of hours, and despite the blistering heat, the two techs worked methodically, communicating in the kind of verbal shorthand that longtime colleagues often developed. Chad and I didn’t talk much, either. We stayed busy passing equipment and evidence up and down as requested and simply watching the state investigators as they moved around the narrow outcroppings—the one on which I’d discovered the remains and the ledge below it, where I’d found Tina. We called out a warning whenever either man became so engrossed in his work that he forgot he was on the edge of a precipice. Safety harness or no, an unexpected fall could cause injury and was something to be avoided.
Both ledges looked more hazardous by the light of day. Darkness had only suggested the depth of the ravine, but had left mostly unseen the jutting rocks, ragged dead branches and a rock-strewn stream far below. I realized how very fortunate Tina and I had been.
Finally, Chad and I helped the state investigators back up to safe, solid ground. Then we all stood for a moment, surveying the boxes and bags that they’d collected.
Bones, it seemed, were pretty much all that remained of the victim. Except for a small white button and a section of zipper, nature and animals had stripped away our victim’s clothing and scoured away clues.
“No ring?” Chad asked, though it was obvious there wasn’t one. His mother had always worn her wedding band and, during questioning, his father had been upset because he’d forgotten