front of her seat. Covered her with a blanket. So that no one would see her as I drove…
I pushed those thoughts away, opened my eyes. But my head was already throbbing and my face seemed to be on fire. And no matter how shallowly I breathed, I couldn’t avoid the clinging, putrid smell.
Bile rose in my throat and I gagged again.
I didn’t want to contaminate the crime scene.
I turned, staggered back to the logjam, managed to make it to the far end of the stumpy log. Stood there, staring at a beetle crawling along the rough bark, holding my breath, pressing my lips shut, willing myself not to vomit.
And then my best friend was there behind me, his hands cool against my neck and shoulders, his voice soothing.
“No shame in being sick,” he said. “Sooner or later, every cop sees something that makes him puke. Lucky if it only happens once in your career. Don’t fight it. Just get it over with.”
He supported me as I retched violently, painfully onto the ground.
We worked around natural obstacles, pushing the sturdy wire stems of tiny orange flags into the ground, making the body a bull’s-eye at the center of an irregular circle.
When we were finished, I stood looking back at the body from the downstream side. Realized that, from this angle, I might have recognized a human form beneath a crusty layer of earth. Or noticed the triangle of tattered fabric that the sand hadn’t completely covered and recognized it as the corner of a man’s trousers. Unfortunately, what I now saw most clearly was the terrible damage my misplaced footstep had caused.
I sighed.
“Sure messed up that crime scene,” I said.
Chad put his hand on my shoulder, gave it a little squeeze before releasing it.
“You found the crime scene, rookie,” he said, smiling. “Don’t be greedy.”
Minutes later, we crossed the stream to deal with what Chad had found, the discovery that had prompted him to call out my name so urgently. The bits of spine he’d discovered near the mouth of a fox’s den prompted us to search for a few minutes longer. It took a much larger circle of flags to mark the scattered remains of a body that hadn’t been buried beneath a layer of sand. That’d had no protection from the teeth of small carnivores.
“Two,” I said, thinking out loud.
“Three if you count the first victim,” Chad corrected. “We should go back, call in. We’ve got a hell of a lot more here than a simple murder.”
I nodded, agreeing with him. But then I said: “Let’s walk for another hundred feet, see what’s there.”
“Greedy,” Chad repeated, then softened that judgment with his smile. “Which side of the stream do you want?”
I lifted my chin in the direction of the opposite ravine wall.
“I’ll go back there,” I said, mostly because I wanted an excuse to wash my boots and the cuffs of my jeans in the stream again. And then I had another, unrelated thought. “The Feds are going to be involved in this one, aren’t they?”
Chad nodded, sighing heavily.
Because of Hardin County’s odd mix of jurisdictions, it wasn’t at all unusual for FBI field agents to work with deputies investigating crimes that took place in the forest. I’d never heard Chad complain about it, so didn’t understand his obvious lack of enthusiasm.
“I thought you liked working with those guys.”
“Those guys, yes,” he said. “But we both have the same gut feeling about what we’re going to find out here, don’t we? If we’re right, this will be a headline-getter—one of those cases that’s too high-profile to be left to mere field agents. And it’s been my experience that those big-city bureaucrats don’t play well with others.”
Twenty feet was all it took for me to confirm our gut feelings. Twenty feet and a sun-bleached skull hanging almost upside down in a fallen tree. Impaled on a jutting branch a few feet from the ground. A veil of browning leaves and other debris from the flooding that had put it there framed the jawless skull.
The branch entered through the right eye socket and exited through a slightly smaller man-made hole. The opposite route, I thought, than the bullet had taken. Strands of dried grass and tattered bits of fabric hung from the other eye socket. As I watched, a tiny yellow finch darted into that opening, intent on feeding a demanding chorus of nestlings inside the dome.
No shouting was needed over this one.
I simply planted a flag, crossed the stream