“Shit,” Marino said, “you’re lucky they put gas in your damn car and furnish you with a gun. The squirrels in Spring Street got it better than we do.”
Spring Street was the state penitentiary. It was true that it cost the state more money each year to house some inmates than a lot of police officers got paid for keeping them off the street. Marino loved to complain about it.
“I see the locals drug your ass out here from Quantico. Your lucky day,” Marino said.
“They told me what they’d found. I asked if they’d called you yet.”
“Yeah, well, they got around to it eventually.”
“I can see that. Morrell told me he’s never filled out a VICAP form. Maybe you can give him a hand.”
Marino stared at the bodies, his jaw muscles flexing.
“We need to get this into the computer,” Wesley went on as rain drummed the earth.
Tuning out their conversation, I arranged one of the sheets next to the female’s remains and turned her on her back. She held together nicely, joints and ligaments still intact. In a climate like Virginia’s, it generally takes at least a year of being exposed to the elements before a body is fully skeletonized, or reduced to disarticulated bones. Muscle tissue, cartilage, and ligaments are tenacious. She was petite, and I recalled the photograph of the lovely young athlete posed on a balance beam. Her shirt, I noted, was some sort of pullover, possibly a sweatshirt, and her jeans were zipped up and snapped. Unfolding the other sheet, I went through the same procedure with her companion. Turning over decomposed bodies is like turning over rocks. You never know what you’ll find underneath, except that you can usually count on insects. My flesh crawled as several spiders skittered off, vanishing beneath leaves.
Shifting positions in a fruitless attempt to get more comfortable, I realized Wesley and Marino were gone. Kneeling alone in the rain, I began feeling through leaves and mud, searching for fingernails, small bones, and teeth. I noticed at least two teeth missing from one of the mandibles. Most likely, they were somewhere near the skulls. After fifteen or twenty minutes of this, I had recovered one tooth, a small transparent button, possibly from the male’s shirt, and two cigarette butts. Several cigarette butts had been found at each of the scenes, though not all of the victims were known to smoke. What, was unusual was that not one of the filters bore a manufacturer’s brand mark or name.
When Morrell returned, I pointed this out to him.
“Never been to a scene where there aren’t cigarette butts,” he replied, and I wondered just how many scenes he could swear he had been to. Not many, I guessed.
“It’s as if part of the paper has been peeled away or the end of the filter nearest the tobacco pinched off,” I explained, and when this evoked no response from him I dug in the mud some more.
Night was falling when we headed back to our cars, a somber procession of police officers gripping stretchers bearing bright orange body bags. We reached the narrow unpaved logging road as a sharp wind began to kick in from the north and the rain began to freeze. My dark blue state station wagon was equipped as a hearse. Fasteners in the plyboard floor in back locked stretchers into place so they did not slide around during transport. I positioned myself behind the wheel and buckled up as Marino climbed in, Morrell slammed shut the tailgate, and photographers and television cameramen recorded us on film. A reporter who wouldn’t give up rapped on my window, and I locked the doors.
“God bless it. I hope like hell I ain’t called to another one of these,” Marino exclaimed, turning on the heat full blast.
I drove around several potholes.
“What a bunch of vultures.”
Eyeing his side mirror, he watched journalists scurrying into their cars. “Some asshole must’ve run his mouth over the radio. Probably Morrell. The dumb-ass. If he was in my squad, I’d send his ass back to traffic, get him transferred to the uniform room or information desk.”