Several feet away the metal detector signaled us again, and this time my rooting around on hands and knees paid off. When I felt the unmistakable hard, cylindrical shape, I gently parted kudzu until I saw the gleam of stainless steel, a cartridge case still as shiny as polished silver. I gingerly plucked it out, touching as little of its surface as possible, while Marino bent over and held open a plastic evidence bag.
“Nine-millimeter, Federal,” he said, reading the head stamp through plastic. “I’ll be damned.”
“He was standing right around here when he shot her,” I muttered, a strange sensation running along my nerves as I recalled what Hilda had said about Deborah’s being in a place “crowded” with things “grabbing” at her. Kudzu.
“If she was shot at close range,” Marco said, then she went down not too far from here.”
Wading out a little farther as he followed me with the metal detector, I said, “How the hell did he see to shoot her, Marino? Lord. Can you imagine this place at night?”
“The moon was out.”
“But it wasn’t full,” I said.
“Full enough so it wouldn’t have been pitch-dark.”
The weather had been checked months ago. The Friday night of August thirty-first when the couple had disappeared, the temperature had been in the upper sixties, the moon three-quarters full, the sky clear. Even if the killer had been armed with a powerful flashlight, I still could not understand how he could force two hostages out here at night without being as disoriented and vulnerable as they were. All I could imagine was confusion, a lot of ‘stumbling about.
Why didn’t he just kill them on the logging road, drag their bodies several yards into the woods, and then drive away? Why did he want to bring them out here? And yet the pattern was the same with the other couples. Their bodies also had been found in remote, wooded areas like this.
Looking around at the kudzu, an unpleasant expression on his face, Marino said, “Glad as hell this ain’t snake weather.”
“That’s a lovely thought,” I said, unnerved.
“You want to keep going?”
he asked in a tone that told me he had no interest in venturing an inch farther into this gothic wasteland.
“I think we’ve had enough for one day.”
I waded out of the kudzu as quickly as possible, my flesh crawling. The mention of snakes had done me in. I was on the verge of a full-blown anxiety attack.
It was almost five, the woods gloomy with shadows as we headed back to the car. Every time a twig snapped beneath Marino’s feet, my heart jumped. Squirrels scampering up trees and birds flying off branches were startling intrusions upon the eerie silence.
“I’ll drop this off at the lab first thing in the morning,” he said. “Then I gotta be in court. Great way to spend your day off.”
“Which case?”
“The case of Bubba shot by his friend named Bubba, the only witness was another drone named Bubba.”
“You’re not serious.”
“Hey,” he said, unlocking the car doors, “I’m as serious as a sawed-off shotgun.”
Starting the engine, he muttered, “I’m starting to hate this job, Doc. I swear, I really am.”
“At the moment you hate the whole world, Marino.”
“No, I don’t,” he said, and he actually laughed. “I like you all right.”
The last day of January began when the morning’s mail brought an official communication from Pat Harvey. Brief and to the point, it stated that if copies of her daughter’s autopsy and toxicology reports were not received by the end of the following week, she would get a court order. A copy of the letter had been sent to my immediate boss, the Commissioner of Health and Human Services, whose secretary was on the phone within the hour summoning me to his office.
While autopsies awaited me downstairs, I left the building and made the short walk along Franklin to Main Street Station, which had been vacant for years, then converted into a short-lived shopping mall before the state had purchased it. In a sense, the historic red building with its clock tower and red tile roof had become a train station again, a temporary stop for state employees forced to relocate while the Madison Building was stripped of asbestos and renovated. The Governor hod appointed Dr. Paul Sessions commissioner two years before, and though face-to-face meetings with my new boss were infrequent, they were pleasant enough. I had a feeling today might prove a different story. His secretary had sounded apologetic em the phone, as if she knew I were being called in to be gaffed.