The drive should have taken an hour, but I sped. Waning light flashed white on the underside of leaves, and rows of corn were brown in farms and gardens. Fields were ruffled green seas of soybeans, and goats grazed unrestrained in the yards of tired homes. Gaudy lightning rods with colored balls tilted from every peak and corner, and I always wondered what lying salesman had hit like a storm and played on fear by preaching more.
Soon grain elevators Grigg had told me to look for came into view. I turned on Reeves Road, passing tiny brick homes and trailer courts with pickup trucks and dogs, with no collars. Billboards advertised Mountain Dew arid the Virginia Diner, and I bumped over railroad tracks, red dust billowing up like smoke from my tires. Ahead, buzzards in the road picked at creatures that had been too slow, and it seemed a morbid harbinger.
At the entrance of the Atlantic Waste Landfill, I slowed my car to a stop and looked out at a moonscape of barren acres where the sun was setting like a planet on fire. Flatbed refuse trucks were sleek and white with polished chrome, crawling along the summit of a growing mountain of trash. Yellow Caterpillars were striking scorpions. I sat watching a moiling storm of dust heading away from the landfill, rocking over ruts at a high rate of speed. When it got to me it was a dirty red Ford Explorer driven by a young man who felt at home in this place.
‘May I help you, ma’am?’ he said in a Southern drawl, and he seemed anxious and excited.
‘I’m Dr Kay Scarpetta,’ I replied, displaying the brass shield in its small black wallet that I always pulled at scenes where I did not know anyone.
He studied my credentials, then his eyes were dark on mine. He was sweating through his denim shirt, hair wet at his neck and temples.
‘They said the medical examiner would get here, and for me to watch for him,’ he said to me.
‘Well, that would be me,’ I blandly replied.
‘Oh yes, ma’am. I didn’t mean anything . . .’ His voice trailed off as his eyes wandered over my Mercedes, which was coated in dust so fine and persistent that nothing could keep it out. ‘I suggest you leave your car here and ride with me,’ he added.
I stared up at the landfill, at Caterpillars with rampant blades and buckets immobile on the summit. Two unmarked police cars and an ambulance awaited me up where the trouble was, and officers were small figures gathered near the tailgate of a truck smaller than the rest, Near it someone was poking the ground with a stick, and I got increasingly impatient to get to the body.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s do it.’
Parking my car, I got my medical bag and scene clothes out of the trunk. The young man watched in curious silence as I sat in my driver’s seat with the door open wide, and pulled on rubber boots, scarred and dull from years of wading in woods and rivers for people murdered and drowned. I covered myself with a big faded denim shirt that I had appropriated from my ex-husband, Tony, during a marriage that now did not seem real. Then I climbed inside the Explorer and sheathed my hands in two layers of gloves. I pulled a surgical mask over my head and left it loose around my neck.
‘I can’t say that I blame you,’ my driver said. ‘The smell’s pretty rough. I can tell you that.’
‘It’s not the smell,’ I said. ‘Microorganisms are what make me worry.
‘Gee,’ he said, anxiously. ‘Maybe I should wear one of those things.’
‘You shouldn’t be getting close enough to have a problem.’ He made no reply, and I had no doubt that he already had gotten that close. Looking was too much of a temptation for most people to resist. The more gruesome the case, the more this was true.
‘I sure am sorry about the dust,’ he said as we drove through tangled goldenrod on the rim of a small fire pond populated with ducks. ‘You can see we put a layer of tire chips everywhere to keep things settled, and a street cleaner sprays it down. But nothing seems to help all that much.’ He nervously paused before going on. ‘We do three thousand tons of trash a day out here.’