Heart of Ice

Chapter Twenty-three

Miller’s Marsh Pond, outside of Cherrystone

The thought of a decomposing body is enough to make the skin crawl on the living. But decomp is always the natural outcome of a death. A stealthy decomp is the killer’s hope for lifelong freedom. Maybe even life itself.

A grave, not the proverbial shallow one, is always the best course of action. Bury the corpse deep enough in a remote location, scatter debris over the surface in a haphazard manner, and hope that no one stumbles upon it. That’s been a successful path for all of the murderers no one has ever heard about.

Dismemberment works well, too. Chop up the corpse in the bathtub, disperse the bits and pieces as convenience allows, and keep fingers crossed.

The killer of the woman in the water had done a mental pros-and-cons chart and decided that while enhancing the convenience of disposal, dismemberment was too messy a course of action. Blood spatter from a power saw almost always goes in a place that escapes detection by the killer with a scrub brush. Luminol with its eerie blue glow is a chemical finger that points right at the killer.

When a human body is surreptitiously dumped in the water, it becomes food for fish, turtles, and the other scavengers of the dead. If the body doesn’t get consumed, gases swell in the tissues and fill the cavities, distending the organs. Enough time in the water turns a dead person into a balloon, bringing it to the surface for discovery by a boater or in the nets of an unlucky fisherman.

Dead bodies and water don’t mix.

In Florida, a body can be consumed by alligators in a sunny afternoon. In the open sea of the Pacific, sharks dine on the fleshy morsels of what had once been a human being with the kind of glee that brings to mind the phrase feeding frenzy. In particularly pure and deep waters like Washington State’s Lake Crescent, bodies have been found preserved decades after they’d been hidden there.

That wasn’t going to happen with the body that he’d dumped that flat, moonless night. That body wasn’t going to be eaten, weighed down, or preserved at the depths.

The weather warmed and for a short time, the snow turned to rain. Mandy was about to make her return.