Say Goodbye

THIRTY-EIGHT

THEY HIKED FOR HOURS, LULU AND FANCY STRAINING their leads in their eagerness to follow the scent. Harold walked beside Skeeter, easily covering the steep, uneven trail as it wound around tree stumps, rocky outcroppings, and washed-out gullies. Periodically, he’d stop and tie an orange surveyor’s ribbon around a tree, marking the trail for his slower, more human, counterparts. Rachel had also assigned Harold camera duty, assuming he’d get to the site before everyone else and could get to work documenting the scene.

Several ERT members stayed behind to man the van, in touch by radio. Should need for additional supplies arise, Rachel could call in her order, with an agent following the orange ties up the mountain. Per protocol, everyone wore flak jackets and carried first-aid kits as well as personal firearms. Safety was always a primary concern, even when pursuing dead bodies.

Kimberly fell back sooner than she would’ve liked. Her mind was willing. Her body had other ideas. She could feel a pulling sensation where the top of her thighs met her steadily increasing abdomen. The tight stretch of tendons and ligaments already struggling to adjust to one demand on the body, without the additional pressure of sprinting up a mountain. Quincy and Rainie walked beside her. Kimberly presumed Sal was farther ahead, up with the action.

“Need to rest?” her father asked presently.

“Fine.”

“I need to rest,” Rainie announced.

“Oh, shut up. I’m pregnant, not stupid.”

Rainie grinned, and they kept moving, though it was possible that Kimberly’s pace had slowed another notch. She could hear the dogs in the distance, an occasional murmur of voices. Otherwise, the woods had folded around them, a damp, green canopy that smelled of moldy leaves and decaying logs. This high up, the trail formed a series of narrow switchbacks, with dense root systems forming crude stair steps beneath their feet. The grade was steep, the footing slow going. They were all panting hard from the exertion.

“Mac call?” her father asked.

Kimberly nodded, not having enough air for speech.

“How was his evening?” Quincy continued.

“Successful drug bust.” She paused. “He’s…happy.”

“You tell him what happened?” her father asked mildly.

“He’s driving here now,” Kimberly managed to gasp, which was answer enough.

“You said Dinchara posted Ginny’s bail money?” Quincy started. “Any idea why?”

“Maybe they’re heading out of town,” Rainie ventured. She paused at the top of a switchback, reaching for water. Kimberly took advantage of the rest to draw in some deep lungfuls of air.

“He needs her,” Kimberly said at last. “Otherwise, why would he risk showing up at the county courthouse after burning down his house? Why surrender ten grand? He bailed her out because he has a plan. I’ll be damned, however, if I know what it is.”

“You think she’s his accomplice?” Quincy asked.

“I don’t know,” Kimberly said. “I mean, to hear Ginny talk, Dinchara picked her up and forced her into a life of prostitution. She’s the victim. And yet…She lived on her own in Sandy Springs. Think of the options for running away. Instead, she sticks around for two years, even after she knows he killed her mother and engineered Tommy Mark Evans’s death. The girl is smart enough to target an FBI agent, but not clever enough to run when she had the chance? I don’t buy it. Whatever’s going on, she’s not doing it just because Dinchara told her to. She likes it. The danger, the manipulation, the violence. That girl is seriously warped.”

“Stockholm syndrome,” Quincy said quietly.

“More warped than that,” Kimberly said flatly.

“You don’t like her.”

“She did try to arrange for me to die.”

“But you don’t blame the boy Aaron, who held the gun.”

Kimberly shifted impatiently, angrier at this line of questioning than she knew she should be. “Hey, from the sound of things, he had to live with Dinchara. He was taken younger, endured more.”

“But if he was taken later, endured less? What exactly is the line that separates victim from not victimized enough?”

“Well, that’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?” Kimberly gave her father a look, to let him know the discussion was done. He could debate semantics all he wanted. In her mind Aaron and Ginny were not the same and that was all there was to it.

They got moving again. The sound of the dogs grew louder. They finally crested a small hill to discover the rest of the team gathered at the edge of a clearing. The dogs were working the perimeter, snuffling at bushes, backtracking, pushing ahead, backtracking. Skeeter followed patiently behind, matching them step for step as the dogs yanked his arm front and back, side to side.

“They lost the trail,” Harold reported, coming to stand beside them. “See, the dogs can pick it up right about there, but then they lose it again, hence all the forward and back, forward and back.”

Rachel was looking around the clearing with an expression Kimberly knew well.

“You think this is it,” Kimberly said, a statement, not a question.

“Got the right feel. What’d you think?”

Kimberly inspected the area. They were probably two-thirds of the way up the mountain, in a twenty-by-forty-foot clearing formed in part by a rocky ledge. The back half appeared meadowlike, a grassy field sheltered by a yawning canopy of evergreens. Toward the front, a massive rock jutted out to form a sitting area. On a clear day, the boulders probably offered a decent view, maybe even one that included skippy little Cub Scouts. All in all, a nice place to grab a bite of lunch.

Or dig a shallow grave.

“You bring the surveying equipment?” Kimberly asked Rachel.

“As if I would ever forget. Harold?”

Harold dutifully turned around, revealing a backpack with long orange rods strapped to one side. He handed over his pack, then went to discuss the matter with Skeeter and Sheriff Duffy. Kimberly started laying out supplies as Rainie and Quincy looked on with interest.

“Ever participate in an outdoor recovery?” Kimberly asked them.

They shook their heads. Quincy’s role as a profiler would’ve had him entering the picture after the fact. Rainie might have had a chance as a small-town deputy, but apparently had managed to miss that piece of luck. Kimberly, on the other hand, assisted with at least half a dozen of these exercises a year. Like all her teammates, she’d spent a week training at the outdoor recovery school at the Forensic Anthropology Center at the University of Tennessee, better known as the Body Farm.

“Here’s the drill,” she explained, picking up the first slender rod and holding it up for display. “We’re going to stand shoulder to shoulder, forming a line that stretches from one side of this clearing to the other. We’ll all advance one step, probe the ground, wait for our neighbors to do the same, then advance again as a single unit. If you feel, say, a soft pocket of earth, where the soil has obviously been disturbed, or, perhaps a hard item worth further exploration, you’ll flag that spot.

“When the line search is done, we’ll grid and map the entire area. Then a second team will follow up on the flags, working grid by grid to process the site.”

“How do you follow up on a flag?” Rainie wanted to know.

“You get down on your stomach and dig with a trowel. Each scoop of dirt is placed in a bucket, each filled bucket is carried to a nearby spot, where it will be dumped in a mesh sifter and processed by another team. Their job will be to look for fine bone fragments, projectiles, teeth, etc. It’s amazing how tiny some human bones are, particularly the ones in the fingers. If you’re not sifting, you can pass ’em right by.”

Rainie had a slightly horrified look on her face. “We’re going to sift every bucket of dirt we dig up?”

“That’s protocol.”

Rainie looked around at the clearing. “We’re going to be here for days.”

“Possible,” Kimberly concurred. She shrugged. “Depends how many areas we flag. Clandestine graves inevitably appear as a series of depressions and mounds next to each other. The mound is from the dirt the killer removed to dig the grave; the depression from the grave itself as the body decomposes, causing the fill material to sink. You want to steer away from the base of big trees-the roots make it too hard to dig, even for a homicidal maniac. Finally, you want to keep your eye out for lots of weeds, which seed nicely in the loose soil of freshly turned earth. The tricky part is that old tree falls create the same pattern of mounds and depressions. Rule of thumb is ‘trowel it and see.’”

“Why on your stomach?” Quincy wanted to know. “That sounds awkward. Why not just dig with a spade until you hit something?”

“Because most clandestine graves are shallow. If the body is fully skeletonized, you can do real damage nicking it with a spade. Body recovery follows the same protocol of an archaeological dig-meaning we want to disturb the skeleton the least amount possible while excavating the soil all around it. You’ll see us using brushes, all the stuff from the History Channel. And before we ever move a bone, we’ll document the hell out of the skeleton in situ, photographing, mapping, graphing. You have to, because there’s no way to remove a skeleton as a whole. Instead, when we’re finally ready, we’ll bag it bone by bone to be reassembled later by a forensic anthropologist.”

“You have a lot more patience than I do,” Rainie said.

“Not really.”

Harold was back with Sheriff Duffy and Sal in tow. “Skeeter says his dogs need a break. He’s not sure if they’ve lost the scent, or they’re just getting fatigued, but either way, now would be a good time to rest. He’ll take them off for a bit and we can get going on searching the clearing.”

Duff cleared his throat. “All right, I’ll assemble my men. You’ll tell us what to do?”

“Absolutely.”

Duff headed over to his deputies, who were shaking out their rain gear and downing bottles of water. In five minutes, he had the group assembled and Rachel gave them the official rundown on how to probe for clandestine graves. Then Harold lined them up, the inexperienced volunteers sandwiched between the pros from the ERT. Sal ended up standing beside Kimberly, neither of them speaking, as they prepared for the first step forward.

The storm had finally passed, the rocks steaming up as the afternoon sun broke through the dark clouds. Beneath her rain poncho, Kimberly shifted restlessly, feeling the building heat, the sweaty discomfort of fabric that didn’t breathe. She couldn’t bring herself to look at Sal and was aware of him returning the favor.

She should say something, break the ice before Mac showed up, took one look at the both of them, and assumed the worst.

Second step. Third. Fourth. Somewhere down the line one of the deputies made an excited exclamation and Harold helped him stick in a yellow flag. Mostly, however, the officers exchanged concerned frowns. Did I just feel a dead body? What did a dead body feel like anyway? Until you’d been through the drill a few times, it was hard to know.

Kimberly found a loose pocket. Flagged it. Beside her, Sal cursed under his breath.

“What?” she asked.

“I don’t know. It’s…something. But maybe it’s a rock something or a root something or a clump of dirt. It’s hard, but too small to be a bone.”

“Bones can be quite small,” she supplied mildly. “If you’re not sure, flag it. Better safe than sorry.”

“I don’t know how you can do this for a living,” Sal muttered, flagging the site.

“Because every now and then, we find the smoking gun. Or the body of the missing girl whose parents have had to wait four years for the funeral. Or maybe, just a gold wedding band. It doesn’t sound like much, but when your loved one was on the plane that hit the Pentagon, a wedding band is all that’s left. And you’ll take it. You’ll take anything to hold on tight and help you grieve.”

Sal opened his mouth, looked like he might say something, but then another shout went out, calling for a yellow flag. The line ordered up, and on Harold’s count, took the next step forward, moving quicker now as everyone got the hang of it.

By the time they crossed the clearing, three dozen yellow flags protruded like dandelions in the meadow. Kimberly didn’t like it. The spacing wasn’t right. The flags were too haphazard, too random. Given the size of a shallow grave, there should be clusters of flags where multiple steps or multiple people encountered an object. There wasn’t.

Kimberly could tell from ten feet back that Rachel shared her opinion. The redhead had both hands on her hips and was scowling.

“What do you want to do?” Harold was asking.

“Grid it, of course,” Rachel snapped. “Don’t have a choice really. When in doubt, trowel it out.” She ran a hand through her hair. “We have both too many flags and not enough. Dammit.”

“We could bring up a cadaver dog,” Kimberly suggested. “See if one hits.”

“We could’ve used cadaver dogs?” Sal spoke up.

“Gotta probe it first,” Rachel commented absently, chewing her lower lip. “The probing releases the decomp gases. You allow thirty, forty minutes for everything to ripen and settle, then bring in the cadaver dog. Works like a charm.”

“It took us four hours to get up that trail,” Sal pointed out. “No way we’re gonna get a dog in the next thirty minutes. What about the bloodhounds?”

“The team is a search team, already working a scent. This’ll just confuse them.” Harold spoke up. He was regarding Rachel. “We could split the crew,” he suggested. “Leave half of us here to start working these flags, send the other half with LuLu and Fancy, assuming they catch the scent again. Might as well check out the summit. Least then we’ll have a better idea for where to start tomorrow.”

“Mountain’s only so big,” Kimberly commented. “If it’s not here, it’s close.”

Rachel nodded absently. “Yeah, okay. Find Skeeter, see what he has to say about his dogs. We’ll break the team in half. The tired ones”-her gaze flickered to Kimberly-“will stay here. The maniacs”-her gaze flickered to Harold-“can continue on to the summit, look for a better site.”

Kimberly was not amused to be lumped in with the less fit members of her team. Then again, her belly ached and she was starving. Harold went to find Skeeter. Sal announced to the group in general that now would be a good time to eat.

He followed Kimberly over to where Rainie and Quincy had taken up position on a fallen log. Quincy was munching on granola. Rainie had king-size Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Kimberly sat next to Rainie.

“Peanut butter cup?” Rainie asked.

“Absolutely. Pudding?”

“Don’t mind if I do.”

Sal had a ham sandwich, which was quickly ruled too boring by the women. They sat in comfortable silence, shedding their raincoats and munching on their snacks until Sal looked over at Kimberly, did a little double take, and went pale.

“Don’t move,” he whispered.

“What?” Kimberly asked in surprise, immediately starting to move.

“DON’T MOVE!”

This time, she stilled, starting to look at Sal in alarm. “What?” she whispered.

“Rainie,” he ordered softly, “you’re closer. There, on her shoulder, do you see it?”

“It’s a spider.” Rainie spoke up, then frowned. “Why are we this excited about a little brown spider?”

“Oh no,” Kimberly looked at Sal with dread. “A brown recluse?”

He nodded.

“I thought they were shy,” she said weakly, very conscious now of the exposed skin on her neck, the scoop collar of her shirt, the salty sweat drying at the base of her throat.

“Maybe they like peanut butter cups.” Sal had put down his sandwich. He stood, took a step closer, eyes on her left shoulder. “I’m going to try to do this quickly.”

“Is it on my shirt?”

“Not quite.”

She closed her eyes. “You have to be committed, Sal. Once you move, just get the damn thing off. If you hesitate…the spider will panic and bite.”

“I know, I know.”

Rainie and Quincy had gotten to their feet, clearly very concerned. Then Rainie glanced over at Quincy, yelled, “Shit,” and slapped his collarbone. He was still looking confused when Rainie went after his shoulder and the top of his thigh.

“One, two, three,” Sal counted quickly, and smacked Kimberly’s shoulder. The minute he did, she leapt from the log, whirling around.

“Holy crap,” Sal cried out and whacked her back three times.

“What is it? What is it?”

“Spiders. There are…spiders. Everywhere.”

The four fell back from the log. And now Kimberly could just make them out, thin, delicate brown bodies running across the crumbling bark, looking desperately for a place to hide.

Rainie was dancing around, trying to check her front, her back, her sides, while Quincy ordered her to stay still so he could help out. Then Sal was spinning in little circles, checking his shoes and socks, the bare skin of his calves.

Kimberly watched them all, looking from the people to the spider-covered log to the people again. Crawford-Hale had told them that brown recluses were shy. She had said it would be uncommon to encounter them, and yet here was an entire infestation.

At the end of a trail that had been hiked by Dinchara and his captive. In a clearing that would be perfect for disposing bodies, except none of the flags made sense.

And in that moment, it came to her. What she had been told in the beginning. What she should have remembered from the start.

Kimberly stepped closer to the log.

And looked up.