Say Goodbye

FORTY

KIMBERLY DIDN’T SEE ANYTHING AT FIRST. THEN THE wind blew and she caught the shape, swaying gently fifteen feet above her head, almost like a pinecone, except the size was much too large.

“Rachel! Harold!” she cried out excitedly. “Everyone, look up! The bodies are in the trees! They’re hanging from the tree limbs.”

She was vaguely aware of other people, leaping to their feet with startled exclamations, and stumbling back to regard the branches overhead. Mostly she kept her eyes on a long, oblong shape swathed in a mottled green and brown fabric. Now she could make out the narrow tip of bound feet, moving up to the wider expanse of shoulders, the rounded shape of a head. It looked like an Egyptian mummy, wrapped in cloth and rope, then suspended for all eternity.

The wind blew again, the long, narrow form rocking with an eerie quiet that prickled the skin of her forearms.

“What the hell,” Sal whispered beside her. Behind them came another shout, then another, as others started to spot the macabre forms dangling above their heads.

“He thinks he’s a spider, remember?” Kimberly murmured. “So he’s wrapped them in a cocoon, suspended them from his web. My God, no wonder no one ever found them. Whoever thinks to look up?”

“Silk,” Quincy supplied behind them. “Old Army parachutes, that would be my guess. Silk because it’s fitting, Army camouflage because it blends better with the trees.”

“Nylon,” Kimberly stated. “Aaron told me. It’s a practical concern-silk is fragile, yielding to total decay in under thirty-five months. Same with wool. Cotton does slightly better, making it to forty-eight months, while nylon shows no sign of deterioration even after four years. It’s the toughest fabric around.”

Her father was regarding her with a small smile. “I stand corrected. Nice work, Agent.”

“Well, don’t get all mushy on me yet. I still have no idea how we’re going to get the corpses down.”

Harold had returned to the center of the clearing. Rachel, too. Kimberly and Sal went to meet them, huddling for a powwow, while the deputies and ERT members continued to search the branches overhead.

“We’re up to ten bodies and counting,” Harold exclaimed. “I’m sticking a yellow flag at the base of every tree, on the side where the body is hung.”

“We’ll need the Total Station,” Rachel declared, chewing her lower lip as she worked through the logistics of their next moves. “Only way to graph a crime scene that’s literally in midair. I’ll call down, have Jorge and Louise bring it up. We’ll need a survey marker, however, as our reference point. Harold?”

“I can check the USGS map in my pack. Otherwise, the command post can access the website for the nearest marker. I’m sure it’s somewhere fairly accessible; the USGS folks don’t like traipsing through the underbrush any more than the rest of us.”

“Okay. We’ll bring up the Total Station, shoot the reference point, then start by graphing the site as a whole, before diagramming each body as a mini scene. Speaking of which, we’ll need rolls of butcher paper, body bags, evidence bags for the rope, and litters to get the bodies off the mountain. We should also put a call in to the ME’s office, so they can arrange transport. Let’s see, that leaves us with…generator, floodlights… Can I get a Green Gator up that trail we just hiked?”

“No,” Harold said.

“Different path?”

“No.”

“Shit.” Rachel went back to chewing her bottom lip. “I’m activating two more teams. If hiking’s the only way we’re gonna get this done, we need more legs-”

“Hey, hey, HEY!” came a fresh cry from deep in the woods. “I got movement. I swear to God-this one’s alive.”

“Holy crap!” Rachel said, then they all started to run.

“We need a ladder,” one of the deputies was declaring.

“No, wait, I can shoot it down,” declared another.

Rachel muscled her way between the two uniforms, standing staunchly beneath a thick fir tree. “Back away. Bodies are my business.”

The deputies backed away.

Rachel stood with her hands on her hips, studying the wrapped shape overhead. Kimberly spotted the activity the same time her team leader did. A bulge down low. Then a faint ripple up high.

It sent a fresh chill up her neck and she could tell from the uneasy look on Rachel’s face that the team leader didn’t think the body was alive, either.

“Harold?” Rachel asked quietly.

“I don’t know,” Harold said, his voice as subdued as Kimberly had ever heard it.

“We have to check,” Rachel murmured. “Just in case. You never know.” But she didn’t sound happy about it. She sounded deeply concerned.

The team leader took a deep breath. “All right, we lay down tarp, right over here.” She delineated an area with her finger, roughly below the dangling cocoon. “We’ll need to lower the form onto the tarp, then we can safely unwrap it. Harold?”

He had wandered over to the trunk of the tree, which he was now skimming with his fingers. “See these holes? At regular intervals? I’m thinking the subject has spiked shoes, maybe like the kind worn by utility workers to climb telephone poles. He used them to ascend the tree to throw the rope over the higher branches. Then he could return below and pull on the end of the rope. Would take a fair amount of muscle, but then again, there might be some kind of pulley system at the top. Or, he had help. Or both.”

“Can you tell what kind of rope?” Rachel wanted to know.

“Let’s find out.” Harold dug out a pair of binoculars and started to adjust them. “Looks like…nylon. Holy crap! The whole thing’s dancing now. Rachel, I don’t think…”

“I know, I know. But we gotta be sure, Harold. It’s the only way.”

Harold took a steadying breath. “I’ll climb up.” He tested a few branches with his hand. “I think I can get high enough that I can lean out and cut the rope without disturbing the knot.”

“And then the poor soul can crash to the ground?” Rachel inquired.

“Oh, oh yeah. Hmmm. I’ll climb up,” Harold said again, “get closer to the rope and see what our options are.”

“Okay, you do that.”

Harold donned a pair of heavy-duty leather gloves and started to climb, working his way gingerly from branch to branch.

Sal moved over to where Kimberly was taking in the action. “How do you get a body out of a tree?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” she murmured. “Never came up at Body Recovery School.”

“That body’s not alive, is it?”

“I doubt it.”

“Then what’s making it move?”

“We’ll find out soon enough.”

Harold was ten feet up, dangling out on a limb now, edging closer to the body. The tree branch dipped down precariously. Harold whistled nervously.

“I found the end of the rope,” he called out. “He has kind of…an elaborate system here. From what I can tell, the rope loops around a variety of branches, almost like a pulley system. I think if I partially cut the rope here, then climb up to the highest branch and yank hard, I might gain enough rope to lower the body to the ground. At least, fairly close.”

“How close?” Rachel demanded.

“I don’t fucking know,” Harold called out in exasperation, which raised Rachel’s and Kimberly’s eyebrows as they’d never heard Harold swear before. He seemed to catch himself, soldier on. “We could try a ladder,” he started to say, then, “ah jeez.”

The body was moving again. The nylon bulging around the crisscross pattern of the rope wrapped around the mummified form. It didn’t look like arms and legs struggling to get free. It looked…alien. A separate life-form, rippling beneath the surface.

“Rachel?” Harold called down in a strained voice.

“All right. Do what you think is best. But save the knot.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” Harold muttered, earning more raised brows.

There was the sawing sound of Harold working on the rope. Then a deep, concerned sigh before Harold resumed his climb up to the higher point of the subject’s pulley system.

This limb was noticeably thinner than the lower branch, and as Harold once again eased out on his stomach, the branch began to dip. Then several things happened at once.

The rope snapped at the half-sawed cut, whipping up the tree with a scissoring slice. Harold yelped, grabbed for the nylon line with his gloved hands, and the whole body careened down five feet before yanking to a halt.

“Holy mother of…” Harold exclaimed. “I can’t…It’s gonna…Shit!”

He lost the end, and the body crashed down another five feet before the rope tangled and the body lurched to a halt. Harold wasted no time, sliding down the tree trunk in a shower of green needles. He reached the lower branches, shimmied straight out, and grabbed the rope again.

“Incoming!” He untangled the line. The body dropped, two deputies rushing to grab the form and lower it gently onto the waiting tarp.

This close it was easy to discern the tightly bound shape of a human body, wrapped in a camouflage-patterned fabric, bound with brown rope. The nylon material rippled again, and with a little yelp, one of the officers fell back.

“All right,” Rachel said, taking control of the situation as Harold swung out of the tree and everyone gathered around the twitching form. “Anyone who is not me drop back. We’re gonna do this slow and controlled.” She donned booties, as well as a hairnet, mask, and gloves. The tarp was the crime scene, meant to catch whatever trace evidence fell out from the nylon wrapping. Rachel’s job was to limit cross-contamination of the scene.

“I’ll do it,” Harold said immediately, reaching for the knife Rachel had in her hands.

“It’s okay, Harold. This is why I get the big bucks.”

Despite her brash tone, Rachel approached the form warily. For the first time, Kimberly could catch the smell. Decay, light but pervasive.

Harold hunkered down at the edge of the tarp. Kimberly moved closer to him. Sal, too. They watched as Rachel gingerly made her way across the blue plastic, eyeing the thick rope that started at the ankles and wound all the way up the body.

She was looking for knots, Kimberly knew. It was always important to preserve knots. Just ask the officers who pursued the BTK killer in Kansas.

Rachel found the first knot at the ankles. She went an inch above it, slid the blade of her knife beneath the rope, and carefully sawed through the tough nylon. It took some time. Then the rope gave, falling away from the feet. Rachel pulled gently, easing the rope from underneath the body, slowly starting to unwind.

The whole form shifted slightly, seemed to sigh. Rachel caught herself, continued on. She was crouched above the head now, the majority of the body directed away from her, allowing for a quicker getaway.

She fished the last of the rope from around the neck. Now Kimberly could see the folds of the nylon fabric, how it wrapped around the form.

“All right,” Rachel said quietly. “I’m gonna start at the middle. Everyone, look sharp.”

She stood up. Bent over. Grabbed the first seam of fabric at the body’s waist, gave it a firm tug.

The form exploded. Like Jiffy Pop, Kimberly thought wildly. The unbound material burst open and a flood of spiders poured out, black and brown, big and small, eight-legged shapes scurrying desperately from their nylon prison while Rachel screamed and fell back, and Harold leapt to his feet, shouting, “Well, look at that!”

Then a rifle boomed from the trees and red bloomed across Harold’s shoulder and he exclaimed a second time, “Well, look at that!”

Harold fell to the ground.

“Take cover!” Rachel cried, already scrambling for the bushes.

As Sal fell on Harold’s injured form, Kimberly leapt toward her father and Rainie’s side, hunkered behind a larger boulder.

As they all learned what the Burgerman knew how to do best.