Enough.
I kneel beside it, run my fingertips over the jagged, broken edge where she tried to sever her bindings; whether she succeeded or not, I can’t tell. The stain of old blood is on the rock where she cut herself in the frenzy of sawing and scraping, but there’s no trail leading away from the rock, no shine running away from the hole and the monster, running away to a future.
This is where he came for her.
I see it all in my head as if it were played out before me.
“Command—” I jump at the sound.
“—this is FBI, over.” Jimmy waits for a response. I don’t hear it because he’s using the earpiece, but Jimmy continues. “We have a crime scene at…” He checks his GPS unit for the coordinates and rattles off the latitude and longitude. “Looks like two shallow graves. One has been disturbed by predators, exposing a number of bones. They appear human.” Silence for a moment, then, “Negative, these appear to be earlier victims.” There’s another pause, this time longer. “Copy that. We’ll be standing by. FBI out.”
Five minutes later, Jimmy’s earpiece startles him. “Go ahead,” he replies, fumbling with the radio. As Jimmy listens, he shakes his head slowly. “Copy that.” There’s a pause, then, “I don’t know. I’m not sure of anything right now.” Pause. “Yeah, I’ll tell him.”
“What? Tell me what?” I blurt as Jimmy lowers the radio.
“That was Walt. He just heard from the hospital. Zell’s dead.” Jimmy looks at the graves, then at the sky, then at the great nothing on the far horizon.
“He wasn’t going to help us anyway,” I say flatly.
“Still…” Jimmy leaves the word dangling.
“We’ll find Susan,” I insist, trying to sound confident. “We’ll find her alive. And we’ll find Lauren and bring her home. There’s nothing else to be done about it. This is the way it is.”
A half hour passes slowly before the first vehicle arrives. More follow. Crime-scene tape goes up around the graves, photos are taken, measurements, everything. A trail of small red flags marks the path from the dirt road to the crime scene. It’s another hour before Dr. Noble Wallace and his understudy show up.
“You caught me just as I was about to tee off,” Dr. Wallace says as he exits the coroner’s van and shakes hands all around. He and Walt talk golf for a minute, which I find odd … and not just because we’re at a crime scene. I’ve only ever played miniature golf, which probably doesn’t count. Still, from my limited experience, Nob looks every bit the golfer, and I can easily picture him on the green driving a ball down range.
Walt’s a different story.
The sheriff is a big man—which is great if you’re a cop, but I’m not sure how that might translate to golf. From their brief conversation, however, I get the impression he’s not half bad, but then they switch gears and we’re back to bodies and shallow graves.
“I’m afraid this is going to be a slow process,” Nob tells Walt. “We’ll be digging them out one trowelful at a time, cleaning the bone with the tip of a brush as we go. Every scoop of dirt will get sifted for evidence. Anything that was lodged in the body is now part of the soil, so that’s the only way we’ll find a bullet fragment or the broken edge of a knife—evidence that points to manner of death.
“Any idea who they are?” Nob asks; this time he’s looking straight at me.
Tawnee Rich and Ashley Sprague, I think to myself, but for Nob I just shake my head and say, “They’ll be on Zell’s death list.”
Nob seems satisfied and helps his assistant retrieve several waterproof cases from the van. As a ten-legged group, we make our way along the red-flagged trail.
“I can’t tell you how long it’s going to take,” Nob says in response to a question from the sheriff. “This isn’t a normal crime scene for us; in fact, I don’t think I’ve done a shallow grave for at least five years. Every bone is going to need to be photographed in place, tagged, and bagged. I’m also going to need to take some soil samples and who knows what else. Our actions, and the time it takes, will be dictated by what we find.”
Nob, Walt, and the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office still have a case to build. Zell may be dead, but they need to show the public that this was his work, that the real killer has come to ultimate justice, and that there’s no more danger. That comes from evidence.
I don’t need evidence.
I have shine.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
July 9, 12:13 P.M.
“We’re burning daylight, Jimmy.”
“I know.”
“Then what are we waiting for? Walt’s got things under control here. We’re not CSI, this isn’t our show.”
“We found them … I just want to make sure—”
I step in front of Jimmy as he tries to move past, placing my hand solidly on his chest. “It’s—not—our—show,” I repeat. That seems to pull him back. Jimmy’s a cop at heart; I’m not. It’s hard to step back from a crime scene when your nature is to dive in and help; and it doesn’t matter what kind of help, you could be holding a flashlight for the world’s biggest jerk of a detective and it would be enough; you would know that you were helping in some small way.