“She puked all over my shoes, but she’s resting at home now with her mother who knows when she’s sick even without CariAnne having to tell her.” Silently Julia told herself to shut up. Why did it bother her that she hadn’t automatically seen that the little girl hadn’t been feeling well? She couldn’t be expected to know that, right?
“I guess that’s a special mother talent the rest of us don’t have,” Platt said, as if reading her mind, but he wasn’t joking. Instead, Julia thought he looked … if she wasn’t mistaken, she thought he looked sad.
“Do they make them or are they premade and frozen?” He was back to digging in the garbage.
For a second Julia had forgotten what they were talking about. “I don’t know for sure, but I’m thinking they’d have to be premade and frozen. No way they could make hundreds of those by hand in a morning.”
Platt looked at the list again. “They also had lettuce salad and oatmeal cookies.”
Julia’s stomach growled. Platt raised an eyebrow. The rancid smell had not dissipated, nor had the flies.
“Missed lunch,” Julia said without apology. Digging through garbage didn’t gross her out any more than scraping brains off a wall or watching a medical examiner crunch through a rib cage. When you’re hungry, you’re hungry. Except today she still couldn’t shake the smell of the kids’ vomit.
Thankfully Platt didn’t make a big deal of it. Instead, he grabbed one of the top bags and, keeping it inside the Dumpster, started unwinding the plastic tie.
Julia took a bag and simply ripped open a hole. She yanked out a handful and suddenly found her gag reflex starting to betray her. She hated that she actually had to swallow back the bile. Damn, she never got nauseated. Why now? Especially when she didn’t want Benjamin Platt going back and telling Maggie that her tough-as-nails friend flipped her cookies over a pile of schoolkids’ leftovers.
“Do you want any of the bags the lettuce came in?” She tried to concentrate on the task at hand. The discarded lettuce bags were the only things she was holding that she could recognize. Everything else was a mish-mash of brown sludge that already smelled bad.
“Yeah, that’d be great.”
Platt set aside his own garbage bag to take one of the lettuce bags.
“There are codes printed on the seam.” He pulled a bag apart and showed her. “The produce companies put these codes in place after the spinach recall in 2006. Let’s see if I can remember how this works. This bag’s code is P227A. The first letter identifies the processing plant, the 227 is the two hundred and twenty-seventh day of the year, and the last letter usually refers to which shift bagged it. Now they keep records at the plant so we can track which supplier and hopefully even which field provided that day’s lettuce.”
“We’ve got like forty or fifty empty lettuce bags here. Do you want all of them?”
Julia swore she saw his shoulders slump at the enormity of the project. He shoved his shirtsleeves up above his elbows not noticing that he had gotten some of the brown sludge on them. His eyes scanned the sky as if looking for answers.
Finally he shrugged and said, “We have to start somewhere.”
CHAPTER 27
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Julia Racine had never really understood what Maggie O’Dell saw in Benjamin Platt. He seemed too disciplined, too spit-and-polish, too much of a play-by-the-rules type of guy. Though she did have to admit he had a nice ass.
Of course, she still noticed stuff like that. When it bugged her partner, Rachel, Julia would usually say, “Hey, I’m gay, I’m not dead.”
Truthfully, she’d always imagined Maggie going for someone who was a bit more adventurous, a little unpredictable and passionate. Someone a little more like … okay, someone a little more like Julia.
She followed Platt out to the school parking lot after offering to help.
“At least there’s no camera crew set up back here,” Platt said while his head swiveled around to make sure. “I couldn’t believe they beat me to the scene.”
Julia actually could believe it. The vultures always somehow found their way. Now she was living with one of them. Just a year ago if someone had told her she’d fall for a card-carrying journalist she would have said they were crazy. And maybe she was nuts. For the second time in about an hour she caught herself hoping Rachel hadn’t been the one to tip off the vultures.
She followed Platt to the Dumpster in the corner of the lot. It was surrounded by a six-foot wooden fence, closed with a padlock.
Platt slapped at the lock. “How bad are things when we start locking up our garbage?”
“Makes it more difficult to dump dead bodies.”
He glanced at her like he hadn’t thought about that before. Funny, it was the first thing that popped into Julia’s head. Too many times she’d had to help fish some poor victim out of a Dumpster—usually a woman. Men rarely got thrown in with the garbage. In fact, one of the last cases Julia and Maggie had worked on together included a decapitated woman whose head Julia had found in the victim’s own kitchen trash bin.