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 28
NEBRASKA
Maggie hadn’t thought about what she’d say to Johnny Bosh to convince him to leave his safe haven. She also hadn’t given much thought to how she would drag his six-foot, 180-pound frame back through the tight squeeze. Now none of that mattered, at least not to the point of urgency. She’d leave it to the paramedics or rescue crew to figure out.
She sat with him for a good ten minutes, all too conscious of the fact that she was more comfortable with dead victims than with the living. She hadn’t had a single answer for Dawson Hayes back at the hospital when he proclaimed that she should have left him to die with the others.
She should have predicted that after such a tragedy, the survivors would have a difficult time. If she hadn’t predicted it as a profiler of human behavior, she should have known from personal experience. How many times had she survived at the hands of a killer while others had died?
It wasn’t even a year ago that Kyle Cunningham had died after being exposed to the Ebola virus. Maggie had been exposed, too. Not a week went by that she didn’t ask herself why she had survived and Cunningham hadn’t.
The real professionals—like her best friend Gwen Patterson, who dealt with the psychological behavior of the living on a daily basis—were quick to identify it as survivor’s guilt: that constant tendency to question instead of accept or simply feel grateful. Maggie could understand that, but not suicide.
“What was it that made you do this?” she asked Johnny, sitting across from him, leaning against the cold cinder-block support column and staring into his dead eyes.
Dust motes floated in the halo from her penlight. The only sound came from the earbuds of his iPod, the tiny gadget tucked into his shirt pocket. It was hip-hop or rap, more words than music. That’s why she had mistaken the sound for Johnny mumbling to himself.
Maybe he hadn’t intended to kill himself. It was possible he just wanted to escape, forget about everything and everyone for a few hours. She didn’t see any drug paraphernalia. There was nothing in the dirt surrounding him.
That’s when she saw the cell phone still clamped in his hand. Had he called someone?
She easily tugged the phone away. Rigor mortis hadn’t fully set in yet. With the penlight she looked for the On switch. Pressed it. Nothing. Pressed again and held it down, but the phone still didn’t come on. The battery might need recharging. She slipped it deep into the front pocket of her jeans.
Maggie finally turned herself around and started to leave. It would be easier getting out than it had been coming in. Less surprises. It would be good to breathe some fresh air, to stand up straight and stretch. And yet, she hesitated. She knew she was headed for more unfamiliar ground as soon as she crawled out from under this house. And that’s what made her hesitate.
She sat back on her haunches and looked at Johnny Bosh again.
“What the hell am I supposed to tell your mom?”
CHAPTER 28
NEBRASKA