I felt sure the crane could get the wreckage up the bluff. But I still wasn’t clear on how we could get down.
That answer, too, was quick to materialize. Two of McCready’s agents emerged from the back of the ERT truck, big coils of rope slung over their shoulders. The ropes were red nylon, interwoven with diamonds of black—a pattern that made them look more like rattlesnakes than I liked. Two other agents brought out bundles of harnesses, racks of carabiners, and other climbing hardware. The agents with the ropes tied them off to cleats at opposite ends of the crane, then flung the coiled bundles off the edge of the bluff. For a moment, as the bright red loops separated and unspooled, they looked like party streamers, and the juxtaposition—the festive unfurling against the grim backdrop—gave me a surprising pang. Poor Richard, I thought, followed by a line of Shakespeare’s: So quick bright things come to confusion.
“Yo, Doc.” I turned to find McCready staring at me.
“Sorry. Were you saying something to me?”
“Only three times. You wanna stay up top till things cool off some more? Or would you like to get a closer look? Probably too soon to start the actual recovery, but you could start getting the lay of the land down there—figure out a plan of attack—if you want to.”
I hated the notion of a whole posse of agents tromping around the wreckage unsupervised—specifically, unsupervised by me. I imagined fragile, burned bones crushed into cinders by careless footsteps. No matter that the FBI’s crime-scene techs were the best in the nation. The Bureau had brought me out here for a reason, and I meant to give them their money’s worth. “Beam me down, Scotty,” I said.
“You got it.” He nodded toward the rope-throwing agents, who were now laying out climbing harnesses near the rim. “You ever done any rappelling?”
“A little. It’s been a while, but I reckon it’ll come back to me once I’m harnessed up.” In fact, it came flooding back to me only a heartbeat later: a death scene I’d roped down to, in a rugged part of the Cumberland Mountains. “Here’s the thing,” I hedged. “Can somebody else go first?” He looked puzzled. “Ten or twelve years ago, I recovered a woman’s body up near the Kentucky border. She’d been dismembered and thrown off a bridge into a ravine.”
He nodded. “I think I remember reading about that case. Serial killer? What was his name?”
“Satterfield. Sick, sadistic sonofabitch. Anyhow, I roped down a bluff to this woman’s body, and I landed right by a rattlesnake—a coiled-up, pissed-off timber rattler. It struck at me; missed my leg by about that much.” I held up a thumb and forefinger, practically touching. I took another glance down at the rocky terrain. “I’m thinking this terrain looks kinda snaky, and I’ve had enough fun with snakes to last me a lifetime.”
He nodded, tucking back part of a smile. “I’ll send Kimball and Boatman down first, with the Total Station,” he said. “They’ll stomp around and scare off the varmints.”
He turned toward the two agents, who were uncoiling a pair of ropes and tying them to their gear—a hard-shell tripod case, about the size of a golf bag, plus a suitcase-sized aluminum box containing the electronics. “Yo, Kimball,” McCready yelled. The ever-eager agent looked up. “Got a job for you.”
“Instead of the Total Station?”
“In addition. You’re on snake-bait duty.”
“Snakebite duty?” The young agent cocked his head. “You want me to take the antivenom kit with us?”
“Not snake bite. Snake bait. You’re the designated snake bait.”
“Boss. Seriously? Did you really just call me snake bait?”
“I did. Doc here is snake-phobic. Your job is to run interference. If he gets bit, you get transferred. To Fargo.”
Kimball pondered this for a fraction of a second. “Hey, Doc,” he said. “Do me a favor, will you?”
“If I can.”
“If you get bit, chuck that snake over at me, so it’ll bite me, too. I’m Fargo-phobic.” He turned to his partner. “Hey, Boat-Man, toss me that figure eight, would you?” A piece of polished metal arced through the air toward Kimball; he caught it deftly, looped the rope through it, and then clipped it to his climbing harness. Then, easing the tripod case over the rim, he lowered it down the bluff, feeding the rope smoothly through the figure eight until the line went slack. Boatman did the same with the aluminum case.
Once the hardware was down, the two men clipped themselves to the rappelling ropes, backed off the precipice in sync, and dropped from sight. “Look out, all you rattlers and cottonmouths and king cobras,” I heard Kimball call out as he descended. “I’m coming down, and I am one snake-stompin’ son-of-a-mongoose badass!”