Then I dialed Sheriff O’Conner to tell him we were looking at a case of carefully planned, meticulously executed murder.
“Bear bait,” I told O’Conner when he asked how I knew. “The victim was smeared with bear bait. ‘ConQuest Scent Stick. Smoked Bacon,’ the label says.” I had a sudden realization, and I spun around to the table where I’d piled the empty cans and wrappers to confirm that I was remembering correctly. Armour Star, the plastic wrapper still cloudy with grease. “There was actual bacon, too—raw bacon. When I saw the package, it didn’t make sense—all those empty cans, all that processed food, but raw bacon? Why would he feed the kid raw bacon? But he wasn’t feeding it to him.”
“Lord, Doc, are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
“He wasn’t feeding it to him,” I repeated. “He was coating him with it. The killer turned that kid into living, breathing bear bait.”
CHAPTER 7
I WAS IN MY ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICE EARLY THE next morning, huddled over the mountain of paperwork that had somehow accumulated on my desk during the hours I’d spent sifting through Beanee Weenee cans and bear-bait sticks.
I was just starting to flip through the annual inventory of Anthropology Department property—a twenty-page list of stuff that, apart from the equipment in the new DNA lab and the Body Farm’s processing facility, was worth about fifty bucks—when my door burst open. “You!” exclaimed Miranda, coming toward me at a brisk clip. “You are unbelievable.”
“Come on, Miranda,” I said. “You’re still mad at me? I told you how sorry I was.”
She had already made it across the room and around the end of the desk; she kept closing the distance, until she was directly beside me. “You are unbelievably wonderful.” She bent over, threw her arms around my neck, and gave me a quick hug, which—given that she was standing above me—felt more than a little awkward, from where I was sitting. Mercifully, she turned me loose quickly. “How on earth did you do that?”
“Do what?” I asked. I wasn’t just playing coy; I honestly didn’t know what she meant.
“The director of the FBI Laboratory—the head honcho, the big cheese—he came looking for me. He walked in on my job interview about five minutes after it started.”
“What for?”
Her eyes narrowed with suspicion. “He said he’d heard I was interviewing. Wanted to be sure he had a chance to meet me, since he’d heard ‘such glowing things’ about me. He grilled me for twenty minutes, then shook my hand and said he thought they’d be lucky to get me.”
“Well, well,” I said. “Mr. Big Cheese is clearly a smart guy. Does he have a name?”
She rattled it off, then added, “As if you didn’t know.”
“Actually, I didn’t,” I said honestly. “Never heard of him. Pretty cool, though, that he’s heard of you.”
“Are you telling me you didn’t call him yesterday morning, after I left in a huff?”
I raised my right hand, my first three fingers nestled together and pointing upward, my pinkie and thumb folded and touching each other. “Scout’s honor. How could I call him if I don’t even know his name?”
“But you called someone at the FBI lab yesterday morning.”
“No, I didn’t call someone at the FBI lab,” I said. Then, realizing that Brubaker now worked for an outside consulting firm, I said, “As a matter of fact, I didn’t call anyone anywhere in the FBI.” I made a mental note to phone Brubaker again and thank him for his swift, miraculous intervention. It’s possible that I wasn’t entirely successful at hiding my sense of relief and self-satisfaction at how I’d managed to redeem myself, because Miranda gave me a look of knowing triumph. She appeared to be formulating her next question—if Miranda had studied law rather than anthropology, she’d have made a damned good prosecutor—so I parried, hoping to derail her cross-examination.
“Hey, did you see Chip Thornton while you were there?”
Miranda flushed. “No, I did not see Chip Thornton while I was there.”
Thornton was an FBI agent specializing in weapons of mass destruction. He’d been sent down from FBI headquarters several years before to work with us on a murder committed with a powerful radiation source, and at the time, I’d noticed some serious sparks crackling between him and Miranda. “Oh well,” I said, all innocence. “Too bad. He’s a nice guy. Maybe if you go to work for the Bureau, you’ll cross paths with him.”
“The FBI’s a big place,” she retorted. “Besides, he’s in DC, not Quantico. Not that I’m keeping track of him. But yeah, maybe I will. If I’m lucky enough to get the job.”
“So you’re pretty serious about it? You think you’d take it, if they offered it to you?”