“In a minute.”
He followed her and rolled on through the lecture as they got into the trees. Nothing there but a pile of brush, and some scuffed-up dirt. The strobe from the stage was flickering off the tree branches and aspen leaves and made it hard to focus on anything.
Lucas walked back until the brush got dense enough to drag at his jeans, then shone his light deeper into the trees, saw nothing interesting, and walked back toward Letty. To get to her, he had to circle the edge of the pile of tree limbs, and caught a flash of yellow-white: the stump end of one of the tree limbs was fresh, recently ripped off a tree. He stopped and shone the light into the pile, and saw more fresh breaks.
Letty asked, “What?”
“These branches. Looks like somebody just broke them off the trees.” He shone the flash around the clump of evergreens and spotted a couple of places where the limbs had been pulled off, leaving a white gash in the bark. They moved the smaller branches and Letty, one arm clutched to her injured side, tugged away a bigger one. As she dragged it out, she spotted a streak of deep pumpkin orange, in the light of the flash. Her hands went to her mouth and she said, “Oh, no. No.”
“What?”
“Skye bought some orange socks at REI. We joked about it.”
Lucas shone the light deeper into the pile, caught the flash of orange. “Okay. Get back. Get out of the trees.” Letty backed away and Lucas shouted at the deputies, who hurried over.
Lucas said, “We might have something here. We don’t want to move any more stuff than we have to, if it turns out to be a crime scene. But there’s an orange . . . something . . . under these tree limbs. Might be a sock. Somebody hold the light.”
They spotted the streak of orange again, and two of the deputies lit it up from different sides, and then the third deputy held Lucas’s belt, at the back, so he could lean far into the pile without touching anything, and he pushed aside some bark and pine needles and said, “It’s a foot. There’s a body under here.”
“We gotta get her out,” Letty cried. “It hasn’t been long. She could still be alive.”
“Don’t think so,” Lucas said. “Can’t take the chance. Let’s see if we can spot how she’s oriented under there.”
They pulled out a few more tree limbs, discovered a lower arm, and Letty, standing next to Lucas, with both hands now clutching her chest, saw the plastic exercise bracelet she’d given Skye in San Francisco.
“Oh my God, it’s her, it’s her, it’s her . . .”
She was babbling, and knew it, but couldn’t stop. One of the deputies put an arm over her chest and pulled her away. Lucas decided where Skye’s head must be—the body was hardly buried, mostly just covered with damp leaves, pine needles, and brush. When Lucas found Skye’s face, the first thing he saw was one dead blue eye, nearly popped from its socket, behind a crushed zygomatic bone.
? ? ?
WHEN HE SAW IT, and the graying flesh behind it, the anger finally ripped through him. It had been a year since he’d felt anything like it: since the fight in a madman’s basement. Letty’s actions had frightened him, but he’d always known, through the series of phone calls, that she was all right.
But Skye . . . a young woman who had no parent or anyone else to look after her, except his daughter; and this could have happened to Letty, if a fat man hadn’t been there.
If they’d dragged her off between the cars . . .
For a whole year, he’d been stuck in bureaucratic mode, running down little ratshit criminals. Even in the larger cases, like the Merion murder case, the trial would turn on sleazy money-conflicted witnesses. This was different. This was a kid . . .
He backed away: “She’s gone. She’s gone. Goddamnit. We need to get a crime scene crew out here . . . Ah, Jesus Christ . . . she’s gone.”
He wrapped an arm around Letty and one of the deputies went running to his car, to call more cops. In the background, the rap went on, and the strobe bounced its wicked multi-multicolored light off all the clown faces around them.
Letty started to cry into Lucas’s shoulder.
Lucas told the deputies that he had to take Letty to the hospital, right now, and he pried Letty loose from the murder scene and half dragged her across the parking lot to where she’d parked the SUV. The only thing Letty said on the way out of the parking lot was “Take it slow.”
Her nose was bleeding again and she tipped her head and pushed Kleenex into her nostril.
“What was I thinking about?” Lucas asked, pounding the steering wheel as they headed out the highway toward town. “What the fuck was I thinking about?”
He had his flashers on, but the highway was crowded with people heading into the Juggalo Gathering, or leaving it, and he never got any speed.
“You should have been at the goddamn hospital a half hour ago,” he groaned. “What the fuck was I thinking about . . . ?”
“Had to find Skye.”
“Somebody else could have found her,” Lucas said. He turned sideways: “Tell me the truth. How bad?”
“It hurts, but he never hit me or kicked me square, except that first punch, and that didn’t knock me out or anything, I kept moving—”
“Get the fuck out of the way, you asshole,” Lucas shouted at a slow-moving car ahead of them. “Get the fuck out of the way.” He crowded the car until it pulled off onto the shoulder, then accelerated away until he caught the next slow-moving vehicle.
“He could have killed you if that fat guy hadn’t helped you,” Lucas said. “Letty: you’re not a cop. Maybe you will be, but you’re not now. What you did . . .”
He trailed off, and she said, “Stupid.”
Lucas banged the steering wheel with the heels of his hands: “Motherfuckers. Get out of the fuckin’ way.”
? ? ?
AS THEY GOT CLOSE to Hayward, Letty said, “You’re mad now.”