Scent of Evil (54 page)

I felt his hands around my neck, adjusting the strap, fitting each spool into the depression on either side of my trachea.

“Of course, if it doesn’t work, I’ll just go back to using my thumbs, but let’s give it—”

Silence fell like a cleaver. The strap went slack. I couldn’t move my head, but I shifted my eyes from the skylight and scanned what little I could see of the darkness beyond. Behind me, I could hear Buddy quietly pulling the hammer back on his gun. Whatever had caught his attention was quiet now.

He moved as gently as a cat, sliding into my field of vision from the right, his gun in his hand, gliding down the two steps from the platform to the one catwalk I could see in my frozen state, the same one we’d traveled from the air shaft.

My heart beat faster, the hopeful memory of the trail of blood drops springing back to mind. Gail must have done something, called someone. And told them what? That I’d hung up on her and wouldn’t answer when she called back? She had done something, I was utterly convinced. She had set salvation into motion. I knew, just as Buddy obviously knew, that that one sound, whatever it had been, had come like a knock on a door. It had to be answered, or the door would be kicked in.

Buddy vanished into the gloom and I tried willing myself to see further, surprised to find I could actually squint a little. I remembered then what Hillstrom’s toxicologist had told me, that curare only lasted a few minutes, and that without booster injections, its effects wore off quickly. The simple act of squinting gave me hope I was on the upswing. If Buddy could be taken out, I’d survive, even without medical intervention.

But this was no textbook assault by a police SWAT team. In fact, it might be no more than an animal scratching at some rotten wood. If that were true, Buddy would satisfy his curiosity, retracing our steps to the air shaft, perhaps checking out parts of the maze of catwalks he knew more intimately than anyone, and then he’d return to conclude his little fantasy.

There was a sudden, blinding, conical stab of light. I saw Buddy arrested in midstep, like a tightrope artist at the circus trapped by a spotlight in the gloom above the audience. There was a double explosion accompanying two long, fiery, swordlike muzzle flashes, one from Buddy’s gun, the other from the darkness beyond the source of the light. That light, obviously a flashlight, spun out of control, landed with a thud on the catwalk, rolled over the edge, and in a final end-over-end sparkle, vanished into the soft, absorbing insulation below.

There was a long moment of silence, punctured only by the rasping of my own breathing. Then I heard movement, slow, cumbersome, no longer stealthy. I kept my eyes on the distant end of the catwalk, as intent on it as a gambler on the flip of a coin. A shadow moved there, too vague to decipher, a man using the one handrail for balance, lurching, fighting for control, half dragging himself along, the glow from the skylight still too weak to pick out his emerging features.

Finally, almost mercifully, the dim light picked up Buddy’s twisted face, his eyes screwed tight in pain, one hand clutched across a blood-soaked chest, the other still awkwardly holding the .45 as it slid uncertainly along the handrail. I let out a sigh, the suspense over, my fate at his hands looking unchanged for all the damage he'd sustained. He may have been mortally wounded, but he wasn’t going to let that thwart his final ambition.

Buddy paused some fifteen feet away, his body swaying, his breathing a ragged string of gurgles. He tried once to let go of the railing, failed, tried again, and half succeeded, holding his gun hand only a foot away from the cable, testing his balance. Satisfied, he finally looked up at me, his eyes glistening with a malevolence I wouldn’t have thought possible in another human being.

The hand with the gun slowly rose and leveled out, the black eye of the barrel seeking my motionless forehead. But the white-orange blast, when it came, came from behind, and it threw Buddy up like a leaf caught by the wind and tossed him lightly into the air. Spread-eagled, he landed with a crash on the skylight, his weight taking the entire pane of glass with him to the floor below, where it blew apart with a crystalline shattering. The cool air from the hallway beneath washed up and surrounded me like the after-splash from someone leaping into a pool.

Ron Klesczewski appeared out of the darkness, his stiff leg making him look like some peg-legged sailor of old. His face was both quizzical and lined with pain. There was a crimson gash on his forehead but no blood to speak of—“a scratch,” as they say.

I looked back through the skylight opening. Buddy’s corpse lay as a child’s in sleep, half curled up on itself, its fetal memories still strong. Near his face, like a prized possession almost cupped in one hand, was the dead sparrow.

In the quiet, soothed by the cool air pushing by me, I closed my eyes for a moment, once again aware of my own breathing and heartbeat. I felt a drop trickle down my cheek and fall away soundlessly, but whether sweat or a tear I didn’t know.

Available soon as an e-book, Archer Mayor’s
The Skeleton’s Knee
is the fourth Joe Gunther novel.

“Hello, Lieutenant.”

I turned away from the jumble of people setting up staging and equipment by the roped-off grave site and saw Beverly Hillstrom coming toward me. I had called her right after discovering the skeleton, to ask her advice on how to deal with it. It was now 10 a.m. the following morning.

I smiled at her with genuine pleasure and shook her slim, elegant hand. “Doctor. It’s wonderful to see you; I thought one of your regional MEs would be attending. I didn’t know you were coming.”

“I wasn’t going to initially, but then I couldn’t resist it. Besides, once I’d recommended a forensic archeologist, I thought the least I could do was to introduce him personally.”

She turned and gestured to a short, wiry man whose face was as bushy with black hair as his head was gleaming bald. His eyes looked enormous behind thick, dark-framed glasses, and he squinted at me slightly as we exchanged formalities, as if considering what a slice of me would look like under a microscope.

Hillstrom beamed between us, the immaculate hostess. “Dr. Boris Leach—Lieutenant Joe Gunther.” Leach’s eyes shifted away from me after a cursory glance, focusing instead on the activities by the hole. His hand was cold and limp in mine and I dropped it as soon as I could.

“Lieutenant, I take it no one has aggravated the hole any further?” He stepped around me and ducked under the yellow mylar “Police Line” we’d used to surround the site.

Hillstrom patted my arm quickly and smiled, encouraging me to ignore Leach’s arrogant tone of voice. I realized then she wasn’t here purely out of professional curiosity. When I’d called her about the skeleton, she’d warned me that Leach was no Miss Manners; she’d obviously decided upon reflection to run interference between us.

I lifted the barrier for her and we followed in Leach’s wake. “It’s just the way we left it last night, except for what your assistant dropped off a while ago.”

He stood at the edge of the hole, now illuminated by the bright, cool sunlight. The metal knee joint shone like a white spark, nestled in its pit. He looked around suddenly, “Where’s the backhoe? I told Henry to specifically request a backhoe. I can’t be expected to remove four feet of dirt by myself. It’s idiotic… Pointless.”

I held up my hand to interrupt him. “It’s coming, Doctor; it should be here in a few minutes. What about everything else?” That sidetracked him for a while. He left us to examine the pile of equipment his twitchy, birdlike “assistant” Henry had brought in a pickup truck some forty-five minutes earlier.

Watching him, I muttered to Hillstrom, “Too many years digging in the Gobi Desert?”

She smiled like an indulgent mother. “Take the bad with the good, Lieutenant. This man is very good.”

Leach returned from his inventory and fixed me with his fierce, owl-wide eyes. “Who’s the forensics man on your team?”

“J.P. Tyler.” I shouted over to J.P., who was doing his own surreptitious examination of Leach’s assembled hardware.

Rather than waiting for Tyler to join us, Leach marched off and made his own introductions. Both men took hammers and large spikes and set off toward opposite trees near the grave site. Once there, they drove the spikes into the trunks, fastened them to the ends of two reeled measuring tapes, and unrolled the tapes toward the hole, establishing both a double set of fixed surveying points, and an accurate triangulation system. From now on, all maps of the site would feature the two trees, and all items on that map would be measured from them. Indeed, even as I was admiring the simple efficiency of the plan, I saw Leach thrust a drawing pad, a pencil, and a ruler into Tyler’s hands.

At that point, Leach shouted over to Hillstrom. “You can play photographer now, if you want to earn your keep.”

Hillstrom merely chuckled and pulled a camera from the bag hanging off her shoulder. Even considering our friendship, it never would have occurred to me to address her in such a tone.

From that point on, Dr. Leach was like a caricature general in the field, shouting orders to his troops, and doing most of the work himself.

After a quick sketch of the scene as it was, the surface debris of leaves and stray stones was cleared away to reveal the true topography of the land. Shovels were handed out, and slowly, inch by inch, the top layer of soil was removed over about a ten foot by five foot area, revealing at first a uniform mantle of dark, moist, nutrient-rich dirt.

I wandered near Hillstrom at one point in this drawn-out process and asked how deep we were going to go. She shook her head in shocked amusement. “Not to worry. That’s why he was asking for the backhoe. Soil like this is divided into two parts: the upper layer can be about eight inches deep, like it is here, and it tends to be dark and rich. Below it is the lighter colored, generally sandier layer, which usually goes down until you hit ledge or water or whatever. The premise is that if you dig a grave, you’ll punch through the top and burrow into the lower layer, but when you later fill in the hole, the dirt you throw in will be a mixture of both dark and light. So, years later, if you skim the dark top soil off of a larger surrounding area, chances are you’ll discover one spot in the lighter, deeper soil which looks slightly different, because it’s been disturbed. That’s how you know exactly where your grave is.”

“But we know where the grave is,” I persisted, unembarrassed to display my archeological ignorance.

“Yes, but we don’t know its orientation or size. People rarely dig nice big, deep, rectangular holes for their murder victims. They do what they can in a hurry, crunch their victims up as tight as possible, and stuff them in. Boris and I have found them head first, balled up, and cut into pieces. It’s amazing.”

Her explanation was right on the mark. At about one foot down, a barely perceptible darker patch, about three-and-a-half feet round, distinguished itself from its pale surroundings. The hole we’d dug the night before was right at the edge of it.

The backhoe had long since arrived, accompanied but not operated by the high strung Henry, whom Leach put to work laying out wooden stakes and a grid. Once a cut line was established, the machine began digging a wide, deep trench right next to the grave site.

Leach stood next to me as we watched the backhoe at work. “You ever been to a dig before?” he asked suddenly without looking at me.

“No.”

“Well, it’s a pain in the ass to dig straight down. The position’s uncomfortable, the visibility stinks, and the dirt keeps falling back into the hole. Plus, if the body’s still ripe, the stench comes straight up at you. Much easier to put a trench alongside the site, and work at it in comfort, directly in front of you. Then it’s more like emptying a chest of drawers, from the top one down.”

I was about to thank him for this unexpected tidbit when he left as abruptly as he’d come, signaled to the backhoe operator to stop, and jumped over the trench like some bespectacled billy goat, falling to his knees at the point where the light dirt and the mixed dirt met. He used a long knife to cut a cake-sized wedge between them and then signaled to me to join him.

I knelt down by his side and he pointed at the cleavage the wedge had left behind. “Shovel marks left by whoever dug the hole. You can see from the scalloped cut that it was a spade-shaped shovel, about twelve inches wide at the base and slightly curved.”

He looked up suddenly. “Beverly, where the hell are you? You want to take possession of this mess fast, you’ve got to help me out.” Hillstrom, standing nearby, shook her head silently and joined us, focusing her camera on the evidence as Leach laid out a ruler for comparison. In the meantime, I called over to Dennis to check the tool shed for a shovel fitting Leach’s description. As I did so, I noticed State’s Attorney James Dunn quietly joining the crowd at the police barrier, as irresistibly drawn to this death scene as he was to all the ones I’d ever attended during his tenure. I’d realized by now that we’d be here most of the day; it astounded me that Dunn’s specialized curiosity would allow him to abandon the office for so long on such short notice. Hard to keep a man from his personal interests. I gave him a small wave and went back to being a spectator. The trench now complete, Leach set to work in earnest, scraping the side of the dirt wall before him until the faintest change in color indicated he was right at the wall of the narrow, vertical, cylindrical grave. Then, as he’d told me he would, he set to work removing the dirt from the top down. By the time he’d reached the artificial knee, Dennis had returned with a shovel, and we took a brief pause to document that we had indeed found a match for the scars in the dirt. This was no small matter to me privately, for while everyone else was narrowly focused on the task at hand, I was still wondering if the body in the hole had anything at all to do with Abraham Fuller. The shovel was a comforting bridge over that gap. It didn’t prove culpability; it didn’t even point at Fuller, since it was perfectly possible that the shovel was Coyner’s, and that he’d buried Old-Kneecap before Fuller had appeared on the scene. Nevertheless, it was a link, until something better came along.