Girls Like Us(13)

I squat down, staring close at a pile of rocks. They are small and flat, about as thick and wide as the palm of my hand. Seven of them. Stacked one atop the other, like a deck of cards.

“A cairn,” I murmur, turning my head to examine it closer.

“A trail marker?”

“Something like that. Cairns have been used for centuries, for lots of things. Trails, caches of food. They can be ceremonial, like for a burial site.”

“Here.” Lee hands me a pair of latex gloves. He puts on a pair himself, stretching them over his long, bony fingers.

“Look at this. This is deliberate. The stones are stacked so precisely. And I’m not sure these rocks are even from this area. They should be tested. Was there anything like this near the Sandoval site?”

“Not that I recall. But it’s possible we missed it.”

“It could have been disturbed before you got there, too. Maybe the hikers who found the body remember seeing it.”

“You think it might still be there?”

I shrug. “It’s worth going back to check it out.” I stand up, brush some sand off my jeans. “I have a friend from the Bureau. Sarah Patel. She works out of Miami. She’s the head of a human trafficking task force. If we’re looking at two young sex workers murdered a year apart, killed in this very particular way, I think you guys should consider bringing in her team. Either that or someone from the BAU.”

“You’re from the BAU.”

“You know what I mean. This is not a case for local PD, Lee. You need to be cross-checking this stuff against national databases.”

Lee kicks the sand with his toe. “I’ll raise it again with Dorsey.”

“Or you could just let me call Sarah Patel and let her decide.”

“No.” He shakes his head emphatically. “Absolutely not. Dorsey will flip out. He does not want outside involvement here. And it’s his call, not Sarah Patel’s.”

I disagree, but there’s no point in saying so. We’re quiet for a minute. I clear my throat, breaking the tension. “Who did you say found this body?”

“Grace Bishop. She lives down the street. Married to Eliot Bishop.”

“The Treasury Secretary?”

“Yep . . . she’s on the board of the Preservation Society, actually. She might know about the restoration project here. She walks her dog on the beach every morning. Dog took off, came up here, dug up the body. Tore off a piece of the ankle bone. Grace had to wrestle it out of the dog’s mouth. When I got here, she was hysterical.”

“A human foot before seven a.m.? I’d be hysterical, too.”

Lee blanches, and I wonder if he’s going to lose his breakfast. He probably hasn’t seen all that many murder victims in his time at the SCPD. Fewer than I have, anyway. Car accidents, sure. Maybe the occasional suicide. But there is something particularly unsettling about murder scenes. There is a darkness that clings to the air long after the killer has departed. I know it well.

This one feels particularly gruesome. The body in the grave is shrouded in burlap. It reminds me of the trip Dad and I would take every December to a nursery on the North Fork. We would pick out a Christmas tree—usually a small one, so that I could reach the top of it without too much help—and the nursery owner would wrap it in burlap just like this. Then Dad would hoist it over his shoulder and tie it to the top of our car. We’d drive home in silence, both of us knowing that Dad rarely had the energy to decorate the tree. During the holidays, Dad’s drinking was worse than usual. Something like a tangle of Christmas lights was enough to set him off. He’d get frustrated, yell at me, throw something. Then he’d disappear, returning only when he was too drunk to notice that while he was gone I’d managed to unwind the lights, fix the broken bulbs, and wrap them around the tree by myself.

There is a tear at the bottom of the sack. Visible through it is a brown stump. The girl’s anklebone, I’d guess. The dog had torn the foot clean off. The mangled remains of it lay like trash at the edge of the gravesite.

“Can I see her?”

Lee nods. He stoops over and pulls back the burlap. The smell intensifies. Lee reels, as though knocked back by it. The scent of human decay is something you never really get used to. It’s a heavy, rancid odor that creeps into your pores and crawls beneath your skin. It feels unholy, as though it might infect you just by getting too close. The first time I saw a cadaver, I couldn’t shake the smell for days. I kept showering and washing my hands, but the scent of it had burned itself on the inside of my nostrils like gunpowder. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Lee gulp air, his fingers pinching at his nose.

The body has putrefied and shriveled. The maggots are gone, at least, but there’s still skin on her; she hasn’t fully skeletonized. I’d guess the corpse is a few weeks old. Skin, like leather, is shrink-wrapped around the bone. Her teeth are bared, like an animal’s. When I shift positions, the sunlight gleams off the metal plate in her jaw. Lucky girl, I think to myself. A plate like that is a pathologist’s golden ticket to identification.

“The eyes,” Lee groans. “God, that freaks me out.”

The eye sockets are hollow. Part of her skull is missing, too. It looks as though she was nailed clean in the middle of her forehead. I feel a shiver of respect for the shooter. As a hunter, my father trained me to go for a one-shot kill, preferably to the head, so as to minimize suffering. This is about as perfect a shot as one could ask for.