Neon Prey (Lucas Davenport #29)(10)
He said that, and Rae said, “Garden of Evil. No good in here.”
Fifty yards back into the jungle, all of them yet un-snakebitten, they found a tall, skinny, weathered man wearing mud-caked white Tyvek coveralls, a baseball hat, and gum boots identical to Lucas’s. He wore a belt over the coveralls, with three holsters, one carrying a .40 caliber Glock, the second a plastic canteen, and the third a Marshalltown trowel.
Bob asked him, “What about six?”
“Doc’s down there taking DNA samples. It’s old, it’s all falling apart, we’re gonna box the skull, we can see some dental work. He says it’s male, for sure. We got one hand, but the flesh is gone, so there won’t be any prints. Barb thinks she’s got seven, by the back lot line, and Dave thinks he has eight. The dogs aren’t indicating, so they may be really old, and there’s so much organic matter on top that they get confused. Whatever, we’ll have to dig them out.”
Rae said to Lucas, “This is Cory Laird, FBI, he does old bodies. Cory, this is the marshal I was telling you about, Lucas Davenport.” They shook, Laird smiling and saying, “Clean hands. We all work with gloves, in case you’re worried. You need the tour?”
“Like to take a look,” Lucas said. “You got IDs on any of the bodies?”
“On two of them. We’re shipping the DNA scans everywhere, seeing if we can pick up the others. We think that most of them come from New Orleans, or the parishes right around New Orleans. We’re looking for relatives of missing people that we think might have been Deese’s targets, so we can cross-check the DNA with them. Deese worked for several different mob guys over the years, some of them are dead, so figuring that out has been complicated. My best bet is, we’ll get all but one. It seems like in these situations, there’s always one you can’t identify.”
Laird led them along the narrow but now well-worn path, and, behind Lucas, Bob said, “Newest body is only about seven or eight months old, a woman named Bailee Wheelwright, nicknamed Bill, who kept company with Rog Smith, who I told you about.”
“The lawyer, bail bondsman, loan shark.”
“Right. She was his best girl for two years, and Tremanty said they were having problems and she supposedly moved to Chicago and disappeared. He’d been looking for her, hoping she’d talk about Smith, but never made contact. Tremanty thinks that when they had their falling-out—she might have known too much about his operation—so . . . Deese. The body’s missing a strip of muscle from the back.”
They’d been stringing along the narrow track behind Laird, walking through shallow mud puddles along the way, around the larger trees, past deep excavated pits. Somebody had used a chain saw to open up pieces of the swamp, with the cut limbs stacked back in the heavier brush.
They took a new-cut side track to an isolated pit, where two people were working side by side in the hole, both dressed in Tyvek. A lunch-box-like container sat outside the hole, filled with cylindrical bottles with screw-on tops. The excavations had been cut wide enough to allow the men to stand on clean earth separate from the grave’s hole.
“All the digging is done with trowels, an inch at a time,” Laird said. “It takes a while.”
Peering into the hole, Lucas could make out a dirt-colored skeleton with some rags of clothing and skin and hair. The visible bones had collapsed on top of one another, the vertebrae, arm bones, and ribs crushed down over the folded leg bones, the skull on top. The only odor was that of swamp mud. The men looked up, and one of them said, “Where’s Larry? We need the box.”
“He’s coming,” Laird said. “You see anything?”
“Shot in the back of the head, bullet passing through the brain and out through the left eye socket. Looks like the subject was kneeling, to get that angle. Or, the shooter could have been standing on a chair, but . . .”
Laird said, “Yeah?”
The other man in the hole said, “This goddamn mud gets on everything. Drives me crazy. You scrape it off and one minute later it’s back on.”
Lucas took the rest of the tour: two unexcavated suspicious depressions were pointed out, with Laird saying one was a sure thing, in his opinion, the other was fifty-fifty. “We’re more than halfway through and there are spots in the other half that we think would have been obvious choices for burials. So . . . it’s a big deal and getting bigger.”
Rae asked Laird, “You remember that case up in Minnesota a few years ago? The Black Hole?”
“Sure. Seventeen murders and a few old skulls stolen from cemeteries, if I remember correctly. Crazy guy living with a dead man. It’s a classic.”
“Lucas is the guy who broke that down,” she said.
“No kiddin’.” He looked at Lucas with raised eyebrows. “Glad to have you, then. I hope to hell we don’t have seventeen, though. That’s not a record I’d want to mess with.”
Of the six recoveries, including the one in the grave still being excavated, the means of death had been determined in five—all gunshot wounds to the head. “It looks to us, from what Tremanty’s uncovered, that Deese used a club to punish and guns to kill. Never straight-up fights. He favored ambushes.”
In the last one, the one that had got him arrested, the victim, Howell Paine, said he had answered the door and had been hit in the face and was on the floor before he even understood what was happening.