Lisa Gardner: Say Goodbye

Everyone worked hard, and next thing you knew, a sprawling chaos of wreckage had been reduced into a neat computer model that almost made sense out of the vagaries of fate. It was enough to make any anal-retentive control freak happy, and Kimberly was guilty on both counts. She loved being rod man, though this time out, she’d had to content herself with recording duties instead.

The command center came into view. Kimberly spotted a cluster of white shirts and navy blue suits-the NTSB officials, poring over a huge blueprint of the original 727; then a pool of Windex blue-half a dozen crime scene techs, still wearing their hazmat gear; and finally, a pinprick of burnished copper. Rachel Childs, redhead, ERT senior team leader, and rabid perfectionist.

Kimberly and Harold ducked beneath the crime scene tape.

Harold whispered, “Good luck.”

Supervisory Special Agent Childs had set out to become a famous Chicago architect. At the last minute, she’d decided to join the FBI instead. She ended up assisting one of Chicago’s finest evidence gurus, and that was that, Rachel had found her calling in life. Her attention to detail, ability to sketch to scale, and obsession with paperwork had proven much more valuable to evidence documentation than it had to the further beautification of Chicago’s skyline.

That had been fifteen years ago, and she’d never looked back. At five foot nothing, one hundred and four pounds, she was one small, dedicated, hell-on-wheels Nancy Drew. Who was about to commit her first murder.

“How the hell could you have missed something as major as a human leg ?” she roared.

She, Kimberly, and Harold had stepped away from the gathered masses to the relative shelter of a noisy generator. Rachel only dressed down her team members in private. Her team was her family. She could know they were fuckups. She could tell them they were fuckups. It was no one’s business, however, but their own.

“Well, the leg’s in a bush,” Harold ventured finally. “Beneath a tree. It’s not that easy to see.”

“It’s February. Leaves are long gone. It should’ve been visible.”

“It’s in a grove of pine,” Kimberly said. “Harold led me straight to it. I still couldn’t see anything until he pointed it out. Frankly, I’m impressed he saw it at all.”

Harold shot her a grateful look. Kimberly shrugged. He’d been right, Rachel wouldn’t go too hard on Kimberly. She might as well spread the magic around.

“Crap,” Rachel grumbled. “Day three, we should be wrapping up this mess, not restarting our efforts. Of all the stupid, amateurish…”

“It happens. Oklahoma City, the Nashville crash. These big scenes, it’s amazing we can wrap our arms around them at all.” Kimberly again.

“Still…”

“We adjust the perimeter. We refocus our search on the western side. It’ll cost us another day, but with any luck, one random leg is all we missed.”

Now, however, Rachel’s frown had deepened. “Wait a minute, you’re sure it’s a human leg?”

“I’ve seen legs before,” Harold said.

“Me, too,” Kimberly agreed.

But Rachel was suddenly holding her temples. “Ah crap! We’re not missing any body parts! We recovered three sets of human remains from the intact cockpit just this morning. And since I oversaw the effort, I know for a fact we had all six legs.”

Harold looked at both of them. “Told you we had a problem.”

They took a camera, flashlights, gloves, a rake, and a tarp. A mini evidence kit. Rachel wanted to see the “leg” for herself. Maybe they’d get lucky-it would turn out to be a scrap of fabric, or the torn arm from a life-size dummy, or better yet, the back hock of a deer some hunter had dressed up in clothing just to be funny. In Georgia, stranger things had happened.

With only two hours of daylight left, they moved quickly but efficiently through the copse of trees.

They combed the ground first to make sure they didn’t step on anything obvious. Then, adjusting slightly, Harold and Kimberly caught the item in the combined beams of their flashlights, illuminating it within the shadows of the overgrown bushes. Rachel knocked out half a dozen digital photos. Next came the tape measure and compass, recording the approximate size of the bush, relationship to the nearest fixed point, distance from their current perimeter.

Finally, when they had documented everything but the hoot of a barn owl and the way the wind tickled the backs of their necks, like a shiver waiting to slide beneath their Tyvek coveralls, Harold reached up and carefully eased the item onto the cradling teeth of his rake. Rachel quickly unfolded the tarp. Harold lowered his find into the middle of a sea of blue plastic. They studied it.

“Crap,” Rachel said.

It was definitely a leg, sheared off above the knee with the top of the femur bone glinting white against the blue tarp. From the size of it, probably male, clad in blue denim.

“You’re sure all three remains were intact?” Kimberly asked. She hadn’t gotten to do any evidence collection this time out. She liked to think it didn’t irk her, but it did. Especially now, when it seemed something obvious had been overlooked. “I mean, the cockpit was badly burned, the condition of the bodies couldn’t have been great.”

“Actually, the cockpit had separated from the main fuselage. It was scorched, but not annihilated; didn’t get splashed with enough jet fuel to burn that hot.”

“It’s not a pilot,” Harold said. “Pilots don’t wear blue jeans.”

“Farmer? Hired hand?” Kimberly asked. “Maybe when the plane hit the tractor…?” But she knew she was wrong the minute she said it. The farmer in question had already come by to study the wreckage and mourn his equipment. If he’d been missing a hired hand, they would’ve heard about it by now.

“I don’t get it.” Rachel was backing up, studying the woods around them. “We’re in the trees where the plane first hit. Look there.” She pointed at the sharp white tips of shattered trees just twenty feet south of them. “First impact with the wingtip. The right wing is yanked down, the plane bobbles, but the pilot corrects. In fact, he overcorrects because one hundred yards over there”-she swiveled, pointing at a target too far away to be seen-“we have the deep gouge in the earth at the edges of the farmer’s field from the left wingtip coming down, digging in…”

“Sending it into the fatal spin,” Kimberly finished for her. “Meaning, at this moment, in this place…”

“Plane shouldn’t be spinning yet, nor crew members’ legs falling out of the air. Think about it: We’re a mile from the cockpit. Even if the damn plane blew up-which we know it didn’t-how’d we get a leg clear back here?”

Harold was walking a little circle, studying the ground. So Kimberly did the next logical thing: She moved back, angled up her head, and studied the trees.

As luck would have it, she found it first. Just fifteen feet away, nearly eye level, so she was proud of the fact that she didn’t scream. The smell had warned her-rusty, pungent. Then she spotted the first bit of fluorescent orange. Then another, and another. Until finally…

The head was gone. So was the left arm and leg, leaving behind a strange, hunched-over shape, still dangling from the limbs of a tree.

“I don’t think we’re going home tomorrow,” Kimberly said, as Rachel and Harold joined her.

“A hunter?” Rachel asked incredulously. “But deer season ended months ago…”

“Deer season ended beginning of January,” Harold supplied helpfully. “But small game goes until the end of February. Then there are feral boars, bears, alligators. Hey, it’s Georgia. You can always shoot something.”