Lisa Gardner - Say Goodbye

“You think she’s his accomplice?” Quincy asked.

“I don’t know,” Kimberly said. “I mean, to hear Ginny talk, Dinchara picked her up and forced her into a life of prostitution. She’s the victim. And yet…She lived on her own in Sandy Springs. Think of the options for running away. Instead, she sticks around for two years, even after she knows he killed her mother and engineered Tommy Mark Evans’s death. The girl is smart enough to target an FBI agent, but not clever enough to run when she had the chance? I don’t buy it. Whatever’s going on, she’s not doing it just because Dinchara told her to. She likes it. The danger, the manipulation, the violence. That girl is seriously warped.”

“Stockholm syndrome,” Quincy said quietly.

“More warped than that,” Kimberly said flatly.

“You don’t like her.”

“She did try to arrange for me to die.”

“But you don’t blame the boy Aaron, who held the gun.”

Kimberly shifted impatiently, angrier at this line of questioning than she knew she should be. “Hey, from the sound of things, he had to live with Dinchara. He was taken younger, endured more.”

“But if he was taken later, endured less? What exactly is the line that separates victim from not victimized enough?”

“Well, that’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?” Kimberly gave her father a look, to let him know the discussion was done. He could debate semantics all he wanted. In her mind Aaron and Ginny were not the same and that was all there was to it.

They got moving again. The sound of the dogs grew louder. They finally crested a small hill to discover the rest of the team gathered at the edge of a clearing. The dogs were working the perimeter, snuffling at bushes, backtracking, pushing ahead, backtracking. Skeeter followed patiently behind, matching them step for step as the dogs yanked his arm front and back, side to side.

“They lost the trail,” Harold reported, coming to stand beside them. “See, the dogs can pick it up right about there, but then they lose it again, hence all the forward and back, forward and back.”

Rachel was looking around the clearing with an expression Kimberly knew well.

“You think this is it,” Kimberly said, a statement, not a question.

“Got the right feel. What’d you think?”

Kimberly inspected the area. They were probably two-thirds of the way up the mountain, in a twenty-by-forty-foot clearing formed in part by a rocky ledge. The back half appeared meadowlike, a grassy field sheltered by a yawning canopy of evergreens. Toward the front, a massive rock jutted out to form a sitting area. On a clear day, the boulders probably offered a decent view, maybe even one that included skippy little Cub Scouts. All in all, a nice place to grab a bite of lunch.

Or dig a shallow grave.

“You bring the surveying equipment?” Kimberly asked Rachel.

“As if I would ever forget. Harold?”

Harold dutifully turned around, revealing a backpack with long orange rods strapped to one side. He handed over his pack, then went to discuss the matter with Skeeter and Sheriff Duffy. Kimberly started laying out supplies as Rainie and Quincy looked on with interest.

“Ever participate in an outdoor recovery?” Kimberly asked them.

They shook their heads. Quincy’s role as a profiler would’ve had him entering the picture after the fact. Rainie might have had a chance as a small-town deputy, but apparently had managed to miss that piece of luck. Kimberly, on the other hand, assisted with at least half a dozen of these exercises a year. Like all her teammates, she’d spent a week training at the outdoor recovery school at the Forensic Anthropology Center at the University of Tennessee, better known as the Body Farm.

“Here’s the drill,” she explained, picking up the first slender rod and holding it up for display. “We’re going to stand shoulder to shoulder, forming a line that stretches from one side of this clearing to the other. We’ll all advance one step, probe the ground, wait for our neighbors to do the same, then advance again as a single unit. If you feel, say, a soft pocket of earth, where the soil has obviously been disturbed, or, perhaps a hard item worth further exploration, you’ll flag that spot.

“When the line search is done, we’ll grid and map the entire area. Then a second team will follow up on the flags, working grid by grid to process the site.”

“How do you follow up on a flag?” Rainie wanted to know.

“You get down on your stomach and dig with a trowel. Each scoop of dirt is placed in a bucket, each filled bucket is carried to a nearby spot, where it will be dumped in a mesh sifter and processed by another team. Their job will be to look for fine bone fragments, projectiles, teeth, etc. It’s amazing how tiny some human bones are, particularly the ones in the fingers. If you’re not sifting, you can pass ’em right by.”

Rainie had a slightly horrified look on her face. “We’re going to sift every bucket of dirt we dig up?”

“That’s protocol.”

Rainie looked around at the clearing. “We’re going to be here for days.”

“Possible,” Kimberly concurred. She shrugged. “Depends how many areas we flag. Clandestine graves inevitably appear as a series of depressions and mounds next to each other. The mound is from the dirt the killer removed to dig the grave; the depression from the grave itself as the body decomposes, causing the fill material to sink. You want to steer away from the base of big trees-the roots make it too hard to dig, even for a homicidal maniac. Finally, you want to keep your eye out for lots of weeds, which seed nicely in the loose soil of freshly turned earth. The tricky part is that old tree falls create the same pattern of mounds and depressions. Rule of thumb is ‘trowel it and see.’”

“Why on your stomach?” Quincy wanted to know. “That sounds awkward. Why not just dig with a spade until you hit something?”

“Because most clandestine graves are shallow. If the body is fully skeletonized, you can do real damage nicking it with a spade. Body recovery follows the same protocol of an archaeological dig-meaning we want to disturb the skeleton the least amount possible while excavating the soil all around it. You’ll see us using brushes, all the stuff from the History Channel. And before we ever move a bone, we’ll document the hell out of the skeleton in situ, photographing, mapping, graphing. You have to, because there’s no way to remove a skeleton as a whole. Instead, when we’re finally ready, we’ll bag it bone by bone to be reassembled later by a forensic anthropologist.”

“You have a lot more patience than I do,” Rainie said.

“Not really.”

Harold was back with Sheriff Duffy and Sal in tow. “Skeeter says his dogs need a break. He’s not sure if they’ve lost the scent, or they’re just getting fatigued, but either way, now would be a good time to rest. He’ll take them off for a bit and we can get going on searching the clearing.”

Duff cleared his throat. “All right, I’ll assemble my men. You’ll tell us what to do?”

“Absolutely.”

Duff headed over to his deputies, who were shaking out their rain gear and downing bottles of water. In five minutes, he had the group assembled and Rachel gave them the official rundown on how to probe for clandestine graves. Then Harold lined them up, the inexperienced volunteers sandwiched between the pros from the ERT. Sal ended up standing beside Kimberly, neither of them speaking, as they prepared for the first step forward.

The storm had finally passed, the rocks steaming up as the afternoon sun broke through the dark clouds. Beneath her rain poncho, Kimberly shifted restlessly, feeling the building heat, the sweaty discomfort of fabric that didn’t breathe. She couldn’t bring herself to look at Sal and was aware of him returning the favor.