Douglas Preston - Crimson Shore

He put down the heavy hod and moved over to investigate, his waders making an unholy noise with each step. It didn’t take long for Doyle to realize he was looking at a body, lodged in the muck, and a few more steps brought him up to it. It was a naked man, lying facedown, legs and arms splayed out, face and lower portion of the body buried several inches in the mud. The back of the head was partially bald, with a big shiny spot in the center of a ring of salt-encrusted hair. A tiny green crab, sensing motion, scuttled across from one hair patch to the other and hid cowering in the comb-over.

Boyle had seen plenty of bodies drowned and washed up, and this looked like most of them did, even down to the holes piercing the flesh here and there where ravenous sea life — crabs, fish, lobsters — had begun to feast.

He stood there for a time, wondering if he knew who this person was. He couldn’t recall the bald spot offhand, but a lot of people had bald spots, and without clothes he just couldn’t come up with a possibility. Of course he would have to call the police, but curiosity got the better of him. He still had the rake in hand, so he bent over the corpse and slid the rake into the muck under the belly. With his other hand clutching the corpse’s upper arm, he gave a pull. The body broke free of the grasping muck and flopped over with a hideous sucking-popping sound, the stiff arm smacking down hard into the mud.

Impossible to see anything; the face and torso were completely covered with black mud. Now what? He needed to rinse the mud off the face. Moving around the body, he waded into the shallows of the stream channel, cupped his hands, and began splashing water on the body. The mud ran off quickly, the stark white flesh exposed in rivulets and then sheets.

Boyle stopped, frozen. The face was pretty much eaten off — eyes, lips, nose — not so uncommon with a body immersed in salt water, as he knew. But what had stopped him was not the face, but the man’s torso. He stared at it, trying to make sense of it. What he had thought at first were crude tattoos turned out to be something quite different.

Benjamin Franklin Boyle set down the clam rake, fished in his pocket under the hip waders, and removed his cell phone. He dialed in the number of the Exmouth Police Department. When the dispatcher answered he said, “Doris? This is Ben Boyle, down in the mudflats. There’s a body here, nobody local, looks like it washed out of the marshes. A real artist went to work on it. No, I can’t describe it, you’ll just have to see for yourself.” He explained his location in more detail, and then hung up and slid the phone back into his pocket.

His brow wrinkling, Boyle considered what to do now. Even if the cops left immediately, they wouldn’t get here for at least twenty minutes. There was still time to fill up his hod.

He thumped on the mud with his foot, saw where the little squirts were thickest, and began digging a line through them, building up a rhythm: two steps, sink, turn over, pluck, toss, and repeat.

Bradley Gavin, up to his thighs in muck, adjusted the last of the light stands and plugged the cord into the generator. With some effort he extracted his waders from the mud and stepped back onto the temporary boardwalk that ringed the site.

He’d spent the last hour hauling down planks of lumber, laying them out to the scene of the crime, wheeling out the generator, setting up the lights, taping the perimeter, and following the instructions of the Scene of Crime Officer, a big man named Malaga, who had come all the way from Lawrence with a Crime Scene Investigator and a photographer. Those three gentlemen were now waiting at the edge of the marsh for everything to be set up so they could tippy-toe out and do their work without getting muddy.

“Check the fuel gauge on that generator,” said the chief, standing on the boards in shiny new waders that had not yet seen a speck of mud, arms crossed over his chest. The chief had been in a rotten mood ever since Pendergast’s lunchtime visit, and the mood had only grown worse when the body was found. The reason was pretty clear to Gavin: here was something perfectly timed to create actual work, delay his retirement, and possibly compromise the low crime rate he had enjoyed during his tenure as chief. Naturally, the last of his concerns was actually solving the crime.

Gavin shrugged it off. He was used to this. Six more months and it would be over, and with any luck he’d be chief himself.

He checked the gauge. “Still almost full.” He tried not to look over to where the body lay, faceup, left that way by the clammer who had turned him over. The son of a bitch had continued clamming around the body, totally screwing up anything that might have been left there. The SOCO, Malaga, was going to have a fit when he saw that.

“All right,” said Mourdock, interrupting Gavin’s reverie, “looks like we’re set.” He raised his walkie-talkie. “We’re ready for the SOC guys.”

Breathing hard, Gavin tried to scrape the excess mud off his waders with a stick.

“Hey, Gavin, don’t let the mud get on the boardwalk.”

Gavin moved to one side and kept scraping, flicking the mud off into the darkness. A chill evening had settled on the marshes, a clammy mist collecting low above the ground, adding a white pall to the scene. It looked more like some horror movie set than a real crime scene.

He heard voices and saw lights bobbing through the mist. A moment later a tall, dour-looking man walked up: Malaga. He had a shaved and remarkably polished head atop a massive neck covered with black hairs, giving him the look of a bull. A young Asian man followed him — the crime scene investigator — and behind him, grunting and shuffling, an obese man draped with camera equipment.

Malaga parked himself at the edge of the scene and spoke in a deep, melodious voice. “Thank you, Chief Mourdock.” He waved the photographer forward, who was at least a professional, taking photographs from every angle, kneeling down low, stretching up high, the silent flashes going off every few seconds as he moved about with surprising dexterity. Gavin tried to control his deep shock and maintain a professional, disinterested expression on his face. He had never actually been at the scene of a homicide before. As he glanced again at the body, splayed on its back, with those symbols carved brutally into its chest, he felt another wave of surprise and horror. He wondered who could have done such a thing, and why. It made no sense to him; no sense at all. What could possibly be the motivation for such an act? He felt anger, too — anger that his hometown had been violated by a crime like this.

As Malaga worked the crime scene, from time to time he would murmur a suggestion to the photographer, who in turn took more photos. At one point he mounted his camera on a pole and held it over the corpse, photographing almost straight down.

“All good,” said the photographer at last, stepping back.

And now the CSI guy crept into the scene, his hands in latex, wearing booties and white coveralls. He laid down a satchel and removed several rolled-up felt holders, which contained a variety of things — test tubes, tweezers, small ziplock bags, pins, labels, little flags on wires, Q-tips, and a number of spray bottles of chemicals. He bent over the body, picking off hair and fibers, spritzing this and swabbing that. He scraped under the nails and taped plastic bags over the hands, and he examined the carved symbols with a penlight, picking things out and wiping Q-tips here and there, sealing them in test tubes.

All was silent. Even Malaga had nothing to say, no suggestions to offer. The last thing the CSI man did was take the dead man’s fingerprints with an electronic pad. And then he was done; he packed everything up in the satchel and retreated in as cat-like a fashion as he’d arrived.