Karin Slaughter - A Faint Cold Fear

“Ellen Schaffer,” Jeffrey provided. “She was jogging toward the woods. Crossed the bridge and saw the body.”

“When did she find it?”

“About an hour ago. She called it in on her cell phone.”

“She jogs with her phone?” Sara asked, wondering why she was surprised. People could not go to the bathroom anymore without taking their phones in case they got bored.

Jeffrey said, “I want to try to talk to her again after you examine the body. She was too upset before. Maybe Brad will help calm her down.”

“Did she know the victim?”

“Doesn’t look like it,” he said. “She was probably just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Most witnesses suffered from this same sort of bad luck, seeing something in a few moments that stayed with them for the rest of their lives. Fortunately, from what Sara could see of the body in the center of the riverbed, the girl had gotten off lightly.

“Here,” Jeffrey said, taking Sara’s arm as they approached the bank. The land was hilly, with a downward slope toward the river. A path had been worn into the ground by rain falloff, but the silt was porous and loose.

Sara judged that the bed was at least forty feet wide at this spot, but Jeffrey would have someone measure that later. The ground was parched beneath their feet, and she could feel grit and clay working their way into her tennis shoes as they kicked up dust walking toward the body. Twelve years ago they would have been up to their necks in water by now.

Sara stopped halfway to the scene, looking up at the bridge. The design was a simple concrete beam with a low railing. A ledge jutted out a couple of inches from the bottom, and between this and the railing, someone had spray-painted in black letters DIE NIGGER and a large swastika.

Sara got a sour taste in her mouth. She said derisively, “Well, that’s nice.”

“Ain’t it, though,” Jeffrey replied, just as disgusted as she was. “It’s all over campus.”

“When did it start?” Sara asked. The graffiti looked faded, probably a couple of weeks old.

“Who knows?” Jeffrey said. “The college hasn’t even acknowledged it.”

“If they acknowledged it, they’d have to do something about it,” Sara pointed out, looking over her shoulder for Tessa. “Do you know who’s doing it?”

“Students,” he said, giving the word a nasty spin as he resumed walking. “Probably a bunch of idiot Yankees who think it’s funny coming down south to play hicks and crackers.”

“I hate amateur racists,” Sara mumbled, putting on a smile as they approached Matt Hogan and Frank Wallace.

“Afternoon, Sara,” Matt said. He held an instant camera in one hand and several Polaroids in the other.

Frank, Jeffrey’s second in command, told her, “We just finished the pictures.”

“Thanks,” Sara told them, snapping on the latex gloves.

The victim was lying directly under the bridge, facedown on the ground. His arms were splayed out to the side and his pants and underwear were bunched up around his ankles. Judging from his size and the lack of hair on his smooth back and buttocks, he was a young man, probably in his twenties. His blond hair was long to the collar and parted on the back of his head. He could have been sleeping but for the splattering of blood and tissue coming out of his anus.

“Ah,” she said, understanding Jeffrey’s concern.

As a formality Sara knelt down and pressed her stethoscope to the dead boy’s back. She could feel and hear his ribs move under her hand. There was no heartbeat.

Sara looped the stethoscope around her neck and examined the body, calling out her findings. “There’s no sign of the kind of trauma you’d expect with forcible sodomy. No bruises, no lacerations.” She glanced up at his hands and wrists. His left arm was turned awkwardly, and she could see a nasty pink scar running up the forearm. From the look of it, the injury had happened within the last four to six months. “He wasn’t tied up.”

The young man was wearing a dark green T-shirt, which Sara lifted to check for further signs of damage. A long scrape was at the base of his spine, the skin broken, but not enough to bleed.

“What is it?” Jeffrey asked.

Sara did not answer, though something about the scrape seemed odd to her.

She picked up the boy’s right leg to move it aside but stopped when the foot did not come with it. Sara slid her hand under the pant leg, feeling for the bones of the ankle, then the tibia and fibula; it was like squeezing a balloon filled with oatmeal. She checked the other leg, finding the same consistency. The bones were not just broken, they were pulverized.

A set of car doors slammed, and Sara heard Jeffrey whisper, “Shit,” under his breath.

Seconds later Chuck Gaines walked down the bank, the shirt of his tan security uniform stretched tight across his chest as he tried to navigate the slope. Sara had known Chuck since elementary school, where he had teased her mercilessly about everything from her height to her good grades to her red hair, and she was just as happy seeing him now as she had been on the playground those many years ago.

Lena Adams stood beside Chuck wearing an identical uniform that was at least two sizes too big for her small frame. A belt kept the pants up, and, with her aviator sunglasses and hair tucked under a wide-brimmed baseball cap, she looked like a little boy playing dress-up in his father’s clothes, especially when she lost her footing on the bank and slid the rest of the way down on her bottom.

Frank moved to help her, but Jeffrey stopped him with a look of warning. Lena had been a detective—one of them—up until seven months ago. Jeffrey had not forgiven Lena for leaving, and he was bound and determined to make sure no one else under his command did either.

“Damn,” Chuck said, taking the last few steps at a jog. There was a light sheen of sweat over his lip despite the cool day, and his face was red from the effort of walking down the bank. Chuck was extremely muscular, but there was something unhealthy about him. He was always perspiring, and a thin layer of fat made his skin look tight and bloated. His face was round and moonish, his eyes a bit too wide. Sara did not know if this was from steroids or poor weight training, but he looked like a heart attack waiting to happen.

Chuck gave Sara a flirty wink, saying, “Hey, Red,” before jutting out his meaty hand toward Jeffrey. “How they hanging, Chief?”

“Chuck,” Jeffrey said, reluctantly shaking his hand. He gave Lena a cursory glance, then turned back to the scene. “This was called in about an hour ago. Sara just got here.”

Sara said, “Hey, Lena.”

Lena gave a slight nod, but Sara could not read her expression behind the dark sunglasses. Jeffrey’s disapproval of this exchange was obvious, and if they had been alone, Sara would have told him what he could do with it.

Chuck clapped his hands together, as if to assert his authority. “Whatcha got here, Doc?”

“Probably a suicide,” Sara answered, trying to remember how many times she had asked Chuck not to call her “Doc.” Probably not nearly as many times as she had asked him not to call her “Red.”

“That so?” Chuck asked, craning his neck. “Don’t it look to you like he’s been fiddled with?” Chuck indicated the lower half of the body. “Looks like it to me.”

Sara sat back on her heels, not answering. She glanced at Lena again, wondering how she was holding up. Lena had lost her sister a year ago this month, then gone through hell during the investigation. Even though Sara could think of a lot of things she did not like about Lena Adams, she would not wish Chuck Gaines on anyone.

Chuck seemed to realize no one was paying attention to him. He clapped his hands together again, ordering, “Adams, check the periphery. See if you can sniff up anything.”