Alex Kava Bundle - Alex Kava [488]
It didn’t matter, though. Not now. He’d never be able to use that old quarry again. Never, never, never. The whole area was crawling with cops and reporters. And here he was, stuck in line, like one of the gawkers. This was worse than the idiots who jammed the roads every fall looking at the trees. And they would be starting up soon, within weeks. Long lines winding the byroads, gawking like they’d never seen leaves turn colors before. Stupid, stupid, stupid idiots. But he pretended to be one of them. Just this once. Just so he could see the commotion, scope things out, figure out what was going on.
Finally he could turn off, escaping onto a side road. No one followed. They couldn’t. They wouldn’t miss any of the excitement. He made his way up the winding road, and felt the tension in his back ease. But only a little. He still had things to worry about. Things to take care of. He needed to settle down, calm himself. He couldn’t let the panic return. Couldn’t handle the pain. Not now. Not when he needed to think. That panic, that pain could paralyze him if he let it. Couldn’t let it. Couldn’t let it. That pain, the same pain from when he was a kid, could still come out of nowhere, sharp and intense stabs as if he had swallowed a pack of shingling nails or maybe even a fillet knife.
He needed to stop thinking about it. He needed to get to work. How could he work, thinking about this? How could he function? What would he do? What could he do now that he no longer had a safe dumping ground?
CHAPTER 12
Adam Bonzado looked over the bits and pieces the crime-scene tech named Carl had spread out on a plastic tarp. He had already bagged and labeled some according to where they had been found and what he guessed they might be. From his preliminary once-over Adam could already tell the specimens were from at least two different corpses.
“The dog brought this one,” Carl said, pointing to what looked to be a left foot.
Adam picked it up carefully in double-gloved hands and examined it from all angles. Most of the phalanges were gone. The metatarsals and some of the tarsals were held together by what little tissue remained. Even the calcaneus, the heel bone, appeared to be still attached.
“Have you found the rest of the body?”
“Nope. And I doubt if we will. A couple of the barrels look like they rusted through. Coyotes probably helped themselves. There might be pieces scattered all over this county.”
“How much do you need to identify a person?” Sheriff Henry Watermeier asked, looking over the assortment.
“Depends on a lot of things. This has some tissue left,” Adam said, handing the foot back to Carl, who placed it in a brown paper sack. “We probably have enough for DNA testing. But it won’t matter if we don’t have anything to match it to.”
“So let me see if I can remember how this works,” Watermeier said in a tone that Adam thought already sounded exhausted. “If a person is missing, we couldn’t test for DNA to see if this is that missing person unless we already had something from that person, like hair samples, to match?”
“Exactly. You can do reverse DNA when you’re looking for someone in particular. We did it to identify some of the World Trade Center victims.”
“What do you mean, reverse DNA?”
“Say a person is missing, but we have nothing of his to match our DNA sample to. We could do a DNA test on one or both parents, and in some cases siblings, to see if there are enough hits. It can be a bit complicated, but it does work.”
“So in other words,” Watermeier said, “we may never know whose fucking foot that is.”
“If we find more parts and identify them as belonging to the same person I might be able to piecemeal a profile. You know, narrow it down to male or female. Maybe give you a ballpark age. That way you have something to check against the missing persons lists.”
“You know how many people go missing every year, Bonzado?”
Adam shrugged. “Yeah, okay, so you’re right. We might not ever know whose fucking foot that is.”
Carl brought several more pieces,