Blood Trust - Eric van Lustbader [80]
“Possibly.” Annika stared off to their right.
Naomi followed her gaze, but could find no anomaly. “Who took him here, Annika? Who was driving that boat?”
“I hope you’re not averse to getting your feet wet,” Annika said as she stepped off the platform onto a protruding root, and from there down into the water. The hem of her raincoat caused ripples to expand out from where she stood, knee-deep.
Kicking off her shoes, Naomi grabbed on to the bole of the tree and swung down from the root, which was slippery, skinned now from Annika’s weight, to the water herself. As soon as she was down, Annika picked her way north, up the narrow channel. The bottom was soft and mucky, and mud squelched between Naomi’s toes. The water was surprisingly warm, thick as chowder. What was she stirring up with each footfall? she wondered. Tiny whirlpools of little fish and decayed leaves wove around her ankles, turning the brackish water ruddy. A sudden shadow overhead caused her to duck, and she heard a bird call, as if mocking her.
“Come on!” Annika called from up ahead. “Don’t get lost!” Her voice was oddly flat, echoless, as if they had entered a strange and unknowable place where the natural laws of science didn’t apply.
Naomi moved on, picking up her pace as best she could, but the footing had become unstable, the muck under her feet shifting and sliding as it deepened. Several times she stumbled and had to grab an overhanging branch to keep herself from pitching headlong into the water. She realized that the water was neither cold nor warm, but seemed to be the same temperature as her body.
Up ahead, she could see a flicker of Annika’s raincoat, like the scales of a reptile moving slowly and inexorably toward its goal. Now she used the branches to drag herself forward, relying on her arms rather than her legs for locomotion, as if she were a chimpanzee.
Maneuvering around a small bend to the right, she stopped. Annika was standing with one foot on the low bank. One leg was raised. The raincoat had parted, sliding off the knee, revealing a section of naked thigh. What did or didn’t Annika have under that raincoat? Naomi wondered briefly.
“Closer,” Annika said, beckoning Naomi forward.
When Naomi came up behind her, she saw that Annika had been digging in the muck. She had uncovered something. Stooping down, she cupped her hands and threw water on it. A pale and shining patch shone through as the mud and leaf detritus slid off.
It was part of a hand.
Heart in her throat, Naomi saw again the splatter of blood on the old wooden boards deep beneath the streets of Chinatown, and tears shattered on her cheeks. Annika moved out of the way as she crouched down, unmindful of the water and the mud. Using her bare hands she swept away more of the earth. The body had been buried in the V-shaped gap between two massive tree roots, a hammocky space.
The hand was small, the fingers delicate, so Naomi knew this was a young girl. She dug almost frantically now, tearing a nail, then another, not caring. All she could think of was uncovering the girl’s face, as if she were still alive and, unburied, could be made to breathe again, to live, instead of being yet another victim of these slave traders.
A brow came first, then the heartbreakingly beautiful swell of a cheekbone. She gasped to see the nose fractured, bruised and swollen to almost twice its size. At this point, the lack of decomposition brought home to her that the girl had been killed very recently, possibly within the last forty-eight hours, though only a coroner could tell for certain.
This was all on the right side of the face. As she brushed clean the left side, her fingertips felt for the telltale fracture, this one of the left eye socket. And there it was, just as it had been with Billy and the two men in Twilight.
“Same MO, same perp,” she murmured to herself.
“That’s right,” Annika said from right behind her.
Then an arm encircled her throat, the pad of a thumb pressed against the bone just below her left eye.
And she heard Annika’s voice