If I Should Die_ A Novel of Suspense - Allison Brennan [37]
“I haven’t seen a fly down here.”
“Neither have I. It’s still too cold, but they could have been here at some point if there was a change in temperature. I’m not an entomologist, and this is all coming from a long-ago forensic biology class, but the larvae I saw in her mouth were about three days old. They wouldn’t have gotten to the pupa stage for another five to six days.”
“So you think she could have died three days ago?”
“Five days—three days before I found the body. If she was killed then, it wasn’t here.”
“Because there are no flies.”
“Exactly. The key point is that flies lay eggs within minutes of death,” Lucy continued, “so if she was killed in town, for example, the eggs would have been laid there.”
“So you think she died five days ago?”
“Possible, not likely—not based on her skin tone.”
“Can eggs be laid and then not hatch?”
“Yes.”
“So she could have been killed months ago, and only because it’s spring and the weather is warming the eggs hatched.”
“Exactly.”
“But not last summer, because they would have hatched long ago.”
She smiled. “You should be a scientist.”
He shrugged. “Well, I did go to M.I.T. I might not have been paying too much attention, but some basic knowledge seeped into my thick head.”
There was something about his tone that sounded odd to Lucy, almost regretful. She wondered what had happened back then that had him unusually melancholic. Before she could ask, Sean continued.
“A frozen body wouldn’t have been easy to move.”
“Quite right,” she agreed.
He shined his light slowly around the eerie space while Lucy looked more closely at the ground.
Yesterday, when she’d been down here with Hammond and Getty, the men had walked down each of the two tunnels for several yards. She considered it now, only because Sean was here with her. But Tim had warned them that there were cave-ins, holes, any number of dangers. And she had no idea where the tunnels led, or how to get to the main entrance from here. They could follow the tracks, but the dangers in the mine stopped her from suggesting it. Still the tracks were a clue. There was no evidence that the killer had moved the body up the mine shaft that Sean had fallen down. And the cart was missing. She wasn’t foolhardy—she wasn’t going to risk her life wandering down a deadly labyrinth without solid evidence.
“We should have asked Tim to take us to the entrance of the mine. The killer took the cart to move the body, he couldn’t have gone up the shaft.”
“When we’re done here”—he glanced around—“maybe we should go down the tunnels—”
“No,” she interrupted. “There are too many unknowns. We’ll go down a few feet, but that’s it.”
“What specifically are you looking for?”
“Anything that looks out of place. We should start where I saw the mining cart.”
They walked over to the narrow tunnel, just wide enough for a cart and little more. Its ceiling was low, just an inch taller than Lucy’s five feet seven inches.
Sean squatted, resting his weight on his good leg. “The tracks are freshly scraped, see?”
She saw the rust missing in gouges, possibly from the metal wheels of the cart. “How long ago, do you think?”
“Two days.”
“How about if you didn’t know I saw the cart here just two days ago.”
“I’d say these marks were made not more than a few weeks ago, at most. Seriously, the rust would have started to grow back. Not fully, but enough to lose that sheen.”
She took pictures of the markings and the track itself.
“Hammond followed the track down twenty feet,” she said, “and didn’t find anything. This probably leads to—” Something moved in the corner of her vision.
Lucy turned her head, dipping her flashlight to the packed dirt floor between the metal tracks. She sucked in her breath, stifling a startled cry, her stomach clenching painfully beneath her ribs.
On the ground, several maggots flopped slowly, stymied by the cold and lack of nutrients now that they had fallen outside of the corpse. Finally, solid evidence the killer had moved the body down this tunnel after Lucy’s discovery had been made public.
Her heart raced