Infinity Beach - Jack McDevitt [77]
They descended to treetop level and moved in directly over the roof. The display remained green.
The utility building showed nothing.
She circled the immediate area, keying off the villa. Most of the old Tripley property was new-growth forest and heavy underbrush. Its fences were down, and a group of spruce trees on the east side looked dead.
Next she extended the search several kilometers west, flying a Crosshatch pattern, scanning as far as the ridge that had protected the town on the night of the explosion. She checked along the summit, surveyed the far slope and the woods beyond until the ground got rocky.
Using the map, she came back and flew over the town. The center of Severin Village was in the water. She went down until the treads got wet. The display remained green.
“You didn’t really think the killer would hide her near city hall, did you?” asked Solly.
“If he was a maniac,” she said, “who knows what he might have done?”
A killer would have been likely to throw the body into the lake, which had been much smaller then; or into the river. Or he might have buried her north of town, in ground that was now at the bottom of Remorse. In either case, she’d still be in the water. So Kim flew systematically over the lake surface, marking off squares until, after an hour and a half, they’d covered it all.
That eliminated, Kim thought, the most likely places.
She took them east along the southern shoreline. Almost immediately the screen began to blink. “Got something,” said Solly. The rate varied back and forth as she jockeyed through the sky.
Down there.
Just woods. “I see an iron fence,” said Kim.
“And some headstones.” They were overgrown by thick brush, hidden by trees.
And a pair of wrought iron gates.
“Cemetery,” said Solly. He got a fix on the hit so they wouldn’t lose it when they moved out of the scanner’s range.
Kim set down in a glade about a hundred meters away. There was a short argument about who would go and who stay. “It’s my party,” she insisted.
Solly shrugged. “Keep talking to me.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said.
She sealed her jacket, climbed down from the flyer, and plunged into the woods. The day was cold and hard and very still. Snow crackled underfoot.
She wasted no time getting lost and had to double back. Solly’s line of sight provided shortest distance to the target, but did not allow for fences, thick shrubbery, creeks, or other obstacles. On her second try she found the gates. An arch was inscribed with the words JOURNEY’S END.
“These people weren’t much for subtlety,” she told Solly.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll explain later.”
“Okay. Are you inside?”
“Yes. Give me a bearing.”
Solly checked the map he’d made and compared it with her position. “To your right, about sixty degrees.”
There were a lot of headstones, and the cemetery was overgrown. She headed off in the indicated direction.
“Good,” said Solly. “Keep straight.”
She glanced at the markers as she went by. Some were two centuries old.
“You got it,” said Solly. “You should be right on top of it.”
She was looking up at a stone angel. “Nothing here except a grave,” she said. “Old one. Husband and wife. Both buried at the beginning of the last century.”
“That’s got to be it. It’s down there.”
She looked at it. Looked at some elms and a couple of mausoleums and more headstones half hidden in the underbrush. “Can’t be,” she said.
“Sure it is. It’s ideal. Nobody’d want to dig it up.”
“But the killer would have had to disturb the original grave. Somebody would have noticed.” Maybe the couple had been buried with their wedding rings. “This is not where you hide a body, Solly. You put it in the woods, or weight it and drop it in the lake.”
She walked back to the flyer and they took off again and resumed the hunt along the southern shore, and then off to the east. They broke out pork slices and apples while the AI executed the search pattern. The afternoon wore on.
By twilight, Solly had given up. “I don’t think