And that was when the sunshine jumped off something in front of her. Stepping forward and bending, she saw a shiny disc apparently dislodged from the leaves by her crashing, ill-cut branch.
It sat balanced against the limb now, as if placed there. Nothing, really. Just a metal jar lid, made of a common alloy of some type, gold hued, the kind with the red rubber gasket built within the threaded circumference.
For pickling. Preserving. Storing over time.
Lost in the sharp oak leaves; found by stupidity.
She got down on her hands and knees and hovered over it like an entomologist over a bug. She stabbed her hair back behind her ears. The dry oak leaves bit into her knees and forearms. The metal was not oxidized. The rubber was not cracked.
Seeing this object sent a wild little shiver up her back because the best feeling in the world to Merci was finding evidence she could use. Because it was always evidence of more than just a crime. It was evidence of herself, too. It let her know she was good, lucky and prepared. It showed that she was not so stupid after all.
She went to her coat and got out a paper bag. She knelt and pushed in the lid with her pen.
She worked out concentrically from the log, bag in hand, kicking through the prickly detritus and soil and stiff roots.
Ants. Acorns. A thin layer of mulch. Hornets buzzed nearby and the sun was low enough to shine through the oak branches and paint the ground with spots of light and shadow. She kept waiting for her toe to hit something hard but hollow, for a ray of sunlight to bounce off glass and into her eyes.
She didn’t find the jar the lid fit and she hadn’t expected to. You could lose a lid in the leaves at night, under pressure, in a hurry. Not a whole jar. But what, exactly, in the hell would you be doing with it in the first place? In the woods? While a beautiful young woman dangled dead (and naked?) in the tree and her blood flooded downhill like something released from a dam?
She had imagined Janet Kane’s throat laid open ear-to-ear when Hess had told her what field dressing was. It sickened her a little and made her angry. It frightened her too, to be so close to where he had been. Where he had done what he did. Because she was the kind of person — she was just thinking generally of her appearance now — that he would truss up and hang from a branch just like he did to Janet Kane. If he could.
One of the many advantages, she thought, of a nine millimeter at your side and a two-shot .40 cal derringer and fake Italian stiletto in your purse. As long as you have the nerve and skill to use them.
You could learn those things — the skill more easily than the nerve — and she had.
Still, she would slide into her car seat like any other person...
She wouldn’t look in the seat behind her, nor into the space behind her seat. She wouldn’t have her hand near the butt of the H&K — in fact, she’d probably be holding the keys in her right hand. Check handedness for Kane and Jillson. She would already have unslung the purse and set it on the passenger seat. So the derringer and knife were useless. She might even have lifted her eyes into the rearview for a quick vanity check — not that she was likely to do this, but a lot of women did: she’d seen them. And yes, to be honest, she herself had done it more than once.
Then what? How was he subduing them? Choking? A gun to the skull? Some kind of drug or stun gun?
A cool tingle issued across her scalp as she thought about how easily he had taken them. She stood under the tree now and looked up into the sun-shot branches. She realized that their field dresser might not have had anything to do with a jar lid at all.
But if he was the one who lost it, he wouldn’t have wiped off his fingerprints first, now would he?
Pray for prints.
Praying, Merci Rayborn sawed her heart out for the next ten minutes. Done. It took another twenty to find the Jillson site, get arranged on the tree and make the two cuts — outside cut first — then load the branches into the trunk of her car. She examined the abraded notches with a magnifying glass. She could see the orange and black fibers attached to the broken edges of the bark and to the meatier fiber beneath it. She taped some newspaper over the notches. Gilliam, she thought: I’m bringing you the bacon and you’re going to fry it.
The sun was almost behind the hills and the evening was cool and pink on the water. She stood on the shore of the lagoon and watched the bubbles of the divers mark their slow paths across the bottom. One by one the men surfaced on the far side and struggled through the cattails to the black muddy shore. They waved at her in their absurd gear, shaking their heads, wobbling on their swimfins.
She heard one of their voices carry across the water:
Sorry, Sergeant — all we found was mud!
We mucked up!
Mucking fud all over the place!
And mucking fosquito larvas!
She shouted back: Hey, you tucking fried!
She watched as one of them got pushed into the water by his buddies, then struggled up and dragged another down with him. Their laughing and curses came off the surface at her and she wondered why men could so easily become friends with each other, whereas they distrusted most women while still wanting to fuck them.
I just don’t get you guys. But sometimes it looks like a lot of fun.
She waved again and turned back toward the dirt road. Halfway to her car she saw Mike McNally trudging toward her with a bag in his hand. His handlers were around him with their dogs dragging tongues in the dust. For a mean-spirited moment she hoped that McNally hadn’t found anything useful so she wouldn’t have to thank him for it or seem impressed. Then she hoped he’d found the Purse Snatcher’s severed penis and testicles and had collected them in his Food for Less bag.
She fell in with them because it was clear this army of tired men and panting dogs was not going to come to an easy stop even though she outranked them all but McNally, who was her level. He was tall and square jawed and had the plain good looks of a surfer without the simpleton cool.
“Same as last time,” he said.
“We had to check,” she said.
“Three terminuses — the two sites and the place on the road where they lost the scent. It’s where his car was. Has to be.”
She knew the Purse Snatcher wasn’t going to this much trouble to leave his kills in shallow graves. It didn’t take Hess to convince her of that.
“Wish they could track a car scent on command.”
She wasn’t trying to be hurtful, but such was the tone of Merci Rayborn’s voice, the history of her attempts at light comedy.
She saw the anger in his face. “They can. But it’s too goddamned dusty for that here.”
Last year McNally testified that one of his dogs had followed the trail of a kid who was picked up in a park, transported in a car to another site, molested, then let go. His dog had followed the in-car part of the trail for two and a half miles. As it turned out the dog had been exactly on trail, but the defense attorney had sunk McNally in court because he couldn’t explain exactly how the dog had done it. They’d canned the perv anyway, but McNally had been embarrassed and bitter. He wasn’t good on the stand because Mike wasn’t a people person, he was a dog person.
A month later a judge had thrown out evidence that McNally had gotten with a “scent box” that one of his teachers invented. They used the box to pull a suspect’s scent from a shirt that had been in a refrigerator for three years. The dog had trailed the scent straight to their murder suspect, and the jury had bought this one — explanation or not. But this time, it was the judge who’d overturned McNally and his dogs.