All this at a time when Mike was trying to get more budget for the scent dogs — a program he administered above and beyond his usual duties on vice. Two high-profile convictions would have helped, but he got neither.
She thought he might be over it, but she should have known that McNally tended not to get over things very quickly, if at all. He was stubborn and sensitive at the same time, possessed of an ego both huge and brittle, something Merci had decided was common to the male sex. He was a second-generation deputy, too, and Merci wondered how much of Mike’s energy came from trying to outdo his father.
“Thanks, Mike.”
“Welcome, Sergeant.”
“What’s in the bag?”
Without breaking stride he opened the bag and held it down. A little brown-and-white banded snake lay on the bottom, vibrating with McNally’s footsteps.
“For Danny.”
“He’ll love it, Mike.”
“He’ll probably be scared of it.”
Danny was McNally’s five-year-old. He was moody and glum and intensely serious about all things. She’d always secretly liked him. Liked him the same way you’d like an exquisite little pet, maybe, or a tremendously valuable classic automobile. Liking him wasn’t the problem. But how did you show it? How did you touch something like that, so small and fragile and utterly priceless? What did you say to it?
The kid had actively reviled her, which she understood, but it made things kind of tough. Not my mother, not my mother, you’re not my mother! Yeah, yeah, yeah.
A few months later she had stopped sleeping with Mike but wouldn’t have minded seeing him some more. Just slow things down, unstick a little. He said all or nothing. The mandate was his and she’d known it was coming. She’d slept with a man out of a sense of obligation before, but that was back in college when the world was simpler and less permanent. She’d lost a friend and gained nothing.
Mike had acted caustic and amused. Some angry crap about her being a control freak, afraid to let go. It really didn’t surprise her — that was his way. Then she heard the dyke quip one day in the cafeteria and it hurt her in a place she never knew was vulnerable. It had flabbergasted her to be thought of in that way. It made her wonder about men, too, how they’d indulge an instinct for cruelty they should have outgrown in high school.
So she had sued for a truce, but with no definite result. She hadn’t heard any fresh talk about herself for a while, so maybe that was her answer. He’d talked to her about it just once, something about the humiliation of being dropped like a hot match in front of all the people he worked with, something about keeping him in the loop, something about treating people the same way you’d want them to treat you. Incredibly, something about taking little Danny’s heart. It was a bad fight. It was one of those arguments that blew truth into little bits, then scattered it all over the place like a round of exploding ammunition. When you were done, there was nothing illuminated or resolved, no clarity, just a lot of shrapnel stuck in your face.
Now Kemp. She’d either survive Kemp or she wouldn’t. She put it out of her mind.
“What’s in your bag?” he asked.
She showed him the lid and explained how she found it. He nodded but said nothing.
Merci turned to behold Daisy, a 100-pound female, her favorite. The heavy thing waddled along with her teammates, ears and tongue out, jowls loose, saliva dangling. Merci knew better than to try to touch her right now — the hounds were always temperamental, more so when they were tired.
Mike’s cohorts stopped to look at a hawk eating a rabbit atop a huge sycamore.
“I hear Hess is your new partner.”
“Until I get a permanent one.”
“He was my favorite, of the old farts. Phil Kemp didn’t deserve you.”
“So far, so good.”
“You’ve got in almost eight full hours together.”
“About that.”
“He’ll try to get you between the sheets, you know. He was married something like four times.”
She looked at his face and saw his smile. Hard with him to tell an authentic one from a mean one. But one of the things she liked about McNally was that he walked fast like she did, so you didn’t have to keep adjusting your speed.
“I’ll just turn down his pacemaker,” she said.
“Yeah, pull the plug on him if he doesn’t mind himself.”
She nodded, feeling bad about dissing Hess behind his back, uncertain how far she should take a joke with Mike NcNally anyway. Because if he wanted to let it out that Merci was talking about her new partner’s pacemaker, that would make things tough with Hess. On the other hand, a joke is just a joke, right? Hess was a big boy, she thought; she just wasn’t sure if Mike was.
McNally looked at her, then away. “What do you think about those other women filing suit? Kemp’s got it coming from four directions now.”
“Four?”
“Well, Stratmeyer in records was talking to some reporters this morning. What I heard was, she’s accused Kemp of raping her. At his house.”
“Oh, Christ, I hadn’t heard that.”
“Ugly stuff. I never had Kemp measured as that big an asshole.”
Merci kept up her brisk pace beside McNally. She shook her head and felt that tightness in her chest. She willed away the tightness, willed away thoughts of Kemp and Stratmeyer.
Mike seemed to know what she was doing, because he changed the topic completely.
“So, he’s bled at least two women out here. Then what? How come there’s nothing else left of them?”
“We think the animals have... cleaned up.”
“Maybe they’re still alive.”
“If Gilliam ever finishes the saturation test, we’ll have a better idea if that’s even possible.”
“Well, they’re not around here anywhere, except for those three points and the lines in between. What about the lagoon?”
“The dive team is finishing up. We won’t find them in the lagoon.”
They continued down the dusty road. She could hear the others catching up.
“We should talk about things sometime, Merci.”
“Can’t we just not?”
“Fine. Hey, why knock my head against your wall?”
“Please stop. It doesn’t help either of us.”
“Okay. Sure. I’ll just see you around.”
He sped up. Merci stepped to the side of the dirt road and let the handlers and their panting bloodhounds shuffle past.
Ten
“First off, the canning jar lid didn’t hold any prints. We’ve got smudges consistent with fingers inside rubber or latex gloves, but no prints.”
It was early Thursday morning, two days after Hess had found the Slim Jim marks on the car windows. He stood in the crime lab and felt the tips of his fingers burning. Next to him was Merci Rayborn, with her hair back in a ponytail and a tight set of lines at each side of her mouth.
James Gilliam, the director of Forensic Services, looked at her, then at Hess. To Hess he looked uncustomarily perplexed.
“Now, based on the stain size and the perc rates I can tell you that at least two liters of blood went onto that ground. I can’t tell you how much ran off. An adult human female contains just over four liters. So the chances are excellent that whoever lost this blood is dead. Given the circumstances, the chances are overwhelmingly good. I don’t think our victim was in the presence of a lifesaver, a do-gooder or an ER nurse.”
They were looking down at a bench on which sat a collection of plastic pet litter boxes and plastic food containers filled with earth. Gilliam had aerated the boxes with a narrow-bit drill to replicate natural porosity before adding the soil. The food containers had the original dump site earth, collected by the CSIs. He had gotten plenty of older, soon-to-be-discarded blood units from the UCI Medical Center to see what the blood would do in the dirt.