They walked in slowly, checking the trail for any discarded items that might have been left by the killer, finding only three scattered cigarette butts, a chewing gum wrapper, and a number of shoe impressions. Close to where the tire tracks ended they found an empty book of matches advertising a topless bar in Tampa. Harry made a note of the name. All in all the items they found could have been dropped by anyone too lazy to stick them in a pocket to discard later. But every item had to be checked, so they took their time, placing small orange marking flags next to each one. This was only preliminary, an effort to save them time. The crime scene unit would do a far more thorough job; they would literally sweep the area around each flag that Harry had left and comb the entire area in much greater depth, carefully looking for hair, clothing fibers, anything that might be linked to the crime. Still, Harry gave the trail a reasonably thorough search. He didn’t want to wait several hours for the CSI unit to give him an obvious clue.
It took them twenty minutes to reach the cypress swamp where the land and vegetation suddenly changed. There was a long, narrow pool at the swamp’s center, dotted with water lilies, and it forced the hiking trail, which now turned into black, loamy earth, to veer to the left. A green heron strutted along the bank of the pond hunting frogs, its sharp dagger beak and snakelike neck poised to strike. Harry saw no sign of the gator he had been warned about. Thirty yards ahead, where the trail skirted the pond, he could see two uniformed deputies standing guard over something unseen. He motioned Vicky to his side of the trail, away from the edge of the pond.
“Don’t wanna use me as gator bait, huh?” she said.
“I’ll wait for gator season,” Harry shot back.
“That’s my new partner. Just a sweet, sensitive guy.”
“Always,” Harry said.
When they reached the deputies they could just make out one leg of the body. It extended out past a rotting cypress stump located ten feet off the trail.
The deputies were a Mutt and Jeff combination, one tall and slender, the other short and beefy. Harry introduced himself. Vicky did the same, as Harry studied the ground leading to the body. It was soft and spongy and there were footprints leading in and out. He counted four or five sets, some appeared to be the same size, making the exact number hard to determine on first glance. He turned back to the deputies.
“How many of you went in there?” he asked Jeff, who seemed to have the sharper eyes of the pair.
“Let’s see,” Jeff said, counting mentally. “We went in.” He nodded toward the other deputy. “So did Morgan, the deputy you met coming in. And so did the park ranger. He was first. He went straight in after the bird watcher told him there was a body out here. Then he called us.”
“What about the bird watcher?” Harry asked. “Do you know if she went in?”
“When Morgan questioned her, she told him she didn’t. Just saw the leg stickin’ out and went for the ranger. But she’s still up at the preserve office with another deputy if you want to talk to her.”
“The deputy at the office, did he go in?”
Both deputies shook their heads. “He came later-after us; after the crime scene was set up. He was sent to guard the witness; never got out here at all.”
Harry nodded. “Okay, good work. Now, I’d like one of you to call the office and make sure our witness stays put. I’m also gonna need to get the shoe sizes of everyone who went in to the body, and later, when the crime scene techs gets here, I’m going to want casts and photographs of the soles of everyone’s shoes. We’ll have to eliminate all of you from any prints the perp might have left. Also, I need to know if anyone touched the body.”
This time it was Mutt, shaking his head. “None of us,” he said. “Morgan was the first one here and he made sure no one did. The park ranger said he felt her wrist for a pulse. I don’t know why he bothered. Her throat’s cut back almost to her spine. Same as O.J.’s wife.” Mutt shrugged, suddenly embarrassed by the comparison he had just made; then added: “At least that’s what they said at Simpson’s trial.”
Vicky looked away and rolled her eyes. “Morgan told us she’s wearing a mask. Did anybody touch it?” she asked, turning back to the two deputies.
“Not after we got here,” Jeff said, taking over again. “Morgan got here first and made sure nobody touched anything. I can’t swear about the ranger, but he says he only touched her wrist.”
“Okay,” Harry said. “We’re going in to check the body, but we’ll circle wide to avoid adding our footprints to the mix.”
“Watch where you step,” Jeff warned. “There’s a few cottonmouths around these swamps.”
Vicky wrinkled up her nose and gave a small shudder. “Snakes, alligators, and a dead woman in a Mardi Gras mask-I’m really starting to love this case.”
Harry studied her for several moments. The toughness was well established behind her eyes, and that charnel house humor was a definite plus, a necessary survival tool for a cop working homicide. Yeah, he thought, she’ll do just fine. He gave her an amused smile. “Tomorrow we get vampires,” he said.
“I’ve got to wait until tomorrow?”
“They only show themselves on Thursdays.”
What about werewolves?” Vicky said.
“Never saw one in Florida-too hot for all that fur.”
“Damn. And I could’ve sworn I’d dated a few.”
They moved toward the body in a wide circle, looking not only for the snakes the deputy had warned of, but also for any evidence the killer might have tossed out into the thick undergrowth from the immediate crime scene. The walk in proved uneventful, but a more thorough, wider search would be made later. Right now they needed to learn all they could from the body.
The body lay on its back on a rich, dark bed of rotting vegetation. The woman had been clothed in a straight black dress that would have stopped just above the knees had someone not used a knife to slice open the entire front. Black thong underwear was the lone undergarment and it had been pulled aside exposing a neatly trimmed blond pubis, the same shade as the woman’s hair. Her breasts were also exposed and they were full and round and pointed rigidly up.
“Implants,” Harry observed.
“You betcha,” Vicky said. “Even when all the muscles go soft and slack, these boobs will not sag or lose their shape. Plastic surgeons should use that line in their advertising.”
“I thought they already did,” Harry said.
The flip words didn’t carry to their eyes. Each pair remained grim and focused. It was the charnel house humor again, two detectives forced to witness daily human carnage, trying to maintain their personal sanity.
Harry took a Polaroid camera from his crime scene case and took two photos of the body in situ. He took another of the woman’s feet, which were shoeless and relatively clean except for a dusting of beach sand, indicating both that she had been carried into the swamp and had recently visited a beach. Then he took a minute to study the area around them. It seemed peaceful and threatening at the same time, the way only a primal forest can, and except for the intrusion of the body of a young, modernly dressed woman he might have been standing in a place that had remained unchanged for hundreds of years. He let his eyes roam. Spread out before him were several large cypress stumps, like the one that stood next to the body, each one rotting with age; each probably there since the turn of the last century when loggers scoured Florida lands searching out and cutting all the mature cypress they could find. To the left were several Southern live oaks, their boughs heavy with Spanish moss. Between the oaks were small groupings of young pond cypress, many with butterfly orchids and resurrection ferns attached to their trunks. Larger patches of swamp fern grew in dense clusters across the black, spongy ground, their toothed edges providing protective shelter for small animals, and as Harry watched a cotton rat scurried from one patch to another, scaring up a pair of common yellowthroat, the small birds darting off in search of safer cover. In the distance he could hear the gooselike grunts of tree frogs and the high-pitched chirping of cicadas, and up in the trees he could see several parula warblers and white-eyed vireos flying from tree to tree.