about being alone here. Kaseem had invited her to dine with him, but she had declined, begging off with a headache and paperwork. She'd eaten via room service, a rather dull and cold meal, and her room had begun to feel like a prison. She knew no one here. She knew nothing about the city surrounded by cornfields as far as the eye could see.
She understood that Janel McDonell, although buried here by her parents, having been reared in Iowa City, was actually found dead in a little homestead south of the city called Marshall. Her body was in the trailer house she lived in on an isolated highway, hung from the ceiling, her throat slashed. The autopsy report, signed by three men, one an M.E., said that she had died of the brutal slash to the throat and that she had died at another location and had then been placed in the trailer, since very little blood was in evidence. From her reading of the case and her knowledge of the Copeland murder, Jessica believed she'd been killed in her trailer.
She knew that the Iowa doctors would not take kindly to her overt questioning of their findings. An exhumation on an unsolved murder case was tantamount to throwing a glove in the face. She'd have them to contend with along with Kaseem in the morning, and she needed her sleep, so she fought for it, struggling with her own troubled mind.
Before turning in she had wanted to know why the AFIP guys had been sicced on her and J.T. She'd tried Otto at his private number, but only his answering machine was replying.
She'd also tried to reach J.T. in Illinois through the authorities there, but had had no luck. A bad connection and shattering static had caused an argument with a police dispatcher in Paris, Illinois. She'd gone to bed worrying about J.T.'s situation.
Still, she had much to be thankful for. After all, she had managed to get what she wanted; she'd set up the exhumation for the early morning. It would be a difficult chore, but not impossible. Everyone who was in a need-to- know position in the city, county and state had been contacted by Boutine earlier. The local police had been polite, if stiff, and had seen to her transportation and the room. Boutine had paved the way for her. She just needed to step in, go through the motions, get what she came for and return to Quantico.
She wondered about Kaseem's motivations, and his orders. She brooded about Otto's disappearance. Then she went back to fretting about J.T. and the owl-eyed Forsythe in southern Illinois.
Even in her sleep she wondered.
# # #
In rural Paris, Illinois, John Thorpe was ready to strangle someone to death. Absolutely nothing had gone right. Boutine had not smoothed the way for him, and in fact, had somehow been misunderstood. The exhumation was in progress when he arrived, and he was whisked to the cemetery in the middle of the night. Boutine had either so frightened the locals or so angered them that they had decided to either cooperate too much or to cooperate not at all. Either way, the result was about the same.
And Forsythe was no bloody help, getting in the way at every turn.
At the grave site, lights were flashing, sending up crazy, dancing shadows against the tombstones everywhere as the noise of a backhoe was only offset by the occasional roar of thunder and an accompanying lightning bolt. A simpering, misty rain became a downpour. No one had bothered to check the weather report. And into all this came the casket with the remains of Melanie Trent encased within. Thus far, the only stroke of luck was that the casket was intact, but this luck was suddenly exploded when the vault top, held overhead by an arm of the backhoe, suddenly groaned, sending everyone racing, moments before it collapsed atop the casket.
“ Son of a bitch!” shouted J.T. at the backhoe operator. “How long've you been digging graves, for Christ's sake!”
Forsythe tried to cool him down, pulling him away from the backhoe man, who had jumped from his cab, preparing to take J.T. on. Forsythe's uniform, along with the intervention of the local sheriff, brought order back to the chaos in the cemetery. J.T. shouted over Forsythe and the sheriff, “Goddamned stupid way to do a disinterment, people! Christ, if we crush the body, that'll do us a hell of a lot of good.”
Men worked to remove the concrete blocks over the casket, the damaged wood coming up in large, spiked splinters, the body within soaking up the rain now seeping into a casket that had remained dry since December.
“ Get her into the hearse!” the mortician shouted to his men, once the pieces of cement were cleared off.
“ Wait, whoa, up there, Lem! Stanley!” shouted the sheriff. “Good God Almighty.”
J.T., hearing this, rushed to the sheriff and pleaded, “What? What's wrong now? What?”
“ That's not her.”
“ What?”
“ That's not the Trent girl in that coffin.”
“ Oh, Christ… no,” moaned J.T. “You people've dug up the wrong grave?''
“ No, no! It's the right grave, the right marker,” said the sheriff. “Just that this ain't the right body.”
J.T. rushed the mortician. “Who's responsible for this? Where's the Trent girl buried, dammit?”
Again Forsythe stepped in and tried to cool J.T. down. “We'll find it. We'll look through the cemetery records. How many people could've been buried here the same day as the Trent girl? We just go to that grave and-”
The rain was pelting them so hard now that Forsythe had to talk over it, shouting.
“ In the morning, Sheriff, in the light of day, dammit! No more of this blind shit. Get me the right body, and get it to the hospital morgue by nine A.M.”
“ I'll see what can be done,” he said as calmly as if taking a breakfast order in a diner.
He had had to contend with the relatives and the local police, and no one was cooperating. J.T. had met the local coroner as well, a hospital pathologist who seemed as bitter and angry as the family at what he called the “heaping on of inhuman and awful sufferin' to the family.”
John had been made to feel like the villain here, and Forsythe, jumping on this attitude of the locals, had cajoled them into believing he was here, in his capacity, to uphold all decorum in the indecorous matter. All that J.T. now wanted was to get what he came for as quickly as possible and get the hell out of Paris, Illinois.
The following day, not trusting anyone at this point, J.T. rose early after a fitful sleep, caught a cab to the cemetery, leaving Forsythe abed, to see to it that the right casket was found and lifted from the earth. He was mildly surprised to find men working. In fact, they were just then lifting out a second casket from a second enormous hole created by the monster backhoe. As the casket was lifted, there was a murmur and an unsettling undercurrent that went through the handful of people who insisted on being present. No one had telephoned to send for him, but everyone else in Paris knew what was going on at the cemetery, except now Forsythe.
The parents and other relatives had turned out in mass. They hadn't been here in the night. But now they were like a small army surrounding the scene. It was highly irregular, but it was a very small town. If any place on Earth might be called xenophobic, it was Paris, Illinois. They didn't cotton to strangers, and they spoke like they were all from Kentucky.
The casket was taken to a waiting hearse amid people shouting, “This ain't right! Ain't human!”
“ God, man, don't you have chil-un, mister? Do you?”
John didn't have children, but he imagined that the loss of a child was assuredly the worst suffering anyone could endure… and then to have the remains of a buried child disturbed, the casket opened and a “piece” of the remains taken out. Little wonder they thought him a ghoul and a grave robber.
But J.T. would get what he came a thousand miles for. He'd get it for Jess and Boutine; he'd get it because their case depended upon it.?
ELEVEN
There were scattered patches of lingering snow on the ground at the graveyard where Janel McDonell had rested since November of the year before below the solid Iowa earth. The snow seemed to cling about the bottoms of the headstones for cold life. Janel's headstone, ornamented with flowers and cherubs, had been removed so as not to be unintentionally hit by the giant, crablike arms of the backhoe that now sank its teeth into the grave, hefted out great mounds of rock and stone, lowered this over a growing mound and then repeated the process.
It was 9 A.M. and there was a bright Iowa sun that sent cascading shadows across the cemetery, and the
