After about five minutes, the dog suddenly sat down and softly whined.
“She’s located something,” Clapper told them. “That’s the alert he trains them to give. Now he’ll ask her to show the exact spot.”
“She won’t actually dig it up, will she?” an anxious Gideon asked.
“No, no, she knows better than that.”
“Good girl,” Hicks said to the dog. “Now then. Touch.”
Tess immediately jumped up, placed a graceful forefoot on the sand, and pawed gently and elegantly away, like a high-strung horse.
Hicks knelt to plant a thin metal rod with an orange flag on it. “X marks the spot,” he said, pleased and smiling. “Who wants to do the honors?”
Robb and Clapper deferred to Gideon, who knelt and began clearing sand with his hands, spreading rather than digging. It was as soft as he’d hoped, if a bit colder, and it took less than a minute to uncover a smooth, spiraling, sea snail-shaped knob of bone, as clean of flesh and ligament as a specimen from a biological supply house. “That,” he said, sitting back on his haunches, “is the distal end of a human right humerus—the elbow. Thank you, Tess, well-done.”
The dog, her face on a level with his own, grinned at him and yawned prodigiously, her bright pink tongue curling back on itself into an almost-complete circle.
Robb immediately got out his pad, his camera, and a metal tape measure, and set about industriously drawing, photographing, and writing down the circumstances of the find.
With his fingers and the paintbrush Gideon began clearing sand from the rest of the bone. “If we’re right about it being a dismemberment—”
“So now we’re back to we’re right?” Clapper growled predictably; not with any conviction, but from mere force of habit.
“—the chances are we’ll only find three-quarters of it or so. The top few inches will probably be missing, the same way… Ah, there we are, see?”
He ran his fingers down it. “Male,” he announced. “And adult, of course. As expected.”
“How did you know that?” Clapper asked, looking down from what seemed a great height. He was wearing a voluminous, calf-length topcoat, which gave him even more of a looming quality than usual.
“Male because of the robusticity,” Gideon began, “and as for age, as you can see, the distal symphysis is —”
“No, how did you know the top part would be missing?”
“Oh, I didn’t know, I was just going with the averages. Dismemberments have a pretty typical pattern: upper arms cut from the torso just about where this one was, hands cut off above the wrist, legs severed a few inches down from the hips, head chopped off at about here—” He tapped his own neck. “Feet separated—”
It was all a little too graphic for the imaginative Robb. “A bone like this, it doesn’t look so bad, but when you think about someone actually doing it… what a horror it must be… a nightmare.” A shudder ran visibly down his back.
“It is. They do it in a bathtub when they can, to contain the gore,” Gideon said, continuing to brush sand. How did a peaceable, laughably squeamish guy like me, whose primary academic interest was early Pleistocene hominid locomotion, get to the point where I could so easily and knowledgeably discuss the methods of choice of homicidal monsters whose terrible minds and motives I couldn’t begin to comprehend? It was far from the first time he’d had such a thought, and no doubt far from the last.
“Actually, I’ve never dealt with a freshly dismembered body”—and let’s hope I never do—“but I’ve gone back to the scene of the crime a few days later—the bathroom where it was done, I mean. And gory is hardly the word for it. Blood everywhere—the walls, the ceiling…” At the memory, he couldn’t quite repress a shudder of his own.
Clapper noticed. “Grisly work,” he said sympathetically.
“Messy in the extreme. The bathtub makes it easier to clean up, but of course blood traces are almost impossible to get rid of. If we knew where this guy was sliced up into sections, there’d probably still be traces, even after all this time.”
“At Bramshill,” Robb said with a frown, “they told us dead bodies don’t bleed.”
“That’s not always the case, lad,” Clapper said.
“That’s right,” Gideon agreed. “Oh, there aren’t any great gouts of blood if you cut or stab them, because the heart’s not pumping anymore, so there’s no pressure, but they certainly can bleed if the blood’s still in them and it’s still liquid. The way a garden hose would continue to leak if you cut into it, after you turn it off.”
“Like a fresh piece of meat, you might say,” said Clapper helpfully. “Oozes, like, don’t it?”
“And when you’re cutting up a corpse, and hefting the segments, and trying to get them into sacks,” Gideon added, “you’re juggling some pretty heavy, awkward pieces of meat—a male torso weighs eighty or a hundred pounds, a single leg weighs about thirty—so you’re bound to get quite a lot of blood all over everything.”
“I see,” whispered a pallid Robb, and then, barely audibly, “thank you.”
Gideon had had enough too. “Look, why don’t we just concentrate on what we have here in front of us?” he muttered roughly, his head down, continuing to scrabble in the sand with his fingers. Nice, clean, dry bones, not a sign of gore.
“You’re expecting to find the forearm bones here with it, then?” Clapper asked. “If the body was cut up the way you said?”
“I was hoping so, assuming he deposited the entire fleshed arm here, but anything could have happened to them by now, and it’s starting to look as if—no, no, here we go.” His fingers had found something, and with a few strokes of the brush he uncovered two smaller, thinner bones. “They’ve just shifted in the sand a bit, but here they
