“This must be the place!” Ann Marie chirped cheerfully.
Riley winced at Ann Marie’s lighthearted tone. She felt likewarning the girl that they were about to walk into a deadly serious situation—acrime scene with the body of a murder victim still present.
But Riley thought better of saying anything.
Just let it be a surprise, she thought, suppressing a wrysmile.
She knew that Ann Marie had seen cadavers during her training atthe academy, but only in clinical, forensic settings. Seeing a corpse at acrime scene was a whole different experience—one that Riley felt pretty surethis apparent social butterfly wasn’t ready for. If the rookie couldn’t handleit, Riley would be perfectly happy to send her back to Quantico right away.
They got out of the car and headed toward a wooded patch that wassurrounded by barriers and police tape. Riley was pleased to see that atent-like structure had been set up among the trees, obviously to protect thecrime site. A couple of cops stood sentinel just outside the tent.
The cops here know what they’re doing, she thought.
Riley and Ann Marie held up their badges for the sentinels tosee, then ducked under the tape and stepped inside the tent. The interior waslit by a couple of standing lights, and it was occupied by several men, a largehole with a pile of dirt on one side, and a covered corpse stretched out on theground.
Riley introduced herself and her junior agent to county sheriffEmory Wightman and chief medical examiner Mark Tyler, who had been waiting forthem to arrive. The sheriff was a solid-looking man in his forties, although a potbelly indicated that he wasn’t really keeping in shape. The thin and wirymedical examiner appeared a bit older. Both men looked slightly uneasy for amoment, then Wightman finally asked, “I guess you want to inspect the body.”
“It’s not a pretty sight,” Tyler commented.
Wightman added, “I guess agents like you have seen plenty of—”
“Of course,” Riley interrupted him.
She suspected that the sheriff’s reluctance was because theagents were both women, but even if her young partner might not be up to this,Riley had seen enough corpses not to be daunted by the prospect.
Without further hesitation, Wightman gently lifted away thecover.
The sight of the corpse actually took Riley aback.
The body was in a considerable state of decay from having beenburied for a long time. But the truly weird thing was that the victim waswearing a skeleton costume, a black outfit with white bones printed on it.
A skeleton dressed up as a skeleton, she thought.
Before Riley could ask any questions, she heard Ann Marie let outa sharp cry—but it wasn’t a cry of distress.
“Oh, this is so interesting!”
Ann Marie’s face expressed pleased fascination as she croucheddown beside the corpse. She leaned forward for a closer look at the remnants offlesh and hair clinging to the bare human skull.
This was hardly the reaction Riley had expected from thisyoungster. She wondered what other surprises her new partner might have instore for her.
CHAPTER FIVE
Riley watched with surprise as Ann Marie peered closely andcuriously at the corpse’s face. The victim’s head was little more than a skullwith dried skin stretched over it. It eerily mirrored the costume skull maskthat had been removed and was lying next to the face.
The young woman seemed to be perfectly used to this kind ofthing. In fact, she took out her cell phone and began to snap pictures of thecorpse.
Riley was startled.
Doesn’t she know the guys here have surely taken picturesalready? she wondered.
Riley almost told her to stop, but she didn’t want to criticizeAnn Marie right here at the crime scene with others watching.
Ann Marie glanced up at the medical examiner and said, “I’ve notseen many bodies in this condition before. Most of the ones I’ve looked at havebeen … well, fresher, you might say. This one’s a ‘she,’ isn’t it?”
Tyler just nodded in response.
Ann Marie asked, “How long do you figure she’s been buried here?”
Tyler shrugged slightly. “It’s hard to say,” he told her. “Quitea few months, I guess. I’ll have a better idea when I’ve done an autopsy.”
Sheriff Wightman added, “We’re quite sure that the victim’s namewas Allison Hillis. She disappeared a little more than a year ago. M.E. Tylerwill do some tests to make sure this is the same person. But Allison waswearing exactly this sort of costume when she went missing.”
Ann Marie shook her head and clicked her tongue.
“How sad that she wound up like this,” she said. “But I guess ayear’s a long time to be missing. Hard to expect somebody to turn up aliveafter all that time.”
Then peering again at the face she said, “But there’s somethingunusual about her. She wasn’t just buried a year ago, right after she’d beenkilled, was she?”
Tyler tilted his head with interest.
“Why do you say that?” he said.
Snapping a tight close-up of the corpse’s hand, Ann Marie said, “Well,I haven’t seen many exhumed corpses, and the ones I have seen came outof coffins, not straight out of the ground. And even the ones that were buriedrecently looked a lot more decayed than this one—pretty much falling apart,really. The skin’s more intact on this one—almost like she was mummified orsomething.”
“Yeah, I noticed that too,” Tyler said with interest.
“I’ve got a little theory, if you don’t mind hearing it,” AnnMarie said.
The middle-aged M.E. stroked his mustache and smiled—just a bitflirtatiously, Riley thought.
“I’d love to hear it,” Tyler said.
Ann Marie said, “Well, I think she might have been frozen for awhile before she was buried here. That might help explain the unusualpreservation.”
Pointing to a spot on the neck, she added, “See these cracks?Those look like freezing damage to me, not regular decay.”
Tyler’s eyes widened with surprise.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “I was thinking pretty much thesame thing.”
A bit flirtatiously herself, Ann Marie winked at him and said, “Well,you know what they say about great minds.”
Tyler’s squinted with curiosity. He said to her, “Hey, did yousay that your last name was Esmer?”
Ann Marie nodded.
Tyler asked, “You wouldn’t happen to be related to SebastianEsmer over in Georgetown?”
Ann Marie’s eyes twinkled.
“He’s my dad,” she said with
