The others stood back, and the two of us recorded the scene as we walked toward the stone pile with Doc. When we got there, he waited while we took close-ups of the rocks in situ, as they stood.
The section of rock that commanded our attention measured about eighteen inches high and four feet wide, maybe seven feet long. As we got closer, an unmistakable, strong but not overpowering odor surrounded us. Decomp. The fact that it didn’t overwhelm us suggested either a fairly fresh kill or a body that had been dead for a long time. I thought again of Delilah. It took every ounce of control I had not to throw off all the rocks. I wanted to know. I needed to know. I swallowed and willed myself calm, but my drumming pulse gave me away.
After we had the overall photos, I scanned the rocks, looking for what Proctor described, the opening Bruno made, one the old man looked in and saw a face.
About a foot from one side, I found it, a place where a rock had rolled off. I peeked in and saw leathery skin, taut, slightly translucent.
“Doc, take a look,” I suggested as I snapped a couple of photos.
He rustled over and stooped down. “Well, I’ll be,” he said, peering between the rocks.
“Do you think it’s…” I started. My pulse picking up more steam, I had a hard time spitting the question out. “Does it look—”
“Mummified,” Doc said.
Relief rushed through me, so much so that I had to fight the urge to smile. “It’s not Delilah then,” I murmured. Doc Wiley’s eyes scrunched nearly closed in a question. “One of my sisters. Half-sister. Sariah’s daughter. Delilah is… missing. I was afraid it was her.”
“That’s the case Max asked you to consult on?” Sadness distorted his old face, drawing down his eyes.
“Yeah.”
“How long has she been missing?”
“We think Thursday evening. About four days.”
“You’re right then,” Doc shook his head. “This isn’t her.”
I didn’t have to ask how he could be so sure. I knew.
Utah’s hot, arid summers were perfect for mummification; they efficiently sucked the moisture from a body before it had time to decompose. So were Dallas’s. I once worked a case with a mummified body found in an abandoned crack house. We didn’t know what we had at first, a homicide or natural causes. It turned out that the guy died of an overdose. The day I walked onto the scene, the body looked just the way the one beneath the rocks did—cured a dark golden brown, rubbery, like something on display in a museum.
Even in prime conditions, a human body took at least two weeks to dry out. Delilah hadn’t been missing long enough for her body to be in such an advanced stage of mummification.
My relief, however, faded quickly. The body wasn’t Delilah’s, but it was someone’s. Eliza’s? Jayme’s? And what did the discovery of a dead body mean for Delilah? Wherever she was, I felt even more certain that my sister was in danger.
“Let’s start here,” I said. I took off the first rock and exposed a swollen cheek, a side of a nose with a slight upturn. I snapped a photo. The videographer recorded the scene, and the doc took a closer look. He motioned for me to continue. I pulled off rocks two and three, and an eye emerged, the pupil sunken into a dark orb. It looked like a Halloween mask. Rocks four and five exposed the other eye. By rock nine, the corpse had a nose and a heart-shaped chin.
The body appeared to be either a female or a young boy with delicate features.
I chose the rocks above the eyes and uncovered a forehead. At that point, we could see dark brown hair. I paused long enough for the videographer to record the moment and I took a photograph before Doc Wiley moved in for another look.
As I removed each rock, I deposited it on a piece of cardboard placed to the side, where a technician numbered, bagged and logged it into evidence. Everything would be sent to the lab. Some of the rocks were relatively smooth, holding out the possibility that latent prints might be found.
Our work continued.
As I pulled more rocks away, we could gauge the length of the hair: at least three feet. Separating from the scalp in places, it fell like a long, dark brown wig.
We were most likely looking at a woman.
The head uncovered, I took the next five rocks off the neck and chest. Each one dug into my heart. A once-white cotton collar trimmed in eyelet had cured dark and stiff from the seepage of bodily fluids. The prairie dress remained light green in scattered places with small pink flowers printed in stripes, but the majority of it had turned a dirty brown.
Once we had her completely uncovered, I looked down at the figure of a young woman. I visualized Delilah in that rocky grave, Lily, my mother, myself. If I knew the girl in the grave, I didn’t recognize her. But for me, she represented every woman I’d ever known. I thought of bodies I’d seen in Dallas: men, women, children, some bludgeoned, others shot or stabbed. Each one a tragedy. Each one leaving a family in pain.
“From the clothes, she looks like a local,” Doc Wiley yelled out to Chief Barstow and the sheriff. “Can’t recognize her in this condition.”
“When’s the autopsy?” Gerard asked.
“Quick as we get her to my office,” the doc responded.
I hadn’t noticed, but a crowd had formed. A line of deputies roped them off near the road. Women, men, young and old, children, most probably from the trailer park, but my guess others had come from Alber proper. Some looked curious, others horrified.
“Get a body bag out of my truck, will ya?” Doc asked me.
As I walked toward the pickup, I noticed my mother in the crowd, along
