Liam didn’t speak geology and was willing to take her word for it. He could well believe that Erik had never found the crack in spite of the time he’d spent on the dig and was even more astonished that Kevin and Logan had. Never underestimate the curiosity and determination of a ten-year-old kid. He could understand why they hadn’t noticed Erik’s body, too. They’d stumbled through the cave and fetched up against the back wall.
He hoped with all his heart that Brillo would find that Erik had died before they entered the cave.
They wrangled one of the lights over to the crack and leaned it against the rock wall, angling it as best they could to shine in between the two layers of rock. The separation wasn’t even four inches in places, and try as he might he couldn’t press his face flat enough against the rock to see to the other side. He stepped back, frustrated. “How did that kid get his head in that crack?”
“Wait,” Rafferty said, and pulled out what looked like a dental mirror on a telescoping rod. She saw his look and shrugged and assumed a very bad British accent. “Rafferty. Jane Rafferty.”
He laughed. He liked Chief Rafferty.
“Bought it off my dental hygienist. Useful for checking tight spaces.” She got down on her knees and pressed her bulk up against the rock wall. She extended the mirror’s handle out to its full length and poked it very slowly and very carefully through the crack. “Don’t want to break it off.”
“Don’t want it to get stuck, either.” Or her, he thought.
The cave seemed to be getting colder and the passing seconds stretched into minutes and maybe hours as Rafferty poked around with the mirror, working it like a surgeon doing a sextuple bypass, giving up only the occasional grunt.
Finally she sat back on her heels, collapsing the mirror. She stared at the crack, although without her hand actually inside it it faded again almost into invisibility. “Huh.”
“Is there a skeleton?” Liam said. His toes were numb.
“Yes.” She got to her feet.
“Could you tell if it was human or animal?”
“Oh, I think human. Let’s go outside where it’s warmer.”
Even with a cloudy sky it felt infinitely warmer outside the cave. “Why human?”
“It’s a human skull, Sergeant. I used to work arson investigation and I’ve seen a few. It’s human, all right.”
Liam drew in a breath and let it out on a long, expressive exhale. “Well, shit.”
“Yeah.”
“We have to get it out of there.”
To her credit and his everlasting gratitude she didn’t say, “What do you mean, ‘we’?”
The chief checked in with her people and they were to a man willing to play, probably because it meant that much more time away from their day jobs.
From a frankly unbelievable selection of tools, in the end they defaulted to a crowbar, a sledgehammer, and brute force. It didn’t take as long as he expected before he was peering into a roughly round hole sharply edged with jagged rock. Rafferty moved the lamps so the light fell full onto the scene within.
“Fuck,” one of the men said. “He’s, like, totally mashed.”
“Pulverized,” another said.
“Pulped,” said a third.
Not quite any of those things but not far off, Liam thought. With an inner sigh he got out his phone and opened the camera app to take more photos.
“Something’s been chewing on him.”
“What could get in there?”
“I don’t know. Rats, I guess?”
“Do we even have rats in Baytown?”
“Maybe Rodents of Unusual Size?”
“Gary!”
“Jesus, dude, put a lid on it.”
“Ever the class act, Feldman.”
A brief silence, while everyone looked everywhere but at Liam and the chief.
“Cockroaches then,” a subdued voice said. “Or bats, maybe?”
Everyone involuntarily looked up at the cave’s ceiling.
“I’ve seen year-old bear kill with less damage.”
“Chief, could I trouble you for another body bag?”
“Certainly, Sergeant. Garvey, would you do the honors?”
“Sure, Chief.”
Liam stepped carefully through the hole, and wasted only a few blasphemous moments freeing a shoelace from a snag.
“Ought to get you some boots with Velcro fastenings, Sergeant. Easy on, easy off, and they don’t catch on anything.”
Liam crouched over the skeleton, taking more photos from every angle. He had a one-yard tape measure attached to his key chain. He ran it out next to the skeleton and took more photos. If this was a crime scene, the photos were the only crime scene evidence he would have.
Other than the skeleton itself. It was, as the firefighters had said, in ruins, all of the bones broken more than once and the skull broken in on both sides. Had the body been dismembered? He crouched down for a closer look. The hip, knee and elbow joints looked as if they might still have been intact when they were—What? Fell? Placed?—in the cave. They still fit together, or they would until he tried to pick them up.
He looked up, ignoring the faces peering in at him. The bones were just this side of the common wall between the two caves. He got down on one knee and took more photos.
He got to his feet again. The skeleton was pitiably small, about the size of the two boys who had discovered it. He didn’t know how long these bones had been here but it was a given that someone had missed the person it had been, and it would be his job to find that someone or their relatives. If this proved to be a child, he might be dealing with parents, and certainly siblings. There was nothing worse in law enforcement life.
“Here’s the bag, Sergeant.”
“Thanks, Chief.”
They watched in silence as he collected the bones and placed them in the bag and zipped it up. He cradled it in his arms and stood
