“Thanks.”
We shook. Randall did not join in.
“Perhaps it’s best if you lay low for a while.”
What the flip? First Galimore, now Williams.
I made a noncommittal sound.
“I’ll phone if anything breaks,” Williams said.
That call came very, very soon.
GALIMORE RANG AT NINE-TWENTY. THE WEEKEND’S RACES were fast approaching, and the media were growing hysterical for information on Wayne Gamble’s death. He couldn’t leave the Speedway for any reason.
Galimore sounded so rushed, I didn’t take time to mention that the landfill John Doe had been identified. Or to explain how that had come about.
Slidell phoned around ten. I filled him in on recent developments. He promised to locate Maddy Padgett once he got done checking documents and a PC confiscated from Wayne Gamble’s trailer.
Williams’s call came at eleven-fifteen. I was in the stinky room gluing cranial fragments. Wayne Gamble’s partially reconstructed skull sat in a bowl of sand at my elbow.
Williams sounded out of breath. “About the time we were leaving the MCME, Winge got into his truck and drove from his mother’s house to the Stephens Road Nature Preserve. You know it?”
“It’s between Mountain Island Lake and Lake Norman, right?”
“Exactly. Stephens Road cuts off Beatties Ford Road, winds past a housing development, then dead-ends in some fairly dense forest.”
A voice called out.
“Hang on.”
The air went thick, as though Williams had pressed the phone to his chest. In seconds, he was back.
“Sorry. Winge parked and walked into the woods. Agents found him about fifty yards north of the road. He was on his knees and appeared to be praying.”
I felt my heart rate kick up a notch.
“The agents called me. They described an area of ground slump at the spot where Winge was kneeling. I instructed them to detain Winge and ordered a cadaver dog to the site.”
My grip tightened on the receiver. I knew what was coming.
“The dog alerted at the depression.”
“What’s happening now?”
“CSU is on the way.”
“So am I.”
“I was hoping you’d say that.”
The sun was low by the time the bones were fully uncovered. One skeleton lay on top of the other, the arm bones intertwined, as though the victims were embracing in death.
The grave was shallow, dug quickly, filled with haste. Standard. And Winge, or whoever had done the burying, had made the usual mistake of the uninformed. Instead of leaving the fill mounded over the pit, he, she, or they had stomped it flat. With the passage of time, soil compression had led to the telltale slump.
The temperature and humidity had been so high all afternoon, the forest seemed to be rendered lifeless. Trees, birds, and insects held themselves still and silent.
The dog had remained. Her name was Clara. Clara’s handler had walked her past our excavation periodically. She’d scent, then sit, tongue dangling, saffron rays of sunlight tinging her fur.
Slidell had arrived shortly after I’d staked out a square and set up a screen. He’d watched silently as I instructed the CSU techs on how to trowel and sift dirt. They worked sluggishly, immobilized by the stifling heat.
When I asked Slidell why he was there, he said his sergeant was viewing the Wayne and Cindi Gamble deaths as related. He’d been told to hustle Gamble’s laptop to the geek squad and get his ass to the burial site. From now on he was out of rotation, assigned strictly to their cases.
We’d sealed the scene with sawhorses and yellow tape, but it hadn’t been necessary. The heat and the remoteness of the location had been enough. No one had come to gawk as we went through our macabre routine.
The remains we assumed to be those of Cindi Gamble and Cale Lovette lay on the surface now, zipped into two pitifully flat body bags.
I sat in a patrol unit on Stephens Road, sipping water from a plastic bottle. The radio crackled, and the usual motion swirled around me. I’d come to do my job, to be a professional. But I was finding it hard.
Had it really been less than a week since I’d learned of Gamble and Lovette? It seemed so much longer. I felt I knew them. I’d been so hopeful. Now the verdict was in. Death.
I tried to keep my brain blank. I didn’t want to replay the scene of the soil-stained bones emerging as the layers of dirt were peeled off. To visualize the skulls grinning up from the trench. To see the small round holes
