If I Should Die

searching for evidence, nor did they blockade the area off.

She handed Sean her flashlight. “Shine the light there-I’m taking a few pictures.”

Though she had no cell phone reception, the built-in camera took photographs just fine. She snapped several of the area, then zoomed in on the hair. She wished she had a high-end digital camera for better quality, but her phone would have to do.

“Her head rested here,” she said.

Emboldened, Lucy gave the alcove a thorough examination, taking more pictures, before moving on to the area surrounding the slab. There were faint footprints in the hard-packed dirt, but there was no telling which ones might have belonged to the men yesterday or to whoever removed the body. A serious police investigation would get impressions and compare the footprints to those of the two rescue workers, as well as hers and Sean’s. If one set didn’t match anyone, it might lead to the person who had moved the body.

“A dead body isn’t easy to carry,” Sean commented.

“But not impossible. He was strong, or had a partner. There are no drag marks-dragging her body would be noticeable, even on this hard floor. If we assume she was here for a while and frozen-”

“It’s still twenty-eight degrees here, and it’s already nine,” Sean said, looking at his phone.

“Can you get historical data when we get back up?”

“Absolutely. What do you want? I’ll run it as soon as we get in the truck.”

“Temperature, high and low, for the last year,” she said, brow knitting. “I don’t know how to extrapolate it into underground temps, though.”

“I can write an algorithm for it, but it won’t be perfect. Underground, both heat and cold are retained, depending on the surface temps. You’d want a geologist to interpret the data, based on the location of this room, the type of rock, pulling in any data from when the mine was operational.”

“I’ll write down what I need if you can figure out how to get the information.”

“That I can do.”

“The maggots are important-if it was warmer, flies would breed and lay eggs at a faster rate. The maggots would turn into flies in days. But the cold inhibits them. They could have been dormant for weeks-months. It’s too cold down here for insect activity.”

“What are you thinking?”

She didn’t want to speculate, because she honestly had nothing to go on but conjecture. But Sean liked to brainstorm.

“This might sound stupid …” she began.

“Try me.”

“Under normal temperatures, the life cycle from egg to adult fly is twenty-four days. It’s very predictable. What affects their life cycle most are cold temperatures.”

“And it’s too cold here for a twenty-four-day life cycle?”

She nodded. “If she was killed here, then any flies would have remained dormant until the temperature rose.”

“I haven’t seen a fly down here.”

“Neither have I. It’s still too cold, but they could have been here at some point if there was a change in temperature. I’m not an entomologist, and this is all coming from a long-ago forensic biology class, but the larvae I saw in her mouth were about three days old. They wouldn’t have gotten to the pupa stage for another five to six days.”

“So you think she could have died three days ago?”

“Five days-three days before I found the body. If she was killed then, it wasn’t here.”

“Because there are no flies.”

“Exactly. The key point is that flies lay eggs within minutes of death,” Lucy continued, “so if she was killed in town, for example, the eggs would have been laid there.”

“So you think she died five days ago?”

“Possible, not likely-not based on her skin tone.”

“Can eggs be laid and then not hatch?”

“Yes.”

“So she could have been killed months ago, and only because it’s spring and the weather is warming the eggs hatched.”

“Exactly.”

“But not last summer, because they would have hatched long ago.”

She smiled. “You should be a scientist.”

He shrugged. “Well, I did go to M.I.T. I might not have been paying too much attention, but some basic knowledge seeped into my thick head.”

There was something about his tone that sounded odd to Lucy, almost regretful. She wondered what had happened back then that had him unusually melancholic. Before she could ask, Sean continued.

“A frozen body wouldn’t have been easy to move.”

“Quite right,” she agreed.

He shined his light slowly around the eerie space while Lucy looked more closely at the ground.

Yesterday, when she’d been down here with Hammond and Getty, the men had walked down each of the two tunnels for several yards. She considered it now, only because Sean was here with her. But Tim had warned them that there were cave-ins, holes, any number of dangers. And she had no idea where the tunnels led, or how to get to the main entrance from here. They could follow the tracks, but the dangers in the mine stopped her from suggesting it. Still the tracks were a clue. There was no evidence that the killer had moved the body up the mine shaft that Sean had fallen down. And the cart was missing. She wasn’t foolhardy-she wasn’t going to risk her life wandering down a deadly labyrinth without solid evidence.

“We should have asked Tim to take us to the entrance of the mine. The killer took the cart to move the body, he couldn’t have gone up the shaft.”

“When we’re done here”-he glanced around-“maybe we should go down the tunnels-”

“No,” she interrupted. “There are too many unknowns. We’ll go down a few feet, but that’s it.”

“What specifically are you looking for?”

“Anything that looks out of place. We should start where I saw the mining cart.”

They walked over to the narrow tunnel, just wide enough for a cart and little more. Its ceiling was low, just an inch taller than Lucy’s five feet seven inches.

Sean squatted, resting his weight on his good leg. “The tracks are freshly scraped, see?”

She saw the rust missing in gouges, possibly from the metal wheels of the cart. “How long ago, do you think?”

“Two days.”

“How about if you didn’t know I saw the cart here just two days ago.”

“I’d say these marks were made not more than a few weeks ago, at most. Seriously, the rust would have started to grow back. Not fully, but enough to lose that sheen.”

She took pictures of the markings and the track itself.

“Hammond followed the track down twenty feet,” she said, “and didn’t find anything. This probably leads to-” Something moved in the corner of her vision.

Lucy turned her head, dipping her flashlight to the packed dirt floor between the metal tracks. She sucked in her breath, stifling a startled cry, her stomach clenching painfully beneath her ribs.

On the ground, several maggots flopped slowly, stymied by the cold and lack of nutrients now that they had fallen outside of the corpse. Finally, solid evidence the killer had moved the body down this tunnel after Lucy’s discovery had been made public.

Her heart raced and she scanned the area with her light. About two dozen of the translucent white insects littered the path, some of them dead, some of them having moved much farther down the tunnel.

Sean whistled under his breath. “That’s pretty damn conclusive. I can’t believe they missed this yesterday.”

“They were looking for a body,” she said. “They weren’t thinking crime scene evidence.”

“They should have been.”