Deadly Decisions Read online

  “This better be good, Rinaldi, or your folks can start planning a funeral. Looks like your approval rating has plummeted among your peers.”

  Rinaldi drew smoke into his lungs, held it, then blew two streams through his nose. The borders of his nostrils blanched as they expanded with the effort.

  “Who’s the broad?” His voice sounded odd, as though it were being scrambled to hide his identity.

  “Dr. Brennan will be digging up your treasure, Frog. And you’re going to help her in every way you can, aren’t you?”

  “Pffff.” Rinaldi puffed air through his lips. Like his nostrils, their edges paled with the movement.

  “And you’re going to be as docile as a stiff in the morgue, right?”

  “Let’s get the fuck on with it.”

  “The morgue bit was not a casual comparison, Frog. The simile will have meaning if this turns out to be a con.”

  “I’m not making this shit up. There are two guys eating dirt out there. Let’s get this fucking show on the road.”

  “Let’s,” agreed Claudel.

  Rinaldi flicked a bony finger, rattling the handcuffs connecting his wrists.

  “Circle the house and watch for a dirt track off to the right.”

  “That sounds like a sincere start, Frog.”

  Frog. Another fitting moniker, I thought, listening to Rinaldi’s strange, croaky voice.

  Claudel stepped out and gave a thumbs-up to Quickwater, ten yards away at the crime scene van. I turned to look and caught Rinaldi staring at me as if trying to read my genetic code. When our eyes met he held on, refusing to look away. So did I.

  “Do you have a problem with me, Mr. Rinaldi?” I asked.

  “Odd job for a chick,” he said, never breaking eye contact.

  “I’m an odd chick. I once peed in Sonny Barger’s pool.” I didn’t even know if the former head of the Hells Angels had a pool, but it sounded good. Besides, the Barger reference was probably lost on Frog.

  Several seconds passed, then Frog smirked, gave a half shake of the head, and reached to crush his cigarette in the tiny tray between the two front seats. When the handcuffs slipped I saw two lightning bolts tattooed on his forearm, above them the words “Filthy Few.”

  Claudel got back in and Quickwater joined us, taking the wheel but saying nothing. As we circled the house and cut into the woods Rinaldi gazed silently out the window, no doubt preoccupied with his own terrible demons.

  Rinaldi’s road was little more than two tracks, and the cars and recovery van behind us moved sluggishly through the mud and wet vegetation. At one point Quickwater and Claudel were forced to get out and clear a tree that had fallen onto the path. As they dragged the rotted branches a pair of squirrels were startled and darted out of sight.

  Quickwater returned clammy with sweat and muddy from the knees down. Claudel remained pristine and carried himself as if he were wearing a tuxedo. I suspected Claudel could look prim and tidy when walking around in his underwear, but doubted he ever did that.

  Claudel loosened his tie a full millimeter and tapped on Rinaldi’s window. I opened my door, but Frog was working on another cigarette.

  Claudel tapped again and Frog hit the handle. The door popped open and smoke drifted out.

  “Put that thing out before we’re all on respirators. Are your memory cells still working, Frog? Do you recognize the terrain?” Claudel.

  “They’re here. If you’ll just shut the fuck up and let me get my bearings.”

  Rinaldi got out and looked around. Quickwater gave me another of his stony stares as our informant did a visual sweep of the area. I ignored him and did my own inspection.

  The spot had once been used as a dump. I could see cans and plastic containers, beer and wine bottles, an old mattress, and a rusted set of box springs. The ground was marked with the delicate tracks of deer, circling, crossing, and disappearing into the surrounding trees.

  “I’m getting impatient, Frog,” Claudel urged. “I’d count to three, as I do with children, but I’m sure I’d lose you with the higher math.”

  “Will you just shut the fuck—”

  “Easy,” Claudel warned.

  “I haven’t been out here in years. There was a shed, man. If I can spot the fucking shed I can walk you to them.”

  Frog starting making sorties into the woods, probing like a hound scenting a hare. He looked less confident with each passing moment, and I was beginning to share his doubt.

  I’ve been on many informant-led expeditions, and in a lot of cases the trip is a waste of time. Jailhouse tips are notoriously unreliable, either because the herald is lying, or because his memory has simply failed him. LaManche and I went twice in search of a septic tank reported to be the tomb of a murder victim. Two safaris, no tank. The snitch went back to jail, and the taxpayers picked up the bill.

  Finally, Rinaldi returned to the Jeep.

  “It’s farther up.”

  “How much farther?”

  “What am I, a geographer? Look, I’ll know the spot when I see it. There was a wooden shed.”

  “You’re repeating yourself, Frog.” Claudel looked pointedly at his watch.

  “Sacré bleu! If you’ll quit riding my ass and drive a bit farther you’ll get your stiffs.”

  “You’d better be right, Frog. Or you will be at the center of the biggest cluster fuck of the millennium.”

  The men climbed back into the Jeep and the procession crept slowly forward. Within twenty yards Rinaldi held up his hands. Then he gripped the seat behind my shoulders and strained forward to peer through the windshield.

  “Hold it.”

  Quickwater braked.

  “There. That’s it.”

  Rinaldi pointed to the roofless walls of a small wooden structure. Most of the shed had fallen in on itself, and fragments of roofing and rotten wood lay strewn around the ground.

  Everyone got out. Rinaldi did a three-sixty, hesitated briefly, then set off into the woods at a forty-degree angle from the shed.

  Claudel and I followed, picking our way through last year’s vines and creepers, and slapping back branches still weeks from budding. The sun was well above the horizon now, and the trees threw long, spiderweb shadows across the soggy ground.

  When we caught up to Rinaldi he was standing at the edge of a clearing, hands dangling in front, shoulders rounded like those of a male chimp about to put on a display. The look on his face was not reassuring.

  “This place has changed, man. I don’t remember so many trees. We used to come out here to light bonfires and get wasted.”

  “I don’t care how you and your friends passed your summers, Frog. You’re running out of time here. You’re going to be doing twenty-five hard ones and we’re all going to read about how they found you with a pipe up your ass on the shower room floor.”

  I’d never heard Claudel quite so colorful.

  Rinaldi’s jaw muscles bunched, but he said nothing. Though there had been frost that morning he wore only a black T-shirt and jeans. His arms looked thin and sinewy, and goose bumps puckered the pale flesh.

  He turned and walked to the middle of the clearing. On the right the land sloped gently to a small creek. Rinaldi cut through a stand of long-needle pines to the bank, looked in both directions, then headed upstream. Quickwater, Claudel, and I followed. Within twenty yards Rinaldi stopped and waved his scrawny arms at an expanse of bare earth. It lay between the stream and a mound of boulders, and was scattered with branches, plastic containers and cans, and the usual detritus thrown up by seasonal flooding.

  “There’s your fucking graves.”

  I looked at his face. It was composed now, the look of uncertainty once again replaced by cocky insolence.

  “If that’s all you’re offering, Frog, that pipe has your name on it.” Claudel.

  “Don’t fuck me over, man. It’s been more than ten years. If the broad knows her shit, she’ll find them.”

  As I surveyed the area Rinaldi had indicated, the
bully pressed harder on my chest. More than ten years of seasonal flooding. There wouldn’t be a single indicator. No depression. No insect activity. No modified vegetation. No stratigraphy. Nothing to hint at an underground cache.

  Claudel looked a question at me. Behind him the stream burbled softly. Overhead a crow cawed and another answered.

  “If they’re here, I’ll find them,” I said with more confidence than I felt.

  The cawing sounded like laughter.

  BY NOON WE’D CLEARED VEGETATION AND DEBRIS FROM AN AREA approximately fifty yards by fifty yards, based on Frog’s hazy recollection of the grave locations. It turned out he’d never actually seen the bodies, but was going on “reliable information.” According to gang lore the victims had been invited for a lawn party, then marched into the woods and shot in the head. Terrific.

  I’d marked off a search grid, then set orange plastic stakes along the boundaries at five-foot intervals. Since bodies are rarely stashed below six feet, I’d requested a ground-penetrating radar unit with a 500 MHz antenna, a frequency effective at those depths. It had arrived within the hour.

  Working with the radar operator, I’d dug a test pit outside the search area to allow assessment of density, moisture content, layer changes, and other soil conditions. We had refilled the hole, burying in it a length of metal rebar. The operator had then scanned the pit for control data.

  He was completing the final tuning of his equipment when Frog got out of the Jeep and sidled over to me, followed closely by his guard. It was one of several forays he’d made, the sniper-free morning having allayed his anxiety.

  “What the fuck is that?” he asked, indicating a set of devices that looked like a contraption from Back to the Future. Just then Claudel joined us.

  “Frog, you could benefit from some new adjectives. Maybe get one of those calendars that shows you a different word every day.”

  “Fuck you.”

  In a way I appreciated the English expletives. They were like sounds of home in a foreign land.

  I looked to see if Frog was merely cracking wise, but the pale green eyes suggested a genuine interest. O.K. Where he was going Frog wouldn’t be having a lot of scientifically broadening experiences.

  “It’s a GPR system.”

  He looked blank.

  “Ground-penetrating radar.”

  I pointed to a terminal plugged into the cigarette lighter of a four-wheel-drive vehicle.

  “That’s the GPR machine. It evaluates signals sent from an antenna, and produces a pattern on that screen.”

  I indicated a sledlike structure with an upright handle and a long, thick cable connecting it to the GPR box. “That’s the antenna.”

  “Looks like a lawn mower.”

  “Yeah.” I wondered what Frog knew about lawn care. “When an operator pulls the antenna across the ground it transmits a penetrating signal, then sends data to the GPR machine. The radar machine evaluates the strength and rebound time of the signal.”

  He looked as if he was with me. Though pretending disinterest, Claudel was also listening.

  “If there is something in the soil, the signal is distorted. Its strength is affected by the size of the underground disturbance, and by the electrical properties at the upper and lower boundaries. The depth of the feature determines how long the signal takes to go down and back.”

  “So this thing can tell you where you’ve got a stiff?”

  “Not a body specifically. But it can tell you there’s a subsurface disturbance, and it can provide information about its size and location.”

  Frog looked blank.

  “When you dig a hole and put something in it, the spot is never the same as it was before. The fill may have less density, a different mix, or different electrical properties from the surrounding matrix.”

  True. But I doubted that would be the case here. Ten years of water seepage has a way of obliterating soil differences.

  “And the thing that’s been buried, whether it’s a cable, unexploded ordnance, or a human body, will not send the same signal as the soil around it.”

  “Ashes to ashes. What if the corpse has oozed into tomorrow’s drinking water?”

  Good question, Frog.

  “The decomposition of flesh can change the chemical composition and electrical properties of dirt, so even bones and putrefied corpses may show up.”

  May.

  At that moment the radar operator gave a sign indicating he was ready.

  “Quickwater, you want to pull the sled?” I shouted.

  “I’ll do it.” Claudel volunteered.

  “O.K. Get one of the Ident guys to follow you to control the cable. It’s not complicated. Start where the operator has the antenna set up just outside the cleared area. When you pass the northernmost line of stakes press the remote button twice. It’s on the handle. The signal will set the boundary for that transect. Drag the sled at about two-thirds normal walking pace, keeping your sweeps as straight as possible. Each time you pass an east-west stake, press the button once. When you get to the far end give another double signal to indicate the end of the transect. Then we’ll haul the thing back and start a second sweep.”

  “Why can’t we just go back and forth?”

  “Because the printouts from adjacent transects won’t be comparable if they’re done from opposite directions. We’ll do the whole area north to south, that’s thirty sweeps, then repeat the procedure east to west.”

  He nodded.

  “I’ll stay with the operator and watch the screen. If we note a disturbance I’ll holler and your partner can stake the spot.”

  • • •

  An hour later the search was done and everyone was around the van, unwrapping sandwiches and popping sodas. Twelve blue stakes formed three squares inside the survey grid.

  The results were better than I’d hoped. Readings from the third and thirteenth north-south transects showed disturbances with lengths and widths roughly equal. But it was the profile from the eleventh sweep that held my attention. I’d asked for hard copy, which I studied as I ate my bologna and cheese.

  The printout showed a grid. The horizontal lines indicated depth, based on our calibration with the control pit, with the ground surface at the top. The vertical lines were dotted, and corresponded to the signals sent by Claudel as each grid stake was crossed.

  The pattern just below the ground surface was a wavy but generally flat line. But superimposed over gridline 11 North was a series of bell-shaped curves, one inside the next, like ribs on a skeleton. The profile indicated a disturbance at the intersection of north-south line 11 and east-west line 4. It lay at a depth of approximately five feet.

  I switched to profiles of the area taken on the east-west sweeps. Comparing perpendicular transects allowed me to estimate the size and shape of the disturbance. What I saw made my heart pick up a beat.

  The anomaly was roughly six feet long and three feet wide. Grave size.

  At grave depth.

  “This will work?” I hadn’t heard Claudel approach.

  “We’re cookin’.”

  “Now?”

  “Yep.”

  I finished my Diet Coke and climbed into the Jeep. The van slogged along behind as Quickwater drove toward the 11 North 4 East coordinates. We’d decided that I would dig that location while Claudel and Quickwater investigated the other two disturbances. After I laid a simple grid around each site, they would remove the earth in thin slices, screening every shovelful.

  I’d instructed the Carcajou investigators on how to watch for differences in soil color and texture. If they spotted any changes they would holler. Each of us would be aided by personnel from the Section d’Identité Judiciaire, or SIJ, and section photographers would shoot and video the entire operation.

  And that’s what we did.

  Claudel supervised as his team worked the disturbance at 13 North 5 East, approximately ten feet from mine. Now and then I’d glance over to see him standing above his crew, ges
turing instructions or asking about something in the dirt. He’d yet to remove his sports jacket.

  After thirty minutes a shovel chinked loudly in Claudel’s pit. My head flew up and my stomach tightened. A blade had struck something hard and unyielding.

  As Claudel watched, the technicians and I revealed the contour. The object was rusted and caked with mud, but the shape was unmistakable. Claudel’s SIJ screener made the call.

  “Tabernac! C’est un Weber.”

  “Eh, Monsieur Claudel, you planning a barbecue? Throw on burgers, bring out the lawn chairs, maybe invite girls?”

  “Jean-Guy, tell Luc there’s an easier way. They’ve got these things at the Wal-Mart.”

  “Yes.” Claudel never cracked a smile. “You are so hilarious we may need a body bag because I’m going to die laughing. Now keep digging. We still have to haul this thing out and make sure there aren’t any surprises underneath.”

  Claudel left the grill to his teammates and walked back to 11 North 4 East with me. I resumed troweling at the north end while Claudel stood over my SIJ helper in the south. By two we were down approximately three feet and I’d spotted nothing in the pit or screen to indicate I was nearing a burial.

  Then I saw the boot.

  It was lying sideways, the heel projecting slightly upward. I used my trowel to clear dirt, widening the area around it. My helper watched briefly, then continued scraping at the far end of the pit. Claudel observed without comment.

  Within minutes I’d found the mate. Handful by tedious handful I peeled away dirt until the pair was fully exposed. The leather was wet and badly discolored, the eyelets bent and rusted, but both boots were reasonably intact.

  When the footwear was fully exposed I made notes as to level and position, and the photographer captured my find on film. As I pried each boot loose and laid it on a plastic sheet it was obvious that neither contained leg or foot bones.

  Not a good sign.

  The sky was delft blue, the sun strong. Now and then a breeze teased the branches overhead, tapping them gently against one another. To my right the creek purled softly as it coursed over rocks abandoned by glaciers long ago.

  A drop of sweat broke from my hairline and slithered the length of my neck. I pulled my sweatshirt over my head and tossed it on the pine needles bordering our pit. I was uncertain whether my glands had kicked in due to spring warmth or due to the stress I was feeling.