Death & the City Book Two (19 page)

"Nice panties," Sparky quips, as I kneel up and straighten my skirt.

I give him a glare, but almost immediately switch my glance to Connor warily. I'm waiting for him to have some kind of smart-ass comment or lewd remark to follow, but he says nothing, putting his phone away, while Charlie merely gets interested in the shovel he's just picked up instead. I'm grateful for that. Not all guys are like Animal, it seems - eager to drop reminders and hints about how well they know you, into casual conversation.

"Got a dead leaf in your hair," says Connor, and smiles at me.

Sparky doesn't seem to have any agenda either, as he produces a camera and heads for the white van, taking a picture of the rear doors, which are closed.

"Why am I being David Bailey?" he says, looking over his shoulder at me, and holding the camera up. "You should be doing this."

"Today's weapon of choice," Connor remarks, as he gets out another camera instead of his phone, and heads back towards the bodies.

Yeah, I think, as I sit on the edge of the excavated ground and pull my boots back on. Many years ago it was me with a camera, and THEM playing with baseball bats and shovels. In the old days, most people were a bit funny about being spontaneously photographed. Nowadays, most people are photographed, most of the time.

But the reason I gave it up wasn't the reason many people thought. It wasn't the creeping around stalking Joe Public like a social paparazzo. It wasn't sitting in trees at night wondering if it was possible as a human being to contract Dutch Elm disease. It wasn't any kind of guilt trip or paranoia, no matter how much pressure I was under.

It was because when you're stuck behind the camera lens, you miss 99% of what's going on elsewhere.

I pull the leaf out of my hair and look at it. It's oak. When I look up at the woods around me, there's no sign of oak anywhere else. If it was in the hole where I was just lying down, it's possible it was transfer from the white van, or the shovels, or the boots of the men digging.

"Charlie, you got any evidence bags?" I ask. "Got a foreign leaf. Foreign to the woodland here, anyway."

"In the rucksack," he says, pointing behind him, still examining the shovels. "Well spotted."

I go and grab a handful of cellophane packets and a marker pen, and write
Foreign
Oak Leaf: hole#03EtoW.

"I'll keep looking," I say. I glance over at Sparky, who's still photographing the outside of the van. "Is there any bird crap on the roof of the van? If we've got foreign leaf matter it might be traceable to trees it was parked under elsewhere."

Sparky cranes his neck, to look over the roof of the white compact.

"Yeah, got some dried on," he reports, and looks up at the trees overhead with some concern. "I'll get a plastic sheet taped over it before it gets contaminated."

He pockets his camera and returns to the Merc.

"I knew it was a good idea you came along," says Connor, turning his attention to the soles of one of the digger's boots, shooting me a quick look, and a reassuring wink. "Keep up the good work."

"Have any of you got a laser pen on you?" I ask them, looking at the ground extending back into the sparse trees speculatively.

"Yeah, right here." Sparky rummages in the back of the Merc, before approaching with his blue plastic tarp and roll of gaffer tape in one hand, throwing me the builder's laser measuring sight with the other. "What do you need it for?"

I step back into the hole and crouch down, resting the laser pointer on the edge and switching it on so that I can sight along it, deeper into the woods.

"Looking for occupied holes like this one," I reply, turning the laser slowly to read any bumps or undulations in the ground that might have the regularity of shallow graves. "Keep your fingers crossed that there aren't any. There's a lot of woods out there, and if they do them in blocks of as many as twelve, and are currently on this border of the woods, you better hope they were just starting - not just finishing filling up the available area."

"Why does it worry me that you sound a bit too knowledgeable about that?" Connor mutters.

"Well, I'm guessing you don't even bury yours," I remark. "My guess is you got a good deal going on with the casino owner's safari park, and their infamous man-eating tigers."

Connor just looks at me, and says nothing. I'd guessed already, his experience of escaped tigers and keeping those incidents quiet, had some sort of mutual arrangement attached. But I didn't feel he needed me to elaborate. And asking me to explain would be a bit too much like denial sounding like an admission. I try not to smile to myself. I think he's getting to know me too well, and wonder if he's currently thinking the same about me.

Sparky tapes down the corners of the plastic sheet on the van's roof, and finally gets round to taking the key from the ignition and opening the rear doors.

"What you got?" Charlie asks him, starting to bag up the first shovel and labelling it.

"Just a few big mallets and a load of wooden tent pegs," Sparky reports, taking pictures. "Couple of bush machetes. No tents though, so they weren't planning on camping here. Not yet, anyway."

"That's lucky," Connor grins. "We could have just caught them digging their cold storage and composting toilets in that case."

"Also got a shoebox full of live rounds," Sparky continues. "Got the bling factor. Not gamekeeper fodder."

I finish my laser sweep from this angle, and find nothing conclusive, making a note of the distance and angular direction of any remarkable surface bumps, on the outside of a spare evidence bag.

I get out of the hole and walk to the first one, jumping in to do the same. If I find any corresponding readings, I could triangulate anything suspicious by taking a reading from the edge of each hole. Would speed up the process of a footstep search of the visible ground area.

"So why didn't you join the police?" Connor asks me, evidently keeping one eye on - and guessing - what I'm up to.

"Failed the eyesight test," I reply, hunching down to match the eye-line of the laser, resetting the angle to zero, and then checking the digital distance readout as I turn it. For some reason Sparky's last observation echoes in my head, and the thought of safari parks. Gamekeepers, I think. Maybe big game. Not tigers. Human shaped. That require wooden stakes, machetes and silver bullets. Shallow graves being dug, en masse, in preparation for something. I think about Jag Nut, upgrading from Paint-Ball to live action targets in the woods. "Is there a hunting permit right with the tenancy here?"

"No, because it comes under local livestock free roaming jurisdiction," says Connor. "Some of the
nouveau riche
yobs who own apartments here have been trying to contend it, but it's set in stone. What are you thinking?"

"Illegal sport hunting," I remark. "Preparation to conceal the evidence. Possibly just after taking the trophy photos for the mantelpiece, like you just did of us three taking a nap on duty."

The other three exchange looks.

"I think you should get these guys taken in and I.D.'d," Connor announces to the other two, standing up. "Need to do a back trace on who their other contacts might be."

"I'll get the body-bags," Charlie replies, taking the bagged shovels with him back to the Merc. "Sparky, secure the van, and call Vehicle Recovery."

"You carry on," Connor tells me. "I'll call head office. Give them your theory to run a diagnostic on."

I continue with my laser readouts of the woodland surface area. It occurs to me that it's the first time I've worked as part of a team, in my life away from door work. The nightclub job helped in that respect, because it's not as difficult as I thought it would be, communicating and being communicated with. I always thought the antisocial aspect of me was the most controlling one in my life.

Hmmmm. Antisocial personality in the process of vanishing, while I'm already conscious of deliberately working on controlling the avoidant one. I wonder what could be up for the chop next, in my exopalingenesis of migratory personalities. And what I'll be left with in the end - if there's anything left to speak of.

"Yeah, trophy hunters," Connor says on the phone, catching my eye as he walks around the left side of me, looking down into the hole I've just vacated, to start on the next one. "All these graves have been dug about a head too short for my liking."

That's the other thing about teamwork. You've always got someone else's experience to add another level of perspective. I rub my neck self-consciously, feeling pinpricks of empathy pain for whoever the intended occupants are.

At least, I hope it's that, and not Scarecrow Boy ringworm.

Charlie and Sparky bag and tag the bodies, and put them in the Merc, discussing the alligator that got into the swimming pool while we were at school. They're just preparing to leave, as Vehicle Recovery arrive with their high-visibility-striped low-loader, and hook up the white van. I'm doing some rudimentary maths on the back of the evidence bag, calculating the distance and direction of the one consistent anomaly in the woods.

"Need some help?" Connor asks me, coming over after talking to the recovery drivers. It looks like his experience as a Crime Scene Manager goes further than he's admitting to, but I don't ask about it.

"Yeah, stand in this hole facing the woods," I tell him, trying to focus on my own job instead.

He steps in, and I switch the laser back on, set a desired angle and distance, and point it at his chest.

"I've just got to walk away from you until this gizmo beeps," I say, starting off in the desired direction. "Then I'll tell you if we've got something."

The laser trills if I veer off-course. It's like walking with a sat-nav. I get about thirty-five yards, and the beep tells me I've arrived at the anomaly.

So does the shallow grave-shaped hump in front of me, disguised in tree shadows, to the naked eye.

"Anything good?" Connor calls.

"Yeah," I report. "You might want to call your Forensics buddies down here. Got some digging for them to do."

My phone rings, and I take it out, checking to see whether it's Warren or head office before answering. It's the latter.

"Yuri from Logistics is on his way over with your car," they tell me. I'm amazed how much of a social life my car is getting these days. I guess it just thinks it's owed twenty years' worth of birthdays due to its one not-so-careful owner that I relieved of it. "You're going over to City Central station to complete a profile on someone from last night for us, and in the meantime your car gets another free little valet."

"I hope that's not slang for 'Concealing the body of someone who works at the car wash' in it," I remark.

"Won't be room. There'll barely be room for you once it's finished, at this rate."

"If I get it back turned into a
Transformer
just make sure it has a command for Restore Factory Settings," I warn them. Connor has joined me, and surveys the burial mound speculatively, before holding out his hand for my phone.

"Yeah, it's JD," he greets them. "We'll have the Egyptologists down here, please." He looks at me as he disconnects, and hands me my phone back. "Slang for Forensic diggers."

"I believe you," I say defensively. "I do have some degree of control over my own psychosis."

"Pity you can't teach other people how to do that," he says, mildly. He snaps a four-foot leafy shoot from the nearest tree, and sticks it through an evidence bag into the ground, as a marker by the supposed grave, while I watch the recovery truck depart with the van. Gradually it dawns on me that subsequently I'm alone in the woods with Connor, until either Yuri or Forensics turn up. But for some reason or other, I don't find it as threatening a prospect as I might have done recently. And that's not just because I'm aware that there's satellite coverage in the area for once.

It gives my brain more fuel for speculation. About opportunists, who'd immediately start suggesting ways of passing the time. And people otherwise innocently just working together, whose sexual chemistry drives away all common sense, leaving a huge parking space free for ulterior motive and hidden agenda to reverse into. All I'm thinking about at the back of my mind right now, for idle entertainment while I scope the woods looking for further anomalies, is how many of the surrounding trees are good for climbing. And not as an escape route.

But I'm beyond showing off. Why would you want to show the world what you're capable of, before you need to use it. All you're doing is illustrating your limitations, not necessarily your skills and abilities. It just encourages the competition - or your enemies - to tool up for more, like Warren said in I-Q-24 the other night.