Dead Watch

back into the trees.
    Winsome introduced them as FBI investigators, and one of the plainclothesmen, an investigator with the Virginia BCI out of Appomattox, whose name was Kline, said, “Better come on back.”

    The body was fifty yards into the woods, a small end-of-the-trail clearing, clumps of old toilet paper in the brush, a few bottles and cans, a collapsed plastic trash barrel. The odor of burned pig was thicker here, with the smudgy underscent of petroleum. Though he’d seen people incinerated by napalm, Jake didn’t immediately recognize the body when they stepped into the clearing. It looked more like a rotting tree stump, with a new tree growing up out of the old roots.
    “Jeez,” Novatny said. They all sidled toward it. The closer they got, the more the body looked like a stump, until the last few feet, when they could see bloody raw fissures in the blackened flesh. It still didn’t look human, until Jake went a bit sideways and saw the shoes. The shoes were badly burned, but still recognizable. The victim had been bound with wire to the tree, in a kneeling position, one foot on each side of the tree.
    No head.
    “Not just wire,” Novatny said. “Barbed wire. Wonder if we could trace that? Where they got it.”
    “Could’ve just clipped it out of a fence in the night,” the sheriff said. “That’s what I would’ve done—if I was going to do this.”
    “Was he alive? Were they torturing him?” Jake asked.
    “Have to wait for the autopsy,” the sheriff said. “But nobody heard anything. No screaming, or shouting. No commotion. I don’t know why you’d wire him up if he was dead—why not just lay him down on a big stack of wood, and pile some more up around him?”
    “Nobody saw a car?”
    “No. After the fire died down, Anderson went back to changing his oil, he never saw a car leave. They must’ve come in here with a car, though. Didn’t see much in the way of tracks, it’s all gravel and bark in the parking area.”
    “You done with the photos?” Clancy asked, looking at the sheriff.
    “Yeah . . . got video and stills both. We were waiting for you before we did any more.”
    Clancy walked once around the body, then stepped close, knelt on a bare patch of ground, took a short metal rod out of his case, and began pushing a shoe off the remains of a foot. The shoe fell apart, exposing a patch of reddened flesh. Clancy took another instrument from his case, a nine-inch-long polished steel tube that looked a bit like a syringe, cocked it by sliding the barrel, as if it were a tiny shotgun, pressed the tip against the red flesh, and squeezed. The instrument snapped, they all jumped, and Clancy pulled it back and stood up.
    “How long?” Novatny asked.
    “Pretty good sample. Ten minutes,” Clancy said. He put the sampler in his case and snapped the case. “I’ll go back to the car and do it.”
    “Ten minutes?” The sheriff’s eyebrows were up. “How reliable?”
    “With a good sample, ninety percent,” Clancy said. “I’ve got a digital DNA record in my laptop.”
    “How come that doesn’t get down to us?” the sheriff asked. “On-scene DNA could be handy.”
    Clancy shrugged. “You could have it if you wanted it—but the machine costs seventy grand, and it’s about two grand per test, counting amortization on the equipment. Regular’s what, a hundred and fifty bucks, for a two-day wait?”

    “No head,” Jake said, as Clancy disappeared back down the track. “No blood? Any sign of a struggle, any . . .”
    “What you see is what we got, other than the ID,” Winsome said. “We’ve already bagged the ID. We could do some soil tests, but we wouldn’t learn much. The autopsy ought to tell us if he was alive.”
    Jake looked at Novatny: “Christ, I hope it’s not him.”
    Parker said, “Chuck, it’s him. You know it, I know it. The media is gonna go exactly berserk. This is gonna be worse than a Hollywood murder. This is gonna be worse than anything we’ve ever seen.”
    They all looked glumly at the body for another ten seconds, and Novatny said, “Well, at least we’re not gonna be bored.”

    “Don’t usually smell the gas afterward,” Jake commented.
    “What?” The sheriff looked at him.
    “The gas usually burns up and the smell of the fire cloaks whatever is left. This smells like they either spilled some that didn’t burn, or they deliberately sprinkled it around where it wouldn’t burn.”
    “Why?”
    Jake shrugged. “I