Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

filled with curiosities. Perhaps I shall go there and see for myself. It has been a long while since I got myself thoroughly covered with mud for no practical purpose.

Chapter 15
    It was Wednesday morning. Only a little more than half the work week lay ahead, and Kelly Bergdoll was glad.
    Kelly had found that answering phone calls from people whose data didn’t say what they wished it said was the hardest part of running the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s forensics lab. Her life had gotten considerably harder when Sheriff Mike McKenzie discovered that she came to work very, very early.
    Kelly came to work very, very early so that she could accomplish something before her coworkers came in anxious to share the joke-of-the-day and, certainly, before her clients started bugging her.
    Beep . On schedule. It was Sheriff Mike dialing in to her personal line, and damn the receptionist who let him bully that sensitive information out of her.
    “Why is the fingerprint report blank?” he asked in lieu of saying hello.
    “Because, Sheriff, no identifiable fingerprints were found, except those discussed in Appendix B.”
    “On the whole island?”
    Kelly’s voice rose a semi-tone. “The island is the problem . It’s a huge murder site, compared to the usual apartment or alleyway. Where were the technicians going to lift the prints? Off the sand?”
    “What about the storage shed?”
    “The shed is thoroughly discussed in our report. As I said, check Appendix B. There were loads of prints, all of them traceable to the archaeology team, and I understand that none of them are suspects. We think the killer may have helped himself to the rubber gloves stored in the shed. Or maybe he brought his own.” That was Kelly’s personal theory. Criminals, on the whole, tended to be dumb and lazy, but this guy seemed to be plenty smart enough to take the negligible trouble of sticking a pair of surgical gloves in his pocket before he set out to kill.
    “What about the bodies? We did that thing where you put them in a tent and fumed them.”
    “Glue fuming.”
    “Yeah, I haven’t seen the glue fuming report yet.”
    Kelly waited a heartbeat before replying to prepare herself for the explosion. “The results are still preliminary, but—”
    “But they’re negative.” The explosion didn’t come. Sheriff Mike chose sarcasm for this rejoinder. “It was time-consuming and expensive. It put those poor kids’ bodies through another round of disrespectful poking and prodding. Of course, it didn’t work. I don’t think you ever thought it would.”
    Pushed to the wall, Kelly said, “No, I didn’t. The odds were low. The bodies were damp, they’d been buried, it’s damn near impossible to get a print in those conditions. But we had to try.”
    Finally, she had said something the crotchety old man could understand.
    “Yeah,” he said. “We had to try. Thank you for trying.”
    Then Kelly remembered that she liked Sheriff Mike. She wished he were in the room, so she could give him a comforting pat on the arm, but she just said, “At least we have the bullets. Maybe they’ll give us something we can use.”
    Sheriff Mike grunted and hung up.

    Skimming across calm dawn-blessed waters in her battered skiff, Faye could forget her every trouble, but she didn’t. Not this morning. She scanned the horizon constantly, because no one must see her today. She had an appointment with the remains of Abby Williford.
    The sun had hauled itself above the horizon when Faye beached her skiff and unpacked her gear. Rain and wind had returned the sand to its untouched state and the tide was higher than it had been when she discovered Abby, but Faye’s instincts rarely failed her. She found Abby’s grave within ten minutes of beginning her search. Unfortunately, Abby was no longer there.
    The smell of chlorine bleach was more nauseating than the grave had been when it was merely a pit of dried bones. The porous sand was saturated with it. Someone had pulled Abby out of the ground and made sure that no identifiable biological residue would remain.
    Even Clorox couldn’t keep a real archaeologist from digging when there was something she wanted to find. Faye donned a pair of sunglasses to protect her eyes. She covered her mouth and nose with the toilet tissue she carried with her everywhere, wrapping it around her head again and again to hold the makeshift mask in place. Her hands were already well-protected, since she always