Stranded

Creed kept Agent O’Dell and Grace in his line of vision. To Agent Tully it probably looked like he wanted to make sure Grace was okay. That was only half the truth. He couldn’t get Agent O’Dell—Maggie—off his mind.
    God, she had gorgeous eyes, rich brown with flecks of caramel.
    Hannah would be laughing at him about now, telling him, “Since when have you ever noticed a woman’s eyes, let alone what color they are?”
    She was right. This was stupid.
    Agent Tully pointed at the crater left by a backhoe and was telling Creed about the construction project that had uprooted a skull and other bones along with a garbage bag containing a body.
    “Was it male or female?” Creed asked.
    “That’s information we haven’t released yet,” Tully said.
    Creed didn’t need to know. Grace didn’t care what gender the corpse was. They all smelled alike to her. But Creed wanted to know. The only reason he put himself through so many of these recoveries was in the hope of finding his sister, Brodie. Hannah had told him that when Agent Alonzo at Quantico called, he mentioned that the farmstead was behind an interstate rest area.
    “Does it make a difference?”
    Tully must have seen something in Creed’s face. Hannah had said that these two—O’Dell and Tully—were profilers and that Creed should “behave” himself. If they really did have antennae for someone’s psychological wellbeing they should have already sent him packing back to Florida.
    “It doesn’t matter to Grace,” Creed confessed. “But it helps me to know as much about the situation as possible. For instance, if you suspect it’s a crime of passion the body might not be hidden or buried as deep.”
    “That makes sense.”
    “How many others do you think there are?” Now Creed just wanted to cut to the chase.
    “We really don’t know. There might be a dozen or there might not be any more than what we’ve found.”
    The details that helped Creed and Grace weren’t necessarily the same ones that law enforcement was interested in. And sometimes it was better to
not
know everything law enforcement suspected, or even what their expectations were.
    Creed knew Hannah had also gone over with Agent Alonzo what Creed and Grace could offer, what they would do, and what that meant. She always spelled it out before she ever accepted an assignment so that there were no misperceptions, no misunderstandings, and so the client knew there were no guarantees. At least no family members were here. Creed hated when the officials allowed family to wait somewhere in clear sight.
    “If you can’t tell me the gender, can you give me an idea of how old the remains were in the garbage bag?” Creed asked.
    “About three weeks.”
    “And the skull and bones? What kind of shape were they in?”
    “There wasn’t any flesh. No residue of decomp. They definitelyhad been in the ground for a while. This property has been vacant for almost ten years. We don’t know if the killer has had access to it for that long, but we can’t discount it either.”
    Creed pulled a GPS monitor out of his pack and turned it on. He started tapping into the gadget’s memory some baselines to define the search corridor. It was a large area, and overwhelming if the woods behind the property were to be a part of the grid.
    “I imagine it must make a difference,” Agent Tully continued when Creed had no more questions, “whether a body’s been buried a couple months or a couple of years.”
    “Grace has a remarkable ability to work through multiple targets, but yeah, it can be difficult if those targets are in different stages of decay. Cadaver scent is not one single scent. There’s a whole range of scents that the body gives off at different stages. And there are a variety of things—as you know—that affect decomp. For instance, how deep the body is buried. If it’s enclosed in a garbage bag or just underneath the dirt. The composition of the soil and what the air exchange might be. When we’re searching in water, it makes a difference how warm or cold the water is.”
    Creed glanced at the agent and realized he may have given him too much information to decipher. He found that often law enforcement just wanted him to find the dead bodies. They didn’t care how it was done. As far as they were concerned it was magic. If he tried to explain the science of it, he usually lost them.
    “Your dog can smell a body underwater?”
    Creed smiled, pleased that Agent Tully