Jo studied the scene with a calculating eye.
“And you were running?” she asked.
Brill noted she kept him in line of sight, kept one hand on her gun even as she stepped toward the body.
“Starting one,” he said.
Jo squatted close to the head.
“Raped,” she said. “Throats cut.”
She leaned forward.
“We’ll scrape her fingernails to see if she got a piece of her attacker. Same thing for semen.”
“She’s burned,” said Brill.
Jo glanced up and glared at him.
“How do you know that?”
He pointed.
The skin around her genitals was scarred and blistered with a chemical burn.
He’d seen burned bodies before. It was a popular technique in Africa. Put a spare tire soaked in gasoline around a body and light it up.
Parts of the third world country had fundamentalists.
Worse than rebels, in his opinion.
They used acid to attack.
Throw it in a woman’s face because her hijab was too loose. In a man’s face for sacrilege.
Sometimes just because the religious nutter liked to hurt people.
He’d killed a few of those.
“It’s peeling,” Jo gagged.
“Acid,” said Brill.
He couldn’t study too close. Jo was in the way, and he didn’t want to see it. He had enough bad memories to occupy his mind.
But he bet it was inside her too.
Eliminating the evidence.
“ME won’t be able to pull much from that,” she observed.
He didn’t think the medical examiner would be able to tell anything from there.
Acid did a good job destroying tissue and anything around it.
Brill suspected the fingernails would be the same.
“Fingertips too,” Jo cursed.
She stood up and stared at him.
“When did you get to the campsite? After you were done at Leon’s?”
Brill glanced at his wrist. He didn’t wear a watch now, but it was a show just for her.
“I’ve been here for just over an hour. I parked, went for a run and called the operator when I found the body. You can check the timing with the women in the station wagon, that guy Des, or someone called Jester.”
“You met Jester,” she smirked with a mischievous glint in her eye.
“Did he invite you climbing?”
He nodded.
“I don’t climb.”
“You should,” said Jo. “You’ve got the build for it.”
She stepped around the body and worked the radio on her hip, calling in the ME.
“He won’t be here for a couple of hours,” she said.
Jo pulled a roll of police tape out of a backpack and cordoned off the body.
“We run a small crew around here,” she explained. “It’s the Sheriff, me and one other deputy.”
She watched Brill as she shared this information, searching for a reaction.
“Plus you heard Lucille on the phone.”
Another smirk. Another hint at a smile.
Brill could tell Jo liked her job. She wore it like a mantle, and he noticed the pride she took even in something as small as stringing up police tape.
“You get many of these?”
“Bodies?” she moved to stand in front of him, hand on the butt of her pistol, tape in the other.
Brill tried to appear smaller, to help her relax.
The situation, his presence, something was putting her on edge when she was close to him, hence the need to fast draw just in case.
“This is the first murder in a couple of years,” she told him. “But we get accidents a lot. You’d be surprised how dangerous the wilderness is.”
Studied him again.
Maybe looking for the surprise.
He nodded. It wouldn’t surprise him.
He’d been in the wilderness. Most of the time in other continents, but he had grown up in the forests of Arkansas, before the logging companies moved in to clear cut them.
Now they were pine trees, genetically modified to grow to height in twenty years for a new round of harvesting.
They called it a sustainable practice, and it was a billion dollar industry.
But when he was younger, there were black bears and wild panthers.
A panther’s shriek sounded much like a woman screaming. The wild cats had been forced out, by logging since there wasn’t a population growth in the delta region. The bears followed, through hunting and migration.
So too went the wild parts of the world where he grew up.
But bodies turned up there a lot too.
As far as he could tell, bodies turned up everywhere.
“Any accidents like this?” he asked.
“Bodies that fell or missing hikers turn up?”
He wasn’t sure what he was getting at, but Jo got it.
The rape was deliberate.
The cover up even more so.
“I’d have to go back and check,” said Jo.
She kept studying him.
“Do we have to wait here?”
“You want to leave her out here?”
That was a good trick, he thought.
Making the body a real person. Sure, it had been once, and he knew it. That was the reason he called it in, instead of just running.
Though the fervent gleam in the deputy’s eyes made him rethink that strategy.
She wanted the man who killed this woman.
And she was trying to decide if Brill did it.