Detective Bart Romanski rose to his feet and cracked his back again—this time out of earshot of Cash—and bundled the last duffel of evidence into the helicopter litter, then strapped it down. Cash and the sheriff had returned thirty minutes before with the tracker and his dogs. It had been a bust—they apparently had lost the trail in a mammoth shit-palace down by the lake. The dogs had left for home, heading back down the trail with Acosta, tails between their legs with shamed expressions on their droopy faces.
Romanski had gathered a lot of evidence. “When in doubt, take it out” was his motto. They must have two hundred pounds of evidence in the two litters, much of the weight coming from bloody sections of turf Reno had cut out from the stained ground.
“Lemme see what you got,” said Cash, coming over. She was all red-faced and sweaty and annoyed-looking. Romanski had seen her like this before, and at those times, she was to be avoided at all costs.
He handed her the iPad with the evidence list. She took it and, frowning, began flicking through it with her finger, making grunting noises.
“Lot of latents, I see. You think whoever did this wasn’t wearing gloves?”
“It’s hard to tell,” said Romanski, “until we rule out latents from the people we know were here. But there was no wipe-down, no glove smears. I’m not sure there was any reason for the killers to touch the tent or anything—possibly only the knives and headlamps. We got some full and partials off those.”
“Swab for DNA?”
“Oh yeah. Swabbed everything. It was a pretty clean crime scene, organized. This was no messy, spontaneous attack—this was planned. Choreographed, even.”
She looked up from the iPad and squinted, looking out over the valley, tinged yellow and orange in the setting sun. “Where the hell do you think they went?”
Romanski grunted. “There’s a hundred thousand acres out there.”
“Why did they take the bodies?”
Romanski had the feeling she was thinking out loud, so he said nothing. In his career as a forensic specialist, he’d seen a lot of criminal behavior that totally defied explanation. Some people were just fucking crazy.
She returned her focus to the iPad and went through the rest of the list, grunting her approval, or at least Romanski hoped that’s what those grunts meant. She handed it back. “You done and ready to fly this stuff out?”
“Yes. It’s too much to carry, so the chopper’s gonna drop a rope for it.”
“Good. Let’s get this evidence back to Arvada.”
“Right.” He got on the radio and called the A-Star, which had been waiting at the landing zone for their call, and told them the litters of evidence were ready. Huizinga, Reno, and the rest had already headed down to the landing zone and would be flying back to Arvada with the basket.
“I want you to light a fire under the labs,” she said. “I want top priority.” She looked at her watch. “Maybe you can get a head start on it tonight—I’ll authorize overtime.”
“You got it, boss.” Romanski loved overtime. Not only did it pay double, but he got to work at night, his favorite time. He was a nighthawk from way back.
He could hear the A-Star thudding up from the LZ, and it soon appeared above the trees. It turned and went into a hover, stabilizing itself, the noise loud and echoing off the mountain peaks. The downdraft from the rotors stirred everything up, lashed the bushes, and sucked up a bunch of leaves from the aspens, which whirled around like golden coins.
A cable lowered from a hoist in the open door. Romanski grabbed it as it descended within reach, guided it down, and clipped it to the first litter. The winch pulled it up, and they stowed it in one of the helicopter’s side baskets. After a moment, the cable descended again, and he clipped it to the second litter, stowed in the other basket.
Meanwhile, Romanski slipped into a harness and sling seat himself, and when the cable descended the third time, he clipped into it and was hoisted up and into the A-Star, the door slid shut, and he unclipped and put on his seat harness.
The helicopter, now fully loaded, set off eastward over the Front Range toward Arvada, the Denver suburb where the Forensic Services building was located. As Romanski eased back in the seat, watching the stupendous Rocky Mountains unroll beneath him, he felt the indescribable thrill of being on a big case. This was what he lived for.
Romanski’s interest in forensic work had been ignited when he was ten years old and his crazy English uncle gave him a book about Sir Bernard Spilsbury, the man who invented forensic pathology. He devoured those notorious British cases from the early twentieth century, classics that included the Brides in the Bath murders, the case of Dr. Crippen, and the Crumbles murders. Spilsbury was legendary for his fearsome courtroom appearances and his application of scientific methods to what had previously been guesswork and intuition. No jury could resist his unruffled certitude and keen language as he used science to put away killer after killer. Ever since, Romanski had been enthralled by the whole range of forensic science—pathology, fingerprints, hair and fiber, adipocere, blood splatter, the chemistry of poisons—the works. Spilsbury was the inventor of the “murder bag,” and as a teenager, Romanski had created his own Spilsbury murder bag, with tweezers, gloves, evidence tubes, magnifying glass, and swabs, which he carried to school and with which he pretended to solve crimes until it was taken away by the horrified principal. He graduated from CU Denver’s forensic science program, one of the best in the country, with a master’s degree in crime analysis, and went straight into the Forensic Services division of the CBI, where he had risen to chief in twelve years.
In his spare time, Romanski was also an amateur sculptor who welded together giant faces out of junk—boilers, springs, automobile engines, flywheels, gears, and anything else he could find at various junkyards and scrap dealers. It was a strange hobby for a forensic scientist, everyone told him—but he saw building a picture of a crime not unlike building his “portraits” out of discarded steel junk: you had to take a lot of apparently unconnected pieces and weld them together to create a portrait of the crime.
As the chopper cleared the Front Range and began to turn, heading for the CBI lab complex, Romanski thought about the crime scene he had just processed. He knew—he just knew—that this would be the biggest crime of his career so far. This was not some one-off crime—this had all the hallmarks of an opening volley, with the main action yet to come.