“Could the river have really swept her ten miles downstream in a week?” Spengler asked. “You said bodies sink.”
They were standing on the river’s rocky shore, in an area where the water made a sharp twist and things that’d been floating along without any problem suddenly got stuck on the edges of rocks and caught on the broken branches. There was plenty of garbage out there, too. Hamburger wrappers and clumps of paper and plastic milk jugs and lots of dead leaves. The bend didn’t only catch trash, though. It was where the nude body of Marie Evans was spotted, a branch stuck through the meatiest part of her thigh, sticking her in place the same way you’d pin a butterfly to a board.
Jackson shrugged. He was chewing gum; she could see the flash of bright green between his jaws every time he spoke, stuck to the ridge of his teeth.
“Anything’s possible, I suppose,” he said. His hands were jammed deep into the pockets of his fluorescent orange vest. “I never would’ve thought so, but stranger things have happened.”
Spengler was standing on top of a flat rock, but the moisture had still managed to seep in through the soles of her shoes even though they were supposed to be waterproof. Loren was closer, looking over the body, but she stayed back. The smell was awful, and she was afraid if she came any closer she’d vomit. Besides, she could see enough from back here. Marie Evans had bloated in the water; her face had taken on both the grayish-green color and swollen shape of a winter melon, except the backside of the skull, where the bone had been crushed in, broken and shattered like a walnut shell. Otherwise, there was little recognizably human left. Her eyeballs were long gone, her nose was a sunken mess, her mouth a gaping, empty maw. And strangely, all that made it easier to look at, because then it wasn’t like looking at a person at all but just a thing, maybe something slapped together out of papier-mâché by a toddler.
“She’s bloated up pretty bad for not being in the water so long,” Jackson said, watching the body bag slowly zip up over her face. “Almost looks like she’s been dead a lot longer than she has.”