the ugliness like a civilized person seeks beauty.
He turned back toward the road and was startled by movement in the sand right in front of him. A horned beetle the size of his kneecap was creeping across the road, shiny black carapace gleaming. Garrett felt a shudder of revulsion, moved sharply aside to avoid the thing.
As he circled the creature at a good distance, his eyes were drawn to a bare patch in the green shoulder beside him. He moved closer to the clump of weeds, staring over the small field.
There were irregular oval brown marks in the wild grass, the size of footprints. The wildflowers around the marks were shriveled and blackened, as if by fire. Through his initial confusion, Garrett thought immediately and oddly of the three triangles.
Could it really be? Radiation?
What in God’s name would make footprints like that?
A feeling of dread rose up through him, from his legs through his groin and spine, up to the top of his head. The hair was standing up on his scalp and arms.
He gasped in, sucking breath, inhaling a rotten egg smell . . .
Sulfur.
He wheeled in place, staring around him.
Nothing but piles of gravel and crushed concrete, tangled heaps of rebar. After a long moment Garrett turned back to the dead flowers. He fumbled his digital camera from his backpack and snapped a few shots, then took a plastic evidence bag from a side pocket of the bag and broke off several of the burned flowers, slipping them into the plastic sheath. He stepped back and scanned the dirt road. It was crisscrossed with tire tracks, an amorphous mess, but he pulled a handful of colored flags from the pack and flagged the brown scorch marks in the grass, and the multiple tire marks in the sand of the road.
On his way back toward the body, Garrett stopped a tech beside the parked crime-scene unit van and pointed out the flags he’d placed. “Get impressions of the treads in that area. And there are some burn marks in the grass—get some photos of those, too.”
Landauer met him on the road, his big face flushed red with heat despite the chill, and sucking smoke from probably his fifteenth Camel of the day. “See no evil, speak no evil,” he grumbled, exhaling and jerking a thumb back down the road toward the office trailer. He lit a second cigarette from the one he had burning, carefully dropping the butt into a metal Band-Aid box he carried around at crime scenes for that precise purpose. “These bozos don’t record names or plates, only vehicle size and classification of load. ‘Sanitation Truck, Pickup, Trailer, Truck, Dump Trailer.’ ‘Refuse, Stumps and Brush, Concrete, Rebar, Dirt/Asphalt, Brick.’ The attendant doesn’t even leave the trailer—just eyeballs the load through the window, weighs the truck on the in and out, and collects the cash. Next time I got a body to dump, I’m a comin’ here, too.”
“How many customers today?”
Landauer grimaced. “They average 2,250 a day.”
Garrett’s heart sank. “So this morning . . .”
“Over nine hundred by noon. Got a patrolman getting Closed Mouth Mary to write down every make, model, and color she can remember, but we’re not talking rocket scientist here. And yeah, she collected a few checks, but it’s mostly a cash business. I don’t think we’ll be pulling devil-boy’s name and coordinates off one of those stubs.”
The big detective paused, puffed in smoke. “There is something, though.” He exhaled a noxious cloud and nodded up the trash mountain in the direction of the body. The sun was sinking in the sky, throwing long shadows over the hills. “That whole area was scheduled to be capped this morning—they bulldoze dumploads of dirt, cover it up, level it off.” He indicated a high heap of dirt on the flat road above the trash pit. “Thing is, this morning the front-loader broke down, threw the schedule off.” He pointed to the gigantic vehicle next to the pit.
“So she would have been completely covered if there hadn’t been that glitch,” Garrett said slowly. She wasn’t meant to be found. And that meant carving the numbers and symbol was a private ritual, not meant for anyone else to see.
“He’s familiar with the operation and schedule of this particular landfill, then,” he said aloud with cautious excitement. “A worker, or landscaper or contractor.”
“That’s the best case,” Landauer said with a nod. “The catch is, a lot of these loads that get emptied are from Dumpsters that get picked