The Deepest Wound (Jack Murphy Thriller #3) - Rick Reed Page 0,3

and eating almost as much as he loved his wife.

Fifty yards away, at the main entrance to the landfill, a gaggle of reporters hovered. They jostled each other each time a car slowed to see what was going on. Cameramen and reporters would rush the passing car and, seeing it was no one of consequence, fight their way back to the entrance, anxious to get the gory details. Fear sold TV airtime and newspapers.

“Let’s see the body.” Jack noticed the other officers were wearing boots, and he glanced down at his deck shoes. He would have to throw them away after this.

Seeing his distress, Walker reached in the back of his SUV and came out with two pairs of yellow knee-high rubber boots. “Not a body,” he informed them. “Body part. A head, to be exact.”

Jack slid the boots on—they were large enough to swallow his shoes—and he and Liddell followed Walker down the shoulder of Laubscher Road. Walker pulled up where orange marker flags had been stuck in the ground inside a roped-off area of chain-link fence. Half of the flags were inside the fence, the other half outside.

It was over one hundred degrees, the sun was directly overhead, and the smell hit them first. Decaying human flesh has an unmistakable sickly sweet odor. Jack had smelled it as soon as they parked, but hadn’t been able to pinpoint the source.

Walker pointed toward the edge of the fence where a head seemed to melt into the uneven vegetation and garbage. The skinless right side of the face, teeth, and jaw faced upward, and a piece of scalp with long dark hair flapped away from the top of the skull.

“How long?” Jack asked. The rate of decomposition suggested the head had been there for weeks, but he wasn’t the expert here.

“There are five stages of decay,” Walker said. “This is in the fourth or advanced stage.” He pointed at the blackened vegetation around the skull, resembling an oil patch. “The body fluids purge and seep into the soil. The grass around the head looks like it’s been cooked.”

“Gee, thanks, Mr. Wizard,” Liddell said. “But that doesn’t tell us much.”

“Sorry,” Walker said, seeming to realize how technical he was sounding. “I just returned from a medicolegal death investigation school, and they brought in a forensic anthropologist who taught all this stuff. To determine the time of death, I have to factor in temperature, location, and any other preservation factors, plus age of the victim, manner of death—”

“In other words, Mr. Wizard, there are a plethora of factors to consider,” Liddell interjected.

“Plethora? Did you really say that, Cajun?” Walker grinned. “Anyway, the short answer to your question is she’s been down two days or less. The head was brought here in a plastic contractor’s bag. We won’t be able to tell until the autopsy if the head was stored somewhere else, maybe refrigerated or frozen, or if it was just done.”

Jack looked closer and saw the black pieces of plastic that he had assumed were just more trash. The contractor’s bag suggested the victim—a woman, judging by the length of the hair—had been killed somewhere else and dumped here.

“What lucky soul made this discovery?” Jack asked, but before Sergeant Walker could answer, a uniformed officer walked up holding a portable radio.

“Dispatch,” the officer said, and handed the radio to Jack.

Jack punched the transmit button. “Two David five four,” he said, giving his radio call sign.

“Two David five four. Call Captain at home,” the police dispatcher said.

“Will do.” Jack handed the WT back to the patrolman, who motioned over Jack’s shoulder.

“Little Casket’s here.”

As Jack punched in the captain’s cell phone number, he saw the coroner’s familiar black Suburban arriving. It just missed striking a cameraman who had unwisely run into its path. The phone stopped ringing and the sound of someone cursing loudly in the background came through the line.

“Jack. Jack,” Captain Franklin yelled over the noise.

“Captain, is everything okay?” Jack asked. Captain Franklin was in charge of the detective’s office.

“That’s Stinson raising hell,” Franklin explained. “He’s in the sand trap and about to break an iron over his caddy’s head.”

Jack had to grin at the mental picture of the former commander of the investigations unit swinging a golf club wildly and cursing.

“Look, Jack, I got the call from dispatch. What have you found out?”

“Walker said the murder is recent—one or two days at most. We’ve got a female head. Just a head and it’s not a pretty sight. Looks like it was