Once again, progress progressed at a painful crawl toward Oak Knoll, California. Mendez kept abreast of the latest technology being developed for law enforcement, yet tantalizingly out of reach—particularly for smaller agencies. They didn’t have the budget or the clout.
He glanced down at the corpse of Marissa Fordham, two days into the decaying process, smelling like an open sewer on a hot summer day. “Too late for her.”
3
Vince excused himself from the kitchen, made a beeline for the designated tree, and threw up. He had looked at every kind of horror during his career with the Bureau. His life’s work was the study of murderers. He had spent three years traveling the country from one maximum-security prison to the next, interviewing men who had committed some of the most horrific crimes in the history of mankind as the Bureau gathered information and ammunition to aid in the hunt of human predators. He had stood over crime scenes, one bloodier and more depraved than the next. He’d seen so many bodies in so many states of decay, he had learned long ago not to attach that visual to any emotion other than disgust for the crime.
It wasn’t the visual that got to him.
It was the bullet in his head.
He’d been living with it now for a year and a half, and had grown familiar with the tricks it liked to play on him. The pain ebbed and flowed. Sometimes it was like a thunderstorm contained in his skull. Sometimes it was a dragon sleeping just under the surface.
There were no medical texts in which a list could be found of side effects to having a .22 caliber bullet in one’s head. Seeing as the great majority of people didn’t survive the experience of being shot at nearly point-blank range, anecdotal information was hard to come by. Vince’s own doctors usually had only one thing to say when he would tell them about his symptoms: huh.
One of the stranger side effects was the sudden heightening of senses. Sometimes his vision would become so acute, color so saturated, the light so bright, his eyeballs would ache. Sometimes the smallest sounds would be so amplified in his head he would cringe. Sometimes—now—his sense of smell became so sensitive, every molecule of scent seemed swollen, so full he could literally taste them.
It wasn’t the visual that got to him today. It was the smell.
Like any dead creature, the body of Marissa Fordham had begun its inglorious process of decomposition. Nature was without mercy or modesty. There were no exceptions to the rules. The business of death was dealt with in a no-nonsense, practical matter. Once the heart ceased to pump blood, systems shut down and chemical changes began the process of reducing the highest being on the food chain to food for other creatures.
It didn’t take long. Especially in the warm weather they’d been experiencing. Absent a soul, the eyes glaze over and flatten, the skin loses color, the body’s temperature begins to drop. As if summoned, the blowflies come, laying their eggs in the wounds and orifices. A couple of hours after the last breath, rigor mortis begins in the jaw and neck, slowly spreading through the body. Bacteria rampaging through the abdomen cause gases to form, causing bloating, and the smell begins to gain strength.
It was the smell that got him today.
Vince dug a pack of Doublemint gum out of his pocket, unwrapped two sticks, and began to chew the taste of vomit out of his mouth.
He felt a little weak, a little dizzy. He had no time for either. To clear his head he thought about his bride of five months burrowing under the covers of their bed as he had dressed to leave for this crime scene. A warm sense of calm washed over him and he smiled a little at what a lucky son of a bitch he really was.
“You want to talk to the neighbor?”
Mendez had come out the kitchen door. He took a deep breath of the cool morning air, clearing his head of the stench of violent death. The yard around the house was scattered with pots of geraniums and marigolds and garden herbs. Vince took a deep breath of his own.
Mid-thirties, sharp and ambitious, Mendez had been a good candidate for the Bureau. That had been half of Vince’s goal when he had first come to Oak Knoll to help with the See-No-Evil murders the year before—to recruit Mendez. With some further education and experience, he