Survival Clause, стр. 66

I nodded. That was exactly what I meant. There had been more of us then: Wendell Craig and the three young men from the TBI had been with us, along with Rafe. And we’d been near the airport, so every minute or two we’d had to deal with the sound of a jumbo jet coming in for landing practically on top of our heads. But otherwise it had been a similar experience. Hotter, though. It had been June, and the heat and humidity hadn’t made the task any easier.

And this time, as far as we knew, we were looking for a single set of remains. Back then we’d been looking for several. I’m not sure whether that made it easier or the opposite.

“Hernandez?” Yung glanced between us. I left it to Grimaldi to explain.

“Eugenio Hernandez. One of Hector Gonzales’s associates. He was in prison when Agent Collier took down Gonzales’s SATG. By the time Hernandez heard what had happened, and got out, it was June. He grabbed Collier off the street, spent the best part of a day torturing him, and then left. Agent Collier freed himself and made it home.”

Yung nodded. “I read about that.”

Neither of their voices gave any indication that they understood what that had been like, and the strength of will it had taken. Rafe still had scars all over his chest and stomach from Hernandez amusing himself, not to mention the one on his arm, where Hernandez had pinned him to the table with a knife through the forearm. But since that wasn’t what this conversation was about, I swallowed both the nausea that the memory produced, and the need to point out how heroic my husband had been, and let Grimaldi carry on.

“Collier suspected that Hernandez was responsible for the disappearance of several young women. We went looking for them.”

“And did you find them?” Yung wanted to know. She swatted irritably at a strand of something sticky that tried to attach itself to her pants.

Grimaldi nodded. “In the woods behind the house he lived in at the time. It was a situation much like this one. But they’d been gone less time. Five years, instead of twenty-five.”

“Bones don’t disappear,” Yung said.

Grimaldi ignored this sage comment. “Have you ever done this before?”

“Looked for remains?” Yung didn’t look up. “Yes. It’s easier when it’s bones.”

No question. “Harder to see, though.” I kicked at a dry, brittle stick that could have been a bone or just something that had fallen off a tree. (It was a twig, or I wouldn’t have kicked it.) “Jurgensson’s remains could be five feet away from us, and we’d walk right by them.”

“Maybe we should spread out,” Yung said, with no enthusiasm whatsoever.

Grimaldi shook her head. “No point. I’m not expecting to find anything. This is just something to do because I can’t sit still.”

Yung slanted her a look. “You’re not expecting to find anything because there’s nothing to find? Because you don’t think the remains are here? Or—”

“I don’t expect to find anything because the remains could be five feet away from us and we’d walk right by them,” Grimaldi said. “This isn’t the way to do a proper search. We’d need more people, and dogs. And permission. As it is, we’re just three women taking a walk in the woods.”

“On private property.”

Grimaldi shrugged. “I’m not too worried about that. If he comes and warns us off, it’s just confirmation that he has something to hide.”

“And he won’t be coming anyway,” I added, swatting at a clump of leaves. “Rafe and Bob are keeping him busy.”

“And your brother.”

Right. And my brother. Because you never know when you might need a lawyer.

“How far from here to the house?” Agent Yung wanted to know.

Grimaldi glanced at me. I shrugged. “I’ve never been here before. I have no idea.”

Yung looked from one to the other of us. “Did neither one of you think to consult a map?”

“It’s not like we’re walking the Appalachian Trail,” Grimaldi said. “We’re never more than twenty minutes from civilization.”

“We’ve walked a lot longer than that and seen nothing!”

“That’s because we’re walking parallel to the road,” Grimaldi said. “If he’s going to dump a body on his property, and he didn’t want to bury it in the pigsty or under the rose garden, chances are he’d put it as far from the house, and as far from the road, as he could. At the same time.”

I nodded. That made sense to me. “Less chance someone would stumble over it accidentally.”

“Less chance anyone would find it at all if he’d buried it in the rose garden,” Leslie Yung grumbled.

“And he might have done that. That’s what Sheriff Satterfield and Agent Collier are trying to ascertain. Meanwhile, we’re here looking at the terrain to see where someone might have left a body.”

We walked another few feet in silence.

“Is he a big man?” Yung wanted to know. “Mullinax?”

I glanced at Grimaldi. “He isn’t small. Not as big as Rafe, but no shrimp. And would have been in better shape at fifty-some than he is now, in his mid-seventies.”

“What about the victim? Jurgensson?”

It had never occurred to me to wonder, so I waited to see whether Grimaldi knew. As I might have expected, she did. “Per his most recent driver’s license, thirty years ago, he was five feet, ten inches tall, and weighed a hundred and ninety pounds.”

So not super-sized, but as I’d said about Mullinax, no shrimp, either. Hefty enough that it might have taken two people to get him out here. It’s one thing to carry a woman twenty yards, from a truck to a dumpster, and quite another to haul almost two hundred pounds on a twenty minute hike into the woods, over downed tree trunks and rough terrain. The weather might have been bad too, for all we knew. It was too long ago for anyone to remember, most likely, especially since we didn’t know exactly when he’d disappeared.

“Maybe he had help,” I said, pushing aside