Say Goodbye Read Free Page B

and rabid perfectionist.
    Kimberly and Harold ducked beneath the crime scene tape.
    Harold whispered, “Good luck.”
             
    Supervisory Special Agent Childs had set out to become a famous Chicago architect. At the last minute, she’d decided to join the FBI instead. She ended up assisting one of Chicago’s finest evidence gurus, and that was that, Rachel had found her calling in life. Her attention to detail, ability to sketch to scale, and obsession with paperwork had proven much more valuable to evidence documentation than it had to the further beautification of Chicago’s skyline.
    That had been fifteen years ago, and she’d never looked back. At five foot nothing, one hundred and four pounds, she was one small, dedicated, hell-on-wheels Nancy Drew. Who was about to commit her first murder.
    “How the hell could you have missed something as major as
a human leg
?” she roared.
    She, Kimberly, and Harold had stepped away from the gathered masses to the relative shelter of a noisy generator. Rachel only dressed down her team members in private. Her team was her family. She could know they were fuckups. She could tell them they were fuckups. It was no one’s business, however, but their own.
    “Well, the leg’s in a bush,” Harold ventured finally. “Beneath a tree. It’s not that easy to see.”
    “It’s February. Leaves are long gone. It should’ve been visible.”
    “It’s in a grove of pine,” Kimberly said. “Harold led me straight to it. I still couldn’t see anything until he pointed it out. Frankly, I’m impressed he saw it at all.”
    Harold shot her a grateful look. Kimberly shrugged. He’d been right, Rachel wouldn’t go too hard on Kimberly. She might as well spread the magic around.
    “Crap,” Rachel grumbled. “Day three, we should be wrapping up this mess, not restarting our efforts. Of all the stupid, amateurish…”
    “It happens. Oklahoma City, the Nashville crash. These big scenes, it’s amazing we can wrap our arms around them at all.” Kimberly again.
    “Still…”
    “We adjust the perimeter. We refocus our search on the western side. It’ll cost us another day, but with any luck, one random leg is all we missed.”
    Now, however, Rachel’s frown had deepened. “Wait a minute, you’re sure it’s a human leg?”
    “I’ve seen legs before,” Harold said.
    “Me, too,” Kimberly agreed.
    But Rachel was suddenly holding her temples. “Ah crap! We’re not missing any body parts! We recovered three sets of human remains from the intact cockpit just this morning. And since I oversaw the effort, I know for a fact we had all six legs.”
    Harold looked at both of them. “Told you we had a problem.”
             
    They took a camera, flashlights, gloves, a rake, and a tarp. A mini evidence kit. Rachel wanted to see the “leg” for herself. Maybe they’d get lucky—it would turn out to be a scrap of fabric, or the torn arm from a life-size dummy, or better yet, the back hock of a deer some hunter had dressed up in clothing just to be funny. In Georgia, stranger things had happened.
    With only two hours of daylight left, they moved quickly but efficiently through the copse of trees.
    They combed the ground first to make sure they didn’t step on anything obvious. Then, adjusting slightly, Harold and Kimberly caught the item in the combined beams of their flashlights, illuminating it within the shadows of the overgrown bushes. Rachel knocked out half a dozen digital photos. Next came the tape measure and compass, recording the approximate size of the bush, relationship to the nearest fixed point, distance from their current perimeter.
    Finally, when they had documented everything but the hoot of a barn owl and the way the wind tickled the backs of their necks, like a shiver waiting to slide beneath their Tyvek coveralls, Harold reached up and carefully eased the item onto the cradling teeth of his rake. Rachel quickly unfolded the tarp. Harold