Read Online Bones by Jan Burke - Free Book Online Page B

jar to Andy, who used it. He didn't offer it to Ben.
    Ben was putting a little marker--a small yellow flag on a wire--near the spot where he had probed. They continued in this fashion until they had a few other places marked. The yellow flags formed a rough oval, about six feet long.
    Bingle was agitated--fidgeting but obeying David's command to stay. Every now and then I would get a whiff of what he was reacting to--an unmistakable smell, a smell that is sweet and pungent all at once--a smell that you instantly know the meaning of, even if you have never smelled it before. Perhaps some primal memory repulses us from this scent, tells us that this is the smell of the death and decay of one of our own.
    "I'll show you what we're doing," David said, coming over to calm Bingle. As he moved closer to me, I said, "Vicks VapoRub."
    He moved his hand, just stopped short of touching his upper lip. "A menthol and camphor smell compound that's sort of similar to it, yes. I use it to mask the decomp odor. Do you need some?"
    "Not yet."
    "Don't wait too long," he said. "Once the smell is in your nose . . ." He paused, then said again, "Don't wait too long."
    He began to show me the scene maps they were drawing, with nearby peaks as triangulation points to mark the position of the tree. The grid lines were shown, over which the position of the grave, the outer perimeter boundary, and a cluster of boulders were drawn.
    "If we need to testify about any of this in court, we'll have a precise record of where we found any evidence or remains, how the remains were positioned--and so on."
    Bob Thompson walked up to us. "What's taking so long? Parrish says she's there, about two feet down. He's already confessed. I just need a preliminary identification."
    Behind me, I heard Ben ask, "And what if this is some other victim, Detective Thompson?"
    Thompson hesitated, then said, "Fine, but let's not dawdle, all right? We aren't going to be able to stay up here forever."
    Ben simply walked off. From one of his duffel bags, he pulled two rolls of screen, one about one-quarter-inch mesh, the other about half-inch. David helped him use these and two sets of support pieces to build two sieves.
    Bingle occasionally called out to David, and in Spanish, David answered, "It's okay, Bingle. Stay with Irene." Invariably, I'd get a quick kiss from the dog in response.
    Whenever I looked over at Parrish, he was watching me, a knowing smile on his face. I repressed the urge to quickly look away, to show how uneasy I was under his scrutiny. But I was always the first to break eye contact, and once, when an involuntary shiver went through me as I turned away, I heard him laugh softly.
    With Andy's help, the anthropologists carefully scraped the surface level of the soil inside the markers away, and put it through the two sieves. They continued in this fashion, a few centimeters at a time--over Thompson's impatient protests. Although they didn't seem to be getting anywhere at first, before long I saw more clearly defined edges of the oval they had marked with the flags. The smell was getting stronger.
    Ben took a moment to stretch. When he came over to say hello to Bingle, I said, "You wouldn't happen to have any of that smell compound with you?"
    "I don't use it."
    "But how can you stand--"
    "For professionals who deal with it all the time--well, I suppose it's a matter of personal preference, but I don't recommend using any compound to cover up the smell. Try to deal with it the way nature designed you to deal with it."
    "What do you mean?"
    "Sooner or later, after your brain has received the message from your olfactory cells that something bad is out there--and received it again and again--the signal stops registering. There will be residual odor on your clothes and you'll smell it again later, when you aren't so near the grave."
    "Charming."
    "You'll smell it later no matter what you do now. But if you use something that will open up your nasal passages, it will