176060.fb2
Ten days later
Tuesday, June 10
Interstate 95
39 miles southwest of Washington, DC
6:19 p.m.
A restless sky overhead. No rain yet, but a line of thunderstorms was stalled over DC and it didn’t look like it’d miss us. At least the storm would break the stifling June humidity.
The exit to the FBI Academy lay less than two miles away.
Tessa sat in the passenger seat and quietly scribbled a few letters into the boxes of a New York Times crossword puzzle, her third for the day.
“What’s a seven-letter word,” she said, “for the ability to recall events and details with extraordinary accuracy?”
“Hmm…” I thought about it. “I don’t know.”
She pointed to the boxes she’d just filled in. “Eidetic.”
“If you already knew the answer, why did you ask me?”
“I was testing you.”
“Really.”
“Seeing if you were eidetic.”
“Maybe I was testing you too,” I said.
“Uh-huh.” The sign beside the highway signaled the exit to the Quantico Marine Corps Base. “It’s just ahead.”
She folded up the crossword puzzle and stared out the windshield at the anvil-shaped clouds looming in the darkening sky.
Tonight’s panel discussion was an official Bureau function so I’d asked her to take out her eyebrow ring and lose the black eye shadow. She’d obliged, but only after giving me a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me teenage girl look.
“If they ever make eye-rolling an Olympic sport,” I’d told her, “you’d be a gold medalist.”
“How clever,” she’d mumbled. “Do you write your own material or do you hire out?”
I’d opened my mouth to respond but couldn’t come up with anything witty on the spot, and that seemed to please her.
I’d decided to ignore her black fingernail polish but did ask her to kindly dress up a little, and rather than her typical black tights or ripped jeans, she’d grudgingly put on a wrap-around skirt and a long sleeve charcoal button-down shirt that hid the line of two-inch scars on her right arm that bore witness to her self-inflicting stage.
Leather and hemp bracelets encircled her left wrist, a few steel rings hugged her fingers.
Paradoxically, this girl who couldn’t care less about being cool had managed to define her own avant-garde style-Bohemian light goth. A free spirit, whip-smart, and cute in a slyly sarcastic way, she’d become the person I cared about more than anyone else in the world, now that my wife Christie was gone.
I took the exit and Tessa looked my way. “You promise we’re not going to drive past the-”
“Don’t worry.” I knew what she was referring to. We’d talked about it earlier. “We won’t be anywhere near it.”
Silence.
“I promise.” I took a sip of the coffee she’d bought for me twenty minutes ago at an indie coffee shop on the outskirts of DC.
“Okay.”
The FBI Academy had recently started a body farm on the east side of the property, similar to the famous Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Research Facility in Knoxville, Tennessee.
So now, in a back corner of the campus, dozens of corpses lay in various states of decay. Some in car trunks, others in shallow graves, others in streams or ponds, others in shadowed forests or sunny meadows-all positioned to give us an opportunity to study how decomposition rates, insect activity, and scavenger-initiated disarticulation vary for different means of body disposal. A real-world way to advance the field of forensic taphonomy-the science of understanding how dead organisms decay over time.
Even though I’d never had any intention of taking Tessa there, it’d been her biggest concern ever since I invited her to attend tonight’s panel discussion.
I sipped at the coffee, and this time she watched me carefully.
“Well?” she asked.
“What?”
“The coffee.”
“I’m not going to do this, Tessa.”
“Admit it. I got you this time.”
“I don’t have to prove any-”
“You have no idea what kind of coffee it is.”
I took another sip. “Yes, I do.”
“Now you’re stalling.”
“Let’s see. Full-bodied and smooth. Low-toned with expansive acidity. Complex flavor. Slightly earthy, a hint of dried figs and a deep, velvety complexion-Sumatra. I’m guessing shade-grown, the Jagong region along the northern tip of the island.” I took another sip. “You put some cinnamon in it to confuse me.”
She said nothing.
“Well?”
“You need to get a life.”