Bitter Wash Road Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    Hirsch noted Nancarrow’s contact details. When he was alone, he grabbed the Canon stored in his glove box and stepped carefully to the rim of the depression, trying not to disturb the layers of dirt, pebbles and flinty stones. The dead woman lay a short distance in from the edge. He ran his gaze over the surrounding dirt. Last night’s showers had left a speckled crust, meaning prints would show clearly. Hirsch saw no boot or shoe prints, no drag marks, just the fine tracings where animals and birds had circled the body. A fox or a wild dog had gnawed at her forearm, a crow had pecked out the visible left eye. Ants had found her. Flies. Clearly she was dead, but Hirsch was obliged to check.
     
    He took a series of photos first, the scene from all angles, then perspective shots: the body in relation to the road, a nearby culvert, the township on the other side of a stretch of exhausted red soil. Finally he stepped down into the shallow bowl, crouched and felt for a pulse. Nothing. Her clothes were still damp.
     
    He straightened, stepped away from the body.
     
    She was struck while walking or hitching by the side of the road and fell into the hole; she fell from a moving vehicle; she was tossed from a moving vehicle; she was killed elsewhere and tossed down here from the road.
     
    She lay as if sleeping, face down, her chest to the ground but her left hip cocked and her legs slightly splayed, one bent at the knee. Her right arm was trapped under her right hip, and her right cheek was stretched out in the dirt as if she were looking along her outflung left arm: looking blindly, Hirsch thought, thinking of the eye socket. Maybe her other eye was intact, tucked into the dirt. There was very little blood.
     
    He took another series of photographs, focussing on the clothes. Tight black jeans, a white T-shirt, a tiny fawn cardigan, bare feet in white canvas shoes. The T-shirt had ridden up to reveal a slender spine, a narrow waist, the upper string of a black thong. Bruising and abrasions. A silver chain around her neck. No wristwatch but craft-market silver rings on her fingers, and in her visible ear a silver ring decorated with a Scrabble piece, the letter M.
     
    What about ID? Hirsch couldn’t see a bag or wallet anywhere. If she was struck by a vehicle, and knocked or carried some distance, then her bag or wallet would be further along the road. Time for that later.
     
    He crouched, peering at the area of waist and spine between the low-riding jeans and the scrap of T-shirt, and saw a small manufacturer’s tag on the thong. Her underwear was inside out. He crab-walked closer to the body and lifted the T-shirt: a rear-fastening black bra, fastened with only one of the two hooks.
     
    None of that proved anything. It was suggestive, that’s all. He could think of plenty of scenarios to explain it, some of them innocent. For example, she’d dressed in a hurry, she’d dressed in darkness, she was short sighted, she was careless or drunk, she’d dressed in a cramped space, like the rear seat of a car.
     
    Or someone else had dressed her.
     
    He peered at her back, but couldn’t read anything into the surface damage. Dirt on her bare ankles and arms, dirt on her cheek. But you’d expect dirt if she fell or was tossed by tyres—or by hand—down a dirt incline. That’s all he could tell. Dr McAskill would do the rest.
     
    Now Hirsch brought himself to examine her head. The outraged eye socket stared back at him as he stared at a small, fine-boned face. Small, slack mouth, tiny teeth and a swollen tongue. A pert nose. A bruised, misshapen cheek. Something had hit the girl pretty hard, and he noticed he was thinking girl, not woman —the designation given him by Kropp and Nancarrow. She’s maybe sixteen, thought Hirsch. Somewhere between mid and late teens.
     
    Then he wandered along the road in each direction. He found a small fabric bag twenty metres from the body, strap and flap torn, still damp. He