Over Tumbled Graves Read Online Free PDF Page A

shouldn’t disrupt any more evidence, but he couldn’t stop, just kept pulling branches away, filled with the irrational fear that he might know who this was.
    More branches came away, revealing a small head, already shrinking in on itself, features wearing away, patches of wiry hair. Female, her lips pulled tight over her teeth, as if she had eaten something sour, her eyes darkly socketed, drawn in on themselves. Dupree felt his mouth go dry. The things men do to women. He pulled the branches away, further disrupting the crime scene because even though he knew it wasn’t possible, he had to know this wasn’t his daughter or his niece or his wife. Or Caroline.
    That night, another detective would tell him the body was that of a hooker and methamphetamine user named Rebecca Bennett, whom no one could recall having seen alive since April 1, four weeks earlier. No report had been filed, because it was assumed she’d gone back to Seattle or perhaps down to L.A., or perhaps had gotten married, or maybe had been abducted by aliens, or, more likely, noone cared enough to notice she’d gone missing. A disappearing hooker was not much of a magic trick, as it turned out. Her file could’ve had a hundred different names on it, the details were so basic: victim of a sexual abuse at eleven, drug charge at thirteen, runaway at fourteen, theft at fifteen, foster care, runaway again, another drug charge, another theft. When she was killed—strangled and then shot in the head—Rebecca Bennett was twenty-two.
    As he crouched in front of her, Dupree couldn’t stop thinking of her as one of the women he cared for, especially Caroline. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, staring into the face of the decomposing young girl. It took far more strength than it probably should have for him not to reach up and brush the hair from the dead girl’s eyes. Instead he pulled a few more branches away until the girl’s other arm emerged, bones with patches of dried skin, and then a hand, still clutched around the thing that had drawn his eye: two folded, twenty-dollar bills.

4
     
    Caroline had gone back to the office, turned off her phone, and looked through a book of mug shots for the man in khaki pants. When she had looked through pages of mugs of forty-ish white men, she sat staring out a window. Time passed without any gauge. She took a shower in the locker room, letting the water pool in her long, narrow fingers, then changed into dry clothes. When she came out into the SIU offices, Sergeant Lane was standing at her cubicle, holding a picture of her niece that he quickly put back on her desk.
    “They find the kid’s body?” Caroline asked.
    “No. Not yet.” He sat down, overweight and blanched, still wearing the suit from the sting. After a moment, she sat across from him. “Dupree just called, though. They found a body, a young woman, probably been there a couple weeks.”
    “Jesus. What a day.”
    “You taking tomorrow off?” he asked.
    “I wasn’t planning to. Aren’t we doing the house on Sixth?”
    “Caroline,” he began, and already she flinched. He never usedher first name, always called her “Mabry.” “I want you to see someone in professional services.”
    She smiled at the department’s euphemism for its psychiatrist—professional services. She knew who went to see the dour woman in professional services: drunks just before they were put on disability leave; drug users just before they were fired; wife beaters, attitude problems, and burnouts, the guys who beat the shit out of people at routine traffic stops. “Sarge, I don’t need this.” Caroline lifted a hand to rub her jaw, but became self-conscious and dropped it back in her lap.
    “After the day you had, Caroline…”
    “I fucked up a bust. I know that.”
    “It isn’t about that.”
    Reflexively, she turned steady and cool, cleared her head of the fog, allowed her anger to dissipate, and stared at him through calm eyes.
    “You work sixty-hour