Unnatural Exposure Read Online Free PDF Page A

voice them with the certainty of one who doesn't know enough to realize he could be wrong. In part this was because he wanted results without work.
    'I haven't examined the body yet or verified gender,' I said, hoping he would remember there were other people in the room. 'This is not a good time to be making assumptions.'
    'Well, I'll leave ya,' Pleasants said nervously, on his way out the door.
    'I need you back in an hour so I can get your statement,' Ring loudly reminded him.
    Kitchen was quiet, looking at diagrams, and then Grigg walked in. He nodded at us and took a chair.
    'I don't think it's an assumption to say that what we got here is a homicide,' Ring said to me.
    'That you can safely say.' I held his gaze.
    'And that it's just like the other ones.'
    'That you can't safely say. I haven't examined the body yet,' I replied.
    Kitchen shifted uncomfortably in his chair. 'Anybody want a soda. Maybe coffee?' he asked. 'We got rest rooms in the hall.'
    'Same thing,' Ring said to me as if he knew. 'Another torso in a landfill.'
    Grigg was watching with no expression, restlessly tapping his notebook. Clicking his pen twice, he said to Ring, 'I agree with Dr Scarpetta. Seems we shouldn't be connecting this case to anything yet. Especially not publicly.'
    'Lord help me. I could do without that kind of publicity,' Kitchen said, blowing out a deep breath. 'You know, when you're in my business, you accept this can happen, especially when you're getting waste from places like New York, New Jersey, Chicago. But you never think it's going to land in your yard.' He looked at Grigg. 'I'd like to offer a reward to help catch whoever did this terrible thing. Ten thousand dollars for information leading to the arrest.'
    'That's mighty generous,' Grigg said, impressed.
    'That include investigators?' Ring grinned.
    'I don't care who solves it.' Kitchen wasn't smiling as he turned to me. 'Now you tell me what I can do to help you, ma'am.'
    'I understand you use a satellite tracking system,' I said. 'Is that what these diagrams are?'
    'I was just explaining them,' Kitchen said.
    He slid several of them to me. Their patterns of wavy lines looked like cross sections of geode, and they were marked with coordinates.
    'This is a picture of the landfill face,' Kitchen explained. 'We can take it hourly, daily, weekly, whenever we want, to figure out where waste originated and where it was deposited. Locations on the map can be pinpointed by using these coordinates.' He tapped the paper. 'Sort of similar to how you plot a graph in geometry or algebra.' Looking up at me, he added, 'I reckon you suffered through some of that in school.'
    'Suffer is the operative word.' I smiled at him. 'Then the point is you can compare these pictures to see how the landfill's face changes from load to load.'
    He nodded. 'Yes, ma'am. That's it in a nutshell.'
    'And what have you determined?'
    He placed eight maps side by side. The wavy lines in each were different, like different wrinkles on the faces of the same person.
    'Each line, basically, is a depth,' he said. 'So we can pretty much know which truck is responsible for which depth.'
    Ring emptied his Coke can and tossed it in the trash. He flipped through his notepad as if looking for something.
    'This body could not have been buried deep,' I said. 'It's very clean, considering the circumstances. There are no postmortem injuries, and based on what I observed out there, the Cats grab bales off the trucks, smash them open. They spread the trash on the ground so the compactor can doze it with the straight blade, chopping and compressing.'
    'That's pretty much it.' Kitchen eyed me with interest. 'You want a job?'
    I was preoccupied with images of earth-moving machines that looked like robotic dinosaurs, claws biting into plastic-shrouded bales on trucks. I was intimately acquainted with the injuries in the earlier cases, with human remains crushed and mauled. Except for what the killer had done, this victim was