‘OK.’ Garcia spoke first, after several silent seconds. ‘I sure as hell wasn’t expecting this.’
Seven
‘What the hell?’ Dr. Slater gasped, as the extra-bright beam from her flashlight illuminated the open casket inside the shallow grave by her feet. She had driven up to the park ahead of the forensics circus that was about to descend on them.
Lying inside the makeshift casket, still in the very early stages of decomposition, was a female body. Her eyes, nose and lips were completely gone, leaving her skull with three ominous black holes and two lines of exposed stained teeth, but a fair amount of dried skin and muscle tissue was still attached to her skeleton.
The state of the body didn’t surprise Hunter, Garcia or Dr. Slater, as they all knew that without a coffin, in ordinary soil, an unembalmed adult body buried six feet under would take somewhere between eight and twelve years to fully decompose to a skeleton. Placed inside a coffin, the timeframe for the body’s decomposition would be considerably longer, depending on the type of wood used. Since the body Hunter and Garcia had uncovered had been placed inside a sturdy wooden box that had been tightly sealed and buried in a two-foot-deep shallow grave just over two years ago, its slow decomposition matched the expectation. No, what had surprised everyone had been the wedding dress.
‘Her killer dressed her up in a wedding dress?’ Dr. Slater asked. ‘Why?’
She wasn’t really expecting an answer. Hunter and Garcia both knew that.
‘Was there any mention of a wedding dress in that notebook?’ Hunter asked.
Dr. Slater angled her head to one side, shrugging. ‘I haven’t read much further than what the two of you have. We are running behind in so many cases, I just couldn’t find the time, but up to the point I got, there was no mention of it.’
‘Is the notebook still back in the lab?’ Garcia asked.
‘Not in the one you were in earlier today,’ she replied. ‘I sent it over to the DNA lab for testing, together with all the Polaroid photos.’
The FSD Serology/DNA lab was the only FSD specialized unit lab that did not operate out of Cal State Alhambra. It was located four and a half miles away in the C. Erwin Piper Technical Center in Downtown Los Angeles, not that far from the Police Administration Building.
‘But out of pure interest,’ Dr. Slater admitted, ‘I did photograph the first few pages so I could read them later.’
‘Can you send those photos over to the UVC Unit ASAP?’ Hunter asked.
‘Of course,’ she confirmed.
‘But now that we’re sure that the book isn’t a hoax,’ Garcia said, ‘we’re going to need the entire notebook photographed.’
‘No problem,’ Dr. Slater replied. ‘I’ll get in touch with the DNA lab tomorrow and ask someone to photograph all the pages.’ She allowed her attention to return to the body in the casket. A few seconds later, she frowned. ‘Wait a second. Something else isn’t quite right with this picture.’
Hunter nodded. He and Garcia had already discussed it while waiting for the doctor.
‘You found her in this position?’ she asked.
‘We haven’t touched a thing, Doc,’ Garcia confirmed.
The body was lying on its back, in a traditional burial position – legs extended, arms by the side of the torso, bent at the elbows with the fingers interlaced and the hands resting on the body’s stomach. Her long black hair was sprawled around her head like a fan.
‘But according to the notebook,’ Dr. Slater said, her stare moving between the two detectives, ‘the victim was buried alive.’
Hunter nodded once.
‘So how come she’s in such a tranquil position, right?’ Garcia asked. ‘Once she woke up inside a dark box, it would’ve taken her just a few seconds to realize that it had been nailed shut. From then on, panic would’ve taken over. She would’ve kicked, punched, scratched, screamed, head-butted . . . anything to try to free herself. She should’ve been in any other position but that one. And then there’s the hair. It perfectly frames her face, as if she was posing for a photograph.’
‘And she did fight,’ Hunter confirmed, indicating the lid that they had carefully rested against a tree a few feet behind them. ‘On the inside of the lid there are plenty of scratch marks, some blood and a few embedded fingernails. She fought all she could.’
Dr. Slater shifted her flashlight beam toward the trees and the lid, but she stayed where she was. She would get a chance to better examine the lid back in the lab.
‘The second problem with this picture,’ Hunter carried on, ‘is that the dress should’ve been at least torn in places and certainly dirty.’ He nodded at the body in the grave. ‘Look at it. It seems almost pristine.’
The penny finally dropped for Dr. Slater.
‘Jesus!’ She gasped. ‘So whoever buried her alive waited for her to die, then came back here, dug her up, reopened the casket, dressed her up in that wedding dress, posed her perfectly, and then buried her again?’
‘That’s the assumption,’ Hunter agreed.
Dr. Slater breathed out heavily. She wanted to ask ‘why’ again, but right then, no one but the killer would really be able to answer that question. Instead, she looked around the area they were in.
‘This is a relatively large area,’ she said. ‘Do you think that there might be any more graves around?’
‘Right now it’s anyone’s guess,’ Hunter replied. ‘But I would hold back on a full search excavation operation for now. We have the book,’ he explained. ‘Since whoever wrote those entries gave us the exact coordinates to her . . .’ he indicated the body on the ground. ‘It stands to reason that he would’ve also noted down the coordinates for any other subsequent graves he might’ve dug, here or elsewhere.’
‘Fair point,’ the doctor agreed. Right then, her phone rang in her pocket. ‘Excuse me for a second.’ She turned away from the grave and took the call.
‘Doc.’ It was Kenneth Morgan, a senior forensics agent who worked with Dr. Slater at the FSD. ‘We’re here. Parked just behind your car. So how do we get to this place?’
‘Stay there. I’ll come and get you.’
Due to the harsh vegetation and the unforgiving hilly and rocky terrain, vehicle access to that particular spot inside the park was downright impossible. No forensics van or police car would be able to get through. They needed to park on Dunsmore Canyon Trail and carry everything in by hand, including lights, excavation equipment and power generators. It was nearly eleven thirty in the evening when the full forensics circus was finally able to be lit up.
‘Getting a crane up here is out of the question,’ Dr. Slater informed Hunter and Garcia. ‘We’ll have to re-seal the box, to avoid dirt falling into it, and dig the whole thing out by hand.’
Both detectives had guessed that that would be the case.
‘While we were waiting for you,’ Hunter said, ‘Carlos and I looked around the area for any traces of anyone being here. This is such an isolated spot that if we’d found anything – a cigarette butt, a piece of gum, a candy wrapper, a discarded bottle of water, whatever – there was a good chance that it would’ve come from whoever dug that grave. Whoever that person is, it looks like he spent a considerable amount of time up here, especially if he came back to dig her up and then bury her again.’