'Grigg,' a man answered in a deep voice.
'This is Dr Scarpetta,' I said as I stared dismally out windows at large terra cotta pots on the deck and the dead hibiscus in them.
'Oh good. Thank you for getting back to me so quick. I'm out here on a cellular phone, don't want to say much.' He spoke with the rhythm of the old South, and took his time.
'Where, exactly, is here?' I asked.
'Atlantic Waste Landfill on Reeves Road, off 460 East. They've turned something up I
think you're going to want to take a look at.'
'Is this the same sort of thing that has turned up in similar places?' I cryptically asked as the day seemed to get darker.
'Afraid that's what it's looking like,' he said.
'Give me directions, and I'm on my way.'
I was in dirty khakis, and an FBI tee shirt that my niece, Lucy, had given to me, and did not have time to change. If I didn't recover the body before dark, it would have to stay where it was until morning, and that was unacceptable. Grabbing my medical bag, I hurried out the door, leaving soil, cabbage plants and geraniums scattered over the porch. Of course my black Mercedes was low on gas. I stopped at Amoco first and pumped my own, then was on my way.
The drive should have taken an hour, but I sped. Waning light flashed white on the underside of leaves, and rows of corn were brown in farms and gardens. Fields were ruffled green seas of soybeans, and goats grazed unrestrained in the yards of tired homes. Gaudy lightning rods with colored balls tilted from every peak and corner, and I always wondered what lying salesman had hit like a storm and played on fear by preaching more.
Soon grain elevators Grigg had told me to look for came into view. I turned on
Reeves Road, passing tiny brick homes and trailer courts with pickup trucks and dogs, with no collars. Billboards advertised Mountain Dew arid the Virginia Diner, and I bumped over railroad tracks, red dust billowing up like smoke from my tires. Ahead, buzzards in the road picked at creatures that had been too slow, and it seemed a morbid harbinger.
At the entrance of the Atlantic Waste Landfill, I slowed my car to a stop and looked out at a moonscape of barren acres where the sun was setting like a planet on fire.
Flatbed refuse trucks were sleek and white with polished chrome, crawling along the summit of a growing mountain of trash. Yellow Caterpillars were striking scorpions. I sat watching a moiling storm of dust heading away from the landfill, rocking over ruts at a high rate of speed. When it got to me it was a dirty red Ford Explorer driven by a young man who felt at home in this place.
'May I help you, ma'am?' he said in a Southern drawl, and he seemed anxious and excited.
'I'm Dr Kay Scarpetta,' I replied, displaying the brass shield in its small black wallet that I always pulled at scenes where I did not know anyone.
He studied my credentials, then his eyes were dark on mine. He was sweating through his denim shirt, hair wet at his neck and temples.
'They said the medical examiner would get here, and for me to watch for him,' he said to me.
'Well, that would be me,' I blandly replied.
'Oh yes, ma'am. I didn't mean anything…' His voice trailed off as his eyes wandered over my Mercedes, which was coated in dust so fine and persistent that nothing could keep it out. 'I suggest you leave your car here and ride with me,' he added.
I stared up at the landfill, at Caterpillars with rampant blades and buckets immobile
on the summit. Two unmarked police cars and an ambulance awaited me up where the trouble was, and officers were small figures gathered near the tailgate of a truck smaller than the rest, Near it someone was poking the ground with a stick, and I got increasingly impatient to get to the body.
'Okay,' I said. 'Let's do it.'
Parking my car, I got my medical bag and scene clothes out of the trunk. The young man watched in curious silence as I sat in my driver's seat with the door open wide, and pulled on rubber boots, scarred and dull from years of wading in woods and rivers for people murdered and drowned. I covered myself with a big faded denim shirt that
I had appropriated from my ex-husband, Tony, during a marriage that now did not seem real. Then I climbed inside the Explorer and sheathed my hands in two layers of gloves. I pulled a surgical mask over my head and left it loose around my neck.
'I can't say that I blame you,' my driver said. 'The smell's pretty rough. I can tell you that.'
'It's not the smell,' I said. 'Microorganisms are what make me worry.
'Gee,' he said, anxiously. 'Maybe I should wear one of those things.'
'You shouldn't be getting close enough to have a problem.' He made no reply, and I had no doubt that he already had gotten that close. Looking was too much of a temptation for most people to resist. The more gruesome the case, the more this was true.
'I sure am sorry about the dust,' he said as we drove through tangled goldenrod on the rim of a small fire pond populated with ducks. 'You can see we put a layer of tire chips everywhere to keep things settled, and a street cleaner sprays it down. But nothing seems to help all that much.' He nervously paused before going on. 'We do three thousand tons of trash a day out here.'
'From where?' I asked.
'Littleton, North Carolina, to Chicago.'
'What about Boston?' I asked, for the first four cases were believed to be from as far away as that.
'No, ma'am.' He shook his head. 'Maybe one of these days. We're so much less per ton down here. Twenty-five dollars compared to sixty-nine in New Jersey or eighty in
New York. Plus, we recycle, test for hazardous waste, collect methane gas from decomposing trash.'
'What about your hours?'
'Open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week,' he said with pride.
'And you have a way to track where the trucks come from?'
'A satellite system that uses a grid. We can at least tell you which trucks would have dumped trash during a certain time period in the area where the body was found.' We splashed through a deep puddle near Porta-Johns, and rocked by a powerwash
where tracks were being hosed off on their way back out to life's roads and highways.
'I can't say we've ever had anything like this,' he said. 'Now, they've had body parts at the Shoosmith dump. Or at least, that's the rumor.'
He glanced at me, assuming I would know if such a rumor were true. But I did not verify what he had just said as the Explorer sloshed through mud strewn with rubber chips, the sour stench of decomposing garbage drifting in. My attention was riveted to the small truck I had been watching since I had gotten here, thoughts racing along a thousand different tracks.
'By the way, my name's Keith Pleasants.' He wiped a hand on his pants and held it out to me. 'Pleased to meet you.'
My gloved hand shook his at an awkward angle as men holding handkerchiefs and rags over their noses watched us pull up. There were four of them, gathered around the back of what I now could see was a hydraulic packer, used for emptying Dumpsters and compressing the trash. Cole's Trucking Co. was painted on the doors.
'That guy poking garbage with a stick is the detective for Sussex,' Pleasants said to me. He was older, in shirtsleeves, wearing a revolver on his hip. I felt I'd seen him somewhere before.
'Grigg?' I guessed, referring to the detective I had spoken to on the phone.
'That's right.' Sweat was rolling down Pleasants' face, and he was getting more keyed up. 'You know, I've never had any dealings with the sheriff's department, never even got a speeding ticket around here.'