Free The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel by Jefferson Bass

start the actual recovery, but you could start getting the lay of the land down there—figure out a plan of attack—if you want to.”
    I hated the notion of a whole posse of agents trompingaround the wreckage unsupervised—specifically, unsupervised by me . I imagined fragile, burned bones crushed into cinders by careless footsteps. No matter that the FBI’s crime-scene techs were the best in the nation. The Bureau had brought me out here for a reason, and I meant to give them their money’s worth. “Beam me down, Scotty,” I said.
    “You got it.” He nodded toward the rope-throwing agents, who were now laying out climbing harnesses near the rim. “You ever done any rappelling?”
    “A little. It’s been a while, but I reckon it’ll come back to me once I’m harnessed up.” In fact, it came flooding back to me only a heartbeat later: a death scene I’d roped down to, in a rugged part of the Cumberland Mountains. “Here’s the thing,” I hedged. “Can somebody else go first?” He looked puzzled. “Ten or twelve years ago, I recovered a woman’s body up near the Kentucky border. She’d been dismembered and thrown off a bridge into a ravine.”
    He nodded. “I think I remember reading about that case. Serial killer? What was his name?”
    “Satterfield. Sick, sadistic sonofabitch. Anyhow, I roped down a bluff to this woman’s body, and I landed right by a rattlesnake—a coiled-up, pissed-off timber rattler. It struck at me; missed my leg by about that much.” I held up a thumb and forefinger, practically touching. I took another glance down at the rocky terrain. “I’m thinking this terrain looks kinda snaky, and I’ve had enough fun with snakes to last me a lifetime.”
    He nodded, tucking back part of a smile. “I’ll send Kimball and Boatman down first, with the Total Station,” he said. “They’ll stomp around and scare off the varmints.”
    He turned toward the two agents, who were uncoiling a pair of ropes and tying them to their gear—a hard-shell tripodcase, about the size of a golf bag, plus a suitcase-sized aluminum box containing the electronics. “Yo, Kimball,” McCready yelled. The ever-eager agent looked up. “Got a job for you.”
    “Instead of the Total Station?”
    “In addition. You’re on snake-bait duty.”
    “Snakebite duty?” The young agent cocked his head. “You want me to take the antivenom kit with us?”
    “Not snake bite . Snake bait. You’re the designated snake bait.”
    “Boss. Seriously? Did you really just call me snake bait?”
    “I did. Doc here is snake-phobic. Your job is to run interference. If he gets bit, you get transferred. To Fargo.”
    Kimball pondered this for a fraction of a second. “Hey, Doc,” he said. “Do me a favor, will you?”
    “If I can.”
    “If you get bit, chuck that snake over at me, so it’ll bite me, too. I’m Fargo -phobic.” He turned to his partner. “Hey, Boat-Man, toss me that figure eight, would you?” A piece of polished metal arced through the air toward Kimball; he caught it deftly, looped the rope through it, and then clipped it to his climbing harness. Then, easing the tripod case over the rim, he lowered it down the bluff, feeding the rope smoothly through the figure eight until the line went slack. Boatman did the same with the aluminum case.
    Once the hardware was down, the two men clipped themselves to the rappelling ropes, backed off the precipice in sync, and dropped from sight. “Look out, all you rattlers and cottonmouths and king cobras,” I heard Kimball call out as he descended. “I’m coming down, and I am one snake-stompin’ son-of-a-mongoose badass!”
    “Yeah, right,” I heard Boatman taunting as he slithereddown the other rope. “You proved your badassedness in Baton Rouge, didn’t you? How many times did you hurl at that scene? Four? Or was it five?”
    “I told you, man, that was food poisoning from the night before. Toxic gumbo. Tainted crawdads. A lesser man—you,