Free Carved in Bone:Body Farm-1 by Jefferson Bass

could be simply heartbreaking.
    “How long did it take y’all to get the car?”
    “Two days. Which was one day too many. Twenty-four hours sooner, her prints would’ve been there. Her prints were there.”
    “Witnesses slow to come forward?”
    “No. Lawyer quick to tie our hands. Claimed we were harassing his client.”
    I had a bad feeling inside. I didn’t want to ask, but something in his face dared me to. “Who’s the lawyer?”
    “Three guesses.”
    I didn’t need three. “DeVriess.”
    “Good ol’ Grease. Your new buddy.” He shot me a black look.
    “Look, Art, I hate what he does, and I hate how he does it, as much as you do. Most of the time. If he’s helping a child predator, he’ll burn for that someday. But this stabbing case he’s got me working on, it’s different. The ME screwed it up, plain and simple, and the DA’s covering for him. And if you don’t know that, you’re not as smart as I think you are.” I glared at him, furious that he would tar me with the same brush as DeVriess.
    He glared back, then looked away and sighed. “I know. You’re right. I understand what you’re doing. I respect it. I respect you —hell, you know that. It’s this little girl—it’s tearing me up. I want to kill the son of a bitch that snatched her, and I want to dismember the son of a bitch that kept us from dusting that car until the kid’s prints had evaporated.”
    “I don’t blame you for that.”
    “Sorry I jumped on you.”
    “Forget it.”
    He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, then blew it out loudly. As if from another life, the phrase “deep cleansing breath” popped into my head, unbidden and unwelcome. Art rubbed his raw fingertips. “So, aside from the pleasure of my cheery conversation, Bill, what brings you here?”
    I reached into my jacket pocket and fished out a ziplock plastic bag and handed it to him. “This.”
    “What’s the story?”
    “It was around the neck of a corpse. Is it what I think it is?”
    He squeezed the outline gently in every direction: the narrow side, the long side, and the thin edge. “Probably. Was he a veteran?”
    “Not a he. A she. And no, I don’t think so.”
    “What’s she doing wearing a military dog tag?”
    “That’s what I’m wondering.”
    “And whose is it?”
    “That, too.”
    “And you brought it to me because you can’t read?”
    “Exactly. Also, I’m hoping there might be a print somewhere under that gack.”
    “Gack—is that one of those technical anthropology terms you Ph.D.s throw around to impress and intimidate us common folks?” I nodded. Art fingered the tag, frowning. “A print. Sheesh—you don’t ask much, do you?”
    “What’s the problem?”
    “Well, for starters, we’ve got to figure out how to remove the gack without removing the print. If there’s even a print under there. Which I very much doubt.”
    “How come?”
    “The metal may have corroded or oxidized, though dog tags are supposed to be corrosionproof. If the metal did corrode, it’s undergone both chemical and physical changes that could destroy or distort the print. And if it didn’t corrode, the gack—adipocere, we lowly criminalists call it—will have either absorbed or smeared any prints that might have been there once upon a time.”
    I nodded glumly. “So what you’re saying is…”
    “…not a snowball’s chance.” I’d pretty much expected him to say something like that—he was a criminalist, after all, not a wizard—but until he actually said it, I’d held out some hope. “But still, let’s see what we can see.”
    He laid the bag on a lab table and donned a pair of latex gloves, then slid the ziplock open and extricated the waxy tag. After studying it awhile, he leaned toward a tray of tools and selected a pair of tongs, then rummaged under a counter and hauled up a small torch, the sort a chef might use to caramelize the sugar atop a dish of crème brûlée. Holding the tag by the slightly curved