Free She Who Watches by Patricia H. Rushford

Your troopers out of Madras and The Dalles are helping out on the east side, but we could use even more help.”
    â€œWe’ll make do.” Mac motioned toward the ODOT guys and told them where he wanted the lights. “Let’s get going. With the fire bearing down on us, this scene isn’t going to hold until morning.” Mac set his box on the ground and pulled out a digital camera. He photographed the scene, taking several pictures of the earth around the body in the event the camera could capture a footprint that his eyes were missing in the poor light. The smell of smoke partially masked the sour odor of rotting flesh, making the job easier than usual.
    Dana sketched the area, dictating notes onto her tape recorder as they approached the body. “Any idea on how long she’s been here?” Dana asked the medical examiner.
    â€œNot really,” the heavyset man replied. “I can’t give a guesstimate until we get her out of the hole.”
    â€œI have enough pictures,” Mac said, going back to his box. “Dana, I need you to help me grid the scene.”
    Dana knelt next to Mac and pulled out a stack of wood stakes and some twine.
    Mac gestured toward the two FBI agents, who were standing nearby. “They’re a big help, aren’t they?”
    Dana shrugged. “Guess they figure it’s not their case either way now. If our victim turns out to be Sara, it’s our ticket. If she’s a tribal member or anyone else, it will probably still be ours. Besides, do we really want them mucking up our crime scene?”
    â€œGood point.”
    Dana cleared her throat, apparently affected by the condition of the remains. “They probably just want some closure, Mac. It must be tough seeing your hopes of finding someone crushed like that.”
    â€œWe don’t know it’s Sara yet.” Mac stood up and took the stakes from Dana. “Let me take those. I’ll hammer the stakes if you document the evidence; you have better handwriting than I do.”
    â€œDeal.” She picked up her clipboard and legal pad as Mac walked toward the body.
    A mass of thick, dark hair and rigid cheekbone were visible above the soft dirt. The eye socket was beneath the surface with the rest of the face. “The hair length looks like Sara’s, only the color seems a bit lighter,” Dana noted.
    â€œIt could be the dust.” Mac approached the body. “Let’s lay out a twelve-by-twelve grid with square-foot grid markers.”
    Mac pounded the stakes into the ground, one after another, until he had a chessboard grid set up around the body. He’d used heavy stakes at the perimeter and thin wire standards closer to the body to support the twine and hopefully not destroy any evidence. They would process the scene the same way in which an archeologist would process an ancient tomb or preservation site. Because of the fire, however, they’d have to move much more quickly.
    Mac photographed and processed each square of the grid around the body. After a cursory search of each square foot for evidence, he shoveled the dirt from the squares into a plastic bag and labeled each bag with an evidence tag.
    â€œWhat’s he going to do with that?” Nate asked Dana, who was documenting each bag on the department evidence form.
    â€œWe’ll sift the dirt once we get to a controlled environment, to make sure we aren’t missing some evidence, like a bullet or something that was dropped or passed through the body.”
    â€œCheck.”
    Nate seemed truly interested in the process, and Mac appreciated that. He painstakingly processed the area, and it was well after midnight when he indicated that they could began to exhume the body.
    â€œThe body is nude,” he told Dana, “and seems to be covered with a white powder. Lime, I’ll bet.” Mac scratched his chin with his wrist to avoid touching himself with his latex-gloved hand.