Free Last Words by Mariah Stewart

window and what lay beyond.
    “Hal. I need you. Now. At the house. Call Lisa. And Duncan. Tell him to make sure to bring the evidence kit. And tell Garland to get the ME over here. Now. I need her now.”
    He hung up before Hal could ask any questions and opened the back of the Jeep. He got a flashlight and took a pair of clear plastic gloves from a box and pulled them on. As carefully as he could, he opened the left rear door and leaned in.
    The body was slightly too long for the bench seat, and so had been left with the legs angled forward. The overhead light automatically came on when the door was opened, and it shed an eerie glow on the plastic encasing the body. There were bubbles of moisture on the outside of the wrappings, and inside the tightly wound plastic was a barely contained mess of fluid. He then went around to the passenger’s side to get a better look at the victim. What he saw was the remains of what had been, not so very long ago, a vibrant young woman.
    That she’d sucked furiously for air was evident. The plastic was pulled tightly across her face, indented at the nostrils and the mouth. Through the plastic, Beck could see her eyes seem to bulge, and her mouth was open in a grotesque grin, the head tilted back at a slight angle. Fluids had been trapped within the layers of wrappings, blood and urine and feces and whatever else had been released when her abdomen split as her intestines had swollen, then burst with the inevitable buildup of gases.
    “Beck.” Hal called as he approached rapidly from the end of the drive. “What it is?”
    Beck turned and walked away from the Jeep.
    “I think it’s what’s left of Mindy Kenneher….”
             
    It had taken almost an hour for Viv Reilly to arrive, and when she did, she stood next to Beck’s Jeep shaking her head.
    She glanced at Beck, who stood nearby, and said, “I’ll never understand why. I can figure out how, but I cannot understand why.”
    Beck had personally processed the scene with Lisa and Duncan’s assistance, but had found no traces. No fingerprints, no hairs, no fibers.
    “It’s as if she was transported here in a vacuum,” Lisa told Beck. “There’s nothing on the outside of the vehicle or the door handle, so we can assume that he used gloves, which would account for the lack of prints. But no fibers? Nothing at all on the plastic?”
    “I think I know why.” Hal pointed to the grass where the garden hose lay in a careless heap. Water dripped from the spigot attached to the side of the house.
    “I haven’t used that hose in weeks,” Beck said as he walked toward it. “Duncan, bring a trowel and some paper bags over here. Let’s bag up the grass and the top layer of dirt in the areas that are wet. If he hosed down the body, maybe he washed away some evidence.”
    He waited until the body was removed from the Jeep under Viv’s direction, then leaned in to examine the backseat more closely. The fabric was such that he could not tell if it was wet without touching it, so he removed a glove and did just that. In the heat overnight, much of the wetness had evaporated, but the seat was still damp.
    “You must sleep like the dead, Chief, for someone to come into your yard, turn on your hose, open up your vehicle, put a body inside, then sneak away.” Viv looked over her shoulder as she followed the gurney to her van.
    “No dogs in the neighborhood barking last night, Chief?” Lisa asked. “Didn’t hear the doors slamming?”
    “I sleep on the opposite side of the house and had the air conditioner on in my room last night. I wouldn’t have heard anything.”
    He pointed to the house next door, on the other side of a row of ancient pines.
    “You can ask the Dawkins if they heard or saw anything, but it’s unlikely. They’re both in their late eighties and can’t see through the hedge anyway. But maybe someone else on the block heard something during the night, so you and Duncan start going door to