Free Without Mercy by Jefferson Bass

seemed clear—from the lack of leaf litter atop the bones—that the death had occurred only a few months before, perhaps during summer. Removing the jug from beneath the hood, I raised it toward my face, sniffing as I did, ready to thrust it back into the exhaust the moment I caught the stench of sour milk. But I never did, even when the open spout was practically touching my nose. Water , I realized: The jug had been rinsed out and used to store water. I set it on a table behind me and reached for another jug.
    This one—translucent and colorless, not Mayfield yellow—didn’t require the sniff test, as it had flecks of clotted milk clearly visible within the hollow handle. It also had a far more recent pull date: May 29, just five months before. The remaining half-dozen jugs followed the same pattern as the first two: three of them were clean, odorless jugs, stamped with pull dates ranging from six months to three years earlier; the other three stank of sour milk, and bore dates ranging from May 17, the earliest, to June 24, the latest. Chained in the woods for six weeks , I calculated. God in heaven .
    Next I tackled the cans—a few beer cans, but mostly an assortment of pull-top tins of processed meats, including, I grimaced to see, cheap dog food. The cans, whose contents were supposedly tasty for years, were less informative than the milk jugs, so I gave each one only a quick look before settingit aside. Next came a series of crumpled wrappers and bags: Slim Jim meat sticks. Lay’s Potato Chips. Armour Star Bacon. McDonald’s Egg McMuffin—a delicacy consumed by the killer, I suspected, who didn’t seem the sort to waste a warm, tasty breakfast sandwich on a victim he sometimes fed dog food. Three Red Man Tobacco foil pouches, whose contents likewise had probably gone into the killer’s cheek: chewing tobacco was a luxury item, an indulgence, which almost surely would not have been offered to the captive victim, except, perhaps, in the form of a stream of brown spittle, delivered to the face and followed with an insult.
    I set the beer cans, the Egg McMuffin wrapper, and the Red Man pouches to one side. I would package those separately for the TBI lab, in hopes that the killer’s mouth had contacted their surfaces and left behind a trace of telltale DNA. A cigarette butt might have done the job also, but apparently our perpetrator preferred saliva to smoke as his nicotine delivery system.
    After I’d removed the jugs, the cans, the wrappers, and the bags, very little was left. A foil chewing-gum wrapper. A whiskey bottle. An empty Altoids tin. And, oddly, two sticks of deodorant—or, rather, two empty deodorant dispensers, their labels peeling and tightly curled. Why on earth . . . , I wondered. It seemed inconceivable that the victim had been provided with toiletries to keep him smelling fresh during his ordeal in the woods. But it also made no sense that our tobacco-chewing perpetrator would be attending to his own personal hygiene at the scene of the crime, either. If he had been, why stop with deodorant? Where were the empty toothpaste tubes, the nail clippers, the dental floss?
    On a whim—curious about what brand of deodorant might appeal to the sort of person who would chain a youngman in the woods for weeks—I gave the deodorant a tentative sniff. It didn’t smell like my own “sport” fragrance, nor like baby powder, nor lavender, nor any other deodorant I’d ever smelled. It smelled pungent, like rancid meat. Involuntarily I made a face, then gave the curled label a tug to remove it from the dispenser. As I held the paper in my upturned palm and smoothed it flat, it gave a sudden flutter, then—caught by the exhaust hood’s rising column of air—it fluttered upward and plastered against the mesh screen guarding the fan. “Crap,” I muttered, switching off the fan. As the spinning blades slowed, the label detached