Free Blood Echoes by Thomas H. Cook Page B

it.”
    â€œLet’s go check on the car first then,” Angel said.
    Twenty minutes later he arrived at the small dirt road identified in the radio dispatches, and headed down it. He’d only gone a short distance when he realized that the radio traffic had purposely concealed the profound nature of Espy Gray’s discovery. A car had been located. That much was true. But it had not been found alone.
    Sprawled across the forest bramble in an area incongruously adorned with the bright buds of summer wildflowers, Mary Alday’s nude body lay facedown, her head turned slightly to the left, her hands tucked just beneath her breasts so that both elbows were nearly parallel to the upper part of her rib cage. The stark, midday sun fell so brightly on her pale skin that her body appeared to glow luminously from out of the deep shade that surrounded her, an eerie patch of blinding white that rested motionlessly on a sea of green.
    As he drew nearer, Angel could see how her dark hair lay in a tangled mass on her bare shoulders, her body’s only cover. All her jewelry, if she’d had any, had already been stripped from her hands and neck and ears.
    Angel knelt down for a closer look. He could see no ligature marks on her hands or legs to indicate that she’d ever been forcibly restrained.
    As to the cause of death, it could hardly have been more obvious. Dried blood had caked in a broad swath from a large wound in her upper back. A second gunshot wound was clearly visible near the back of her head. The rest of her body had been so ravaged by ant bites that for an instant she appeared to Angel, as he stared silently at her, as if she’d been raked repeatedly by distant shotgun fire.
    Only a few yards from the body, Angel noticed a few pieces of clothing scattered across the forest floor. One by one, he examined them before dropping them into evidence bags. There was the bottom half of a turquoise pants suit that appeared damp and soiled in the crotch. A few feet away, its matching checkered blouse, grimy with dirt and forest debris, lay in a tangled mass amid a scattering of leaves. A white bra rested nearby, but as he glanced about, Angel realized that there were no panties to go with the bra, nor any other female underwear in the vicinity either of Mary Alday’s body or her other discarded clothes. Their absence suggested that unlike her male relatives, Mary Alday had been subjected to even more than murder.
    After his initial observation of the body and clothing, Angel paced the area carefully, concentrating on the scene as minutely as he could, pointing out and gathering up various items that appeared to have been abandoned at the murder site. Up ahead, at a distance of perhaps a hundred feet, obscured within the shadowy light of the woods, he saw a car, its dark green exterior blending almost seamlessly into the surrounding woodlands. As he neared it, he could see that it was a 1968 Chevrolet Super Sport and that it bore a temporary Pennsylvania license plate, number 2029-301. Pennsylvania was far to the north, hundreds of miles away, and as Angel began circling the car, gathering what little information he could before the lab crew arrived, he sensed that what he’d already been told about the murders was probably true, that no one from Seminole County would have wished any harm upon the Aldays, that their killers had been strangers who’d swept in from afar, the kind of wanton, shiftless drifters who emerged from time to time to carry out some appalling act on villagers who still insisted, despite all his advice to the contrary, that they need not lock their doors.
    For the next hour or so Angel continued to process the green Super Sport. Nick Campbell, the chief of the Latent Fingerprints Section of the GBI, had arrived from the Alday trailer by then, and Angel assisted him in lifting various prints from the car’s interior. After that, he repeated his initial search of the area