Page 70 of Long Gone

My chest squeezed. He had a point.

“And,” he continued, “he’s gonna take over the case and leave you out. The credit will be all his, too.”

My stomach twisted. I’d seen this case as my chance to set up my P.I. career. If Jones took over, it would still be a win for me, but it wouldn’t be the big win I’d hoped for. “My job is to find out if Hugo’s dead,” I said, realizing as I said it that the only person I was trying to convince was myself.

“Are you really going to be satisfied with that? If you want to be a P.I. then you need to build your cred, and handing it off Jones will destroy that. You need the W in your own name so you can use it as a successful case reference.”

I hated that I saw the logic in everything he said. “Okay,” I finally said, reaching for a shovel. “We’ll confirm whether there’s a body and then go from there.”

He didn’t respond. Instead, he tossed the crowbar on the ground and started tapping on the ground with the shovel.

“We should find the edge,” I said. “Then go all the way around to see how big this concrete pad is…presuming it’s concrete.”

Malcolm found the first edge and scooped out a shovel full of dirt, revealing a bumpy concrete surface underneath.

“Obviously, they weren’t going for a neat job,” he said. “Dump the body, cover it with concrete and dirt, then get the hell out of here. The clothing in the woods is further proof.”

“Then why leave the concrete mixer behind?” I questioned. “I mean, you and I wouldn’t be digging up this field if the mixer hadn’t been here.”

“Because no one was looking for Burton. And maybe someone was supposed to pick up the mixer later and fell down on the job. It’s idiotic, sure, but they must have thought they were okay. And maybe it wasn’t someone affiliated with Larkspur at all. Maybe they bought it after all of this was done.”

“Maybe.”

“Let’s keep going,” he said even as he scooped another shovel full of dirt. I knew it was wrong. We were disturbing a crime scene, possibly destroying evidence, but I couldn’t bring myself to stop him.

What the hell was wrong with me?

I nearly laughed out loud at that question. I didn’t have enough time to make an inventory. Instead, I pulled the flask out of my pocket and took a long swig.

Malcolm glanced up at me even as he kept digging, but he didn’t comment.

I took another deep swig for good measure, then tucked it back in my coat pocket and resumed searching for an edge on the opposite side.

Malcolm started to shovel another load of dirt, but I said, “Wait.”

He turned to me, irritation in his eyes.

“I’m not going to call it in. Yet,” I said to appease him. “But let me at least take photos. If nothing else, we can use it as evidence for ourselves.” I pulled out my phone and started taking photos of the ground and the trees around us. Then nodded for him to continue.

He was about to dig the shovel into the ground, but he dropped it and then stripped his coat off, throwing it several feet behind him. As he picked his shovel back up, he said, “I say we clear the dirt off the entire surface, then try to pry the concrete up.”

“Okay.” I couldn’t help noticing his thick arms through his black thermal shirt. While I acknowledged they would be useful for digging, I appreciated them for other reasons I quickly stuffed down.

I was not attracted to James Malcolm. That would be a nightmare. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t notice that his arms were just one of many attractive features he possessed.

We got to work and managed to scrape the dirt off the concrete within ten minutes or so. While the concrete had been buried about a foot below the surface on one side, it had only been covered by a few inches of dirt on the other. There were still clumps of mud on the surface. Even without going any further, I could tell Malcolm was right—they hadn’t tried to make the concrete smooth for a road or a patio. It had been a dump job to keep the body buried. The dirt still clung to the deep pockets in the uneven concrete, but we didn’t bother brushing it away.

“I bet they did a piss-poor job of burying him after they murdered him,” I said. “So maybe it wasn’t premeditated. Surely, they would have come up with a plan to dispose of his body if their intention for meeting him out here was to kill him.”

“Maybe. Based on what I’m seeing here, I’m not convinced they would have gotten it right with plenty of planning.”

“They’ve gotten away with it so far,” I said. “So don’t discredit them too much.”

He turned to me and held my gaze. “You ready to find out if he’s in there?”

I could see he was testing me, seeing if I was about to back out, but I was just as curious as he was. And just because we found a pad of concrete under a shallow bed of dirt didn’t mean there was a body underneath.

But I’d bet my mother’s Blue Willow china Hugo Burton was there.

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