Page 15 of Girl, Unseen

There was nothing romantic about hauling a body from the earth, Ella realized. Just muscle and machinery and math. The kind of operation where one wrong move means you're fishing pieces out of a hole instead of a whole corpse.

‘Subject located. Multiple fractures.’

Subject. That's what death did to you – turned professors into paperwork. Ella remembered Marcus's office with its perfectly arranged specimens. No disorder in death either; guy kept his style right to the end.

The crane whined. Metal cables drew tight. Something pale emerged from the shaft like a ghost through black water.

Marcus Thornton hung suspended between earth and sky. His clothes were thick with quarry dust but otherwise pristine. No blood in sight, and no blood outside meant a lot of bleeding inside. Where it did the most damage. Even from this distance, Ella could tell that his bones splintered on impact. She’d seen enough high-falls to know what gravity did to bone and tissue. Marcus's legs had accordion-pleated on impact, turning femurs into jigsaw pieces. The rest of him hadn't fared much better, but his face remained untouched – almost peaceful, like he'd solved some cosmic riddle in those final seconds of freefall. The poor guy still had his rucksack strapped to his back.

‘Hell of a thing,’ Luca said. ‘Still got his backpack on.’

‘Which means he died quickly. Small mercies.’

‘A soldier’s death. Die with your boots on. At least this is more interesting than giving lectures.’

Ella shot him a look. ‘Shut up, Hawkins.’

‘I’m just saying.’

‘Maybe don’tjust say.We’ve got a dead body ten feet away.’

Luca raised his hands in surrender. ‘Alright, sorry.’

She loved the guy, but he couldn’t read a room to save his life. The man would have cracked a joke in Auschwitz given the chance.

The recovery team laid Marcus on a steel gurney like they were arranging a museum piece. Up close, death had a way of shrinking people. Marcus looked smaller now, fragile in a way that living flesh never did. His limbs were splayed at angles that instantly made Ella’s burns feel like a minor sting.

The medical examiner descended on the body while her team photographed Marcus from every angle. She called out her observations into a digital recorder. ‘Male, approximately forty-five years old. Multiple compound fractures to both legs. Severe trauma to the thoracic cavity.’

Ross lit a cigarette and offered one to Ella and Luca. They both declined. ‘What's your take on this, agents?’

Ella was still wrestling with that question. One side of her said accident, another that there was something more at play here. ‘I’m on the fence. You?’

‘Honestly? Looks like suicide to me.’ Ross exhaled a plume of smoke. ‘Guy drives out to the middle of nowhere. Climbs to the top of a quarry. Maybe he just couldn't face Monday morning.’

‘What about the hole?’ Luca asked.

‘What about it?’

‘It's perfectly round. Like it was cut into the rock.’

‘People get creative when they're desperate.’

Ella watched the ME's team work. They'd stripped Marcus's clothes, revealing the full extent of the damage. His torso was a watercolor of bruises, internal bleeding frozen in time. ‘Desperate people leave signs. Depression, anxiety, changes in routine. Everything we know about Marcus says he was stable. Organized. The kind of guy who color-coded his geology samples. And what about those symbols carved into the wall?’

‘Looks like gibberish to me. My guess is that our subject thought he’d stumbled upon something big. Then got a bit too close for comfort.’

The ME finally stepped back from the body. Her team bagged Marcus's clothes and prepared him for transport.

Ella needed to get closer.

‘Mind if we take a look? Before they zip him up?’

Ross pulled out two sets of gloves and passed them across. ‘Sure. Just make it quick. The ME’s got a schedule to keep.’

Ella and Luca applied the gloves and approached the gurney. Up close, Marcus looked older than forty-five. Maybe it was death that aged him, or maybe it was the weight of whatever brought him to this hole in the ground. His eyes were half-open, glazed with that thousand-yard stare that came with checking out of the mortal coil.

The backpack caught her attention. Black nylon, weather-beaten but sturdy. It hung off his shoulders at an awkward angle, twisted by the impact but otherwise intact.

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