Page 6 of Alex Cross Must Die

Holmes ignored the jab and stalled for time, waiting for his overactive senses to settle. He glanced around the property, from the barnyard to the fence line in the distance.

“If you want to dispose of a body on a farm,” he said, “you have several options. You can feed it to the pigs, but they leave hair and teeth behind, so it’s an incomplete solution. You can bury the body in the middle of a field, but eventually a plow or some woodland creature will dig it up. You can drop a body in a grain silo, but you’d have to lug the dead weight up the stairs and hope that you don’t tumble in yourself and suffocate under the grain.”

Grey stood with her arms crossed, drumming her fingers. “Put up or shut up, Mr. Holmes,” she said. “Do you know where the body is or not?”

Holmes paused and took a deep breath. His delaying speech had worked. Olfactory adaptation was setting in, desensitizing him tonearby smells. In their place, he began to detect telltale molecules of cadaverine, putrescine, indole, and skatole. Faint and distant, but unmistakable.

The scent of decomposing flesh.

Holmes looked past the barn toward the uncultivated field behind it. “Follow me.”

The team walked single file across the muddy furrows, Holmes first, then Grey, then the two cops, then Poe, then Marple—the only one in the posse wearing knee-high Wellington boots.

As he walked, Holmes felt all the ancillary scents disappear. It was like wiping a film of vapor from a pair of glasses. Now everything was clear.Painfullyclear. His stomach started to turn as he homed in on the odor of death, and it triggered a curious sense of loss. He’d never met Sloane Stone, but he knew things about her that nobody else did. Not even his partners.

At the edge of the field was a mound of compost, five feet high and stretching twenty yards along the perimeter of the property. Holmes walked slowly down the row as the others trailed behind him. About ten feet from the end of the mound, he stopped and pointed.

“She’s right here,” he said.

Grey glanced at Marple. “Is he sane?”

“Not always,” said Marple.

“But he’s usually right,” added Poe.

Grey turned to the two cops. “Tape it off, guys.” Then she pulled out her phone and placed the call to CSU.

CHAPTER 7

MARPLE WATCHED TWOwhite Crime Scene Unit vans roll to a stop near the barn. Stone-faced and anxious, she stood with Holmes and Poe as Detective Grey briefed the technicians, dressed in white overalls with matching hoods and booties. As the techs gathered their tools, the detective walked over with three extra respirator masks. “If Holmes is right,” she said, “you’ll want these.”

Marple strapped the mask around her face and heard the strange sound of her own breathing from behind the mouthpiece. She hesitated for a few moments while the rest of the team headed across the field.

As much as she trusted her partner’s skills, Marple held out a small hope that he was wrong, at least in this case. She preferred to imagine Sloane Stone on a sunny beach with a huge margarita, laughing at the thought of men in hazmat suits trying to dig up her bones in a bean field.

“Margaret! You coming?” Poe’s voice was muddled by his mask. Marple waved back and followed the worn path through the furrows.

The CSU team set up a series of metal screens over huge trays. They used small spades, not much bigger than beach toys. Workingslowly and deliberately, they scooped small mounds of compost onto the screens and spread it with their gloves and tools. But just a few minutes into the dig, the detailed archeology became moot.

“Christ!” shouted one of the techs, stepping back. A human arm, or what was left of it, protruded from the pile.

Marple turned away for a moment, then forced herself to look. It was part of the job. For her, it was the hardest part—the part where all hope was gone.

The extraction took thirty minutes, and the result was pure horror. The once beautiful young woman was now barely a coherent shape. Only the hair on her scalp still had some semblance of who she had been. Though matted with dirt and refuse, it retained a hint of how it had looked in her official law-firm profile photo.

New pictures were being taken now, detailed and devastating, from every possible angle. Inside her mask, Marple murmured a silent prayer as the team unzipped a body bag and gently enclosed inside it the mortal remains of Sloane Stone. Two of the CSU guys then carefully transported the bag back across the field toward the vans. A second team stayed behind to sift for more evidence.

Grey, Holmes, and Poe walked a few yards away from the scene and yanked off their masks. Marple removed hers too and caught up with them. She could hear Holmes expounding again.

“Don’t be surprised if the hyoid bone is intact,” said Holmes. “That doesn’t mean she wasn’t strangled. She was. I believe that the act took some time. Perhaps because the killer had small hands.”

“Well, let’s see what the autopsy turns up,” said Grey. “That might narrow down our suspect list.” She looked pointedly at Holmes. “Let’s hope it excludes you.”

It was clear to Marple that Grey was into procedure and process, and that she was eager to get the case back onto a normal track, firmly under her control. But Marple could tell that, as usual, Holmes had a plan of his own.

CHAPTER 8

AT NINE O’CLOCKsharp the next morning, Holmes and his partners arrived at Gracie Mansion, the official residence of Mayor Felix Rollins. Detective Grey pulled up behind them in an unmarked sedan, then led the way inside.

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