“I don’t.” Rowan shook the woman’s hand, admiring her direct dark-blue eyes.
“Rowan is the SAR member I told you about,” said Evan.
He told her about me?
“And this is Thor.” Evan squatted to greet the dog and received a lick on the cheek.
“Nice to meet you, Rowan. And Thor is gorgeous.” Noelle admired the dog.
Rowan liked her even more. No better way to her dog handler’s heart than showing sincere admiration for her dog.
Evan stood and turned his attention to the scene. Dr. Peres gestured for him to come in. “Stay on the path,” she told the detectives.
Rowan watched them enter, envious that they were getting up close. But she and Nate stood only twenty feet from where the work was happening, and they could hear pieces of the conversation.
Rowan frowned as Evan said something in a low voice to the doctor that she couldn’t make out. The doctor’s response was also quiet.
Dammit.
She had a feeling it concerned her. And Malcolm. Annoyance stirred in her belly. If the doctor had an idea about the sex and age of the skull, Rowan wanted to hear it. At that moment both Evan and Dr. Peres looked back at her, as if they had heard her thought.
“I’ll get her,” Rowan heard Noelle say before she headed out of the crime scene.
“Would you watch Thor?” she asked Nate, who immediately nodded. Heart pounding, Rowan rapidly walked to the entrance to meet the detective.
“What is it?” Rowan asked. “Is the skull a young boy?”
“She hasn’t removed the skulls yet,” Noelle told her. “Evan told her you should be in there.”
Disappointment flared, but she was also pleased. Evan was on her side. “Thank you,” she told Noelle, who indicated for her to follow.
Feeling as if she were walking on hallowed ground, she joined the two detectives and Dr. Peres.
“I prefer to work without an audience,” the doctor said, holding Rowan’s gaze. “But I’ll give you a few minutes.”
“I appreciate that.” She truly did. Rowan studied the scene. One tech was carefully turning over dirt with a hand trowel near the larger skull while another sifted dirt with a large screen. The third tech, the one with the camera, hovered at the shoulder of the first. She also had a notepad with a rough sketch of the scene, and she constantly added more detail to it. When the skull was fully exposed, many photos were taken, and then Dr. Peres carefully lifted it.
“Hair,” said the first tech. She grabbed a large, clear baggie from a kit and gingerly added long strands of dark hair that had been under the skull. The mandible still lay in the dirt. The remains were skeletal, and no soft tissue remained at all, so the mandible had detached from the skull.
How long did it take to become fully skeletal?
Rowan tried to remember what she’d read but only recalled that many factors influenced the time.
“Can you tell how long they’ve been here?” Evan asked.
The doctor grimaced. “No. I believe they were fully buried at one point, but the grave was quite shallow—which could speed up decomposition. Either animals have uncovered it or possibly the ridiculous amount of rain we had last winter did it.” Dr. Peres studied the skull in her hands. “Definitely female. Caucasian.” She wrote something on the skull in pencil and set it in a tub. Then she grabbed a trowel and helped the tech unearth what Rowan quickly identified as ribs and vertebrae.
“Anything?” Dr. Peres murmured to the tech.
“Nothing obvious,” the woman said. “Maybe something will turn up in the filter.”
“What will?” asked Noelle. She rested her hands on her knees, bending over as she intently studied the two women’s actions.
“Buttons, zippers, belt buckles, jewelry,” said the doctor. “Sometimes they’re caked with dirt and hard to distinguish at first.” Dr. Peres’s tone was uncertain.
“You’re not expecting to find any,” Rowan said flatly. “You think she was naked.”
Like the woman yesterday.
“It’s too early to say that,” said the doctor. “Way too early.” She shot Rowan a sharp look.
Rowan wanted to ask her to start on the small skull but said nothing. She was on thin ice already. The doctor continued to dig and remove bones, writing on each one before she added it to a tub. “You good here?” she asked the tech, who nodded without looking up.
Dr. Peres moved to the smaller skull several feet away, and Rowan held her breath, suspecting the doctor had worked on the other skeleton for a while simply to teach Rowan some patience. Two-thirds of the second skull had been visible the day before, and the doctor removed more earth around it, adding the dirt to a bucket to be screened.