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He did, she thought, just as she knew him. In charge, in control, but under it a sparking anger.
His property, he’d think, and it had been used for murder.
So she spoke in the same brisk tone. “We don’t know what we’ve got until we know.”
“You’ll know.” His hand brushed her arm, just the lightest touch. “You’ve only to see. Eve, I think—”
“Don’t tell me what you think yet. It’s better if I go in without any preformed ideas.”
“You’re right, of course.” He walked her over. “Lieutenant Dallas, Detective Peabody, Pete Staski. He runs the crew.”
“Meetcha,” said Pete, and tapped his finger to the bill of his grimy Mets ball cap. “You expect all kinds of crap in demo, but you don’t expect this.”
“You never know. Who’s the other suit?” Eve asked Roarke, glancing toward the woman sitting on some sort of big overturned bucket with her head in her hands.
“Nina Whitt, the architect. She’s a bit shaken still.”
“Okay. I need you to move back.”
After sealing her hands, her boots, Eve stepped to the hole. It was jagged, uneven, but a good two feet wide at its widest point, and ran nearly from floor to ceiling.
She saw, as Roarke had, the two forms, one stacked on the other. And saw he hadn’t been wrong.
She took her flashlight out of her field kit, switched it on, and stepped through.
“Watch your step, lady—Lieutenant, that is,” Pete corrected. “This wall here, the studs, they’re flimsy. I oughta get you a hard hat.”
“That’s okay.” She crouched, played her light over the bags.
Down to bones, she thought. No sign of clothing, no scraps of cloth she could see. But she could see where rats—she imagined—had gnawed through the plastic here and there to get to their meal.
“Do we know when the wall went up?”
“Not for certain, no,” Roarke told her. “I did some looking while we waited for you to see if there’s been a permit pulled for this sort of interior construction, and there’s nothing. I contacted the previous owner—their rep, I should say. According to her, this wall was here at the time they bought the property, some four years ago. I’m waiting to hear back from the owner prior to that.”
She could have told him to leave that to her, but why waste the time and the breath?
“Peabody, send for the sweepers, and put a request in for a forensic anthropologist. Tell the sweepers we need a cadaver scan, walls and floors.”
“On it.”
“You think there might be more,” Roarke said quietly.
“We have to check.”
She stepped out again, looked at him. “I’m going to have to shut you down, until further notice.”
“So I assumed.”
“Peabody will take your statements and your contact information, then you’ll be free to leave.”
“And you?” Roarke asked.
She shrugged out of her coat. “I’m going to get to work.”
Back between the walls, Eve carefully recorded the wrapped bodies from all angles.
“The skeletal remains of two victims, both individually wrapped in what appears to be heavy-grade plastic. We’ve got holes in the plastic. Looks like vermin chewed through. Increased the air—heat and cold to the bodies,” she said half to herself. “And that probably accelerated decomp. No data, at this time, on when this secondary wall was constructed. It’s impossible, from an on-site eval, to determine TOD.”
