Linksshifter II

The Volunteered

Diego shaded his eyes, the sun beating down hard on the empty flat, on the slumped dump truck, the sloping pile of dredge, and the small knot of workers leaning on their rakes and shovels up by the truck's cab, keeping their distance from the thing in the river muck – the reason he was out here. The whole scene was strangely silent, like his ears were plugged – not a murmur from the men, no insects buzzing, no birds singing, like something on this patch of landfill behind the hotel was out of order and disconnected, cut away from the real world. Out of the scrub to the north, the chucking call of a sereima echoed, breaking the spell; this was real, and here, and had to be dealt with before the vultures caught wind of the corpse.

Diego approached the truck by the dump end, pulling a pair of gloves out of his back pocket. "Who is in charge here?" he asked, looking over the men, who looked around from one to the other, like they were waiting for someone else to speak up. Diego shook his head. "Nobody is being held responsible. If you say you dredged it out of the water and didn't notice till the load was being dumped, I'll believe that. Nobody is going to be charged with anything – I still have to investigate before that. Please – who is in charge, so that if I have to ask you to do something, I'm talking to the right man who will set you up correctly."

The men muttered between each other again, and at length one of them cleared his throat, looking down at Diego's feet with his hat over his eyes. "Grilo's not here. The hotel boss, when he called in to the police, he called them too, and he pitched a fit. He's not back yet." Diego turned to look back over the golf course towards the hotel; nobody coming this way. That could mean a lot of things: this Grilo could be getting pumped for information, deployed to go hush up the local papers, or just fired straight up for calling the police instead of burying the body at the bottom of the pile of silt; this could go any number of ways, and the only thing that was sure was that he wasn't here. Whatever.

Diego turned back and gestured at the mottled flesh poking out of the pile of muck. "All right. I don't know you, I don't know your jobs, so I won't try to order you around. I'll start on this myself till he gets back. Just stay back; if I need something, I'll come ask again." They didn't object – they were all on board with the idea of not needing to mess around with a dead body – and Diego pulled his gloves on to start the investigation.

Kneeling down in the crumbling river silt – already drying in the relentless December sun – Diego turned carefully through the muck, scraping it away from the corpse. The arm and back and the back of the dead man's head were all there, poking out of the black dirt where it'd collapsed and gotten the workers to call the police, at least that much was certain; how much of the rest of the body he was going to find would probably determine who or what killed the guy. His boots sank into the silt as he dug, the black muck that he tossed away collapsing down on them as well, but it didn't really matter: there was plenty of space to spread the dirt around here, and the body was starting to take form from under the muck.

There was another arm attached to the torso besides the one that had been sticking up, and it was there at least as far as the elbow, bent back under the body. Probably not scavenged then – wild dogs would tear bits off a corpse and break up the long bones for marrow. And the whole trunk was there, back to the hips, with a belt still holding up the stiff's pants. So probably not a dump – the gangs up here stripped people when they disappeared them, to make identification take longer. That didn't leave a lot of possibilities: a recent accident, right by the river, or a murder done by rank amateurs. Fortunately, both of those meant an easy case, and that this one probably wasn't part of the thing Diego'd been dreading that it might be part of since he got the call.

He scraped away another handful of dirt from around the corpse's hip, and found a hole in the contour of the muscle, a dent in the body where the silt had gotten packed into a wound. It didn't have to be – you could get something like that from an accident, you could get fish scavenging through a hole in the guy's pants. But this one was: as Diego cleaned out further around the wound, he found more and more of the thigh missing, torn completely to bits, the guy's jeans hanging in shreds. This was bad. This was really bad. But the body was still fresh – he hadn't been dead long, and if there was enough of him left, he might just be the missing piece to the whole puzzle, the one Diego had been stalking for three weeks through the backest back corners of Soriano.