He was still ten feet away when he caught the first glimpse of blue fabric through the moving blades of grass.
It was definitely a body.
He slowed as he approached the last couple of yards. “Hello?” he said. “Hey, are you okay?”
The dead guy didn’t move. If he had, Harvey may well have shit all over himself.
Nearly on top of it now, he could just make out the whole form. He gasped and clamped his hands over his mouth. Horror washed over him out of nowhere, gripping his insides and twisting them.
Without any thought or warning, Harvey Rodriguez did something he hadn’t done in too many years for him to remember. He started to cry.
CHAPTER TWO
July in Virginia.
Though the sun had set, the weather still hung like wet wool as the two men climbed out of their rented Chevrolet Caprice and closed the doors. They wore the standard uniforms of the FBI agents they pretended to be-white shirts and rep ties under unimaginative pinstriped suits. Blue for the smaller of the two, and gray for his massive companion.
The big man-Brian Van de Meulebroeke by birth, but Boxers to his friends-pulled at his collar like a boy in church. “I swear to god, Panama was cooler,” he grumbled.
Jonathan Grave smiled. “At least we’ve got autumn on the other end of it,” he said. Back in the day when discomfort was part of their patriotic sacrifice to God and country, the two men had logged dozens of months in fetid tropics, but today’s Brooks Brothers uniforms made Virginia way less comfortable. The latex facial prostheses didn’t help.
Their destination lay half a block away, remarkable for its ordinariness. Low rise, and constructed of red brick trimmed in white stone, the Basin Jail looked like the result of a student architectural lesson gone bad. It might have been mistaken for a small elementary school or even a recreation center.