the horror of their expectations.
They discussed how best to drain the slime-green water. The simplest thing, Nishimura suggested, was to pump it over the bank from Griffin’s pond. Assuming they were connected, that would empty the de Cuchilleros pond with the least disturbance. They would have to check both ponds, anyway, smooth bottom or not. Nishimura had a portable two-inch pump in his van that could keep ahead of the natural seepage.
Eugene Nishimura got started on that while Morgan went in to call headquarters. He explained to Alex Rufalo that he thought he had multiple human remains and asked the superintendent to notify the coroner’s office.
After he got off the phone, he walked through the tunnel and out into the de Cuchilleros garden. The water level in the widow’s pond was already beginning to recede. He called over the wall to Nishimura but couldn’t be heard above the sputtering of the pump’s gasoline engine. Shrugging, he went back to Griffin’s place to check that Nishimura was removing the fish, which he was, transferring them to the formal pool.
Morgan returned to watch the water drop slowly down the clay edges of the de Cuchilleros pond. He splashed the water periodically with a rake to make sure the fish swam through to the Griffin side. Turning, he saw Mrs. de Cuchilleros and Dolores, side by side in the dining-room window, each of them holding a bone china cup of Tippi Assam. He waved and they waved back.
By the time a lump at the bottom of the pool emerged into open air, the place was swarming with police personnel, a forensic team, an emergency unit from the fire department, and a squad of coroner’s people, including Ellen Ravenscroft, to whom he nodded without speaking.
Everyone watched in horror as the water receded and the extent of the atrocities became apparent. At first it looked like a series of clay drumlins rising from the depths, the long thin deposits of silt from a glacial retreat. As glistening contours of limbs and torsos and heads took shape, Morgan grieved. He mourned because no one had missed these girls and women enough to resolve the circumstances of their disappearances.
Just as he had immediately accepted that Robert Griffin was a serial killer, Morgan knew with certainty that the man’s victims were female. How many had gone missing each year from the streets, how many would have leaped at a ride in a sleek convertible, driven by a man getting on in age who would easily be satisfied and undoubtedly generous? He might just want to bring them home to talk.
Someone turned a hose on the pile with a gentle spray. Morgan’s assumption that they were female was confirmed as body after body separated in the wash from the mass, each of them wrapped naked with plastic sheeting and duct tape, in various stages of dilapidation. Their flesh seemed shrivelled to the bone despite the water. Decay had been arrested and the effects of putrefaction had been controlled by the clay silt that shrouded each body in layers stirred up by the fish, season by season over years, and by the coldness of the water and its continuous flow through the soil, leaching through the embankment into the ravine.
Morgan felt an overwhelming loneliness. It should never have happened this way to these human beings, most of whom were known only to God. He was drawn, he wanted to hold them, and he was repelled by what they revealed of human depravity and the human condition. Morgan gazed away, up into the foliage of the silver maples, then down into the gaping hole. His eyes were dry, his mouth was dry. He could taste his own blood.
On impulse he looked around and saw that Mrs. de Cuchilleros and Dolores were absent from the window, but striding toward him from the direction of the door below the carriage house was the young woman he had last seen at the morgue. Before he could stop her she was at his side. He tried to steer her away from the hellish scene, but she was focused on him. Her eyes were raw and her expression was resolute. She had clearly been coping with demons of her own.
“Jill, for goodness’ sake, you shouldn’t be here!” he declared.
“I need you to come with me, Mr. Morgan.”
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