“I’m afraid I probably do,” Scarpetta says, lifting out the snorkel and the little girl’s shoe with her gloved hands, imagining twelve-year-old Helen in that hole as dirt is being shoveled in, a snorkel her only means of air as her uncle tortured her.
“Shutting children in trunks, chaining them in basements, burying them with nothing but a hose leading to the surface,” Scarpetta says as Reba looks at her.
“No wonder she’s all these people,” Benton says, not so stoic now. “Fucking bastard.”
Reba turns away, stares off, swallowing. She gets hold of herself as she folds the top of the brown paper bag, slowly, neatly.
She looks toward the back of the house, toward the pits. She keeps swallowing and blinking, her lower lip trembling.
“I don’t think any of us are exactly socially acceptable right now,” she adds, clearing her throat again. “Probably shouldn’t be walking into a 7-Eleven smelling like this. I just don’t see how…if he did that, we got to get him. They should do to him the same damn thing he did to her! Bury him alive only don’t give him a goddamn snorkel to breathe! Cut his fucking balls off!”
“Let’s get suited up,” Scarpetta says quietly, to Benton.
“No way we can prove it,” Reba says. “No damn way.”
“Don’t be so sure of that,” Scarpetta says, handing Benton shoe covers. “He left an awful lot in there, never thinking we’d come looking.”
They cover their hair with caps and go down the warped old steps, pulling on gloves, covering their faces with the face masks.