Page 24 of Dozer

Nobody radios unless something is wrong and nobody needs to.

I can read the whole operation off body language alone, which is how I prefer to read most things. Reyes touches two fingers to his ear, then drops his hand. Clear. Malloy gives me a quick nod through the windshield. The sweep team disappears around the corner.

Done.

Nice and clean.

Exactly how I like it.

Kenzi hasn't said a word since we walked in. It's refreshing after she talked my ear off for the last three hours in the truck. Although, if I'm being honest, I hadn't minded her chatter. That realization has been sitting in the back of my mind since somewhere around mile marker forty, and I haven't figured out what to do with it yet.

I’m a man who likes quiet. I've always liked quiet. Quiet gives me room to think. Room to listen. Room to notice the things other people miss.

Kenzi fills the quiet like she has a personal vendetta against it. And somehow, with her, I didn't mind. I'll examine that feeling later. Maybe. Right now, I have a job to do.

My asset has gone quiet the way a professional goes quiet. She’s focused. Everything extra falls away but the mission at hand. I recognize it because it's the same quiet I drop into before a breach, the kind where everything unnecessary disappears and only the job is left.

I hadn't expected that from her. I didn’t think she knew when to be quiet and when to engage. I should have. She’s surprised me in all the good ways today. I'm not sure what I expected from her exactly. Something closer to what the file suggested. A consultant. Consultants are useful in theory, but best kept at a careful distance in practice.

Instead, I watch her circle the examination table without touching anything, her hands clasped behind her back like she's in a museum instead of a room that smells like refrigerant and formaldehyde. Her expression has changed.

The woman from the truck is gone.

There’s no more teasing smile with a running commentary. Gone is her bright-eyed observation about my questionable snack preferences and lack of music playlist.

She's studying the body without touching it. Her eyes are cataloging every inch, every detail of the man laying before us. We need to move this along, but somehow, I know what she is doing is important, so I don’t rush her.

She leans over the man's hands, close enough that anyone else in the room would probably call it too close and goes very still.

I watch her face instead of looking at the body, because something just caught her attention and I want to know what it is.

"That's wrong," she says.

Malloy, standing near the door, doesn't move, and neither does anyone else.

My team doesn't react to much, but I catch the flicker anyway, the collective decision to wait and see if the consultant knows what she's talking about before anybody wastes breath asking.

I step closer. "Define wrong."

"Lividity's inconsistent with the position he was found in." She says it like she's reading it off a page of a textbook and not like she's standing three feet from a corpse. "If he died face-down, the blood pools in his face, chest, and the fronts of his thighs. That's not what I'm looking at." Her voice is calm, almost clinical.

"Meaning?" I ask.

"Meaning somebody moved him after death, and I don’t mean to this building. I mean he was moved to the scene he was found at." She finally looks up at me. "This wasn't a clean death in a clean location like the evidence in the file showed. Somebody staged this."

Nobody in the room says anything. I don't either. I do what I always do when new information changes the shape of a mission. I recalculate. The entire operation. This means we aren’t as sure about the threat as we thought, or the timeline. The body isn't simply evidence anymore. It's evidence somebody has already tried to manipulate. Which means someone has gone to considerable trouble to control what we find.

And people don't go to that kind of trouble unless they're afraid of what someone might uncover.

"Can you prove it?" I ask.

"I can document it." She's already crouching beside her bag. "Photographs. A couple measurements. Give me five minutes." She pulls on gloves. "I need better light. And I need everyone who isn't cleared for what's actually in this file to be somewhere else."

The last part is aimed at the two junior staff hovering near the far wall. County employees who’ve been told this is a routine transfer. They have no reason to know otherwise. By now, I’m sure they know this is anything but routine.

Kenzi doesn't even look at them when she says it, she just knows they're there and exactly how much they're supposed to see. She handles it without breaking her rhythm.

I move one step sideways, then another. I angle my shoulder between the table and the two staff members' sightlines. Six inches, maybe eight. Enough that whatever she photographs next, they won't see.