To assuage her guilt, she gave the cab driver a hundred-dollar bill to cover the fare, and Ruiz was too out of it to protest. When the cab was nothing but a dust cloud on the dirt road leading to the culvert, she turned back to the tent, squinting against the sun. The hat and long-sleeved Windbreaker that Alex McKenna had offered her made it bearable, but she still felt exposed and vulnerable. She was always exposed and vulnerable during the day, really, but it also gave her a kind of safety: There wouldn’t be any other shades out here to spot her. Most of them were too young to be out like this; they stayed inside. She stepped back over to the tent and watched the buzz of activity around her. In all her many lives, Lindy had seen plenty of crime scenes, even caused some of them herself. She’d never experienced it from the police side of things, however. The BPI had taken over the crime scene now, using one of the FBI’s veteran evidence collection teams. Lindy trailed Alex McKenna, watching as he oversaw the procedure of it all: There was a certain way for everything to be bagged, documented, studied, put away.
