Read Body Farm 2 - Flesh And Bone for Free Online Page B

signature line—“I make my own dough”—remained on the job, as did the recipe for his memorable crust. The pizza was heavy, greasy, and extremely good. We ate fast and appreciatively.
    “I haven’t seen your name in the paper lately,” Jenny said, taking a third slice. “Things pretty quiet in the seamy underbelly these days?”
    “Things are never quiet in the seamy underbelly. Just quiet in the press, thank goodness.”
    “What’s an underbelly?” asked Tyler.
    “This is an underbelly,” I said, and reached down and tickled him.
    “Where’s my underbelly?” Walker asked, so I tickled him, too.
    I asked Jenny about her recent projects, which were safer dinnertime fodder than my work. The winter had been slow, but she had just landed a contract to design a collection of brochures and ads for UT, which was launching a billion-dollar fund-raising drive. “Be sure you use some good photos of my research subjects,” I said.
    “I like it,” she mused. “Tell folks if they don’t pony up, this is the fate that awaits them. I think the money would roll right in.” Then she shared war stories from a photo shoot with the UT herd of dairy cattle. Apparently, getting that photo I’d seen of the rolling pastures and the pooping cow took multiple shoots. “Who’d have thought, with all those cows, it would take us a whole week and the magic of PhotoShop to get that pooping cow in the picture?”
    “Poopy cow, poopy cow,” crowed Walker.
    “You’re the poopy cow,” said Tyler.
    “Huh-uh, you’re the poopy cow.”
    “I hope,” I said, “we’re not having chocolate ice cream for dessert.”
    “Ooooh,” said everyone.
    Jenny finally hauled us back to civility. “Tyler, do you want to tell Grandpa Bill about the project you’re doing for school?”
    “Sure,” he said. “It’s a PowerPoint about sea turtles.”
    A PowerPoint? The kid was in second grade. I had tried making a PowerPoint presentation once, and I ended up needing a new hard drive in my computer. “Sea turtles? I like sea turtles. Can I see it?”
    “’Course,” he said. “C’mon.” I followed him into the den, where Walker had already settled into a video game involving some whirling, twirling, spiky-furred creature. Sonic, I presumed, living his three more lives at warp speed.
    Tyler clicked the mouse on the Apple computer sitting on a table in the den, and the big flat-panel display—which until recently had been Jenny’s graphic-design monitor—came alive. The screen’s background image consisted of a collage of photos of Tyler and Walker from babyhood on. In one close-up, Walker stared, transfixed, at a monarch butterfly perched on his index finger; in another, Tyler peered out from behind an enormous sphere of purple bubble gum, half the size of his head. Every photo showed a child alive with wonder, and I suddenly felt a stab of fear and sadness. All that joy and innocence reminded me of the two other children whose faces I’d seen on computer monitors just a few hours before: the young boy and girl being sexually abused by a paunchy, middle-aged man.
    It took everything I had to focus on Tyler’s slideshow about sea turtles—their long lives, the remarkable homing instincts and nesting habits of the females, the way many of the species were being driven to extinction by hunting and beachfront development. Finally he finished, and I praised his work extravagantly and excused myself. I found Jenny in the kitchen, packing the next day’s school lunches. “Can I ask you something?”
    She looked at me closely. “Sure; what’s wrong? You look upset.”
    “I’ve gotten a little too close to the seamy underbelly lately,” I said. “My friend Art is working on Internet crimes against children—he’s chasing down pedophiles who troll for kids online.” She looked upset now, too. “We didn’t have to worry about this when Jeff was growing up, thank God. How do you deal with that kind of threat, and that kind of