"Kristine Katheryn Rusch - Buried Deep" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

Batson even had dust on his face. His dark skin seemed unusually ruddy, and his eyelashes, long and
beautiful, accenting startling green eyes, looked like they'd been coated in red dye.
"I had to walk," Scott-Olson said. "I couldn't get a cart small enough for the all-Disty section."
He grunted, shook his head, and then took her kit from her.
"Where's the Death Squad?" she asked.
He looked at her sideways as he led her to the construction site. "We've got a major contaminant, as
far as they're concerned," he said.
"Major contaminant?" In all her years as medical examiner for the Sahara Dome Human Government,
she had never heard of anything categorized like that.
 "They took one look, decided the body'd been here for years, and ran off. I managed to catch one, and
he yelled something about tearing down the entire communityтАФat our expense."
Scott-Olson frowned. "Our expense?"
"The body's human," he said.
She had figured that much. Otherwise, she wouldn't be on the scene. The Death Squad dealt with their
own in this section of the dome. She got Disty who died in the human section, and had learned to perform
Disty autopsies because the Disty were so squeamish about doing one themselves.
"I've handled human bodies in the Disty section before," Scott-Olson said.
"Not one like this." Batson stopped at the edge of the construction site. There were several large dips in
the sand, caused by the weight of the buildings that had been on this site. She counted five separate
rectangles, and stopped when she realized she couldn't take in the entire leveled area.
She scanned the site. Aside from the Disty excavation equipmentтАФsomething that resembled a
miniature backhoe, a claw-shaped digging something-or-other, and a tiny truck that carted the recyclable
building materials to another location тАФshe saw nothing except flattened sand.
"Where's the body?" she asked.
Batson set her kit on the side of the site, then jumped down the meter or so to the main part of the dig.
He extended a hand to help her down, making her feel old.
She was old, or at least older than he was. She took his hand, let him ease her down, then grabbed the
kit.
From here she could see Disty prints, with their distinctive three-toed mark barely deep enough to be
called an impression. Disty bones were hollow, and the Disty themselves weighed next to nothing.
Batson walked in his original prints. He was a good detective, if a bit blunt and brash. She liked working
on his cases because he actually cared. So many people on Sahara Dome's Human Police Force didn't.
He walked almost to the center of the large excavated area and then stopped. He crouched and pointed
with one dust-coated finger.
She was probably dust-coated as well. Already she could taste the sand in the back of her mouth,
grinding as she pressed her teeth together. Her eyes felt dry and gritty.
Amazing how little of the dunes had to appear before they coated the entire area, even with the
fantastic filtration system.
She still didn't see anything. The area near Batson's finger was raised slightly, and nothing else.
She crouched beside him, removing a paintbrush from her pocket. She had learned during her first year
that any case involving Martian sand required a delicate tool for brushing it away.
"What am I looking at?" she asked.
"I'm no expert, Doc," he said, "but I think that's a pelvis."
His finger outlined the air above the sand. She squinted and finally saw what he was pointing at.
Ridges, whirls, edges.
Bone.
She blinked twice to clear her mind, and looked again.
Bone.
Bone the same color as the sand, a dusty reddish-orange. She leaned forward, clutching her brush, and
tried to rub off the sand. It came off in delicate chunks, floating to the side.