Ring In the Dead by J. A. Jance Page B

metal.
    â€œI’ll bet dollars to doughnuts this is somebody’s idea of a great April Fool’s joke,” he said. “Wanna bet?”
    â€œNo bet,” I agreed. “Sounds suspicious to me.”
    We went straight there, not with lights and sirens, but without stopping for coffee along the way, either. We didn’t call the medical examiner. We didn’t call for the Homicide squad or notify the crime lab because we thought it was a joke. Except it turned out it wasn’t a joke at all.
    We located the two kids, carrot-­topped, freckle-­faced twin brothers Frankie and Donnie Dodd, waiting next to a pay phone at the Elliott Bay Marina where they had called 911. They looked to be eleven or twelve years old. The fact that they were both still a little green around the gills made me begin to wonder if maybe Mac and I were wrong about the possibility of this being an April Fool’s joke.
    â€œYou won’t tell our mom, will you?” the kid named Donnie asked warily. “We’re not supposed to be down by the tracks. She’ll kill us if she finds out.”
    â€œWhere do you live?” I asked.
    â€œOn Twenty-­third West,” he said, pointing to the top of the bluff. “Up on Magnolia.”
    â€œAnd where does your mother think the two of you are?” I asked.
    Frankie, who may have been the ringleader, made a face at his brother, warning Donnie not to answer, but he did anyway.
    â€œShe dropped us off at the Cinerama to see Charlotte ’s Web. We tried to tell her that’s a kids’ movie, but she didn’t listen. So after she drove away, we caught a bus and came back here to look around. We’ve found some good stuff here—­a broken watch, a jackknife, a pair of false teeth.”
    Nodding, Frankie added his bit. “Halfway up the hill we found a barrel. We thought there might be some kind of treasure in it. That’s why we opened it.”
    â€œIt smelled real bad,” Donnie said, holding his nose and finishing his brother’s thought. “I thought I was going to puke.”
    â€œHow do you know a body was inside?” I asked.
    â€œWe pushed it away from us. When it rolled the rest of the way down the hill, she fell out. She wasn’t wearing any clothes.”
    â€œThat’s why we couldn’t tell our mother,” Donnie concluded, “and that’s when we went to the marina to call for help.”
    â€œHow about if you show us,” Mac suggested.
    We let the two kids into the back of the patrol car. They were good kids, and the whole idea of getting into our car excited them. Kids who have had run-­ins with cops are not thrilled to be given rides in patrol cars. Following their pointed directions, we followed an access road on the far side of Pier 91. There were no gates, no barriers, just a series of NO TRESPASSING signs that they had obviously ignored, and so did we.
    The road intersected with the path the barrel had taken on its downhill plunge. Its route was still clearly visible where a gray, greasy film left a trail through the hillside’s carpet of newly sprung springtime weeds and across the dirt track in front of us. What looked like a bright yellow fifty-­gallon drum had come to a stop some fifteen yards farther on at the bottom of the steep incline. The torso of a naked female rested half inside and half outside the barrel. The body was covered in a grayish-brown ooze that I couldn’t immediately identify. The instantly recognizable odor of death wafted into the air, but there was another underlying odor as well. While my nicotine-­dulled nostrils struggled to make olfactory sense of that second odor, Mac beat me to the punch.
    â€œCooking grease,” he explained. “Whoever killed her must have shoved her feet-­first into a restaurant-­size vat of used grease. Restaurants keep the drums out on their loading docks. Once they’re full, they haul