Steven Havill - Scavengers

“I wonder how many more of these little surprises we’ve got out here,” Tom Pasquale said. He grinned at Jackie Taber. “You see any more patterns, Picasso?”

“No,” Jackie replied without a trace of humor. “Except I’ll be willing to bet that when we move Juan here, we won’t find any ID. That’s a pattern. And whatever weapon took off the back of John Doe’s head over by the MacInernys’ could sure enough have punched that big hole through this young man’s chest. That’s a pattern.”

“The answer’s with the shovel,” Estelle said more to herself than anyone else. She ducked her head against the wind, hunched her shoulders, and walked across the rough prairie toward the creosote bush in whose angular, spiky limbs the tool had lodged.

She walked around the bush, turned her back to the wind, and knelt, hands on her thighs. “TemperRite,” she said, reading the remains of the label on the handle. The tiny rectangular price tag was worn smooth, the printing nothing but a faint trace.

Jackie Taber knelt beside her. “The finish on the handle is smooth enough that we’re going to get some prints if we’re lucky,” Estelle said. “And we’ve got a price tag that might give us a point of purchase.” She rested her hands on the ground and leaned close. The shovel was turned slightly, and she could see the back of the blade, where the steel formed a deep groove to the handle socket.

“And there we have it,” she whispered. Against the earth-polished steel, the dark russet of dried blood might as well have been glow-in-the-dark paint. Caught in the folded steel, near the junction of metal blade and wooden handle, were several hairs. She leaned back and looked at Jackie Taber. “An interesting question.”

“A shovel makes a mean weapon,” the deputy said softly.

“Sure enough. But if it connected with somebody’s head before the grave was dug, then we wouldn’t expect to find blood and hair still on the blade.”

Jackie stood up with her hands on her hips, frowning down on the shovel. “It’s way up high, though. And on the back.” She grimaced. “Hard to tell.” She turned full circle, seeing Tom and Linda standing near the front fender of Jackie’s Bronco, their own and Estelle’s units nose to tail in a row behind it. In the distance, she could see a column of dust rising and then being whipped away in a spreading plume as the medical examiner and the EMT ambulance made their way up the rough, bouncing trail from Maria.

“This place gives me the creeps,” she said.

Estelle was surprised to see her husband riding with Dr. Alan Perrone. Although the friendship of the two physicians reached back more than a decade, and had been strengthened by their recently organized joint venture to build a new clinic in Posadas, Francis Guzman had expressed only a passing interest in the forensic side of medical practice.

Still, he assisted Perrone that morning as if the two had teamed at a hundred crime scenes. The two men worked, a study in opposites, quietly talking back and forth, never raising their voices so that anyone else was privy to their conversations.

Perrone would have looked at home behind the wheel of an elegant Dusenberg in a 1930s movie. Hatless even in the chill of the February wind, his long blond hair was parted in the middle and combed straight back, held in place as if molded out of yellow fiberglass. His lean, clean-shaven face was benchmarked by an aquiline nose, intense blue eyes, and full, sensuous mouth-his appearance drawing quick second looks from strangers who knew that he must be somebody.

Alan Perrone was of average size, but Francis Guzman made him look delicate in comparison. Well over six feet tall and powerfully built, Estelle’s husband had inherited an exotic combination of his family’s Andalusian and Moorish genes, from the dark polish of his mahogany complexion to the proud, ruler-straight bridge of his nose and his wide, expressive mouth. A year before his thirtieth birthday and his marriage to Estelle Reyes, Francis had grown a full beard-and was astonished when it sprouted fully salted and peppered. Nevertheless, he’d kept it and at the same time earned the nickname oso viejo , or old bear, from Estelle.

Perrone stood at the foot of the grave with his hands in his pockets and regarded the corpse with an expression of sad resignation. Francis Guzman’s frown of concentration was dark and formidable as he paced a slow circle around the shallow pit.

“This appears to be a dangerous spot of nowhere,” Perrone said without looking at any of the officers. “Until yesterday, I’d never been to this miserable little patch of the county. Now we’re having reunions out here.” He glanced up at Estelle. “Do any of you know this gentleman?”

“No, sir.”

“Interesting,” Perrone said, and knelt at the side of the grave. Francis Guzman did the same on the opposite side. Estelle stood a pace or two back, wishing that she had one of those nifty polyester folding chairs. She knew that the examination of misfortune’s target by the two physicians would be methodical and thorough…and she also knew that neither physician wanted to narrate every step of the process for an audience. At that moment, the persistent wind became an ally-without it, Estelle knew the warm sun would make the drowsies unbeatable.

Estelle watched Linda Real reload her thirty-five millimeter camera three times before Alan Perrone finally straightened up and brushed off the knees of his trousers. He turned and beckoned to Estelle.

“This isn’t going to give you much,” he said. “One gunshot, through and through. He wasn’t lying in the grave when it happened, so the odds of you finding the slug are slim and none.” He flashed a tight smile and shrugged. “If the bullet fragmented, we may find some pieces when we autopsy, but don’t hold your breath. That exit hole is only moderately larger than the entrance, so whatever tore through him did its damage and then just kept going.” His gaze wandered out toward the open prairie, and he shrugged again.

“What about the angle?” Estelle asked.

“My first guess-and it’s just a guess, remember-is that the trajectory was dead on, or nearly so,” Perrone said. “The slug exited through the seventh thoracic vertebra, so you maybe have a slight upward slant. Maybe. It’s impossible to say how the shooter was standing, or how your victim here was standing. And even as powerful as that weapon obviously was, it’s impossible to predict how the bullet is going to wander around when it starts smashing through things. My best off-the-cuff preliminary maybe guess is a dead-on shot.” He made a face of indecision. “No powder burns on the jacket or shirt, so there’s a little distance there.”

“A maybe guess.” Estelle grinned at Perrone.

“That’s it,” Perrone said cheerfully. “There’s a lot of blood in the grave, though, under the corpse. My guess is that he was shot while standing fairly close by. Hell, I don’t know. Maybe he dug it himself. And that was that. Bang. One shot, and in he goes.”

“You’re thinking that someone made him dig his own grave?” Tom Pasquale asked.

Perrone shrugged again. “It’s a good guess, isn’t it? If I’m holding a gun on you, why should I bother to dig the grave? My hands are full, for one thing. I’m busy holding the weapon.”

“He could have been shot first, and then the grave got dug.”

“I don’t think so,” Perrone said.

“It would take ten minutes at the least to dig that pit,” Francis Guzman said. “Maybe longer, depending how frantic the worker was. If your Mr. Doe had already been shot while all that was going on, he would have bled out with a wound that size. By the time he was placed in the hole, you’d be lucky to have a teacup drain into the soil. That’s not the case here.”