Julia Spencer-Fleming - I Shall Not Want

"You all right?" Chief Van Alstyne patted her back. In response, the rest of her stomach lurched up and out and spattered onto the ferns and grass at the creek's edge. Oh, God.

"Nothing to be embarrassed about," he said. "We've all done it."

From her doubled-over vantage point, Hadley saw jeans and sneakers approaching. "He throws up all the time," Mrs. McGeoch said. Now that Hadley had fallen apart, the chief's sister seemed a whole lot calmer. "Here. Water from the truck. It's clean." Hadley squirted a cupful into her mouth. It was hot and tasted of plastic. She bent over again and spat it into the creek.

"I do not," the chief said, over her back.

"You do, too. You throw up when you're stressed."

"If I threw up when I was stressed I wouldn't be able to leave the damn bathroom for more than ten minutes at a time."

Hadley straightened. "Sorry," she croaked.

"Don't worry about it," the chief said. She heard the snapping of footsteps through the brush and then Scheeler's voice.

"If we didn't vomit five or six times the first year of medical school, the professors didn't think they were doing their job."

Hadley wiped her mouth with her sleeve and turned toward the pathologist, keeping her eyes on him so as not to glimpse the bloated, fly-blasted corpse.

"I remember this one old coot," he went on, "used to have us drink urine. We were supposed to be able to-"

The chief peered at her face. "I don't think that's the best topic of conversation right now."

"Oh. Right. All right, then, let's talk about John Doe, here. Or maybe we should call him Juan Doe."

"That is a gunshot wound, isn't it?" the chief said.

Scheeler nodded. "The occipital entry point has been enlarged by animal depredation"-Hadley's stomach lurched again when she translated the med-speak as animals ate his brains -"but there's no doubt. I suspect, from the lack of any anterior damage, I'll be digging out a small load. Maybe a twenty-two."

"Knox." The chief's voice, addressing her, caused her to snap to. "Tell me what you can infer from what Doctor Scheeler here has told us."

"Uh…" She took a deep breath. The surfaces of things seemed hallucinogenically bright; the sun bouncing off the chief's uniform buttons, the razor edges of the willow leaves drooping toward the ground. "A twenty-two. Not much stopping power. Whoever killed him would have had to have been pretty close."

"Do you think it could have been a hunting accident?"

"Do people hunt with twenty-twos?"

Scheeler snorted.

"Yes," the chief said, his voice patient.

"Uh… no. A hunting accident would mean someone mistook him for an animal from a distance, or discharged their weapon up close by mistake. A shot in the back of the skull doesn't jibe with either of those."

"Good."

She was surprised to find she felt better.

"I very much doubt that the guy was a farmworker, not with two-hundred dollar sneakers and that trendy jacket. So what was he doing out here?"

"Flynn told me Mexicans sell most of the pot up here. Maybe he was a dealer?"

"The gangs dominate wholesale distribution. They have networks of locals who do the retailing."

"Maybe a carnie from Lake George?" the pathologist suggested.

"Maybe. I'm going to put in a call to the state CSI, see if we can get Morin or Haynes over here with the van. I want you to get up to the top of that rise in the woods-" the chief pointed to where the mountain first flanked up from the creek bed-"and start working downward. You're looking for anything: fiber, hair, impressions, cartridges."

She nodded.

"Do you think he was rolled from above?" Scheeler asked.

"Can you assure me he didn't drop where Janet found him?"

The pathologist shook his head. "It's been at least a month. His blood patterns are gone."

"It's a funny spot to be hanging around, waiting to get shot. But if he got tapped up there, he might easily roll until he lodged against that bush." He turned toward his sister, who was hanging back at the edge of the stream. "Janet, is that still your property?"

"Yeah. It goes back into the hills a ways, until you see some blaze markers. It's useless land."

The chief's mouth thinned. "Not entirely. It's a pretty good place to hide a murder."

So far, Hadley hadn't found much in common between her old job guarding cons and her new job policing them, but working the crime scene was just like watching the cell block during open hour: a combination of detailed observation and mind-numbing boredom. Under Van Alstyne's direction, she squatted in the grass and scrub brush, parting saplings and peering under dock leaves for some bit of evidence. She worked her way up to where the chief stood, surmounting a heavily wooded rise. He did a 360, taking in the thick forest behind them and the fields spreading out below.

"Who the hell was this guy?" She didn't think he was speaking to her. "Damn, I want a look at the lost-and-missing file."

Across the stream, at the top of the bluff, the state CSI van had pulled in. A figure emerged from the driver's side. The chief pointed. "Knox, get over there and help Morin with his gear."

She thudded down the hill, picked her way across the stream, and climbed up to the van. Sergeant Morin of the NYSPD shook her hand, looked at her chest, stuttered a hello, and had her take one end of a footlocker-sized box. They staggered down to the stream, heels digging into the crumbling earth, the flesh at the back of Hadley's neck creeping and itching the closer they got to the body.

"Do you know if anybody moved him?" Morin asked.

Her eyes involuntarily went to the John Doe. "The chief thinks he might have rolled…" Her voice trailed off.

Dr. Scheeler glanced up at her. "Uh-oh," he said.

"No." She shook her head. "It's not that. His hand." She could only see one. The other was rubber-banded inside a brown paper bag. "The tattoos. The symbols on his fingers. I saw two guys with the same tattoo. Last night."

The barn was on the edge of a pasture ringed with woods, the last things left, he guessed, from a long-ago homestead that hadn't worked out. From his side, a half-hidden trail led down the mountain, over the stream, and onto the McGeochs' land. On her side, a rutted sheep-churned path broad enough to admit a hay cart. Leading, he guessed, to her home.

The barn stood beside an oval fire pond levied up around a creek some long-ago summer. From inside the open doorway, Amado watched the sluggish trickle, water in through one bank, out through the other.

The first time Isobel had brought him here had been a few hours before dawn, the night they met. She had left him there, to sleep away the morning, and when she'd returned that afternoon, they had found a fox skeleton against the cut-stone foundation. The skull, smooth and yellow-white, was their signal. Right now, it hung on a nail on the pasture-side door, letting her know, if she saw it, that he was here. Waiting for her.

It was a pole barn, straight up and down, designed for one thing: to store hay against the hard, long winter. The doorways, front and back, were set hay-wagon high, and he had to haul himself up to the edge and then climb a stack of square bales before getting to his feet. Then he could either climb again, to sit on one of the massive beams transversing the barn, or spread out the quilt she had left on the mound of loose hay in the corner. He usually chose the beam or sat cross-legged on the hard bales. The soft mow and the quilt were too casual, too… sexual. No need to chase temptation.

This had been her special place before she had ever shown it to him. She had a crate filled with books, CDs, a CD player, and water bottles. He knew she smoked here, too, though she never did so in front of him; there was a lingering smell of marijuana above the green and dusty scent of the new and old hay.