“Three girls from the local high school.” Richards
paused to blow her nose. “They were looking for early
fiddleheads for a science project. One of them’s my
niece. Shirlee’s oldest daughter?”
Bo grunted to acknowledge he knew her sister
Shirlee.
“Soon as they realized what it was, she called me on
her cell phone and sent me a picture of it. I’m afraid
they trampled the ground around it too much for us to
see any animal tracks.”
Bo shook his head and Dwight knew it was not over
the messed up tracks, but that teenagers came equipped
these days with cell phones that could transmit pictures
instantaneously.
“Getting too high tech for me,” he said. “Any day
now I expect to hear they’ve put a chip in somebody’s
brain so they can tap right into the Internet without
having to mess with a keyboard or screen.”
A few hundred feet or so in from the road, they
reached the scene, a popular local fishing spot, ac-
cording to Richards. A ring of stones encircled an old
campfire and a few drink cans and scraps of paper were
scattered around.
“There’s actually a way to drive here closer, but it
means going around through someone’s fields. That’s
how the girls got here,” she said.
Detective Denning was already there taking pictures
and documenting the find. The hand lay at the edge of
the water among some ice-glazed leaves.
“My niece said it had ice on it, too, when they first
found it,” said Richards. “But when they poked it, the
ice broke off.”
74
HARD ROW
It had been in the open so long that the skin was dark
and desiccated around the white finger bones.
“Not gonna be easy getting fingerprints,” said
Denning as they joined them. “I haven’t moved it yet,
but just eyeballing it?” He gave a pessimistic shrug in-
side his thick jacket. “Doesn’t look hopeful.”
“Were the bones hacked or sawed?” Dwight asked.
“The cartilage is pretty much gone, so it’s hard to say.
Should I go ahead and bag it?”
Bo Poole deferred to Dwight, who nodded.
Abruptly, the sheriff said, “Tell you what, Dwight.
Let’s you and me take a little drive. I need to see
something.”
“Call me if they find anything else,” Dwight said,
then followed Bo back out to the road and his truck.
