“She say go follow those birds. There also we find father.”
Joanna glanced in the direction indicated. Far overhead, three huge buzzards, harbingers of death, circled the mountaintop in long, lazy circles.
But they might just as easily have been circling over a road-killed rabbit or coyote rather than over the body of Ivy Patterson’s father.
“What time did you call in the report?”
Yuri shrugged. “Early,” he said. “Five or maybe four.”
“Early-bird buzzards,” Joanna said. “They must have been out looking for worms.”
Yuri looked at her with a puzzled frown. “Excuse?” he asked.
Joanna shook her head. “It’s nothing,” she said. “An old joke.”
The hair prickled warningly on the back of Joanna’s neck. There was no reason to tell Yuri Malakov that she knew either he was lying or else Ivy was. Even if the vultures had been up and circling overhead that early in the morning, they wouldn’t have been visible in the dark, not to someone three miles away, down in a valley.
Joanna glanced toward the glory hole. While Joanna and Yuri had been talking, she had watched while Dick Voland used a winch and leather harness to lower Ernie down into the hole. Now, with Ernie back on the surface, the two men were earnestly conferring in tones hushed enough that none of the words carried as far as the fire truck.
“Wait here,” Joanna said to Yuri. She walked to the glory-hole fence, eased her way through the strands of barbed wire, and joined the two men on the little mound of rock-chip tailings. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“We’ve got a problem,” Ernie said slowly.
“Accident or not?” Joanna asked, abandoning all hope that Harold Patterson had died of natural causes.
“It’s no accident,” Ernie said firmly. “And no cave-in, either. Somebody bashed his skull in with a five-pound river rock.”
“River rock?” Joanna repeated, looking around at the shards of brick-red shale that littered the basin. “There’s no river rock around here.”
“That’s right. The closest place to get it would be the last crossing of Mule Mountain Creek at least half a mile away,” Ernie answered. “But that’s not the major problem.”
“What is?”
“Come look,” he said.
Together, the three of them walked to the edge of the glory hole and looked down. The ugly stench of not-yet- disinfected death wicked up from the hole into Joanna’s face. The odor that had attracted vultures from miles around sickened her, causing a bubble of nausea to rise in her throat.
She held her breath to contain it.
“Here,” Ernie said, taking out a flashlight and handing it to her. “Use this.”
Fighting back nausea and battling dizziness as well, Joanna moved forward and aimed the flash light into the pitch-black hole. It was some time before her eyes adjusted to the gloom; before she could see anything at all in the glow of that frail artificial light.
At last, though, the pale yellow beam illumination noted something-Harold Patterson’s open, blankly staring eyes.
“What about it?” Joanna asked, still not sure what she was supposed to be seeing.
“Look under his shoulder,” Ernie Carpenter said. “Under his right shoulder.”
By now Joanna could see well enough that she noticed river rocks scattered here and there on the floor of the hole. At first the white bulge sticking out from under Harold Patterson’s shoulder seemed like one of the same.
“It’s just another rock, isn’t it?” she asked, keeping her voice controlled and steady.
“I wish it were,” Ernie Carpenter said softly. “I wish to God it were. It’s a skull, Sheriff Brady. A human skull. It looks as though the rest of the skeleton is under Harold. It’s somebody who’s been down in that hole a hell of a lot longer than Harold Patterson has.”
“But who?” Joanna asked.
“I guess we’ll just have to find out, now, won’t we?” Dick Voland said.
Joanna could have been mistaken, but it seemed as though the chief deputy was smiling to himself when he said it. But the meaningful look that passed between the two men required no interpretation.
Federal EEOC guidelines notwithstanding, both Ernie Carpenter and Dick Voland regarded crime scene investigation as an all-male preserve. They had expected Dave Hollicker’s roadblock to function as a Nobody- Allowed notice, but she had ignored the warning.
It would have been easy for Joanna to take the easy way out. For her to stagger away, grope her way over to the fire truck, collapse on the running board, and wait for her head to stop swimming.
Instead, steeling herself against the fainthearted impulse, she stayed where she was and kept her eyes focused full on Harold Patterson’s face.
“Yes, we will,” she said softly, underscoring the word “we.”
“Now how about telling me exactly how you propose to go about it?”
Joanna WALKED back to where Yuri Malakov was sitting on the running board of the decommissioned fire truck.
