He moved aside far enough to make room for her. Sinking down beside him, she wiped her clammy forehead with the sleeve of her jacket and closed her eyes, trying to shut out the memory of Harold Patterson’s eerily blank eyes.
She wanted to forget how they had caught the glow of Ernie Carpenter’s flashlight and stared dully back up at her through the darkness.
Yuri glanced at Joanna with some sympathy, and he seemed in tune with her reaction. “Is bad thing,” he muttered. “Very bad thing.”
Joanna studied his broad face. Thick eyebrows hunched over heavily lidded eyes. Although from a distance he had appeared to be relaxed and snoozing, she realized now that his carefully hooded eyes were observing everything about him with intense interest.
Ernie Carpenter, leaving the glory hole for the moment, carted a cumbersome suitcase of equipment from his traveling crime-lab van to a newly dried puddle in the road. There, on hands and knees, he was attempting to make plaster casts of the fire tracks left in crusted mud. Meanwhile, Dick Voland stood beside Ernie’s van, speaking into the radio microphone and gesturing with his other hand.
“Detective Voland is trying to locate a sump pump,” Joanna explained.
“A what?”
“An emergency pump and a generator to run it. They need to empty the water out of the bottom of the hole before they attempt to bring up either body, Patterson or the other one.”
Suddenly, Yuri Malakov was no longer lounging against the side of the truck. He loomed over Voland and Joanna, dwarfing them both. “Two bodies?” he demanded, his smoldering dark eyes boring into Joanna’s. “More than one? More than Mr. Patterson?”
Joanna realized at once that she had blundered and spoken out of turn. That kind of information about an ongoing investigation shouldn’t have been casually mentioned to a passing acquaintance who happened to appear at the crime scene. But it was too late to take it back, and there didn’t seem to be any justification in lying about it.
She nodded. “Detective Carpenter seems to have found another body, a skeleton, under Harold Patterson. He had fallen directly on top of it.”
“Who?” Yuri asked.
“We don’t know that,” Joanna answered. “The other victim has been dead for a long time, most likely. Until they can search the glory hole for evidence, there’s no way to tell.”
Yuri Malakov lurched to his feet. “Ivy must know about this,” he declared.
“No,” Joanna objected. “That kind of news should come from one of the investigating officers, from someone official.”
Yuri shook his shaggy head impatiently. “Investigators busy. I am not busy. I tell her.”
With that, Yuri stomped away toward the Scout, leaving Joanna no choice but to trail along after him. He was a huge man. The idea of her physically restraining someone his size was laughable.
Joanna glanced back toward Dick Voland, who was still talking on the radio. He would be of no help. Besides, she didn’t want to tell him about this. She didn’t want to admit to blabbing out of turn.
“Wait,” Joanna said. “If you’ll give me a ride back down to my car, I’ll come with you and tell Ivy myself.”
Yuri stopped next to the Scout with one hand possessively on the door latch. “Okay,” he agreed readily. “I drive. You tell.”
As they maneuvered past the spot in the road where Ernie Carpenter was working on the plaster casts, Joanna directed Yuri to stop. “I need to tell Detective Carpenter where I’m going.”
As if that was necessary, she thought afterward.
Ernie barely glanced up when she spoke to him, acknowledging their departure with an inattentive frown. By then the homicide detective was totally focused on the solitary pursuit of obtaining evidence. Anything that removed distracting onlookers was to be regarded as a help, not a hindrance.
“That’s fine,” he said, waving them away. “Tell the people down at the house to stay out of Harold’s room. That goes for everyone there. Tell them to leave it alone until I have a chance to go through it.”
“Right,” Joanna said. “I’ll tell them.”
At the point in the road where Dick Voland’s Blazer still blocked the way, they had to abandon the Scout in favor of Joanna’s Eagle. The hulking Russian had to scrunch his broad shoulders and duck his head in order to cram himself into the passenger’s seat, but he did so without complaint.
While Joanna drove, he sat with his arms folded stubbornly across his massive chest, frowning and looking straight ahead, saying nothing. She looked at him from time to time and tried to decipher the troubled expression on his face.
She was surprised at the complete change in Yuri Malakov’s demeanor. His appearance now was a complete 180 degrees from the way he had looked earlier, sitting relaxed and supposedly dozing on the running board of the pumper. And the change had been instantaneous rather than gradual. It happened the moment she had mentioned existence of that second body. The news had seemed to distress him in a way that went far beyond his supposedly slight connection to the Patterson clan and their troubles. “What’s the matter?” Joanna asked. “Is some thing bothering you?”
Yuri glanced at her suspiciously. “What means ‘bother’?”
“Bother is like worry,” Joanna explained. “Is something worrying you?”
“Nyet,” he answered. “Nothing.”
But Yuri Malakov, silent and brooding, certainly didn’t look worry-free.
Thinking about his situation, Joanna realized it had to be dismaying to be thrown into a crisis especially a crisis
