Dead Guilty

Waggoner’s Hitch

Chapter 1
    ‘‘If I’d known she was so afraid of snakes, I wouldn’t have hired her,’’ Diane Fallon muttered as she parked her car behind a patrol car on the hard shoulder of the small two-lane dirt road. She could hear the screams of her museum assistant director still ringing in her ears as she took her case from the backseat and climbed out.
    Two guys and four young women dressed in cutoffs and tanktops stood in a knot talking to each other on the opposite side of the road between a beat-up pickup and a Jeep. A blonde, cell phone to her ear, stretched up on her toes, as if that would give her a better view into the woods. The words ‘‘See anything’’ leaped out of the crowd.
    On Diane’s side of the road, two men, tanned and athletic, stood next to a patrol car with what looked like surveying equipment in a pile at their feet. One of them appeared restless. He started to light a ciga rette when the other stopped him, pointing to the dry weeds.
    The onlookers turned their attention to Diane as a patrolman approached her, spawning a minicloud of dust with each step. He was a young freckled redhead, and he squinted at the sun though his dark glasses, his khaki shirt wet with spots of perspiration around his collar and under his arms.
    ‘‘Nothing to see here, lady. Get back in your car.’’ He motioned with his hand as though he was direct ing traffic.
    ‘‘Forensic anthropologist.’’ Diane held out identifi cation that hung around her neck. ‘‘Sheriff Braden called.’’
    The patrolman attempted a smile, nodded and pointed to the woods. ‘‘You have to work your way through the woods there. It’s dense at first, but you’ll come to a deer trail. Follow it about a quarter of a mile.’’ He hesitated a moment, a grimace distorting his features as he nodded toward the two men next to his car. ‘‘They say it’s not normal.’’
    Not normal. The kind of death they called her out for usually wasn’t. ‘‘My crime scene crew will be here soon. Send them down when they arrive.’’
    ‘‘Sure thing. Spray yourself down good. Lot of deer ticks in these woods.’’
She thanked him, retrieved a can of bug repellent from her case and sprayed herself from head to toe before ducking through the underbrush. She followed orange tie markers through brittle flora until she found the deer trail.
About four hundred yards into the woods, a breeze brought a brief shot of relief from the heat but carried with it the aroma of death. Pushing her way through a thicket of wild shrubs, she saw the sheriff through the leaves. He and several deputies stood in an open ing under large spreading trees, staring at the crime scene, muttering to each other. They looked in her direction and nodded as she came into the clearing— obviously glad to see her arrive.
At the familiar yellow-and-black tape she stopped to take in details of the scene. Like a grotesque image from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, three bodies hung by their necks from ropes in the copse of trees.
The sheriff approached her, shaking his head, wip ing his face with a blue bandana and fanning himself with his wide-brimmed hat. He was a tall, thin man with a round face and thick, wavy dark hair that was just beginning to gray at the sides.
‘‘I don’t know what they could have done to these people to make them like that,’’ he said, motioning in the direction of the three hanging bodies. ‘‘When word of this gets out...’’
Diane said nothing. She walked with the sheriff carefully around the perimeter of the yellow-taped crime scene. What had upset the sheriff and his depu ties was not simply the triple death, but the horrid look of it. Bodies hanging still, as though frozen— their necks stretched from one to three feet in length.
The bodies looked very much alike, the way dead do. The kinship of the dead—skin black with decay, vacant eye sockets, exposed bones, mouths open and askew. They were each dressed in similar if not identi cal coveralls—navy blue, maybe dark gray, it was hard to tell, they were so stained with dried body fluids. One had long blond hair half plastered to its skull, with strands blowing gently in the breeze. The other two had shorter dark hair—brown maybe, or black. All had their hands tied behind their backs.
Without warning, the farthest body fell as the neck skin ripped apart. The head bounced on the ground and rolled a dozen feet from the torso, trailing a long piece