Dead Guilty

large red X on it and handed it to the sheriff.
The sheriff poked the deputy with it. ‘‘Here. Put it in this and take it back to your car. And while you’re up there, talk to them timber fellas and see if there’s a back road into here. Leon, you go with him and make sure he don’t screw up.’’
The deputy picked up the discarded tobacco cud with a wad of leaves and stuffed the whole thing in the brown paper bag.
As he and the other deputy, Leon, were leaving, the sheriff shouted at them. ‘‘And don’t piss in the woods on the way back.’’ He turned back to Diane. ‘‘I tell you, sometimes I wonder how he gets through the day.’’
‘‘Is the coroner here?’’ she asked, suppressing a smile.
‘‘Not yet. You know we have a new one, don’t you?’’
‘‘It’s not Sam Malone?’’
‘‘No. He retired. Moved to Florida. Lynn Webber’s the coroner. She’s a medical examiner at the hospital too. Smart little girl. Real smart.’’
‘‘Do I hear you talking about me, Mick Braden?’’
Sheriff Braden’s face lit up at the approach of a young woman dressed in designer jeans and a white lab coat. ‘‘Nothing but good things,’’ he said. ‘‘Lynn, this is Diane Fallon...’’
Lynn Webber was several inches shorter than Di ane’s five feet, eight inches, and her short, shiny black hair was much more neatly coifed than Diane’s nononsense haircut. She extended her hand and gave Diane a smile that flashed bright bleached white teeth. ‘‘I just love the museum. I took my parents there while they were visiting. It kept them from thinking about what I do for a living for a whole day.’’ Her dark eyes twinkled as she laughed.
‘‘I suppose medical examiner isn’t the job they picked out for you,’’ replied Diane, shaking her hand.
‘‘They wanted me to be a pediatrician.’’ Lynn Web ber looked up at the hanging bodies. ‘‘Good heavens. We’ve got something here, don’t we, Sheriff?’’
‘‘I’ll say.’’ The sheriff nodded. ‘‘It was a relief, though, when Dr. Fallon told me this is natural.’’
Lynn lay a hand on his arm. ‘‘Bet you thought someone stretched them on a rack before stringing them up.’’ She laughed again.
‘‘Something like that,’’ he said. ‘‘Lynn here caught a murderer that almost slipped by us. We all thought the Whitcomb woman died of a heart attack— including her doctor. Wasn’t going to even have a postmortem—natural causes. Lynn just happened to hear the paramedics talking about the woman’s rigor. Something about her position. What’d you call it— hyperextension? Suspected right away it was a poisoning.’’
‘‘Sodium monofluoroacetate?’’ said Diane. She saw a momentary flash of disappointment in Lynn’s eyes before she nodded.
‘‘I’m impressed,’’ Diane continued. ‘‘That’s a tough one. I only know about it through my human rights work. It’s the poison of choice among men in India who kill their wife because her dowry wasn’t high enough.’’
Dr. Webber looked at her, speechless for a moment, pondering, perhaps, the self-centeredness of murder ers. She shook her head and looked back at their corpses. ‘‘How’d the perp get them so high?’’ Her gaze darted around the crime scene. ‘‘A ladder, maybe. But it would’ve been hard to get their cooper ation to just climb up and stick their head in a noose, wouldn’t it?’’
‘‘The crime scene should show something. . . .’’ Diane began, then stopped.
Dr. Webber and the sheriff followed her gaze up to where, among the leafy branches, a fourth noose hung.

Chapter 2
    ‘‘The one that got away? Or is it waiting to be filled?’’ said Dr. Webber, squinting up at the piece of hemp hanging in the tree. ‘‘It’s not exactly a noose, is it? It’s just a rope tied to a limb.’’
    Diane had been studying the rope. It hung from a branch high off the ground like the others. Whoever put it there hadn’t tied the familiar hangman’s knot with tight coils above the loop. The noose was formed by a portion of the rope pulled back through a small loop tied on the end of the rope, creating a slip noose. Were it not for the small leafy branch that stuck its woody fingers through the loop, the noose would have slipped and vanished, leaving only an enigmatic piece of rope.
    Diane looked carefully at the other ropes, paying particular attention to the one from which the body had fallen.
    ‘‘It’s like the others.’’