A Body To Die For. G. A. McKevett

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СКАЧАТЬ or God knows what. I don’t know where it’s been before, but it’s been sitting here only a few hours, I can guarantee you.”

      She had to agree with him. While Sulphur Creek Road wasn’t as heavily traveled as your average Southern California freeway, it was the main road connecting San Carmelita with Twin Oaks, a smaller inland community of about three thousand people.

      “That’s true,” she said. “A red Jaguar convertible sitting on Deadman’s Curve would have raised a ruckus, even if no one had noticed the bloodstained interior.”

      “Lemme borrow that flashlight,” Dirk said.

      She handed it to him, and he walked slowly toward the guardrail.

      Knowing his fear of heights, Savannah couldn’t help admiring him and snickering just a little, as she watched him tiptoe up to the edge and peek over. Her thing was snakes. His was heights. She freaked out at the sight of an over-grown worm; he couldn’t go more than three rungs up a ladder.

      Hey, you couldn’t be a superhero twenty-four hours a day.

      She joined him at the railing as he trailed the beam of the flashlight back and forth over the thick sagebrush, cacti, and large craggy rocks that covered the steep cliff.

      At the very bottom, far beyond the reach of the simple flashlight, was a river. She could hear it, rushing over its rocky bed and she had seen it before—the day the kids had gone over the cliff and landed in the water, upside down.

      That was a day she would never be able to forget.

      “Hell of a thing,” Dirk muttered. “This happening here of all places. I thought we were done with this friggen place.”

      She reached for his hand and for a moment, her fingers entwined with his. She squeezed them gently. “I know, buddy,” she said. “I was thinking the same thing.”

      She released his hand before any of the other cops could see. No point in starting rumors. And policemen gossiped worse than anybody she knew. Probably because they had more exciting tales to tell than the average accountant or store clerk.

      “There’s a lot of water down there,” she said, stating the obvious in an attempt to change the subject. “All those rains we’ve had. One storm after the other last week.”

      “And that one last night was a doozy,” he replied, playing along.

      Yeah, she thought, when all else fails, discuss the weather.

      After a few more awkward moments of reminiscing, Savannah said, “If they took his body out of that car and threw it off this cliff…do you think he’d hit the water down there?”

      Dirk leaned forward, ever so slightly, and took a quick look. “Yeah. I do. It’s pretty much straight down.” He took a couple of steps back from the guardrail. “I really wish it wasn’t this spot,” he said. “For more reasons than one.”

      “I hear you.”

      Gently, with her best fake-nonchalant look on her face, she took the flashlight from his hand.

      Stepping around him, she moved closer to the railing and shone the light down the cliff.

      Unlike him, she was fine with cliffs. As long as those cliffs were certifiably snake-free.

      Swinging the light back and forth, she peered into the darkness and saw nothing at the bottom but a black void. However, as she trained the light on the cliff itself, she saw something interesting.

      “I think he’s down there,” she said.

      Phobia or no phobia, Dirk was instantly alert. He took a few steps, closing the gap between them.

      “Why? What do you see?”

      “Some broken cactuses, I mean, cacti or whatever. Right down there. See?”

      He did see. It was obvious, several large clumps of prickly pear about ten feet down from the edge, broken—their pads torn off or crushed. And all around the smashed cacti was equally damaged sagebrush.

      “Something definitely went down through there. Recently,” he said. “Something big.”

      “Like a human being,” Savannah added.

      “Exactly like a human being. And even if he was alive when he went over that cliff, he sure wouldn’t be by the time he hit the bottom.”

      Savannah winced at the very thought. The cliff with its sharp, jagged rocks and nettled vegetation, that terrible drop, and of course the river at the bottom with its rushing water and stone-covered banks and bed.

      She glanced back at the luxury car, fouled by its gruesome biological evidence. “I guess the good news for Bill Jardin is…” she said, “…he wasn’t alive when he went over.”

      Dirk shook his head. “Yeah, right. Goody for him.”

      Savannah looked at her watch. 10:15. “It won’t be dawn for hours,” she said. “And there’s no way we’re going to find him until we’ve got some daylight.”

      “That’s for sure. We’ll get the crime scene unit out here as soon as it’s light to process that car, the road, and as much of this cliff as they can get to. That’s gonna be great fun for them, processing a scene while hanging from ropes.”

      “And of course, we have to go down there to search the river—either rappel down the cliff or have a chopper drop us.”

      He didn’t answer, and she knew he was searching his mind for any excuse to get out of doing either of those.

      “Your mom could have another emergency appendectomy,” she suggested.

      “Naw.” He sighed. “They wouldn’t buy it. She’s already had three in the past five years.”

      “That’s gotta be some sort of record.”

      “Yeah, especially for a woman who’s been dead twenty years.”

      She stifled a giggle. “This time you might have to fake an attack yourself.”

      He took another tentative look over the cliff. “Hell, if it comes down to it, I’d rather actually have the operation. Anything would be better than going over that cliff on a rope or hanging from a helicopter by a thread.”

      Turning away from the guardrail, he shuddered and added, “I hear you don’t really need an appendix.”

      “Yeah,” Savannah replied. “They’re just for decoration anyway.”

      Savannah had considered going home and grabbing a few hours of sleep before daybreak came and the next step in the search for Bill Jardin would begin. Certainly, it would have been the sensible thing to do.

      But she hadn’t considered it seriously. Of all her many virtues—which, of course, included humility—“sensible” wasn’t at the top of the list.

      Years ago, she had discovered that she could usually circumvent the biological need to sleep, СКАЧАТЬ