On Pins and Needles. Victoria Pade

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СКАЧАТЬ ain’t no kind of formal buryin’. I’m bettin’ we’ve opened up somethin’ somebody thought would never come to light.”

      Josh Brimley turned those dark, dark blue eyes to Megan again, this time from beneath one raised brow. “Anything you’d like to tell me?”

      “Only that I don’t have the foggiest idea what’s going on.”

      But he didn’t look completely convinced of that as he led the way out of her office.

      Chapter 2

      THE OCCASIONAL CAR ACCIDENT. Reckless driving. Speeding. Mailbox bashing. Minor vandalism. Cattle tipping. Drunk and disorderly conduct. Brawling. A break-in here and there—in the history of Elk Creek that was as bad as it got in the way of crime. Until now.

      It was a little hard for Josh to believe that only three months into his run as sheriff he was looking at what seemed to be a murder. But it didn’t take him long after reaching the Bailey place and looking over what had been un earthed to realize that could well be just what he was con fronted with.

      “I’ve put up the crime scene tape to cordon off the area. Your men can work around it,” he told Burt Connors when he had the burial site contained.

      Chaos reined supreme in the Bailey backyard since Burt insisted that he and his crew had to finish up their work so the Bailey sisters would have use of their plumbing facilities by night fall. And although Josh was fairly certain curiosity in what that same crew had uncovered was the real reason behind their lingering, he didn’t object. He had work of his own to do as he used a whisk broom to care fully and methodically brush away the soil that remained partially obliterating the skeleton so that the entire grave and its contents were visible.

      Josh had trained with the Wyoming sheriff’s department and he knew all the procedures, including those for a crime of this magnitude. He knew the procedures by heart. But a murder investigation was the last thing he’d ever expected to actually have to do in his small hometown.

      Of course he should have known better than anyone that not many things turned out the way a person expected them to. But still, it was a sobering job that lay ahead of him.

      Daylight had disappeared by the time Josh backed away from the freshly cleared hole, confident that he’d done all he should do on his own for the moment. But he did avail himself of Burt Connors’s offer of floodlights to illuminate the area and then hunkered down on his heels at the grave side to get a closer look at what he’d actually exposed while he waited for the sheriff’s department’s forensic team.

      Along with the bones that had been discovered, there was a knapsack and the clothes the victim had worn. The clothes were non de script, the same kind of clothes he and most everyone else around these parts wore—a plain shirt, blue jeans, cowboy boots.

      The sole of one of the cowboy boots was down to its last layer of leather and the fact that there was a tear in one knee of the jeans and the shirt was thread bare around the edges led him to believe this hadn’t been a prosperous man. Josh was betting that when they got into the knapsack that rested along side the skeleton, they’d find all his worldly goods contained in it.

      The knapsack itself was a well-worn canvas bag and, although Josh was careful not to disturb anything so that the scene would be intact for the forensics unit, there was a local news pa per sticking out far enough for him to read the date without touching anything. It was a June news pa per. Eighteen years old.

      After his arrival on the scene and his initial look into the grave Josh had radioed Millie Christopher—the woman Megan Bailey had referred to as his secretary—and had Millie look for any missing persons reports that might be on file at the office.

      Millie said she’d look, but she knew for a fact that in the entirety of her thirty-eight years as the sheriff’s girl-Friday, the only missing persons case there had ever been was a teenage girl who had turned out to be a runaway in 1982.

      So much for hoping for an easy lead.

      The forensics unit arrived then and Josh met them at their van, introducing himself and filling them in as he took them to the site. Once they got to work he was left to stand by and oversee their first few chores—taking pictures of the scene from all angles, and closely ob serving and describing in notes the placement of everything. Nothing could be moved until that was accomplished.

      Within moments of the arrival of the forensics unit, two state patrol cars showed up, too. The officers had heard over their radios what was going on and had come to see if they could help. They couldn’t, but they stayed around anyway, adding to the number of on lookers. One of whom, of course, was Megan Bailey.

      Her sister hadn’t returned yet but Megan had set up a card table with beverages and bran muffins for anyone who might want them.

      Josh was tempted to shout over to her “What do you think this is? A tea party?”

      But he refrained. It wasn’t as if she appeared to be enjoying this because she didn’t. On a rational level, Josh knew she was only being consider ate of everyone’s comfort. But still, just having her there—even out of the way beside her back door—was damn distracting.

      At least it was damn distracting to him.

      No one else seemed to pay her much mind beyond quick trips to the table to accept her hospitality before getting right back to work. But for Josh it was a different story.

      Here he was, in the middle of some thing as big as a potential homicide and his thoughts—and eyes—kept wandering to Megan Bailey.

      She’s a flake, he told himself impatiently. Allergy elimination acupuncture—that was how she made her living, for crying out loud. With a gazillion bracelets on one wrist and those nutty-looking wooden clogs on her feet instead of regular shoes. A flake. That’s what she was all right.

      It didn’t matter if she had gleaming blond hair that was so silky and flawless that even the flood lights made it seem to glow. It didn’t matter that she had skin like porcelain or high cheek bones the color of summer roses. It didn’t matter that she had a small, sculpted nose or lips that gave off the sensuality of a siren. It didn’t matter that she had a perfect, compact little body with just enough up front to make a man wonder. And it sure as hell didn’t matter that she had long-lashed doe-eyes the pale color of cream stained by blue berries.

      The only thing that mattered was that she was a flake. A flake with a body buried in her backyard.

      And even if she hadn’t had a body in her backyard, she was not the kind of woman he should be distracted by.

      He’d learned his lesson the hard way. Taught in painful detail by an off-the-wall woman. He definitely didn’t want anything to do with another one.

      Plain, down-to-earth females—those were the only kind he intended to give a second look, and Megan Bailey was a long way from that.

      So why was he standing there, watching her open a soda can for the lead forensic investigator and noticing how delicate her hands were? Why was he straining for a look at her shape through the gossamer draping of her dress when he should be straining for a look at his crime scene? Why was he memorizing the way her hair fell around her shoulders rather than memorizing every word that passed from one forensic investigator to the other? And why on God’s green earth was he paying more attention to a detail like her earlobe and the sweet spot just below it than to the details of his own job?

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