Hard Rain. B.J. Daniels
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Название: Hard Rain
Автор: B.J. Daniels
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Вестерны
Серия: The Montana Hamiltons
isbn: 9781474050142
isbn:
“So it could be an old settler’s grave, right?” Dillon asked. “Wouldn’t be the first time we’ve uncovered one in Montana.”
The coroner shook his head. “The nails in the coffin aren’t that old. Also, the clothing’s all wrong. She’s wearing jeans.”
“Don’t blue jeans date back to the late eighteen hundreds?” Dillon pointed out.
Charlie considered the corpse. “If I had to guess, I’d say she hasn’t been here that long. I could be wrong. She is well preserved.”
Frank said nothing. He had a bad feeling he knew exactly how long this woman had been here. “Any way to estimate how old she was when she was buried?”
The coroner considered the mummified corpse for a moment. “Young. Maybe teens, early twenties. I’ll know more when I get her on the autopsy table.”
“What are the chances of getting any DNA that we could use to try to identify her?” Frank asked.
“I’m hopeful,” Charlie said. “Scientists have been able to extract DNA from mummies a whole lot older than this one. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“Will be interesting to find out who she was,” the undersheriff said as he motioned to the shattered remains of the wooden box the body had been buried in. “Wasn’t much of a burial.”
“Looks like an old feed box found on places all around this county,” Frank said. “Let’s make sure we take the box in as evidence.”
“Wait,” Dillon said. “You’re thinking foul play?”
“Just covering all bets.” Nothing like a hard rain to loosen the soil and unearth all kinds of things, he thought.
Charlie reached out to take some strands of the victim’s hair between his fingers. Rubbing off the mud, he said, “I can tell you one thing. She was a redhead.”
Frank stepped away, needing to take a breath. Dread had settled like a bad meal low in his belly.
Behind him, he heard the coroner ask Dillon, “Have you taken all the photos you need? Then I’m ready to move her.” An assistant who’d been waiting patiently in the pines at some distance now moved in with a body bag. “Let’s roll her over. Easy... Hold up.”
Frank had been lost in thought when he heard Charlie say, “Sheriff, I think you might want to see this.”
With growing dread, he stepped back to the scene.
“She was wearing a leather Western belt,” the coroner said, looking up at him. “Assuming it’s her belt, her name is tooled into the leather. It says Maggie.”
THE SHERIFF SWORE, pulled off his hat and raked a hand through his graying blond hair. “Maggie?” he repeated. It appeared that he hadn’t jumped that far after all to the conclusion that had his stomach roiling.
“Do you know who she is?” Charlie asked. He was new to the area. The undersheriff was also looking at him quizzically. Dillon, too, wasn’t from around here so neither of them would know.
“A teenager went missing, hell, it must have been almost thirty-five years ago now,” Frank said. “She just up and disappeared. A lot of people thought that she’d run away. It wouldn’t have been unheard-of, especially this girl. Her name was Margaret Ann McTavish or Maggie as everyone called her.”
“McTavish?” Dillon said. “A relative of Brody’s?”
“His cousin. I was in my midtwenties when she vanished. Maggie was eighteen.” He shook his head at the memory of her and avoided looking at the remains lying in the mud. It broke his heart to see her like this.
“She was a beauty. Green eyes, long red hair, with a wild streak. So it was no wonder that everyone figured that she’d taken off. Rumor was that she’d headed out to Hollywood to become a movie star or to New York to become a model.”
Frank called up an image of her from one hot summer day. He’d been driving along the dirt road near her ranch when he’d spotted her. She’d been on a horse, tearing across the pasture like the devil himself was after her. Her long red hair was blowing out behind her. She’d been wearing a white T-shirt, cutoff jeans and cowboy boots. He remembered the sheen of the sun on her bare browned limbs. She’d had a body that should have been illegal, at least that’s what all the young men around here said. But it had been the look on her face that he thought of now.
“I’ve never seen anyone who lived life to the fullest as much as she did,” he said, overwhelmed for a moment by the deep sorrow he felt as he finally looked down again at her mummified corpse. “We all thought we’d see her on television or maybe in some late-night movie.” He shook his head. “But we never heard anything about her again.”
“No one suspected she’d met with foul play?” the coroner asked.
Frank had had a couple of theories of his own. “I thought there might have been more to the story of her disappearing like the way she did. I hadn’t been a deputy with the sheriff’s department long at that point. Maggie’s father, Flannigan McTavish, filed a missing persons report. The sheriff at the time looked into it.”
Now he could admit to himself that he’d thought the sheriff hadn’t really investigated the case and Frank knew why. “I was worried something had happened to her, but there apparently wasn’t any evidence of foul play.”
“Didn’t her father suspect she hadn’t run off?” Dillon asked.
Frank put his Stetson back on his head and sighed. “Maggie McTavish was like a wild horse that had to run free. There was no corralling her. That’s why I think everyone thought she’d taken off for greener pastures or had gotten herself into trouble and had to leave. She’d apparently packed a few clothes, because they were missing along with a duffel bag,” he recalled the sheriff telling him. “That was the end of it. I think even Flannigan finally believed she’d run off.”
“Why do I get the feeling there’s more to the story?” Dillon said, studying him.
“There were more rumors.” He thought about those now and swore under his breath. “There was talk that Maggie had been seen with Senator John David ‘JD’ Hamilton.”
“Senator Buckmaster Hamilton’s father?” Dillon asked in surprise.
“The one who is now running for president,” Charlie said, nodding as if seeing where this was going.
“The Hamilton and McTavish ranches had access to each other,” Dillon was saying. “But wasn’t JD a whole lot older—and married?”
Frank nodded. “He would have been about forty-two. She was eighteen. His son, Buckmaster, was older СКАЧАТЬ