“Show them,” Claire told Bennett. He sighed glumly and turned around. He had taken a header down the ravine and his uniform was stained with muck, and tiny bits of vegetation still clung to his shirt.
Both Henry and Archie leaned forward to get a better look. Clinging to Bennett’s shoulder blade, among the fern seeds, the moss particulate, and the dirt, was, unmistakably, a clue.
Henry looked at Archie. “That would be a human hair,” he said.
“When you, uh, fell,” Archie asked Bennett. “Did you actually make contact with the body?”
Bennett’s spine stiffened. “Jesus no, sir. I swear.”
“Must have picked it up on the way down,” said Henry.
Archie pulled a slim black flashlight out of his pocket and shone it along the length of the red hair. He held it for Henry to look. There was a tiny clump of tissue at the base of the hair. “It’s got a scalp fragment on it,” Archie said.
Bennett whipped his head around, eyes wide. “Get it off me,” he pleaded. “Get it off me, okay?”
“Easy, son,” Henry said.
Claire, who was a good foot shorter than Bennett, reached up and plucked the hair off and dropped it in an evidence bag.
Archie called a crime scene tech over. “Bag all his clothes. Socks, everything.”
“But what will I wear?” Bennett asked as the crime scene tech led him off.
Claire turned to Archie and Henry. The path they were on was about three feet wide, carved worryingly out of the hillside. The back foot of it had been taped off to let the fifty-year-old women by, so they didn’t have to backtrack a mile into the woods and miss afternoon spa appointments. A chocolate Lab bounded through the foliage on the hillside as its owner, in cargo shorts, hiking books, and reflective sunglasses, walked past without even a second glance at the activity at the bottom of the glen. “So?” Claire said.
“Head injury,” said Archie.
“Yep,” said Henry.
“Maybe she fell,” Claire theorized. “Like T. J. Hooker, there. Hit her head on a rock.”
“Or maybe the rock hit her,” Henry said.
“Or,” Archie said, “maybe Sparky scrambled down there and stuck his snout in our corpse, and the hair dropped off his tongue on his way back up the embankment.”
Claire and Henry both looked at Archie.
“Sparky?” Henry said.
“That is so gross,” said Claire.
CHAPTER
2
Susan Ward felt sick to her stomach. Maybe it was nerves. Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was the bar’s toxic smog of cigarette smoke.
“You want another drink?” Quentin Parker asked. Parker had been the crime-beat reporter for the Herald for as long as anyone could remember. Susan didn’t know if he’d started out an alcoholic, or if it had something to do with the job.
“Something with an umbrella this time?” he said.
Parker drank Wild Turkey. No ice. The waitress had poured him one before they’d even sat down.
Susan ignored the crack about the umbrella and slid a cigarette from the pack she had set on the table. “I’ll just smoke,” she said, surveying the bar. Parker had suggested it. It was downtown, and easy to get to from the paper. Susan had never heard of it, but Parker seemed to know everyone in the place. He knew a lot of people in a lot of bars.
The bar was small, so Susan was able to keep an eye on the door, to watch for the man they were supposed to meet. Parker had set it up. Susan usually worked with the features editor, but this story was crime, and that meant Parker. She’d been trying to get this meeting for two months. Parker set it up with one phone call. But the whole story had been like that. She was about to single-handedly decimate the career of an esteemed politician. Most of the staff at the Herald had voted for the guy. Susan had voted for him. She’d take that vote back now if she could.
“I could have come by myself,” Susan said.
“He doesn’t know you,” Parker said. “And I like to help.” He was kidding, of course. Generosity was not the word that came to mind when you thought of Quentin Parker. Belligerent? Yes. Sexist? Yes. Great fucking writer? Yes. Drunk? Absolutely.
Almost everyone thought he was an asshole.
But for some reason, from that first day at the paper two years ago, Parker had looked out for Susan. She didn’t know why. Maybe he’d liked her smart-ass mouth. Or her inappropriate clothes. Or whatever color her hair had been at the time. It didn’t matter. She’d take a bullet for him, and she was pretty sure that, barring the distraction of a drink or a hot lead, he’d do the same for her.