A corpse rolled out.
He felt Jane behind him. She didn’t scream, but behind her, Heidi let out a terrified yelp. “Oh, my God! It’s another dead man!”
Gavin and Joe came in behind her.
“No!” Heidi said. “Oh, God!”
“It’s a fresh one,” Gavin muttered.
And so it was.
They had an old corpse....
Pointing the way to a new one.
What the hell was going on in Lily?
4
Sloan pulled out his penlight to examine the man and try to determine who he might be and how he’d died. He didn’t want to disturb the corpse any more than he needed to, until the medical examiner arrived.
The corpse was dressed in dirty denim jeans and a cotton shirt. He was wearing work boots, and Sloan noted that his hands and nails were dirty, as if he’d been doing manual labor. He judged him to be about forty years of age, but he’d never seen him before. At first, the cause of death wasn’t apparent. Then Sloan noted that the red on the blanket was deeper because of the blood that had escaped from a bullet hole in the back of the man’s head. He dug into his pocket for the gloves he hadn’t needed yet in Lily but carried anyway because of his days in Houston. He checked the man’s pockets, but he wasn’t carrying a wallet or any form of identification.
“You know him?” Jane asked.
“No.”
Heidi was standing there, hyperventilating.
“Heidi, you don’t need to be here. Gavin, can you and Joe take the old corpse back to town and over to the county morgue and then get a medical examiner out here for me—and a crime-scene unit? Jane, can you get Heidi back to the stables? You can use the patrol car to return to the office. Looks like I’ll be out here for a few more hours.”
Jane nodded. “Sure,” she said. “Heidi?”
But Heidi didn’t seem to hear.
“I knew him! I knew him. I knew him, oh, God, I knew him!” Heidi cried.
Sloan rose and took her by the shoulders. “Heidi, calm down.” He led her out of the tepee. “Who is it?”
“Um, um...his name was Jay. Jay something. He stayed at the Old Jail the other night. He was alone. He came and took the trail ride. Alone. His name’ll be on a form back at the stables. Everybody has to sign a form before they get on one of the horses. He was just a tourist, I’m pretty sure.”
Gavin and Joe walked behind Sloan. “We’ll get the old corpse back and send out the investigators,” Joe said dully.
Sloan nodded. He was still looking at Heidi. “So you took him on a trail ride. The usual?”
“Um, it was three days ago. I took him on a night ride. No, wait. He went on two trail rides. He went during the day and then again at night. Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God...”
“Heidi, let’s go back to the stables,” Jane said. She glanced at Sloan, evidently realizing that the biggest help she could offer was taking Heidi off his hands. She put an arm around her. “Come on now. Are you going to be able to ride?”
“Her horse knows this trail and the way back to the stables better than I know my way around my own house,” Sloan said.
“Call if you need me,” Jane told him. “Heidi, come on.”
Sloan watched her go, berating himself. He’d actually wanted her to be an incompetent rider; he guessed that for some reason he’d wanted her to do badly at something.
Now he was grateful. She was a well-trained federal agent. She also happened to be a beautiful one.
He walked over to where Gavin and Joe had managed to slide a board beneath their century-old mummified corpse and lift it into the wagon, apparently causing no harm to the remains.
“We’ll get crews out here as fast as we can,” Joe promised.
“I’ll be here,” Sloan said.
He watched as they crawled in the wagon and Joe picked up the reins. Jane helped Heidi onto her bay, mounted Kanga smoothly and turned to wave to him.
He lifted his hand. “Thank you,” he said, though he doubted she could hear him.
But she nodded. He didn’t hear her, either, but he thought she said, “See you tonight.”
When they were gone, he returned to the area of the tepee. Unfortunately, they’d all done a lot of tracking around before they’d realized they had a current murder on their hands.
Sloan inspected the area carefully. In the end, he decided they hadn’t messed up any tracks or caused the crime scene any real harm.
The dead man—Jay, whatever his last name might be—had been forced to his knees, Sloan surmised. He’d been shot, execution-style, right where he’d knelt. The blanket had soaked up most of the blood.
Why the hell would anyone take a casual tourist out to the desert and execute him?
“Because, son, he wasn’t a casual tourist,” he heard.
He turned around. Longman was with him. He seldom saw Longman except in his own house.
Sloan nodded.
“I will wait with you,” Longman told him.