A Grave Talent Read Online Free PDF

loathing lay openly on his face, she answered in kind. "Yes, it's pretty awful. I probably would feel sick if it didn't make me so angry."
    "You wouldn't be the first. The first dead child I had, I couldn't keep anything down for two days. Better to stay angry. Now, tell me where you think the murderer stood to throw her down there."
    They found one vague ridge of mud that might or might not have been from the side of a shoe, braced to hurl forty pounds into the air. It was so beaten down by rain that it was impossible to define and could easily have been pushed up by a horse's hoof some days before. Other than that, there was a depressing similarity to the sites where the other two bodies had been found, and by the time the wet, aching team had finished their backbreaking examination of the hillside, they had accumulated a number of rusty tin cans; one broken Coke bottle, old; two buttons, one very old; a handful of odd bits of machinery; a half-buried car tire; a short length of ancient chain with a stub of leather dog collar attached; one cheap ballpoint pen, almost new; and an assortment of paper scraps, including a soggy matchbook from a bar in San Jose.
    All that was much later, though. The doors slammed shut on the ill-filled bag that contained what had once been a little girl, the stoic team started down the hillside with their own, smaller, evidence bags, and Kate and Hawkin ducked under the yellow tapes and climbed back into the wagon.
    "Back to home base?" inquired Detweiler.
    "No, not much point in it yet." A couple with baby, child and dog trudged by, all in bright nylon ponchos. The woman smiled shyly, the child stared from the man's back. "They'll be drifting in for another hour or more. I want to see the Road again, up to the top, if this thing'll make it."
    "No question about that," said the driver, sounding hurt. "She may be slow, but she's sure."
    "Slow she is. Casey, do you have that map? I want you to make a note of the houses as we pass. It'll make things easier when we get back to Tyler's. Now, whose house is that?" Hawkin pointed past the driver's nose to a shack near the Road, and Kate prepared to mark it on the map with her pen.
    "That ain't a house, that's Jenny Cadena's goat shed." Kate wrote in the name. "Only now Harry Gustavson's using it to store the window glass for his house." She crossed out the first name, wrote in the second. "Come to think of it, though, Bob Riddle was staying in it for a while after his brother Ben threw him out. I wonder if he's still there?" He peered incuriously at the blank walls as they passed.
    Kate looked at the map and sighed. "Anybody have pencil?"
    Slowly they rumbled up the narrow, muddy road, stopping twice to let carloads of residents slip by and once to help change a county car's flat tire. Slowly they reached the upper end of the Road, guarded and heavily gated, and slowly they turned back. Just below the Road's summit Hawkin leaned forward and touched Detweiler's shoulder.
    "Stop here for a minute, would you? Come with me, Casey."
    The two detectives walked thirty yards back up the Road, rocks prodding the soles of their city shoes, and stood looking down at a tumble of rock and brush.
    "That's where Tina Merrill was found. Her father had a heart attack last month, did you know that? Her mother's lost twenty pounds and eats tranquilizers, and her honor-roll brother is failing his last year of high school. The murderer dropped her here on the Road like a sack of garbage, and after a few days something dragged her off down the hill."
    The hillside was nearly silent, with only a few birds, the click of the engine, their breathing. The sun came out and Kate began to feel warm, but Hawkin didn't move.
    "What is he after?" he muttered, staring hard up the dirt track. He looked as if he were straining to look back three months, to see that day in late fall when a figure had carried its macabre burden down the road. "What is he doing?"
    "I'm sorry, I don't