A Long December Read Online Free PDF

from what we could see without moving him, the missing area included most of his face.
    “Christ,” said Lamar.
    “Yeah,” I said, taking the last shot on the roll and stopping to reload. “Not much left.”
    “Where’d it all go?”
    “Lots of it’s under Gary’s car,” I said. “He couldn’t get stopped before he realized he was just about on top of the stuff. We thought we’d leave it there until the lab gets here. I hope there’s teeth and stuff under there, so we have some sort of chance of positive identification.” I finished loading the camera and, lying down on the roadway, took three shots of the area under the patrol car. I could see chunks of tissue, and blood. I’d half been hoping to see the other shoe. No such luck.
    “Well, we still got his fingerprints,” said Lamar.
    “Yeah. That’s about all, unless we have tattoos or birthmarks.” I got back to my feet and dusted myself off as well as possible. Frozen dust is still dust. “We sure can’t tell eye color… unless we get lucky and find part of an eye.”
    “It had to be quick,” said Lamar. “I mean, it wouldn’t hurt at all, I think.”
    “Yeah. It looks like a lot of his head was just about vaporized.” I thought I heard a siren in the distance. “Ambulance?”
    “Should be,” he said. “You two call for the DCI mobile lab yet?”
    “I notified them,” said Hester. “Haven’t heard anything back yet.”
    “I’ll check and see,” he announced and headed back toward his car. “Radios still work better than those phones.”
    Ah, yes. But they weren’t as private.
    “You thinking dope on this one? “he asked.
    “I’m leaning that way.” I shrugged. “Way too early to say for sure, though.”
    Gary appeared around the curve and yelled out. “Hey, one of you?”
    I looked up from my camera. “What’s up, Gary?”
    “You wanna come on down this way? I think I got some tracks here, where somebody spun as they left.”
    Hester and I headed down toward him. On our way, I checked in the right-hand ditch for a black tennis shoe. Nothing.
    When I got around the curve to where the tire tracks were, they were pretty good indicators of a very fast turnaround and departure. There was a set of parallel furrows in the gravel and a partial track from one tire in the dust on the edge of the road.
    I looked at them and snapped some quick shots. “So, what do you think?”
    “Well, it’s front-wheel-drive, from the relative positions of the furrows and the nonspinning tire tracks. Came from the south, and turned around and went back the same way.” He sounded pleased with himself. I looked at the tracks and could see what he meant. I doubted if I’d have been able to decipher them, but once he explained it, it was obvious. “He couldn’t get it turned on the roadway in one motion, so he went forward and to his left, backed around, then forward and cranked the wheel, and that’s when he stepped on the gas and made the furrows.”
    I remembered that Lamar had my tape with him, so I laid my pen down alongside the partial track and took a photo of what seemed to be about half the tread-width, well impressed into the soft dust at the very edge of the roadway.
    “You think they can get a plaster cast of this? “asked Hester.
    “Maybe… if they just spray a mist of water to settle the dust first, it should go all right.” Gary looked thoughtful. “I’ve got a box lid in my trunk, and that ought to preserve it until they get here.”
    The approaching siren was getting louder.
    “We better stop the ambulance on the south side of these tire tracks,” I said.

15 :37
    THE DUMB ONE LET LOOSE WITH A BUNCH OF ROUNDS . They hit the dirt about ten yards from the barn, and then he squeezed off some more that smacked through the barn boards just above the limestone foundation line, filling the air with wood fragments and an amazing amount of dust. George’s admonition to get down had come a split second too late, but I managed