Bad Bones (Claire Morgan) Read Online Free PDF Page A

their body. On the other hand, a killer would not want to leave anything behind, no evidence, no clue to the victim’s identity. It would be to his advantage to take any clothes that might be identifiable. Or the victim could’ve escaped his assailant and tried to flee, but in his panic had run right off the edge and fallen to his death.
    After half an hour of searching, they gave up and attempted unsuccessfully to follow the steep boardwalk down in its meandering switchback trail to the lake without slipping and sliding and plummeting themselves down to the crime scene. It was almost impossible to keep their footing on the steeper inclines and they both fell and slid on their backs multiple times. Claire ended up getting snow down inside her boots and up her pant legs and in her gloves, and so did Bud. So by the time they finally found their way to Buck and Shaggy and Vicky and the other technicians, they were not only cold but wet and miserable, too.
    There, they found their good friend, John Becker aka Shaggy, Canton County’s ace criminalist, where he was being supported by a couple of other techs while he used a small blowtorch to melt through the ice holding the corpse against the rocks. The bottom half of the body was still encased in the frozen water just off the bank. Buck had ordered the lights to be focused on the victim, but dusk had fallen fast and hard now, and it was difficult to see as the snow turned to sleet and began to come down harder and in swift, slanted arrows that felt and sounded like BB pellets.
    Shivering like crazy, Claire made her way closer to Buck, where he stood supervising the extraction of the body. There was little she could tell about the victim’s face, except that his skin looked purple. As Buck had said, the murky ice distorted his face and made his features unrecognizable. The scene in its entirety looked a lot like textbook photographs she’d seen of wooly mammoths being dug out of Arctic ice. The victim seemed to have frozen to the spot where he had landed in a relatively upright sitting position, head down, chin frozen tightly against his chest. The ice casing followed the contours of his body and made an ice effigy of a human being that created a very surreal and awful tableau of death in those smoky lights and windblown sleet.
    “My God, Buck, what’d you think happened to this guy?”
    “I’d say murder. There are better ways to commit suicide. But could be that he was on drugs, high on PCP or something like that. Had a bad trip, went crazy, stripped off his clothes and tried to fly off that cliff up there.”
    Claire considered that scenario and then shook her head. “Sounds reasonable. Except there aren’t any clothes up there. No car, either. No tire tracks. No footprints. No nothing. And this place is pretty much off the beaten path. I doubt if he would’ve walked out here buck naked in freezing winter weather and then decided to jump to his death. That’s just too farfetched.”
    Buck glanced at her. “Yeah, but who knows what a suicidal crazy’s gonna do?”
    “True.”
    After another ten minutes, Shaggy turned off the blowtorch and helped the others hack out the lower portion of the frozen corpse with a couple of axes, and then load him on a stretcher, still in a sitting position.
    “I guess we can’t identify him until he warms up,” Claire said, already knowing the answer.
    “Not unless he’s got ID on him, but that doesn’t seem possible, given what he’s not wearing. I’ll take him back to the morgue tonight and put him under the lamps. You and Bud might as well go home, get some rest. Nothing else you can do until we get his name and I can go to work on him. And I hear that a second front’s movin’ in later tonight.”
    “That means more idiotic people travelin’ the roads tomorrow,” Bud said. “And some more dents in my SUV. Great. Can’t wait.”
    “Well, at least this gives us a reason not to have to direct traffic for a few