Bad Company Read Online Free PDF Page A

body had stiffened up with death, and the rocks she was stuck between were way too big to move. The crime lab techs were as careful as they could be, trying to preserve the body in the condition it had been left, but they had to get the deputies to help them pull and haul for minutes that seemed like hours, cursing and sweating. Dickie, the coroner, and the detective stood to one side, talking in low voices, watching intently, their faces blank. Sally could hardly believe how calm they all were. Once she thought she heard the crunch of breaking bone, but it might have been nothing more than the sound of her own senses stretching to the snapping point. Suddenly she was aware of sitting spraddle-legged on a hard lumpy rock, elbows on her thighs, the almost empty Kum ’n’ Go mug dangling from her forefinger. She drank the dregs of the cold coffee and nearly barfed all over her hiking boots.
    Hawk must have been watching her. The next thing she knew, he had his hand on the back of her neck and she had her head between her knees and he was saying, “Deep breaths. Come on, Mustang. They’ve got her out of there now. They’ll be talking to us soon. Don’t mess up the second pair of shoes in one day.”
    She finally looked up again. Couldn’t help herself. She’d never looked at a corpse before.
    In the waning daylight, the coroner had set up battery-powered lamps, aimed at what was left of Monette Bandy. And then he started handling the body, making more notes, mumbling into a tape recorder. The crime lab techs set to work beside him, but Sally couldn’t quite see what they were doing. The coroner’s body partially blocked her view.
    But she could see that Monette’s uniform shirt was torn and bloody. Sally searched her memory. The Life-way checkers wore a uniform polo shirt with whatever pants they favored. That morning Monette had been wearing black jeans, a little too tight. The coroner got up from where he was squatting and went around to work from another angle, giving Sally a better (was that the word?) view. Monette wasn’t wearing jeans, or anything else on the lower half of her body, now, and there was a lot more blood, dried grass sticking to her legs, and between them. She’d been shot. God.
    One of the crime lab techs had gone down into the crevice and pulled out the jeans. Now Sally saw them draped over a rock, the techs looking in their kit for a bigger plastic bag to put them in. “Hunh,” said the tech. “No blood. The guy must’ve got these off her before he shot her.” That was about as much as Sally could stand. She turned away.
    And registered, distinctly, for the first time, what the coroner had been saying in his soft voice. “Shot twice at point-blank range with what appears to be a small caliber weapon . . . head, abdomen . . . likelihood of sexual assault . . .”
    Only that morning, Sally thought, she’d talked with a living human being, somebody she’d pitied more than liked, but a person nonetheless. Sally couldn’t remember exactly where Monette Bandy had grown up—one of the energy boomtowns, Newcastle or Gillette? She’d come to Laramie to widen her horizons, a young woman, probably damaged by a girlhood that hadn’t offered much in the way of comfort or encouragement or pleasure. (Sally could see her holding up that bag of artichokes: “What’re these?”) Monette had just been looking, as she’d said, to “get it on.” Rape murder, it’s just a shot away.
    “Pull it together, girl,” said Hawk, putting out a hand to help Sally up from her seat on the rock. “The detective and the sheriff want to talk.”
    “Sorry to keep you waiting,” Atkins said, all business.
    “I didn’t expect we’d have such a tough time getting the body out of that crack,” Dickie added. “Wish you hadn’t had to watch that.”
    “I assume that was where you found her?” Atkins asked.
    “Yes,” Hawk said. “We were headed up this way, and saw vultures overhead. We figured