Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 07 - Murder Most Fowl Read Online Free PDF Page A

him.
     
    R uth Grady was back from Thurston by the time Rhodes got Hack on the radio, so he told Hack to have her come out and take the three prisoners into town. He also told Hack to call the ambulance and the Justice of the Peace.
    “And see if Lawton can remember what he heard about Lige Ward,” he said before he signed off.
    After Ruth had loaded up the prisoners but before the ambulance arrived, Rhodes took some Polaroids of Lige and the outhouse, and then he looked it over as carefully as he could. He didn’t find a thing out of the ordinary, but he did dig out a couple of slugs from the walls for identification purposes.
    The only unusual thing, if you could call it that, was the fact that Ward’s clothing wasn’t in the position Rhodes would have expected if Ward had been in the outhouse to use it for its intended purpose. Ward’s pants were securely belted at the waist, which meant to Rhodes that Ward had probably not been shot in the silver building. Besides, the seat was down.  Ward had been shot somewhere else and placed in the outhouse later.
    Rhodes continued his examination. He’d have Ruth come back out and go over the portable toilet for fingerprints, but he didn’t have much faith in that process providing anything useful. He’d never been involved with a single case that was solved by fingerprints. He believed in talking to people and listening to what they said.  It was a technique he had a lot more faith in than fingerprints, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t collect all the evidence he could find.
    Lige had been dead for quite a while. Rigor mortis had come and gone, and Lige’s body was not pleasant to handle, not that Rhodes handled it much.
    Lige had been struck at least twice by bullets, in the neck and head, but it would be up to the doctor to say whether the bullets had hit him before or after he was already dead. Rhodes didn’t know yet what caliber the bullets were, and he’d have to find that out, too, to see if they came from the pistol that he assumed belonged to Michael Ferrin.
    The wounds didn’t look as if they’d bled any, which probably meant that they were inflicted after death, but that wasn’t for Rhodes to decide.
    There was blood on the shirt, so there might be an additional wound, one that Rhodes couldn’t see. That one would have to wait for the autopsy.
    After the JP arrived and pronounced Lige dead, which wasn’t a difficult conclusion to reach, Rhodes watched while the body was loaded in the ambulance. Then he walked back through the field to Ferrin’s pickup and went over it as carefully as he had examined the portable toilet.
    Once again, he found nothing unusual. There was a box of shells for the .38, and there were two more beers in a cooler in the floorboards. There was the usual junk in the glove compartment—a map of Texas, a roll of toilet paper, an old stick of Big Red gum, an oil-stained red rag—but nothing that was incriminating.
    Rhodes went back to his car for some yellow Crime Scene ribbon and staked off the outhouse with it. He hoped no one would bother it, and he didn’t think anyone would.
    Now came the hard part. Now he had to go tell Rayjean Ward what had happened to her husband.
    It wasn’t going to be pleasant, and while Rhodes had handled similar jobs before, he thought it might be a good idea to take along some help.
     
    “A ll right,” Ivy said. “I’ll go. But you owe me one.”
    “Whatever you say,” Rhodes agreed. “How about dinner at the Jolly Tamale?”
    Actually, Rhodes was hoping that Ivy would go for the dinner. He didn’t get to eat Mexican food often.
    Ivy knew what he was up to. “You’re not getting off that easy.”
    Rhodes smiled ruefully. “I was afraid you’d say that. What then?”
    Ivy considered it. “I’ll think of something. Do you think I look OK?”
    Rhodes looked her up and down and liked what he saw, her short graying hair, her trim figure in jeans and a plaid shirt, her half-smile as