Dead Hot Mama Read Online Free PDF Page B

hair short and trimmed carefully around his ears. An equally neat moustache hid his upper lip, and every few seconds the nose above it twitched while the fingers on his left hand drummed and the foot at the end of his right leg jiggled. Interested as he was in what the young man had to say, Osborne found himself mesmerized by the body action.
    “What does that mean exactly—the
disarticulation
of the joints?” asked Lew, who was sitting across from Bruce, a paper plate with two generous slices of pizza in front of her.
    “Disarticulation means they cut through the joints rather than the bone to take the entire femur,” said Bruce. “They knew what they were doing, and they wanted to work fast. Amateurs would have used a chainsaw—or a hacksaw and cut through bone at the crotch. And, frankly, it’s too bad they didn’t. Much easier to trace.”
    “They?” asked Lew. “You’re sure we’re talking more than one?”
    Bruce raised his hands as if admitting defeat. “Good call, Chief Ferris, I have no documentation yet to prove if it was one perpetrator or two. I’m
assuming
two or more because both victims are male, weigh at least 180 pounds each and were wearing heavy snowmobile suits and helmets—plus other gear like mitts and boots.
    “Dismemberment is difficult under any circumstances, and that’s a lot of weight to haul around. But I could be wrong. In grad school, I assisted on a case out of Little Scandinavia where a teenage boy chopped up his stepfather who weighed over 300 pounds, wrapped him in freezer paper, and stacked him in the family freezer—in six hours. Yeah, I suppose one person could do this.” He looked around the table at Lew and Osborne as if they might know the answer.
    “How long since you’ve been out of grad school?” asked Osborne. He could not believe the kid was a day over twenty-five.
    “Six months.”
    “A trapper could do it easy,” said Lew, biting into her first piece of pizza, “and a lotta guys around here butcher their own deer. I’d sure keep the door open on that assumption. Umm, I think I was starving—good pizza, Doc. Thank you. Did you get enough?”
    “Plenty. Bruce, help yourself to some pizza,” Osborne said, shoving the box of pizza across the table.
    Mark had arrived with three large pizzas, two of which Erin, Mallory, Mark, and the children had wolfed down within fifteen minutes. Then Mallory, aware Osborne was anxious to shelter his grandchildren from the activities down at the rink, insisted they all go rent a video to watch at Erin and Mark’s.
    “I’ll be back by ten, Dad, okay?” she said.
    “Fine,” said Osborne. “If I’m not here, I’ll be down at the Kobernots’.”
    Minutes later, as Osborne stood in the doorway watching them pile into their cars, Erin had run back for one of the kids’ neck scarves. “Dad,” she had said, speaking fast and keeping her voice low, “I’m worried about Mallory.”
    “Why? She looks okay to me.”
    “Yeah, well, you haven’t spent any time with her since she got here, have you.” The edge in Erin’s voice pushed an old button of guilt.
    Osborne had never been the father to Mallory that he should have. While he and Erin had always been close—she was the daughter he’d loved teaching to fish and hunt—Mallory was her mother’s child. And the coldness that had grown between Osborne and his late wife had resonated, for reasons he didn’t understand, between himself and his eldest daughter.
    It wasn’t until Erin stepped in, forcing Mallory to face the same family tradition that had nearly destroyed Osborne, that he realized how alike they were. Maybe that was the problem.
    But with Mary Lee gone two years now, he had been trying to change that. Apparently he wasn’t doing a very good job. Erin was right—how the hell could he know how Mallory was? He hadn’t seen her in three months, and their only conversation of any length today had taken place over a dead body.
    “She told me she