Final Grave Read Online Free PDF Page B

leaned into a turn, and his wide shoulder nearly touched hers. “You know this place?” he asked.
    The serpentine road curved in and around an upscale subdivision dotted with BMWs and Volvo wagons. The sprawl of fancy new homes crept up the once pristine hillside. “Not anymore,” she said. “Guess I didn’t expect this much growth.
    “Yup. Helluva change from when I was a kid. I’d come here with my dad and shoot chukars. So many damn birds you couldn’t miss. Now we got yuppies, execs from Albertson’s or Hewlett Packard or escapees from Silicon Valley.”
    Vacant lots broke up the rows of houses like missing teeth in a jawbone. “You did a house-to-house?” she asked.
    He thumbed at the last block in the subdivision. “Starting here, ma’am, and on up ahead to Buckner’s place.”
    He nodded in the direction of a showy lodge-pole arch, an entry to a side road. Western-style letters scrawled across a yellow pine placard: Wild Horse Ranch . The dude ranch, or whatever it was, sat a quarter of a mile down a narrow road.
    “Like I said before, nobody saw nothing.”
    Meri Ann slumped against the seat and cracked the window.
    His broad hands gripped the wheel. His focus alternated between the road and a film of dust accumulating on his pristine dashboard. “The dust, ma’am,” he said, politely.
    She closed the window just as the pavement ended.
    The vertical incline grew steeper as the Blazer bounced across packed washboard. She held the door handle to steady herself. Dust billowed behind them, somehow crept in through the windows, seeped through the floorboards and even the closed vents. It settled on everything. She tasted fine grit, felt it coat her throat when she sighed from apprehension.
    A quarter of a mile later the road leveled out, and Mendiola eased off the gas. The sixty-foot neon cross appeared like a giant mast.
    Meri Ann’s hand tightened on the door handle.
    She jumped from the Blazer’s cab the second he shifted into park. She didn’t venture forward, just stood with her knees locked, taking in the arid plateau and the sound of the neon buzz.
    The sense of height dizzied her, yet Table Rock wasn’t a mountain, just a sawed off foothill barely a few hundred feet above Boise’s 2,800-foot base altitude. The plateau was smaller than she’d remembered—nearly the size of a hockey rink and about as flat. A smattering of telephone poles stood like giant, limbless pines strung with wires, everything dwarfed by the neon cross.
    Mendiola joined her.
    She cleared her throat. “Where did you find her?”
    He moved toward the cross’s massive concrete base and stopped about three feet in front of it. A scrap of yellow crime-scene tape clung to a thistle, fluttering in the light wind. Using the pointed toe of his boot, he drew a long line in the dirt. “Right here. It wasn’t a complete skeleton, only the big bones, the ribcage, pelvis, ulna and femur. It wasn’t just a pile of bones, but arranged properly.”
    She turned away, looking at the houses below, wondering if the person who did this lived in one of them. Possibly, but probably not; the possibilities seemed endless. “How long do you think it took him to do that?”
    “I’d say fifteen or twenty minutes, give or take, unless he performed some sort of ritual ceremony. Like I said, ma’am, we don’t know what we’re dealing with.”
    “What condition were the bones? Any shovel cuts or slashes to indicate they’d been buried and dug up? Footprints? Where was my mother’s bracelet?”
    Mendiola bristled. “Whoa. Slow down, would you?”
    She nodded.
    “Whoever did this didn’t fool with the hands and feet. The bones we found were clean with only a trace of flesh. The fabric sat under the pelvis and the bracelet at the lower arm, at the wrist.”
    “And, as I said, we don’t know if it was the killer, or someone who came on the remains by accident and wants to play head games. There’s also the possibility the bracelet and