Fire and Ice Read Online Free PDF

dead guy was run down deliberately, and whoever did it is long gone. It looks to me like he was run over several different times by the same vehicle, or maybe once each by several separate vehicles.”
    “ATVs?” Joanna asked.
    “I’d say we’re looking for something bigger than that,” Ernie replied. “And I don’t know how many. One for sure, but maybe more.”
    “What about having CSI make casts of the tracks?” she asked. “Surely you’d be able to tell the number of vehicles from the number of tracks.”
    “Sorry, boss, no can do,” Ernie said. “These are sand dunes.”
    “Sand dunes?” Joanna repeated. Driving to California, she remembered being impressed by the glorious red sand dunes west of Yuma along I-8. She had lived in Cochise County all her life. The idea that there might be sand dunes much closer to home came as something of a shock. “I didn’t know we had any of those,” she said.
    “You do now,” Ernie told her. “And believe me, tracks that are left in sand like what’s here aren’t remotely castable.”
    “What about identification?”
    “None on the body,” he said, “at least none that we’ve found so far.”
    “What about the dog? Does it have tags?”
    “Maybe so. He was wearing a collar and it looks like he has tags, but no one can get close enough to read them. Natalie’s working on him now, trying to get him into her truck. Once she does that, maybe she’ll be able to tell us something. When I get off the phone with you, I’ll ask her.”
    “All right then,” Joanna said. “I’m on my way.”
    “Good,” Ernie said. “I’m glad to hear it. Dave Hollicker is headed here as well.”
    Most of the time, Joanna’s CSI unit was a two-person team made up of Dave and Casey Ledford, Joanna’s latent fingerprint tech. Unfortunately, Casey was currently out of town attending a training conference on the latest upgrades in AFIS—the nationwide Automated Fingerprint Identification System. With Casey unavailable, Dave Hollicker was reduced to being a one-man show.
    Joanna put down her phone and donned her Kevlar vest, then opened the door to her office and spoke to her secretary, Kristin Gregovich.
    “How long will you be gone?” Kristin wanted to know.
    “It’s a crime scene,” Joanna told her. “I’ll be back eventually; I just don’t know when.”
    Relieved to have an excuse to leave her paperwork jungle behind, Joanna hurried out her private back entrance and into her Crown Victoria parked a few steps from her door. A few minutes later, she was driving east on U.S. Highway 80, heading for Double Adobe, Elfrida, and ultimately Bowie.
    Joanna’s jurisdiction, Cochise County, was an eighty-square-mile block of territory as large as Rhode Island and Connecticut combined. On the south it was bordered by Mexico and on the east by New Mexico. Her office in the Justice Center was in the lowerright-hand corner of the county. The crime scene was seventy miles straight north of there—except she couldn’t drive straight north. The roads didn’t run that way.
    Along the highway, she was glad to see the signs of spring—the bright greens of newly leafed mesquite and the carpet of bright yellow flowers that lined either side of the roadway. Lost in thought, she had driven only a few miles when her phone rang.
    “Sheriff Brady here,” she said.
    “I found Bowie on my GPS,” Guy Machett said without preamble or greeting. “I can make it there just fine, but where the hell is the crime scene?”
    His attitude grated on Joanna as much as his words did. He pronounced Bowie the outlander way, Bowie as in bow tie as opposed to the approved southeastern Arizona pronunciation.
    “It’s pronounced boo-ee,” she told him.
    “That’s not how it’s spelled in my BlackBerry,” he returned.
    And obviously your BlackBerry couldn’t be wrong, Joanna thought to herself. “But it is how people around here say it,” she told him. And it’s how you’ll pronounce it,