Gray Ghost Murders (9781101606070) Read Online Free PDF

snapped close-ups of the individual tread marks. Little Feather had once told him that Martha worked a case like a dog worked a deer bone, gnawing constantly until it was gone. “But you watch that dog,” he’d said, “you’ll notice sometimes he’ll lay his head sideways to get more leverage, like so”—he mimicked a dog gnawing a bone with his incisors—“and he’ll have his eyes closed. Dog’s got focus, but at the cost of his vision. Martha, she’s always gnawing that bone. I’m not saying she’s not a good investigator. But her strength is her focus. You want to complement her work, you keep your eyes on the edges of the case. You might pick up a detail she’s being too Martha to notice.”
    â€œNow what?” Ettinger flicked a bread crust to a gray jay perched on a spruce branch. The jay, waiting for a shot at the bones, hopped onto the ground and pecked at the crust, nervously jerking its head.
    Stranahan had removed a clipboard from his pack and was sketching the imprint of a sole with an air bob tread onto a standard print form. He used a tape to take measurements and made a notation on an irregularity in the tread, where one bob had failed to leave a mark. He glanced at the jay, which an old-timer would call a whiskey jack, then caught the eyes of the sheriff. She gave him a taut smile.
    â€œWhen we get back,” Sean said, “I’m going to need the boots worn by everyone who tracked up this place, including the Air Mercy crew. For matches, so I can rule them out.”
    He sketched for another thirty minutes, filling out six more print forms with impressions that ranged from entire tracks to half a heel from a cowboy boot.
    â€œFive of you from Tuesday, plus the two EMTs. The pilot stayed with the chopper, you said. That makes seven on this plot, if I counted right.”
    â€œYou counted right,” Martha said.
    â€œThen I have at least a partial from everyone. If there’s another track here, I can’t find it.”
    â€œWhat did you expect? There probably hasn’t been anyone up here in months. You’re just going through the motions.”
    â€œIs there anything about the bones I should know, besides their positions?”
    â€œNo sign of foul play, if that’s what you’re getting at. But the skull’s caked with soil so we won’t know until it’s cleaned. And the rib cage is a partial. He could have been shot in the chest and the bullet could be in the guts of that grizzly for what we know. Doc says there’s freezer burn on the upper surface of the chest. You dig down very far, the ground never freezes solid, so that means he was probably buried face up, sometime before the freeze last winter. Victim was male. Doc thought past sixty. We have teeth and we’ll have DNA, no problems there.”
    â€œWe just need a missing person,” Warren Jarrett pointed out.
    On the hike up the mountain, Ettinger had mentioned that a records search failed to reveal anyone missing in the Madison Range, body unrecovered, since the late 1960s. The closest match had been a ranch hand who had disappeared in the Tobacco Root Mountains while hunting elk, but that had been in 2009. Too distant, too old, plus the hand had been in his twenties.
    Stranahan was studying the remnants of clothing that clung to the rib cage. The victim had been wearing a wool jack shirt in a camo pattern. No other clothing but a dark, solid-colored undershirt; Sean guessed spun polyester. There was a femur naked but for a wrap of skin, crinkled like elephant hide. What looked like the other femur, a part of one, lay alongside. The pelvis had been cracked by the teeth of the grizzly. Smaller bones were scattered. Radius? Ulna? Metatarsals? He didn’t know his anatomy well enough.
    â€œNo hunter orange,” he commented.
    â€œNo hunter orange, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a hunter,” Martha