The Dead Detective Read Online Free PDF Page A

particular trail since last spring. After I heard all that I made sure nobody else drove in.”
    They’d lucked out, Harry thought. Morgan was sharp, much more so than a good percentage of deputies.
    “Okay,” Harry said, “when the crime scene boys get here, tell them I want photographs and casts on those tracks. Tell them I want all four tires if they can get them. They’ll probably have to do it on a curve in the trail, but they’ll know that. Anybody else going in, you tell them to keep to the sides of the trail. And no smoking, no candy bars, no anything that’ll screw up my crime scene. You got all that?”
    “I got it.”
    Harry looked Morgan in the eye. “One more thing, Jim. You did a nice job. Thanks.”
    Harry and Vicky slipped on latex gloves and started in, each one using a different side of the eight-foot-wide trail, which was little more than heat-hardened earth, covered in dry, matted grass. A heavy growth of pines rose on each side, obscuring much of what lay beyond …
    The deputy called after them: “Be careful when you get to that cypress swamp. There’s a nine-foot gator back there thinks it’s his.”
    “Thanks again,” Harry called back.
    They walked in slowly, checking the trail for any discarded items that might have been left by the killer, finding only three scattered cigarette butts, a chewing gum wrapper, and a number of shoe impressions. Close to where the tire tracks ended they found an empty book of matches advertising a topless bar in Tampa. Harry made a note of the name. All in all the items they found could have been dropped by anyone too lazy to stick them in a pocket to discard later. But every item had to be checked, so they took their time, placing small orange marking flags next to each one. This was only preliminary, an effort to save them time. The crime scene unit would do a far more thorough job; they would literally sweep the area around each flag that Harry had left and comb the entire area in much greater depth, carefully looking for hair, clothing fibers, anything that might be linked to the crime. Still, Harry gave the trail a reasonably thorough search. He didn’t want to wait several hours for the CSI unit to give him an obvious clue.
    It took them twenty minutes to reach the cypress swamp where the land and vegetation suddenly changed. There was a long, narrow pool at the swamp’s center, dotted with water lilies, and it forced the hiking trail, which now turned into black, loamy earth, to veer to the left. A green heron strutted along the bank of the pond hunting frogs, its sharp dagger beak and snakelike neck poised to strike. Harry saw no sign of the gator he had been warned about. Thirty yards ahead, where the trail skirted the pond, he could see two uniformed deputies standing guard over something unseen. He motioned Vicky to his side of the trail, away from the edge of the pond.
    “Don’t wanna use me as gator bait, huh?” she said.
    “I’ll wait for gator season,” Harry shot back.
    “That’s my new partner. Just a sweet, sensitive guy.”
    “Always,” Harry said.
    When they reached the deputies they could just make out one leg of the body. It extended out past a rotting cypress stump located ten feet off the trail.
    The deputies were a Mutt and Jeff combination, one tall and slender, the other short and beefy. Harry introduced himself. Vicky did the same, as Harry studied the ground leading to the body. It was soft and spongy and there were footprints leading in and out. He counted four or five sets, some appeared to be the same size, making the exact number hard to determine on first glance. He turned back to the deputies.
    “How many of you went in there?” he asked Jeff, who seemed to have the sharper eyes of the pair.
    “Let’s see,” Jeff said, counting mentally. “We went in.” He nodded toward the other deputy. “So did Morgan, the deputy you met coming in. And so did the park ranger. He was first. He went straight in after the