The red church Read Online Free PDF Page B

Storie.
    Her eyes were blue enough to hide everything, as unrevealing as her camera lens. "Extensive trauma. Death probably due to exsanguination."
    Storie's educated flatland accent always surprised him, even though he should have been used to it by now. Most people took her for a local until they heard her speak. "That's what Hoyle says. Only he calls it
    'bled to death.' "
    "Unless shock got him first. Same to the subject either way. I haven't seen this much blood since those driver's ed films they show in high school." She took two steps to her right and snapped another picture, then let the camera hang by its strap over her chest.
    "Must have taken a while. You looked over in the bushes where he crawled after the attack?"
    "Yes, sir. He left a few scraps."
    Littlefield swallowed a knot of nausea.
    "Footprints go from this grave marker here, where the boys said they found the stuff. They're deep, see?" She pointed to the pressed grass. The smaller prints of the boys were visible as well. But Boonie's were clearly marked by the thick treads of his boots.
    "That means he was running, right?"
    "He must have seen or heard whatever it was and gotten scared. He was probably attacked just before he started running."
    "Why do you say that?"
    "Blood here is coagulated almost to powder. The blood over there"—she waved to the slick trail of slime where Boonie had crawled out of the bushes— "isn't as oxidized."
    Littlefield nodded and passed his hand over his scalp. The breeze shifted and he could smell Boonie now. A person never got used to the odor of death. The detective didn't even wrinkle her nose.
    "Hoyle thinks it's a mountain lion," Littlefield said.
    She shook her head. Her brown hair was a couple of inches past regulation and swished over her shoul-ders. "Wild animals typically go for the throat if they're treating something as prey. There are a few wounds around the eyes, but those are no more dev-astating than the other injuries. And it doesn't look like the subject had an animal cornered so that it would be forced to defend itself." Littlefield was constantly amazed by the level of instruction that new officers received. A college de-gree in Criminal Justice, for starters. Then state train-ing, not to mention extra seminars along the way. Littlefield had long since quit going to those things, at least the ones that didn't help him politically. Or maybe Storie was a little too educated for her own good. Frank knew that as a female in a rural department, she had to be twice as smart and icy and sarcastic as everybody else. She couldn't go out for after-shift beers.
    Pay attention, damn it. In case you're going senile and need a reminder, one of your constituents is gathering flies long before his natural time.
    "So you don't necessarily hold to the wild-animal-attack theory?" he asked.
    "I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that if it was an animal, its behavior was unnatural." She looked across the stretch of tombstones to where the ceme-tery ended near the forest. Her brow furrowed.
    "What is it?" Littlefield asked.
    "The thing that bothers me the most."
    If Storie's bothered ... A small chill wended its way up Littlefield's spinal column and settled in the base of his neck.
    "No animal tracks," she said.
    The sheriffs jaw tightened. So that was what had been bothering him ever since he'd first walked the scene. An animal's claws would have ripped chunks out of the ground, especially if it were attacking.
    "Damn," he whispered.
    "No tracks means no easy answers." She almost sounded pleased. "There are no other human foot-prints, either."
    Storie had cracked a big case last year, when an ex-cop had hauled a body up to the mountains for disposal. Perp was a big goofy guy who went around bragging about how he'd never get caught. Well, Sto-rie set her nose on his trail and nailed him so hard that his lawyers had to recite scripture in the court-room to save him from a lethal injection. The con-viction got statewide