The Wild Hog Murders Read Online Free PDF Page A

there was a second murder to cover up the first one. Rhodes hoped that didn’t happen this time.
    He’d given a lot of thought to the situation at the Chandler place. It was messy. That was the only way to describe it.
    It had all started with a pig named Baby.
    Or maybe not, Rhodes thought. It had really started when Janice Chandler had moved to Clearview and bought the old Tallent place to open an animal shelter. And not just any animal shelter. She seemed to have a soft spot for swine, and the first animal she’d taken in was Baby, a pet pig that had belonged to a man named Floyd Pearce. Floyd had been up in years, and he couldn’t take care of Baby anymore. So he asked Janice if she’d take him off his hands.
    That had been the right thing to do. A lot of people would have just turned the pig loose in the woods and let him go feral like so many others, but not Floyd. He was too attached to Baby to do that, and of course Janice was glad to add him to the several other pigs she already had.
    The other pigs were already feral. They’d been shot and wounded, or hit by cars, or otherwise put out of commission but not killed. Janice had taken them in. She had pens for them.
    The other hogs didn’t like Baby. Baby didn’t like them. So Baby had crashed out. It would have been better if Baby had never been seen again, but that wasn’t the case.
    It was a few weeks ago that Hack had gotten the call that sent Rhodes out to see Janice Chandler and her son, Andy. Andy had come to town with his mother, and he helped out around the place.
    One thing was for sure, the Chandlers had done things right. The story going around town was that Janice got a big insurance payout when her husband had died. There was a new house on the property, with an asphalt road leading up to it and a circular drive in front. There was a new hog-proof fence along the road up to the house and all along the county road in front. The fence was about three feet high, too high for hogs to climb. It was made of steel wire like a rectangular net with openings too small for hogs to get through, so it worked to keep hogs both in and out.
    The Chandlers stood by the gate, waiting for Rhodes. That wasn’t all that waited for him. Baby was there, too, or what was left of him.
    Rhodes parked the car and got out.
    “Who’d do a thing like that?” Andy Chandler said.
    Andy was about forty, Rhodes guessed, and about twice as big as his mother. He didn’t look much older than she did, as far as Rhodes could tell, but he’d never really gotten a good look at her.
    Andy was a couple of inches taller than Rhodes, and Rhodes wasn’t a short man. Andy looked as if he could pick up a fully grown hog and carry it around if he wanted to.
    “Somebody very sick, that’s who,” Janice Chandler said.
    She looked almost like a child standing by her towering son. She wore an old-fashioned sunbonnet to shade her eyes and overalls over a blue work shirt. Rhodes wondered if she’d bought the overalls in the children’s department.
    “What are you going to do about it, Sheriff?” she asked.
    The it to which she referred was the remains of Baby. Or most of the remains. Rhodes could see the tail and hide, which lay over the pig’s entrails. He couldn’t see the head.
    “It’s not there,” Andy said when Rhodes asked. “The sick SOB who killed Baby must have kept it. God knows why.”
    “Baby was as gentle as a puppy,” Janice said. “Just as friendly, too.” She paused to wipe her eyes. “He’d do anything for an apple.”
    “Somebody didn’t like him,” Rhodes pointed out.
    “Hunters,” Andy said. “We’ve heard them in the woods.”
    They’d done more than just hear them, or so Rhodes had been told. The rumor was that the Chandlers hunted the hunters. Not with bullets but with shotguns loaded with shells holding rock salt instead of shot. Rock salt wouldn’t do much damage unless the shooter was within a yard of whoever he was firing at, but it could