Skeleton Canyon

Frankie Stoddard shook her head sadly. “Mr. O’Brien hired me to find his daughter,” she said. “It looks as though I have.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

the next several hours passed in a blur of activity. While awaiting the arrival of the Search and Rescue unit, Joa

Joa

“I’m about to give the wrecker operator the all-clear to haul this away, but f wanted you to take a look first,” he said, motioning Joa

Joa

Joa

“Where’s the spatter?” Joa

“Precisely,” Ernie returned. “You’re definitely starting to get the hang of this.”

Joa

“It’s a possibility,” Ernie said. “A distinct possibility.”

Joa

“What about the other journal?” Joa

Ernie shook his head. “Believe Inc, this cab is clean as a whistle. So maybe whoever killed her took the book with him. Maybe she had written something in it that was incriminating.”

Joa

While Ernie went off to confer with the tow truck driver, Joa

“I’m worried about trying to maneuver the body up that trail. Looks to me as though it’s going to be next to impossible. Do you think Mr. Hacker would mind if we used his block and tackle?”

Joa

While Winfield attached the come-along to the basket, one of the deputies took the rest of the block and tackle back up the cliff. Even with Detective Carbajal and the two deputies to apply muscle, pulling the body up was still a tricky process. The face of the ridge wasn’t smooth. More than once the basket got hung up, once on a clump of mesquite and another time it wedged in underneath a jagged outcropping of rock. The second stall was far more serious than the first. With Doc Winfield on his hands and knees at the edge of the cliff shouting instructions, Joa

“Good work,” Ernie said, stretching out a hand to pull Joa

Joa

Grumbling, Ernie did as he was told, with Joa

Wedging his way between Jaime and one of the deputies, Ernie Carpenter dropped to the ground beside Winfield. The detective, too, stared into the grass. “I’ll be damned!” he exclaimed a moment later.

Joa

“Ernie’ll need a set of hemostats,” he said. “I’m going to get them, along with the evidence log and the tape measure.”

“And evidence bags,” Ernie called after him. “I’m all out of the small ones.”

Catching up with the others, Joa

“A hair,” Ernie answered. “A single strand of long blond hair.”

“You’re thinking the same thing I am, aren’t you?” George Winfield said, “‘That she was dead long before she hit the ground.”

Ernie nodded. “I’m afraid so,” he said.

Angie knew the storm was brewing. She was out on the flat now and traveling at an angle toward the road, but behind her in the mountains and to the east of them, she could see a block torrent of rain falling from the sky. She had always been afraid of thunderstorms. One of the girls in her first grade class in Battle Creek had been hit and killed by lightning at an outdoor barbecue. There was nothing for it, though, but to keep walking.

A chill wind shrieked through the three-foot-tall grass. Lightning forked across the sky and thunder rumbled all around her. Angie wore jeans and boots and a long-sleeved shirt, but nothing waterproof. She hadn’t expected to be out in the rain on foot. She hadn’t expected to be in the desert alone.

The wilderness was still a frightening and alien place to her. Watching the desert birds was wonderful, but there were other desert dwellers that weren’t nearly so pleasant. She had heard, for example, that snakes and Gila monsters came out in advance of rain storms. Archie McBride had told her that, and Willy had backed him up. They both claimed that a Gila monster bite could kill you within a matter of minutes. A lot of what Archie and Willy said was so much bullshit. It was possible they had just been teasing her with more of their tall tales. Still, out there all by herself, with the wind whistling and the glass bent almost double, it seemed likely that they had told the truth.

In the course of hours of waiting and walking, Angie Kellogg had moved beyond being hurt. Now she was simply mad. “Damn you anyway, De