Astride a Pink Horse Read Free

here, Art.”
    Bosack barely looked up from examining the deepest of five stab wounds in the murder victim’s back. Puzzled by the pattern of the wounds and the superficial nature of all but three of them, he ran a latex-gloved index finger from wound to wound, connecting them in the shape of an imaginary pentagon.
    “Strange. Real strange.” He grunted, looked up at Sykes, and said, “Wanna go meet our flyboy?”
    The greenhorn deputy glanced across the Tango-11 compound toward a Jeep Cherokee that was parked fifty yards away on the highway shoulder. Recognizing suddenly that the person approaching them was a woman, he simply stared. Their visitor was still fifteen feet away when the sheriff stood, eyed the gold oak leaves on the woman’s shoulder epaulets, flashed her a friendly smile, and said, “How do, Major? Heard we had an OSI officer from Warren headed our way.” He stripped off a glove and offered her his right hand.
    The tall, lithe special investigations officer, who had been dispatched from Cheyenne’s Warren Air Force Base seventy-five miles south, returned the smile as she walked up to the body. “Took me a little bit longer to get here than I expected. A tractor-trailer rig was jackknifed on the interstate,” she said, scrutinizing the partiallytarp-covered body lying at her feet. “Sheriff Bosack, I take it?” She extended an arm above the dead man’s head and shook the sheriff’s hand.
    “Yep,” said Bosack, trying to recall whether he’d ever met a female OSI officer and knowing for certain he’d never met an African American female one. “The man standing to your left is my deputy, Wally Sykes, and the one still kneelin’ there, lookin’ like he’s prayin’ for rain, is our Platte County coroner, Dr. Sam Reed.” The way Bosack said the word
doctor
, as if it were the equal of a military rank, seemed to be the only thing that caused the woman to announce her name.
    “I’m Bernadette Cameron.” There was a self-assured directness in her tone. She extended a hand to the coroner, realized he was still fully gloved, and pulled the hand back.
    “Got gloves in your size if you wanna get down and dirty here with us, Major,” the sheriff said.
    “Think I’ll wait,” said Bernadette. “Just fill me in on what you’ve got.”
    “Sure,” said Bosack, thinking that with a little more makeup, civilian clothes, a tad longer hair, and a set of earrings, the cinnamon-skinned, green-eyed major would be a knockout. “One of our rural-route mail carriers found him about four hours ago, danglin’ from a chain by his ankles inside that missile-silo personnel-access tube over there.” Bosack pointed toward the raised hatch. “He was naked as a jaybird when we found him. I’m guessin’ somebody with explosives know-how blew the hatch cover. Before our mail carrier lifted it usin’ a tree limb, I mean.”
    “Or somebodies,” said Bernadette. “And just so you’re aware,that hatch cover would have been easy enough to raise without an explosive charge if you had the entry code.”
    “Don’t think anybody had that,” said Bosack, eyeing the charred hatch cover. “Wanna have a look?”
    “In a minute,” Bernadette said, looking down at the body. “African American,” she said, pausing.
    “Yeah,” said Bosack.
    “How long do you think he’d been hanging inside?”
    Bosack glanced at the coroner. “Whatta you think, Sam?”
    “Hard to tell,” the coroner said, rising to his feet. “I’d say from the amount of body decomposition, the number of insect and rodent bites, and the lack of skin elasticity that he’d been hanging there for a couple of weeks at least.”
    “Not much smell,” said Bernadette, kneeling next to the body and sniffing.
    “What smell there was is still down there in your tube, Major, and there’s really not much of that. Over time the smell of death dissipates,” said Reed.
    “Any identifying marks?”
    “Just a couple of tattoos,” said the