Dead Wrong Read Free Page B

long line of parked police vehicles. As she exited her Crown Victoria, she caught sight of a pair of hopeful vultures circling lazily in the air above. Up ahead Dr. George Winfield, Cochise County’s medical examiner and Joanna’s stepfather, was unloading his crime scene satchel from his van.
    “Ugly critters, aren’t they,” he observed, following Joanna’s glance.
    She nodded. “They are that,” she agreed.
    “So how’s my favorite mother-to-be?” George added as he dragged an unwieldy folded gurney onto the ground. His pleasant, upbeat manner never failed to surprise Joanna, especially since he spent so much time with her mother—a woman who was, in Joanna’s estimation, one of the most difficult people on earth.
    “Back hurts,” Joanna replied. “And I’m not getting much sleep.”
    “The back part will get better soon,” George observed, “but lack of sleep is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.”
    “Thanks,” Joanna said. “That’s exactly what I needed to hear this morning.”
    Ernie Carpenter had evidently spotted their arrival. He came marching purposefully down the long line of vehicles parked on the shoulder of the narrow road. Ernie was a stout bear of a man. His broad face included a line of thick black eyebrows that seemed to meet in the middle whenever he frowned.
    “What have we got?” Joanna asked.
    “Not much,” Ernie grumbled. Effortlessly he picked up George’s gurney and carried it as easily as if it were a kiddie tricycle. “This is a dumping scene, not a crime scene. Most likely the body’s been here for a matter of hours. Looks to me like somebody dropped him out of the back of a vehicle—a minivan or a truck—and then rolled him over the edge of the berm of rocks that runs along the side of the road.”
    “In other words, no usable tire tracks or footprints.”
    “You’ve got it,” Ernie agreed. “Border Patrol is up and down this road all night long, so any tracks that had been left would have been obliterated long ago. The body’s wrapped in a brown canvas painter’s tarp. It blended in with the rocks well enough overnight that no one actually spotted it until after the sun came up this morning. Dave has been scouring the area, but there’s nothing to see. No cigarette butts, no soda cans, no garbage, nothing.”
    “Any sign of what killed him?” George asked.
    “Like I said, he’s all wrapped up in that tarp. We can see thetop of his head and that’s about it. Some blood seems to have leaked through the tarp. I’m guessing he’s either been shot or stabbed, one or the other. We were waiting for Doc Winfield to get here before we did anything more.”
    George stopped walking long enough to remove a thermometer from his kit and check the air temperature. A chill brisk wind was blowing down off the Mule Mountains. “If this isn’t the crime scene, then whatever we find inside that tarp is all we’re going to have to go on. I’ll remove enough of the tarp to check the body temp, but with the wind blowing like this it could easily blow away hair or fiber evidence without us even noticing. Let’s unwrap him at the morgue, inside and out of the wind.”
    “You’ve got it, Doc,” Ernie said. “All we needed was for you to give the word.”
    Joanna followed the two men as far as the scene itself. The dirt in the roadway showed signs that something heavy had been dropped out of a vehicle and then rolled as far as the edge of the road, where it had been heaved over the rocky bulldozed shoulder. The body had been placed far enough away from any passing traffic so as to be out of sight, but not so far that whoever had put it there would have risked leaving behind detectable traces of hair or fiber evidence.
    One of the officers had surrounded the scene with a hopeful border of bright yellow crime scene tape. Inside the tape Joanna spotted the body, rocks, and a few tufts of brittle, closely cropped yellow grass. Outside the tape, a