Deep Freeze Read Free Page B

don’t quote me until the M.E. releases her to the lab and there’s a full autopsy. She’d been stuffed into that log over there.” With her pen, Merline pointed to the hollowed-out cedar. “We’re missing a few bones, probably because an animal or two dragged off parts of her corpse, but we’re still looking. Already found an ulna and tarsal that were missing at first. Maybe we’ll get lucky with the rest.”
    “Maybe,” Carter said without much enthusiasm as he surveyed the forest floor and the craggy hillside that dropped steeply toward the Columbia River. The terrain was rugged, the forest dense, the river wide and wild as it carved a wide trench between the states of Oregon and Washington. Even tamed by a series of dams, it raged westward, whitecaps visible through the trees. If a body were ever dumped in the Columbia, there wasn’t a whole lot of chance of it ever being recovered.
    He heard the whine of an engine struggling up the hillside and glimpsed the M.E.’s van through the trees. Not far behind was another rig, one belonging to one of the Assistant District Attorneys.
    Merline wasn’t finished. She said, “Here’s what I think is really odd. Check out her teeth.” Jacobosky knelt and pointed with the end of her pen. “See the incisors and molars? That isn’t a natural rot…I think they’ve been filed.”
    Carter felt a whisper of dread touch the base of his spine. Who would file someone’s teeth? And why? “To keep the body from being identified?” he asked.
    “Maybe, but why not just pull the teeth or break them? Why go to all the trouble of filing them to tiny points?” She rocked back on her heels and tapped her pen to her lips as she studied the skull. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
    “Maybe our guy is a dentist with a sick sense of humor.”
    “The sick part is right.”
    “Any ID?” he asked, but assumed the answer.
    “Nothing yet.” She shook her head and flipped over a page of her clipboard. “No clothes or personal effects, either. But we’ll keep looking, under the snow, through the ice and into the soil. If there’s evidence, we’ll locate it.” She squinted up at Carter as gray clouds scudded overhead.
    “What’s this?” Carter bent down and studied the skull with its grotesque teeth and gaping eye sockets. He indicated her hair. There was something clinging to the strands that were visible. A pinkish substance that he didn’t think was flesh. It reminded him of eraser residue.
    “Don’t know. Yet. But some kind of manmade substance. We’ll have the lab check it out.”
    “Good.” He straightened and noticed BJ talking with one of the photographers as Luke Messenger, the M.E. arrived. Tall and rangy, with curly red hair and freckles, he made his way to the crime scene and frowned at the body.
    “Only a partial?” he asked Jacobosky.
    “So far.” He knelt beside the bones as Amanda Pratt, the Assistant D.A. lucky enough to be assigned this frigid job, picked her way down the hillside. She was bundled in layers of down and wool and smelled of cigarette smoke.
    “God, this is miserable weather,” she said, her pert nose wrinkling at the partial body. “Jesus, would you look at that? Found in a hollowed-out log?”
    “So Charley says.”
    “You can’t believe a word out of his mouth,” she said flatly, but eyed the scene.
    “Maybe this time he’s telling the truth.”
    Her eyes flashed behind thin, plastic-rimmed glasses. “Yeah, right. And I’m the friggin’ queen of England. No, make that Spain. England’s too damned cold. Jesus, we’ve got ourselves a regular party up here.” She scanned the vehicles. “Is Charley still around?”
    “In one of the pickups—over there.” Jacobosky hitched her chin toward a white truck idling near the end of the road. Montinello was at the wheel. Charley Perry was huddled in the passenger seat. “He’s not too happy about being kept up here,” Jacobosky added. “Making a whole lotta noise about