Mesozoic Murder Read Free Page A

soil. Curious, Ansel thought.
    The wash had been dry since the March thaws, and it hadn’t rained in months. The rest of the gully was bone dry and hard-packed. Despite the arid conditions, the flora around the gully flourished in the late June weather. A verdant growth of range grass and prickly pear had claimed most of the wash. Except for the area surrounding the hole. It formed a dead patch.
    Ansel stared at the broken glasses. New glasses. And that foul odor of decay. Her head snapped upward.
    â€œLydia, get off that wall right now.”
    Lydia stopped abruptly. Loose dirt shifted beneath her. She began to slide as chert and rock debris gave way in an avalanche of loose ground. Ansel loped to her aid, reaching up a hand so the girl could grab it. She hauled Lydia onto firmer ground at the bottom of the gully.
    â€œYou all right?”
    â€œYeah, Ms. Phoenix.”
    â€œWell, he’s not,” said Shane. He stared down at the new depression above Ansel and Lydia.
    The dust-laden head of a man had emerged in the center of the collapsed gully wall. His swollen, pitted, and hideously mottled blue-green face protruded through the sandstone grit and gave the disconcerting illusion of being cut from marbled stone. Two angry, feasting sand scorpions scuttled out from the dirt around his chin. The three-inch-long, yellow and black arachnids snapped their pincers and twirled in a disjointed dance of death.
    â€œOh, my God.” Lydia threw her hands up to her face, shielding her senses from the sight and smell of the corpse.
    Tim Shanks lifted his camera and clicked off a rapid succession of shots.
    Ansel was too shocked to berate him. Her lungs sucked in rancid air while her mind tried to make sense of the hideous scene. The gold wire glasses. That face. Despite the disfiguring ravages of decay, she knew the man.
    The glasses slipped from her fingers and fell with a thud next to the grave of her ex-lover.

Chapter 2
    â€œEverything on the earth has a purpose.
Every disease an herb to cure it,
And every person a mission.”
    Mourning Dove, Salish
    Lieutenant Reid Dorbandt stared at the male victim decomposing in the gully. He reached to scratch an itch on his nose with a latex-gloved hand. No use. He kept forgetting that he was wearing a painter’s half-mask because it did very little to keep foul fumes from entering his nose and mouth.
    Bacteria had ballooned and pitted the corpse’s flesh inside the jeans and long-sleeved shirt. Resourceful sand scorpions had also done a bang-up job of cutting skin off the exposed parts of the victim’s face, neck, and hands, while burrowing beetles had gone for the soft parts. The eyes and lips were almost completely gone.
    Dorbandt shook his head. The last thing he needed this morning was a murder that had
America’s Most Wanted
potential. His heartburn shot acid up into his throat like a .38 Special loaded with dum-dum bullets, and he was certain that his gray, three-piece suit would never lose the downwind stench of pig feces and rotting man-meat even after drycleaning. He sighed and focused his eyes on the suited Doc Tweedy.
    As the witnesses had been escorted to the farm house, the firefighters had cleared the dirt and territorial scorpions away from the corpse so the associate medical examiner could move in. The silver-haired Tweedy was on his knees in the gully, carefully palpating the victim’s head. He resembled a giant, bug-eyed fruit fly inspecting a melon at the grocery store. At least he got to wear a full-faced floater’s mask, Dorbandt thought with envy.
    A small Crime Scene Unit and one other detective had moved into action, too, collecting evidence samples, taking photographs or site measurements, and sketching everything. Later they would collect more forensic clues from the corpse with forceps and vacuums. Yellow crime scene tape isolated a fifty-foot square running parallel to the wash and across the bottom. EMTs waited to bag