Free Cover of Snow by Jenny Milchman

mechanism on the shovel, open it to its full length. Then he started to scoop out the fresh accumulation. As he dug, he registered how shallow the grave was.
    But hell, it was amazing they had a burial place at all. The Chief had had equipment from Paulson’s available to him. He and Lenny Paulson went way back, which was lucky. Only heavy machinery could break up the ground this time of year.
    Trench empty, Tim turned to face Mitchell.
    The other cop gave a massive bellow of preparation and tossed the body in.
    â€œWell,” Mitchell said, breath emerging in even white gusts. “There goes number two.”
    Both looked down at the rift in the ground, then around the whitened woods. They did it as one, gazes falling, heads turning to check.
    And Tim experienced a brief, fleeting link of connection, the reason he had stayed on the job for so long. He could do it. He could be just like them.
    They were two men sizing up a problem, assessing their location and the likelihood of its being discovered. Two men deciding to work with what they had.
    Tim threw Mitchell a second folded shovel, and Mitchell flicked it to its full length as if it were a match.
    They worked to conceal what they’d done here today.

Chapter Twelve
    The police station was housed in a squat building high up on Roister Road. Its best feature was a view of Lake Nancy, now a silver mirror. Its worst was a sheath of vinyl siding, which I used to ask Vern if he would let me take down.
    My car crunched over the combination of salt, pebbles, and grit that served as a parking lot. I avoided the gas pump, pulling into a space a fair distance off from the row of gray cop cars. Their shadowy forms made my red car look like the afterimage of some alien sun.
    The room I entered was overheated and spare. Brendan had always complained about sweating in his uniform in winter. A mean fluorescent glow made the space even sparer than it might have been: two chairs pushed against a wall with a new sheen of paint on it, and a sliding glass window that was always kept streak-free. I’d never seen a cop occupying this space, though, summoning visitors with a look or a word.
    It shamed me to think of it now, but I’d never paid that much attention to what Brendan did at work. The life of the police force, efficient and well equipped for such a remote region, had always proceeded in a rather vague blur. Sometimes Brendan was what he called
up to things
: domestic problems that occasionally escalated, and recently there’d been a spate of thefts. But usually he led the life of any cop who worked on the perimeter of great wilderness. He made sure black powder season stayed that way, kept an eye on bored kids whose families all owned guns, assisted with Search and Rescue.
    I hadn’t known what black powder was until Brendan explained it to me. And even then, I could never understand why some hunters preferred to act like frontiersmen, pouring gunpowder into their rifles and tamping it down, when Chance at the Bait and Ammo had forty different weapons that would kill a deer with a lot less fuss.
    Then again, I couldn’t imagine killing anything at all.
    A metal door led into another room, gleaming and sleek. This was where the real work was done. Flat screen monitors dominated five desks, the phones had LCD displays, and the gray cubicle walls were thickly padded.
    Brendan had complained when the office had gone paperless, which was more the norm for big city departments. The programs were hard to learn and cumbersome to use, and incident reports that used to take him five minutes to fill out now required a half hour of arduous clacking.
    Vern Weathers sat on top of one desk, his back to me, fleshy body displacing a case or two of CDs, instead of the usual straying sheets of forms. A half-moon of men in gray uniforms perched on chairs, stares presumably fixed on the Chief’s face.
    â€œNo partner patrols for the next few weeks,” the Chief