Free Hunting Season by Nevada Barr

stock-still, she listened. The beeping came from Raymond Barnette's Cadillac, a shining heap of Detroit iron painted, as befitted his calling, as funeral-black as any hearse.
    "Hang on a second," she said to Clintus through the open window.
    The undertaker's car was parked in the sun. Anna crossed the weedy gravel turnaround. In his haste to get to the house, Raymond had left the keys in the ignition and the driver's door ajar. In an act of automatic kindness, Anna started to close it for him to save his battery. On the passenger seat was a sheaf of neatly stapled papers. Last Will and Testament was blazoned across the top in oversized Gothic type.
    Curiosity shouldered aside the good Samaritan. Anna leaned in and snatched it up. "Plain view," she whispered to herself, quoting the rule that allowed law-enforcement officers to use things that might be claimed as protected by a citizen's right to privacy in evidence. Anything left in sight for any eyes that happened by did not fall under the privacy laws.
    Kneeling on the driver's seat, she scanned the document. Florence Littleton Barnette's estate consisted of the house and property and little else: no stocks, bonds, mutual funds or other real estate. The whole of it had been left to her elder son, Doyce Felder Barnette. In the event that Doyce should die before his mother, the estate would then go to the younger son, Raymond Allan Barnette.
    This, then, was why Raymond had been so long getting to his mother's house with the tragic news. He'd stopped off at his home or the lawyer's office to get a copy of the will.
    Who better than a mortician to appreciate the notion that life is short, and one has to make hay while the sun shines?
     

4
     Clintus, Anna and the pretty young under-sheriff, Andre, gathered in Anna's office on the outskirts of Port Gibson in deference to the Trace's chief ranger, John Brown Brown. Brown had made the drive from Tupelo to monitor the festivities and had been left to cool his heels in the district office for three hours. His usually equitable disposition had suffered in transit.
    The doors at either end of the long, dingy office space were propped open and, in lieu of the grinding of the decrepit air conditioner that had sawed at Anna's nerves throughout the summer, the soothing sound of a breeze in the pin oaks and an occasional birdcall drifted in.
    Chairs had been brought out of the tiny office Anna claimed as district ranger. The chief had taken one, Clintus Jones the other. Anna and Andre stood, leaning against the walls for comfort.
    Anna's field rangers, Randy Thigpen and Barth Dinkins, their desks shoved together to form one large working surface, took their own chairs by right. Barth, just back from a morning at the dentist's, watched the proceedings with a half-frozen face that gave him a deceptively stupid look. Barth was African-American with short, black hair sprigged with white and smooth, dark skin. He'd been teetering on serious obesity when Anna had first come to Mississippi. Since then he'd shed close to thirty pounds. He remained beefy and still soft but no longer fat. His eyes, a beautiful and startling feature, always had a mildly unsettling effect on Anna. They were clear gray-green, the sclera white almost to pale blue. They gave her the same sense she had when being studied by a blue-eyed Samoyed, that there were forces she could not completely understand at work behind them.
    Randy Thigpen wasn't scheduled to come on duty until 8 p.m., but as the murder had taken place during his shift the previous night, Anna'd asked him in early. Thigpen, a middle-aged man from New Jersey posing as a southern-fried good old redneck, had chosen to be a thorn in Anna's side since she'd been hired as district ranger, a job he believed was owed to him.
    Early on he'd sued her on the grounds of racism. Thigpen was a white man, with reddish brown hair of which he was inordinately vain and a healthy bush of mustache, which was used to collect