Free Forest Ghost by Graham Masterton Page B

‘How’s it going in
goł ą bki
world?’
    ‘Pretty damn good, as a matter of fact,’ he told her. ‘We’ve been turning people away almost every night this week. So when did you get back from Muskegon?’
    ‘About two hours ago. I’m bushed, to tell you the truth.’
    He pointed to the chair on the other side of his desk. ‘Take a load off,’ he told her. ‘How about a soda? Mountain Dew? Fanta?’
    Sally unslung her beige leather purse and opened it up. She took out several folded sheets of paper and said, ‘Those two people you found in the pool. The Headless Woman and her Tattooed Companion. We identified them.’
    ‘Really? Who are they? Or who
were
they, rather?’
    ‘Researchers, both of them, for Michigan Wildlife Conservancy. Apparently some of the forestry contractors had seen what they thought was cougar scat around that part of the Owasippe Scout Reservation. The two of them were up there to collect samples.’
    ‘Scat? What’s that?’
    ‘In wildlife circles, it’s what they call animal feces. It’s shit, Jack. They scoop it up and send it back to be tested for DNA.’
    ‘Do they know what happened to them yet? Tell me as much as you know.’
    ‘They’re trying to piece it all together but it isn’t easy. The woman’s name was Sandra Greene, with an “e”. She was twenty-eight years old and specialized in human/cougar interactions, especially in urban areas and subdivisions where human development has begun to encroach on cougar territory. The guy’s name was Weldon Farmer. He was thirty-five years old, married with two kids. He was Sandra Greene’s immediate boss. They were both based at the Michigan Wildlife Conservancy Center in Bath, just outside of Lansing.
    ‘Undersheriff Porter told me there was no question that Mr Farmer buried Ms Greene up to her thighs and then severed her head. At the time he buried her, that pool wouldn’t have been very much more than a depression in the ground with little or no water in it, because it only filled up after heavy rain. Underneath Mr Farmer’s body they found a machete, which he almost certainly used to decapitate her.
    ‘He didn’t drown, because there wasn’t enough water in the pool at the time he killed himself. It hadn’t rained until about eighteen hours before you found them. He cut the femoral artery in his groin, probably with the same machete that he had used to kill Ms Greene, and he bled to death.’
    Jack said, ‘Was she unconscious when he buried her? I mean, if she hadn’t
wanted
him to bury her in the dirt that deep—’
    ‘No, you’re right,’ said Sally. ‘The odds are that she was conscious. There was no sign of concussive bruising on her head, and the autopsy hasn’t shown any trace of any kind of knockout drugs in her blood or in her urine – although she must have been there for at least two days before you found her, so any chemicals in her blood would have degenerated long before then. It didn’t help the coroner that she was decapitated, so any drugs like diphenhydramine wouldn’t have had time to penetrate through to her hair, which is where we usually find the most conclusive traces.’
    ‘So what you’re saying is that this could have been a suicide pact?’
    Sally nodded. ‘That’s one of the theories they’re working on, yes. So far, though, the Lansing PD haven’t found any suicide notes at either of their homes or at their place of work, nor any indications that the relationship between Mr Farmer and Ms Greene was anything but purely professional.
    ‘Undersheriff Porter says he’s very wary of jumping to conclusions. Just because all of those scouts and scout leaders committed suicide so close by, that doesn’t necessarily mean that
this
was suicide, too. Maybe some psychopath forced them to do it.’
    ‘I don’t know,’ said Jack. ‘I wouldn’t cut a woman’s head off, even if somebody was pointing a gun at me. I’d rather die.’
    Sally said, ‘I wouldn’t say no to that