Free The Chimera Secret by Dean Crawford Page B

asphyxiation.’
    ‘You got copies of the photographs on you?’ Lopez asked from the rear seat.
    Earl reached down into the side pocket of his door and pulled out a manila envelope before passing it to the back seat. Ethan watched as Lopez pulled out a wad of six-by-eight images and began
sifting through them. If there was anything unusual about the crime scene, she would notice it soon enough.
    ‘What about the other brothers?’ Ethan asked. ‘And the ranger who was killed?’
    Earl Carpenter rested one arm on the sill of his door as he drove. Ethan noticed that the hills around them were getting steeper as they traveled, thickly forested with pines or coarse grass,
and the roadside flanked by occasional shacks and game crossings.
    ‘Well, that there’s a mystery. Cletus and Jesse go off huntin’ out in Nez Perce Forest, and it turns out that the ranger, a local man called Gavin Coltz, spotted them tracking
a game elk. Season’s out right now so he decided to follow them and catch them in the act. He was a tenacious soul, Gavin, and he stuck with them for almost four hours before they tried to
take their shot out near Fox Creek.’
    ‘Then they get attacked?’ Lopez guessed.
    ‘By a bear,’ Earl confirmed. ‘Gavin is killed, so is Cletus, and Jesse runs for his life. Turns up next morning in Riggins lookin’ for all the world like he was dead
already.’
    ‘You don’t believe his story about a monster killing his brother?’ Ethan asked.
    Earl Carpenter looked Ethan in the eye.
    ‘I’ve been working out here since I was a boy,’ he said, ‘and I’ve seen a lot of people come close to dying after attacks by bears and cougars. This kid, he
din’ have no reason to claim what he did, that some kind of other creature had at them. In all my years I’ve never seen fear like that in the face of a man, but then if he’d just
killed two members of his family then I’d guess he’d be all shook up. Truth is, I don’t know what to believe.’
    Ethan glanced up at the foggy mountains looming either side of the car as it drove between the steep hillsides. ‘It’s a mystery all right.’
    ‘It’s not the only mystery,’ Lopez said from the rear seat.
    ‘What you got?’ Ethan asked.
    ‘You say you found Randy MacCarthy hanging just like this?’ Lopez asked Earl Carpenter. ‘And you hadn’t touched him at all?’
    ‘Exactly like that,’ Earl confirmed. ‘I only touched him once to search for a pulse. Needless to say I din’ find one, and his body was cold.’
    Lopez nodded.
    ‘Then this isn’t a suicide, Sheriff, it’s a homicide.’
    Earl’s old eyes flicked up to meet hers in the rear-view mirror. ‘You shittin’ me, lady? The boy’s a suicide for sure. There’s nothing that suggests foul play in my
book.’
    Lopez handed the photographs to Ethan. ‘Tell me what’s wrong with the picture,’ she said.
    Ethan looked at the six-by-eights one after the other. Randy dangling from the noose, his tongue swollen and poking from his mouth, his eyes half-closed and lifeless. The toppled stool three
feet below him. Ethan shook his head.
    ‘I’m not seeing it,’ he admitted.
    ‘The body was cold,’ Lopez said. ‘Been there a few hours. What’s missing?’
    It took only a moment for Ethan to realize what she meant. Images from his service with the marines in Iraq and Afghanistan flashed through his mind, of the shameful sight of the dead lying in
the streets or in bitter, lonely caves in the mountains.
    ‘The body hasn’t voided,’ he said finally. ‘Randy didn’t die where he was found.’
    ‘That’s my boy,’ Lopez smiled.
    ‘Crap,’ Earl Carpenter uttered, and slapped a hand across the steering wheel, angry with himself. ‘Should’ve realized that.’
    ‘When a person dies their sphincter muscles give way and they void their bowels,’ Lopez said. ‘This kid had been hanging for some time but there was no residue beneath him from
the moment of death.’
    ‘So he