Free The Bobcat's Tate by Georgette St. Clair

car. There were two hunters with him, leaning on their pickup truck.
    “We haven’t been able to find the body,” Deputy Ackerman told Loch. “We went to the area where the hunters say they saw it, and there’s nothing. A few of us shifted, ran up and down the stream a mile in either direction, nothing.”
    “Were you at least able to find th e spot where the body was found?” Tate asked.
    “No, all we know is that it’s a couple of miles from the road. The hunters didn’t leave any mark by the spot; they weren’t expecting the body to be moved.”
    “Maybe he was just passed out, not dead,” Loch suggested.
    One of the hunters , a human, shook his head. “I know dead when I see it,” he said. “We saw him lying face down in the creek, half underwater, weighed down by his backpack. I ran over, pulled him out, turned him over…water gushed out of his mouth. He’d been dead for at least a few hours. He had a big dent on his forehead, and a gash.”
    “So somebody could have attacked him,” Loch said . Tate knew Loch was thinking through all the possible scenarios.
    “ Maybe, but it was a rocky stream bed,” the hunter said. “You know Meyer. He didn’t walk too steady. He could have been drunk, fell into the water, hit his head on a rock.”
    “So what could have happened to the body?” Ginger wondered. “Could a wild animal have dragged it off?”
    “They wouldn’t have dragged him that far this quickly, and we’d have spotted it,” the deputy said. “If he was really there, and he was dead, somebody must have moved the body. We announced it over the radio, so anybody with a police scanner could have heard it.”
    “ Not much we can do at this point, if you’ve already searched the area,” Loch said.
    “You know, I saw Meyer standing at the edge o f the crowd when you were questioning people about the tiara theft,” Tate mused.
    “True, although so was half the town,” Loch said. “Hard to picture Meyer being involved. I know he’s a drunk, but he’s never been in trouble for anything more than trespassing or public intoxication. Then again, he hangs out with Rodney McColl, who has some burglary convictions. I’ll have my men pick up Rodney, see what he has to say. Maybe the two of them acted together. Meyer could have acted as lookout while Rodney broke in, and then Rodney didn’t want to share.”
    “If the body was dumped in the middle of the woods, it’s a good bet whoever did it thought that it wouldn’t be found for a long time, if ever,” Tate said. “It was just dumb luck those hunters stumbled on it…otherwise, in this heat, it would have decomposed and been eaten by animals before anybody found it. Days from now, there’d be nothing but scattered bones.”
    “Right, ” Loch said. “And if the person who dumped the body heard that the police were being summoned to the scene, they’d want to move the body before we could have Ginger touch it and read Meyer’s final moments.”
    “Darn it,” Ginger said. “And I was so hoping to get my hands on a cold, dead body today.”
    “Sorry, baby, you’ll just have to settle for my hot , live body.”
    Tate stared off into the woods, his thoughts drifting back to Lainey. Why had she left today without saying goodbye? Should he just go to the boarding house and ask her out to dinner, and see where things went from there? Or was he just setting himself up for disappointment?
    And should he even be pursuing a complete stranger who wouldn’t tell him anything about herself ? Maybe there was some reason why she was so cagey every time he tried to find out more about her, although he couldn’t imagine what the reason would be. He’d run a check on the rental car, and it had indeed been registered to a Katherine McNamara, who lived in Philadelphia and had no criminal record.
    So why had she acted so squirrelly when he’d asked her name?
    The truth was, he didn’t know a thing about her, except that he couldn’t stop