Free Stone Maidens by Lloyd Devereux Richards Page A

things you did.” He glanced up at Elmer. “I’ll drop a truck book by a little later, Mr. Templeton, unless the Heath girl turns up first.” He looked back at Joey. “Can you help someone draw a picture of this man?”
    “Yes, sir, I can.” The sheriff’s belief in him made Joey stand up taller.
    “That’ll be fine,” Elmer said to McFaron. “We’ll be waiting for you.”
    McFaron stood and reminded the others to report any sighting of the girl immediately to him. Then he headed out to his truck, where he called Mary on the cell phone and related Joey’s story.
    McFaron started backing up the Bronco when Joey Templeton and his brother, Mike, stepped out of the diner with their grandfather. He admired the old man. Elmer reminded the sheriff of his own grandfather, who had been the first Crosshaven sheriff in the family. When his son, Joe’s father, dropped dead of a heart attack, he’d taken the sixteen-year-old McFaron in. No amount of work could clear the hurt of being robbed so young. Had Maddy Heath been robbed young, too, he wondered? Robbed of a sister? And had Julie herself been robbed of more than that?

CHAPTER EIGHT
    Roadside dust swirled with the changing weather front. Prusik quickly paid the cabdriver and leaned into a headwind, squinting. A well-defined anvil—a cumulonimbus cloud—loomed several miles in the distance, topping out somewhere high above the cruising altitude of a commercial jetliner. It was oppressively muggy, and thunderstorms were forecast. She’d flown from Chicago to the small Blackie Airport on United Express—a commuter offshoot swallowed by the major carrier to service the spread-out tracts of farmland and huge hardwood forests that blanketed the middle of America for hundreds of miles, bounded by the Mississippi two hundred miles to the west and the Gulf of Mexico nearly five hundred miles to the south.
    She stepped inside the FBI’s rolling laboratory, base for Bruce Howard and the team responsible for collecting and identifying forensic material recovered from the site where the body had been found.
    “Stuart Brewster. Nice to meet you, ma’am.” The field agent stood up from his small desk, where a laptop computer displayed a series of plot lines on a topographical grid demarcating the crime scene.
    Prusik put down her briefcase and forensic bag and shook the man’s hand. “Nice to meet you, Agent Brewster. Where is Mr. Howard?”
    “He’s been down below at the scene with three other agents since this morning. They’re reconnoitering, looking for forensic evidence we may have overlooked yesterday.” Brewster was heavyset and short legged. He leaned his head out the doorway and studied the encroaching storm clouds. “Before things start to open up and turn the ravine into an erosion gully.”
    Good, she thought, Howard was being thorough. Prusik did not know this man, Brewster. He was relatively new to the Midwest office of the bureau. Thorne had given Howard the leeway to bring in a few agents to build his field team. Brewster withdrew a cotton handkerchief from his back pocket and sneezed, briefly turning his face and neck crimson.
    She glanced back at the storage area inside the vehicle. Puffy collection bags filled with detritus removed from the crime scene lined the shelves, each tagged and cataloged. Hopefully, she thought, a clue lay trapped in the leaf mold.
    She heard a muffled shout coming from somewhere down the steep wooded ravine. Prusik stepped outside and walked to the edge of the road, sheltered under the natural awning of several large hemlocks. Two men were methodically scanning the slope filled with dead leaves from the oak, beech, ash, and yellowwood trees that were interspersed with dark groves of cedar and hemlock. They were sweeping the area using a photosensitive ultraviolet lamp and a magnetometer to detect any metal object or other forensic clue that may lie beneath the leaves or near to the surface.
    Another man shouted. She