Free First Kill All the Lawyers by Sarah Shankman Page A

heaven?
    “So what was so important that you dragged me out of bed this lovely morning?” she demanded.
    “The straight poop on Ridley,” he said.
    “What makes you think I care?”
    “You’re here. You’re a reporter. You have a nose for murder. And you were already asking questions about him.”
    “How do you know that?”
    Beau just smiled. His smiles always had been infuriating.
    She shrugged. “Okay, I’m here. Shoot.”
    *
    Even with his lights flashing and siren blaring, it had taken Beau an hour and a half to drive the seventy miles to Apalachee Falls State Park, where a hiker had found the body of Forrest Ridley. Route 400, the expressway, petered out north of Cumming, where he cut over to Route 19, and after that there was a maze of two-lane roads with ill-marked intersections and little towns with blinking red lights in their centers. The farther north he went, the more winding the roads and the slower his pace, for these were the foothills of the Appalachians. The 2,050-mile hiking trail, which stretched all the way to Maine, began at Springer Mountain just north of Apalachee.
    It began to rain, but Beau had no trouble finding the entrance to the park; at its gate were two deputy sheriffs’ cars, their revolving blue lights projecting an eerie lightshow across the deserted road. He flashed his identification, and the deputies waved him through with the slow, sly grin of the country lawman.
    It was the kind of grin, Beau thought, that made you uneasy, encouraged worry about whether they only thought they knew more than city slickers, or really did. It was the kind of grin that made you feel that they were on the verge of writing you a speeding ticket and would make it stick, even if you’d been in your car sitting still.
    The body had been found at the bottom of the falls, pinned beneath the overhang of a large flat rock. Lee Boggs, a kind-faced older man who was the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s very best investigator, was already at work.
    “Dr. Talbot.” He nodded, pushing up his rain-spattered, rimless glasses.
    “Boggs.” Beau returned the nod. “What have we got here?”
    “Well, not a hell of a lot. You can see what the terrain looks like.” The creek was sheer on one side, edged with rocks and leaves on the other. “Course, if we’re looking for footprints, I suspect they’d be up at the top anyway. I’ve got Masterson up there. But it’s gonna be tough. You get a million hikers and campers up here with the first sign of good weather, and you know we had that more than a month ago. No telling how many people’ve tromped around here while he was lying in the water.”
    “Where the hell is the body?”
    Boggs’s cherubic face, more suited to a man selling lollipops than to one sifting through scenes of death, clouded over. “Sheriff took him. Said it was an open and shut case of accidental death, and hauled him right off to Monroeville.”
    “He what! ”
    “Sheriff Buford Dodd, his name was, said he didn’t even know why we bothered to come up here anyway. Said the man obviously fell off the top of the falls and was killed. Said it’s happened five or six times in the past ten years.”
    “Son-of-a-bitch!” Beau smacked his hand down on a rock, then shook it as if he was surprised at the pain. “Who called us, then? The sheriff do it just because the law says he’s supposed to, even when he’s not doing anything else by the book?”
    “Don’t know. I do know that we’re probably not going to learn much here. You might want to go on down to Monroeville to the courthouse. Sheriff’s office is there. That’s where they took him.”
    Beau turned away in disgust, heading back to his car. Then he stopped. “Thanks, Boggs. Didn’t mean to blow up at you.”
    “’S okay, boss.” The man grinned. “It’s happened before. Prob’ly happen again ’fore it’s over.”
    It was nearing midnight when Beau got to the Watkin County Sheriff’s Office, part of a new