Free Fatal Storm by Lee Driver Page B

she should be there, concerned that at her young
age of nineteen she wouldn't be able to handle a body much less the
odor of the morgue. But Sara strode right up to the gurney and
studied John Doe as though he were a patient with a rash.
    “He does have a resemblance to Rick Jensen
but how could that be? This man just died.” Sara almost bumped
heads with Dagger as she moved closer to the tattoo. “That does
look fresh, right?”
    “Looks as though it was just done twenty-four
hours ago,” Dagger said. “Maybe he had it redone. Is that
possible?”
    “If it were possible,” Luther said, “we would
see some underlying evidence of the previous tattoo. No tattoo
artist is that good that he can literally replicate every stroke of
the previous tat.”
    “So this guy was found on the Sebold property
strangled with a scarf?” Dagger asked.
    “Oh, that ain’t the best part,” Padre said
with a chuckle. “The scarf belonged to Sheila.”
    “We need proof,” John said. “We need to
compare John Doe's fingerprints with Rick Jensen's. Anything in the
case file, Luther? Like sample prints, hair off of a hair
brush?”
    Luther held up one finger while he read from
the file. “Evidence box should have hair samples and fingerprints.
Missus Jensen had submitted a plaster of her husband’s hand. It was
a wall hanging of all three hands when Bella was born. Forensics
made a mold of his print so that should confirm the identity of our
John Doe.” His finger tapped one of the entries. He picked up his
current autopsy report on John Doe. “This is interesting. Fourteen
months ago Kara Jensen reported that her husband left for the
airport after eating scrambled eggs, a cinnamon roll, and drinking
three cups of coffee.” He nodded at the body of John Doe. “The
stomach contents of our friend here consisted of coffee, eggs, and
a cinnamon roll consumed roughly one hour before his death.”
     
     
- 18 -
     
    “I haven’t been in this thick of brush since
I was a kid on my family’s ranch in Oklahoma.” Mike Reynolds carved
his way through the weeds, his heavy boots crushing dried stalks
and leaves before sinking into the soggy earth. His trained eyes
were looking for cleared areas, mounds of overturned dirt. Anything
that would give them a hint that a body had recently been
buried.
    “Weren’t you ever a boy scout?” Abe Galto was
ten feet away, eyes on the cadaver dogs shuffling through the
brush. “We could clear an acre in less than a day using only our
pocketknives.”
    Mike studied his fellow guardsmen dotting the
landscape with brown camouflage outfits. Abe was the oldest and his
responses were always prefaced by words that sounded like, “back in
my day.” Compared to Mike and the other eight National Guardsmen,
Abe was a dinosaur, preferring to never rise in rank. The younger
guys didn’t think it was because Abe wasn’t worthy of a stripe or
two. They felt it was because he wanted to spout off his years of
experience to the young pups. To his credit, Abe was still fit and
active, despite the graying hair and sagging chest.
    “Pocketknife, right,” Mike said with a shake
of his head. “You probably set the damn acre on fire and stood
there with a water hose.”
    “Yep, back then,” Abe continued, ignoring
Mike’s comment, “we weren’t soft the way kids are today. We could
work from sun up to sun down without one word of complaint.”
    Mike had to agree with him there. Even his
own son who was eight would rather lie on the couch and play video
games than chase a baseball with the neighborhood boys. They were
raising a generation of couch potatoes.
    Abe looked back at the sprawling mansion.
“Can you believe how the rich lived? Probably entertained royalty
and a few shady characters, you know, like Capone.” Abe still lived
the past, not just in his thinking but also in his appearance. His
hair was kept in a short brush cut, the same as his college
yearbook picture. His street clothes were