Free Scavengers by Steven F. Havill

creosote bush—marked now by a bit of red flagging tied to one of the bush’s brittle limbs.
    At a glance, it appeared to be a standard issue contractor’s shovel, long of handle with an elliptical blade and good, sturdy blade shoulders that would take a beating from heavy-soled work boots. The shovel was new enough that portions of the label still clung to the hickory handle.
    Following Estelle’s gaze, Deputy Tom Pasquale said, “World class dumb. Somebody goes to all the trouble to dig a grave and then leaves the shovel behind.”
    “Let’s hope so,” Estelle said. “If the shovel and grave are related in the first place.” She backed up half a dozen steps until she could lean against the eastern most upright of the huge transmission line support. It had taken nearly two hours to meticulously uncover the corpse, one careful scoop of desert soil at a time. She slid down the warm steel until she was resting on her haunches, arms comfortable across her knees.
    “The crossroads,” she murmured, and pointed west. “I can make out the tracks that head out from here.” The sparse grass, bent and broken by the vehicle’s tires, would remain so for months, until summer rains hastened the decay of the vegetation, and new sprouts took their place. “And Perry MacInerny told Collins that he heard shots on the evening of Friday, February second. He’s got a parts receipt from the next day to lock in the date. All the way from here, you think?”
    “Easily,” Tom Pasquale said. “Unless the wind was howling from the west.”
    “MacInerny said it was calm.”
    “Then he could have heard gunshots from miles away…especially heavy caliber artillery.”
    Estelle nodded. “If the two killings are related, then Perry would have heard this shot first,” and she nodded toward the grave, “followed by the ones that killed number one, way over there to the west.” She turned, scanning the prairie. “I wonder how long.”
    “How long?”
    “MacInerny doesn’t remember an interval between the shots. If this one was first, and then”—she pointed to the west and stopped, brow furrowed—“that could be five minutes, ten minutes…almost anything.” She shook her head in frustration. “We’re going to have to work on Perry’s memory a little bit.” Turning to Jackie Taber, she said, “Tell me again what you saw.”
    The stocky deputy pushed her Stetson back on her head and squinted up into the sun, now harsh and winking on the power lines overhead. The wind was strong enough to touch the expanse of power lines between each tower, flexing them slightly, making them moan.
    “I was sitting in the unit, right there,” she said, indicating where the department Bronco was still parked. “I was waiting for Linda to come out. We were going to walk the tracks that showed up in the aerial photo. I saw where they took off to the west, right here, so this is where I parked. I was watching the changes in light, and I was getting ready to do some sketching. And that’s when I saw the pattern.”
    Estelle regarded the grave expressionlessly. Scant as the vegetation was, there were an infinite number of places where a dedicated gravedigger could find a patch of earth two feet wide and five feet long without disturbing any plant life. Of all the places in Posadas County likely to remain undisturbed, and thus be suitable for an unmarked grave, the eastern Posadas prairie should have topped the list.
    The transmission line service road, nothing more than a rude two-track in the best of places, paralleled the power lines just to the east of the tower’s legs at this particular point. The grave was across the two-track, its northwest corner forty-five feet, nine inches from the tower’s eastern support leg.
    Estelle clasped her hands together and rested her chin on her intertwined fingers. “The pattern,” she repeated.
    Jackie Taber’s were the eyes of an artist, Estelle knew. Why the young woman chose to spend her time as