Free Dead Girl Moon by Charlie Price Page B

techs.
    The tech team arrived by late afternoon. The car’s door handle and steering wheel had been wiped clean of prints, but what was almost certainly blood remained on the window and doorframe. Following the tire prints, the traffic expert discerned the car had first been parked or stationary out by the highway and moved from there back to the nook in the trees.
    A careful search where the car was first parked yielded a disturbed area where a scuffle might have taken place, a dark patch, still damp, probably blood, and a small off-white button from a shirt. The car itself, a ten-year-old Subaru, was registered to a man in Plains who told authorities that it was his daughter’s car and that she commuted to Portage for work. He said she hadn’t returned home last night and that he and his wife had assumed she was staying over with friends.
    *   *   *
    Mick’s 911 call set the county sheriff’s investigation in motion. Within forty minutes Sheriff Paint with his camera and a deputy carrying fishing waders were at the gravel beach on the river looking across to the body. Living this close to rivers and lakes, Paint had dealt with batches of drownings over the past thirty years. When his deputy got the girl to shore, Paint didn’t notice the head injury, but the puncture wound in the stomach was obvious. Not drowning. He, too, called the state police in Missoula for crime scene help and found his was the second request from Sanders County in the past hour.
    The fact that the body was snagged on a submerged limb on the far side of the river didn’t necessarily mean that the body had been dumped there. Paint knew there was no access to that side for miles, plus objects in the water naturally drifted from one bank to another, depending on how the currents caught them. Since the body had apparently not been in the river all that long they decided to search the west bank, the roadside bank, upstream. It was close to dark by the time the state investigators arrived. They set up lights over a large perimeter and began a grid search of the beach area.
    Six a.m. Wednesday a team member located the probable dumping site approximately a thousand yards upstream from the gravel beach. Examination led to a puzzle. Marks at the riverbank indicating the girl had been disrobed there and then dragged or pushed into the water. Underneath the willow and berry cover at water’s edge a deputy recovered blond hairs and white thread.
    Broken branches, bent vines, and gouged earth in the immediate clearing suggested a struggle had taken place. There was surprisingly little blood on the ground, given the nature of the stomach wound. The signs of violence were inconsistent with the Highway Patrol’s initial report that the girl was probably killed miles away on Highway 200. They had most of the blood there, so how did a dead girl put up such a fight here?
    Three sets of footprints were identified, the larger ones entering from the west, probably from the nearby road, the smaller size nine from the south, but it was impossible to discern the gender of the print makers or to follow the prints past the small clearing as the area was too rocky.
    Not nearly enough information to narrow the search for a killer.

 
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    Y EAH , SHE LOOKED FAMILIAR . Evelyn. Evelyn Edmonds. Pretty, eager, stupid. Ev and her sex scam. Actually, Grace had thought the plan might work. Not a bad idea, but such a small town. What were the odds somebody wouldn’t catch her, bust her, or cut in on her profits?
    Grace had watched the girl wink and linger with several of the male customers that ate alone. Truckers and tourists mostly. Evelyn would ask where they were staying, make a plan to meet. A few local guys, too. Some high school guys got wind of it and tried to make a deal, Tim and Cunneen in that group, but Evelyn shooed them off. Wouldn’t take that big a risk. Maybe statutory if she got caught.
    At least once a month, Hammond and his group—Bolton, Mackler,