Free Consumed by E. H. Reinhard

thick. “This is how she was found?” I asked.
    Deputy Washington nodded his head. “Exactly as is. I found a little blood up on the street that I marked off.”
    “Okay.” I turned away and looked at Whissell. “What’s our time frame on forensics?”
    “Any minute,” he said. Whissell crossed his arms over his round chest. He wore the same outfit as he had the day prior—a white sheriff’s-department shirt with black pockets and a black tie. He reached up with his right hand and scratched the side of his white beard. His eyes showed anger.
    “Done looking?” the deputy named Washington asked.
    I nodded.
    “I’ll show you where I found that blood.” He lay the tarp back over the body and walked back toward the coroner’s van. He stopped at the evidence cone at the edge of the road and pointed down. “Looks like she may have lay there for a bit—like she was pulled out of a trunk and dropped to the street or something. There’s no drag marks through the gravel at the shoulder here, so I’m guessing she was carried off to the side of the road.”
    “Anything else stand out at you?” Beth asked him.
    “Not really, I tried looking for footprints but didn’t see anything. Same goes for anything resembling evidence—a cigarette butt, separate drip of blood, any kind of paper or trash—nothing, though.”
    While his not finding anything could be seen as a letdown, the fact that he described actually doing some police work to locate evidence was a bit refreshing.
    “That’s all we have over here,” he said.
    “Thanks,” I said.
    Beth, Deputy Washington and I walked back to Tom and the chief deputy.
    The deputy walked to Whissell’s side and asked what the chief deputy wanted in the report, and Whissell responded that he’d handle it. The conversation struck me as odd. As far as I knew, chief deputies didn’t typically show up to crime scenes, and I doubted they wrote up the reports on them. I pushed the thought away—maybe he was just trying to do his part to help.
    “Nothing found with the woman?” I asked.
    “You’re looking at what was found,” Whissell said.
    “Who called it in?” Beth asked.
    The chief deputy pointed up the road toward an older white house on the left side of the road, maybe a quarter mile up. “Homeowner there,” he said.
    “Someone talk to him yet?” Beth asked.
    “I did,” Washington said. “I got the call to come and check it out. Spoke with him when I arrived.”
    “And?” Beth asked.
    “He saw the remains as he was leaving for work, called it in, turned around, and waited until I arrived. I got a statement from him, checked the guy out, and then let him get off to work. He had a clean sheet—Army recruiter in Clarksville. Not too much there.”
    “Okay,” I said. “What do we know about the other scene?”
    “Haven’t been there, but I’m guessing it looks the same as this one—body at the side of the road,” Whissell said.
    The sound of tires crunching the gravel at the shoulder of the road caught my ear. I turned to see a white sedan pulling up behind Beth’s rental car. A man wearing a white coat stepped from the driver’s side, took a box from the backseat, and approached us.
    “This is our forensics guy,” the chief deputy said.
    The man stopped at Beth’s side and looked over toward the tarp and then at us. He was average in height and weight and appeared in his midthirties. His hair was red with a few specks of gray on the sides—a goatee wrapped his mouth in the same colors. His face was thin, his skin fair.
    “I’m Agent Harper,” Beth said. She pointed at me standing next to her and then past me at Tom. “These are Agents Hank Rawlings and Tom Clifford.”
    “Um, hi. Dave McElroy,” he said. He reached out and shook our hands. “So what have we got?”
    “Female. Arms and legs removed. Stabbed, throat cut,” I said.
    “So the same as the others I’ve been looking at all week?”
    “Appears so,” I said.
    “Sure.”