Free Twice Buried by Steven F. Havill Page B

of her nod. We hurled past two big RVs driven no doubt by snowbirds trundling west. I wondered what they were doing out so late. When 310 was back in the proper lane, Linda turned slightly toward me. “May I ask you something?”
    “Sure.”
    “If the body is already dead, and there’s an officer already out there, why are we in such a hurry?”
    I glanced over at her, amused. She was resting her right hand on the dashboard as if that might stop her from going ballistic if we crashed into something solid.
    “Are you serious?” I asked.
    “Yes.”
    I thought for a moment, trying to frame an appropriate answer, knowing that whatever I said would probably end up as a quotation in the damn newspaper. She didn’t have her pencil out, though, so maybe I was safe. And I didn’t slow down.
    “If it’s a homicide, Linda, then every minute counts. Every minute that goes by in an investigation makes the trail just that much harder to follow.”
    “But isn’t there a working deputy already on the scene?”
    I braked hard and turned off on County Road 27. The rear end of the patrol car fishtailed on the gravel and Linda transferred her grip from the dash to the door’s courtesy handle.
    “Yes. But he won’t investigate. All Paul has done is secure the scene.”
    “Meaning what?”
    “He makes sure no one tromps around and wrecks evidence. He makes sure nothing changes…the crime scene looks exactly the way it did when he found it. That’s all he does. Unless there’s someone standing over the corpse with a smoking gun or a bloody wrecking bar. Then I might let the deputy make an arrest.”
    Linda nodded and put her hand up on the ceiling as she saw the first cattle guard approaching. We sailed across it without much of a thump and she brought her arm back down.
    “And often evidence is time-related. So,” and I shrugged, “if weather conditions permit and if traffic permits, then we don’t let the moss grow.”
    We were well away from the village and any other ranches. With no moon and a growing cloud cover, the prairie was a blank, featureless black void except for the bright tunnel bored by the patrol car’s headlights. We rounded a sweeping curve whose radius gradually tightened until we were down to twenty miles an hour—and that seemed too fast as juniper limbs almost brushed the fenders. Up ahead the wink of Encinos’s flashers was our beacon.
    As we approached I could see a second vehicle on the shoulder of the road, far enough over that its wheels were nearly in the bar ditch. I didn’t have to see the magnetic sign on the door panel to know who owned the Suburban.
    Deputy Paul Encinos stood by the front fender of his county Ramcharger, waiting. The dome light was on and I could see Tony Abeyta inside. Encinos raised his flashlight in salute as I pulled up behind his four-by-four.
    “Should I stay in the car?” Linda asked.
    “Yes,” I said and turned off the red lights.
    The northwest wind had a bite as I stepped out of the car and I remembered the cloud banks I had seen earlier in the day, building in the west over San Cristobal mesa. I snapped my Eisenhower jacket closed and tucked my flashlight under my arm.
    “What’s up?”
    Paul Encinos pointed across the road with his flashlight. If I tried hard, I might make myself believe that I could see the body. But it was just a dark lump that could as easily have been bunch grass. “Tony and I were going to drive out this way as far as the Triple Bar T gate. I saw your orders on the bulletin board to close-patrol this stretch. And there he was.”
    “How’d you happen to see him?”
    “I had the spotlight on and was swinging it back and forth across the pasture there, trying to see dogs running or whatever.”
    “Good man. Then you jumped the fence and walked over?”
    Encinos shook his head. “No, sir. I used the binoculars and I could see that the victim was dead.”
    I held out my hand and Encinos gave me the field glasses. He aimed the