Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller by Clifford Irving Read Free Book Online Page A

father a strong hug—the older man smelled comfortably of tweed and horses and old books. Dennis said, “I’m going to hit the hay. What do you think, Dad?”
    “About what? Sophie?”
    “Yes, about Sophie.”
    “Does it matter what I think?”
    It was not the enthusiasm Dennis had hoped for. He waited, uncertain whether to go on. Finally his father said, “I think she’s fine. Obviously she loves you if she’d come all the way up here to where it’s really cold, just to visit your aged parents.”
    Dennis squeezed his father’s shoulder. “That’s it, eh? ‘People in the East talk about windchill.’ A slur on dear old Watkins Glen! That bothered you, did it?”
    “Honestly, Denny, you can’t tell me it’s colder here at virtually sea level than it is at 9,000 feet, can you? Can you really?”
    “It is, Dad. I’ve been there, and what she says is true.”
    “Go to bed. Your brains are addled by love. Keep your bride-to-be warm in our Siberia.”

Chapter 5
Crime Scene
    “I CAN’T SEE the whole body,” Sheriff Josh Gamble said, frowning, bending forward to study the photographs spread on Queenie’s desk.
    “Meaning what?” Queenie asked. “You don’t think it’s a Scottish deerhound?”
    “Of course I do. You can tell by the head. I’m just saying that I can’t see the whole body or the throat or the other eye.”
    “Why is that important, Josh?”
    The sheriff handed Queenie a Xeroxed copy of a flyer faxed to his office the previous summer by the Colorado State Police. The flyer asked all law enforcement personnel in the state to be on the alert for any suspicious deaths of domestic animals.
    “You remember?”
    Queenie remembered, annoyed that it had slipped her mind. Last spring, for the second year in a row, what appeared to be an adolescent Satanic cult had cropped up in the suburbs of Denver and by summer had spread to rural parts of the state. Dogs and cats were found in out-of-the-way places, throats slit, eyes gouged out. Males were castrated. There was talk of a cult belief that domestic animals were polluting the planet with their excrement.
    “But the theory was,” Queenie said, “that the kids did this in summer, when school was out and they had nothing better to do.”
    “You don’t know when the deerhound was killed, do you? You only know when this quarry guy up in Springhill claims it went missing.”
    Queenie thought it over for a minute. “I’d better go up to Pearl Pass and take a look.”
    That evening she called the Clark brothers at their trailer home downvalley in El Jebel. “Ever been in the service, Fred?”
    Fred Clark said he had been a corporal in the army.
    “Then you know what it means to volunteer.”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “Corporal Clark, I need you or your brother to volunteer for a trip by snowmobile to Pearl Pass.”
    In 4 A.M. winter darkness, Queenie drove her rattly Jeep Wagoneer up to the T Lazy 7 Ranch not far from the base of the Maroon Bells. Harold Clark and Deputy Doug Larsen awaited her, dressed in blaze orange jackets so no rampaging hunter would mistake them for a mule deer or elk, as happened now and then in the blood-soaked past of these peaceful mountains.
    A small black-and-white dog bounded out of Queenie’s Jeep and began running in circles in the snow, barking happily “What’s that?” Larsen asked.
    “That, which I think deserves to be called who, is my Jack Russell terrier. Her name is Bimbo.”
    “Cute. Where do you propose to leave her?”
    “She’s coming with us.”
    “Surely you jest.”
    “If Mr. Clark, with the best of intentions,” Queenie said, “takes us to the general area up near Pearl Pass but doesn’t know the exact spot where he and his brother found the dog—what do we do? Search every square foot of the Elk Range above 12,000 feet?” Bimbo rolled on her back on a patch of earth. “You get her within fifty yards of that dead deerhound’s body and she’ll be all over it. She’s a major-league