Fire and Ice by J. A. Jance Read Free Book Online

sheet shows six DUIs, two criminal assaults, two driving without a license.”
    “So we’ve got a photo then?”
    “On the computer,” Ernie said. “Not one I can print right now. Any idea when Dr. Machett will bother getting his butt out here?”
    “All I can tell you is that he’s on his way,” Joanna said.
    “I’m not holding my breath,” Ernie grumbled. “He always takes his own sweet time about getting to a crime scene, and we’re left standing with one foot in the air until he does.”
    Following a fairly smooth gravel road, the Yukon wound down into a steep wash. When they roared up the far side, they came out on the boundary of a breathtaking landscape. Even though Joanna had been warned about them in advance, seeing the tawny-colored dunes in person took her by surprise. Starting with a line of demarcation just to the left of the gravel, the dunes stretched off into the distance in a series of rounded hills. Here and there the rippled surface of the sand was marred by a series of tire tracks.
    Gripping the steering wheel with both hands, Ernie swung the Yukon off the road and into the dunes along a course that included several of those tracks. Even with four-wheel drive, he had to maintain a fair amount of speed to keep from getting bogged down.
    As they jolted along, Joanna checked her seat belt and then held on to her armrest. “How can this be?” she said over the laboring sound of the engine. “I’ve lived here all my life and never knew these dunes were here!”
    “Think about Kartchner Caverns,” Ernie replied. “Lots of people knew about that before it ever came out in public. This is all on private property. As far as I know, it’s only been open to ATVers in the last few years. Now that I think about it, I think some environmental group or other was trying to buy it up a few years back, but the owner wouldn’t sell.”
    Kartchner Caverns, a series of limestone caverns on the far side of Benson, was Cochise County’s most recent tourism hot spot. The caves had been discovered in the late seventies by a pair of hikers who had been exploring the countryside at the base of the Whetstone Mountains. When they had first located and started exploring the caverns, they were located on private land owned by a family named Kartchner. It had taken another ten years to make arrangements to transfer the property to the state of Arizona and turn it into a state park people could actually come visit. Now Kartchner Caverns is a genuine tourist home run. Joanna wondered if something similar was going on with Action Trail Adventures. People in the ATV community seemed to know all about it. No one else did.
    Is that what this murder is all about? Joanna wondered. Have we wandered into some kind of environmental range war?
    The Yukon crested a dune. In the cleft between that dune and the next, Joanna caught sight of the crime scene. The debris field included an upright ATV as well as a second one that had been tipped over onto its side. Yards away from the vehicles in a tangle of tire tracks lay something that, from this distance, might have been a pile of loose laundry.
    The victim, Joanna thought. “Stop for a minute, please,” she said to Ernie. “Let me take a look from here.”
    Ernie stopped abruptly, allowing a towering plume of dust to blow past them. When it cleared, Joanna could see the victimagain. He looked like a crumpled rag doll, lying facedown in sand. Around him ranged a complex scribble of vehicle tracks that resembled the Etch-a-Sketch doodlings of some giant-sized child.
    Joanna glanced at her detective. “So what do you think happened?” she asked.
    Ernie shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “It looks to me like several vehicles were involved.”
    “And several people?”
    Ernie nodded. “We’ve got tracks of that one wrecked ATV and at least two others, four-wheel-drive pickups, most likely, one with dual rear tires. I’m guessing the dead guy rode up on the wrecked ATV