Hunting Season by Nevada Barr Read Free Book Online Page A

firm. Contact with the dead had not robbed him of body heat.
    "Actually, it is business," the sheriff said. He took off his hat and ran a hand over his hair, the fingers not mussing but gently patting it as if to assure him it hadn't been rearranged.
    Because of the sheriff's careful observance of the amenities at Mt. Locust, Anna had wondered at his not removing his hat when they first came inside. She now suspected it was a subtle sign of disrespect.
    At the word 'business' the undertaker's face altered slightly, not a return to professional empathy but veiled with a thin cast of wariness; that of a citizen wracking his brain for remembered indiscretions he'd believed had gone unwitnessed.
    "It's your brother, Doyce," Clintus said. "I'm afraid we've got bad news. He's been killed."
    A flicker of what might have been relief—or merely a changing of gears behind what Anna was coming to realize was an actor's countenance, capable of putting on one emotion after another without the inconvenience of feeling—briefly crossed Raymond Barnette's face. It was gone in a heartbeat and Barnette's features emerged in proper doleful arrangement.
    "Yes," he said. "Gil called me from his cell phone. He's showing the old Shugrew place out past Mama's. A nice piece of property."
    An odd detail to mention. Maybe it was callousness, maybe shock. Anna looked at Clintus. He'd taken on a slow burn.
    "Gil culled you?" he asked evenly.
    Barnette picked up on the undercurrent. "Just a courtesy, sheriff. Gil and I go way back. He told me Doyce had passed. I was just now closing up shop to break the news to Mama. What was it? Gil said maybe heart attack. Doyce's never taken care of hisself—himself."
    The correction triggered what might have been the first honest emotion Anna had seen on Raymond Barnette's face: hatred. For himself, for his past, for what he thought he should be. A lapse in control that showed his lingual roots.
    "It's a little more than that," Clintus told him. "Is there a place we can talk?"
    "Surely. Surely." Barnette led them back to an office as formal and unused looking as the front foyer. Through that, behind a discreet door, was his working office, unadorned, cramped and cluttered with papers, coffee machine, copier, computer and other modern business paraphernalia.
    All that differentiated it from any other business office were the salesmen's samples thumbtacked to the walls and littering the top of the four metal filing cabinets: tiny coffins, bits of wax shaped into a nose and what looked to be part of an ear, a color poster showing the before and after pictures of a corpse with a disfiguring facial wound carefully reconstructed with mortician's magic for an open-casket viewing.
    Crowded in two narrow chairs, coffee offered and declined, Raymond settled behind his desk and Clintus told him how his brother had been found.
    Details were omitted: the semi-nudity, the strap marks on the body. When the sheriff had finished, the three of them sat in silence for a minute or more. Anna passed the time watching Barnette's face. She could read nothing from his expression or lack thereof.
    When he mentally came back into the room he said, "Mt. Locust? On the Trace there? What in God's name was that—was Doyce doing at Mt. Locust?"
    "Well..." Clintus looked at Anna. She was no help. "It looks like it might be some kind of sex crime, Ray."
    Barnette hardened, face and body, as if the muscles beneath the skin had suddenly turned to steel. He shot such a look of malevolent suspicion at the sheriff that Anna was startled.
    "I don't know what it was, but it wasn't that," he said coldly. "You go sayin' it was that and you got yourself a lawsuit on your hands."
    The undertaker's careful diction had slipped again, but his meaning was clear enough. Neither Anna nor the sheriff responded. People in grief—if this was grief—said many things. Law enforcement officers learned not to engage.
    "I got to break the news to Mama," Barnette said