New Title 1 by Dru Pagliassotti Read Free Book Online

feathers. There was blood and torn skin on the quill. Dr. Todd must have stepped on a dead bird on his way up the hill.
    Deciding that was what he’d smelled, Richard dropped the feather and wiped his hand on his jeans, looking down at the dig again. Somebody new was walking up. He looked through the camera’s telephoto lens and refocused.

VII

     
    “Another guy from the university,” Jackson said tersely, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. Walt Clancy groaned and finished the last of his lukewarm cup of coffee.
    He’d already spoken to the university president, who’d been satisfied to take a quick look at the site and ask to be kept informed. Then, half an hour later, he’d been buttonholed by the university public relations officer, who’d pestered him until he’d promised that nobody would make any statements to the press until daybreak. The campus pastor had dropped by, too, but Clancy had managed to brush him off, as he had the reporters. In his previous job, he’d had to deal with the much more aggressive Los Angeles press corps, so he’d been quick to set up tall wooden barriers around the site to discourage gawkers.
    “Bring him around,” he said without enthusiasm.
    The man who joined him was slender and handsome, with distinguished silver hair and a face that carried its years well. He pulled off his gloves and held out a manicured hand.
    “How do you do, Detective? I’m Gregory Penemue, the university provost.”
    They shook hands while Clancy tried to remember what a provost was.  Something well-paid, apparently.
    “I can’t tell you what we’ve found here, because I don’t know myself yet,” he said. “Forensics is still taking a look at the bones.”
    “Can you tell me whether it may have been a recent crime, at least?” Penemue asked.
    “Well, the bones might have been in the ground for a few years,” Clancy said, keeping his answer vague. “And we don’t know if any crime was committed at all. This might be some rancher’s graveyard.” That wouldn’t explain the malformed state of the bones, but Clancy was relying on forensics to explain that eerie little puzzle.
    “Are the bones human?”
    “It’s still a little early to tell.” In fact, he knew they were human, but he preferred to express a reasonable amount of doubt until an official statement was released.
    “I don’t suppose there’s any chance I could see the site more closely?”
    “We’d like to keep nonessential personnel away from the dig, sir. The team’s going over everything very carefully. If it turns out a crime was committed, we wouldn’t want some defense attorney down the road accusing us of polluting the crime scene.”
    “Ah. Of course.” Penemue seemed to understand, and Clancy blessed the recent popularity of police procedurals. On the one hand, they’d raised the public’s expectation of case closure to unrealistic levels, but on the other, they’d made it easy to invoke the magical word "forensics" and keep people away from a scene. Nobody wanted his DNA involved in a murder investigation. “I was told the bones were found fifteen feet or so below the surface,” the provost continued.
    “They were pretty deep. Of course, if this was some old graveyard, the ground would have shifted in the last fifty years or so.”
    Penemue’s pale eyes searched the ground as if trying to see below its surface.
    “I assume you know that there was a murder on campus tonight?”
    Clancy crumpled up his Styrofoam coffee cup and threw it into a garbage sack tied to one corner of the field table.
    “I heard about it.”
    “I’m afraid that unearthing these bones may awaken something unpleasant.”
    Clancy sighed.
    “You think some killer might have come out of retirement now that his old kills have been found? That’s Hollywood fantasy, sir. We’re keeping a police presence here as a matter of form, but it wouldn’t surprise me if this dig gets handed over to the archaeologists in another day or