The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 by James Patterson, Otto Penzler Read Free Book Online

had noticed anything out of the ordinary.
    A few students mentioned a rust-bucket white pickup truck parked near Derek’s V-dub around the time he vanished, but nobody got a good look at the driver, caught a plate, or could even swear to the make of the truck.
    Maybe a Ford. Maybe a Chevy. White. Rusted out around the wheel wells. Big guy behind the wheel. A working stiff, not a student.
    Why a working stiff?
    “You know. Tractor cap, canvas vest, wild hair? A wood-smoke boy. Cedar savage. You know the type.”
    I knew. Which narrowed my list of potential suspects down to the sixty thousand blue-collar folks who didn’t live in Sugar Hill or the condos along the lakeshore strip.
    Rusty white pickups? That slimmed our suspect list down to a thousand or so. But I didn’t need a thousand names. I already knew the name.
    I questioned Carl Novak, of course. Spoke to him on the porch of his double-wide in Poletown, a Slavic enclave in the smokestack shadows of the Deveraux hardboard plant. Novak didn’t invite me to step in out of the weather, a deliberate breach of etiquette in the north.
    His alibi was rock solid, though. Novak could account for every minute of the day Derek Patel disappeared. Witnesses could vouch for his whereabouts the entire time.
    Which proved beyond a doubt that he was involved. Nobody keeps total track of a day, unless they expect to answer questions about it. Innocents don’t need alibis.
    Still, on the face of it, Novak was as pure as the new-fallen snow. Probably felt ten feet tall and bulletproof. He was sure that he’d won, and he wanted me to know it.
    And I did. But there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.
    Dr. Patel and his family were out of their minds with worry. The state police assigned an electronic intercept team to their home to deal with a possible ransom demand.
    They tapped their landline home phone and their cells, ready to identify the relay tower as soon as the call came, then triangulate the signal and home in on it.
    But there was no call. No ransom demand. No threats.
    As the shopping days before Christmas dwindled down to the final few, there was no word at all.
    Derek Patel had vanished as though he’d never been.
    And when the dreaded phone call finally came, it didn’t ring at the Patels’ home. Or even at my office. It came to Bowie Cadarette, a conservation officer with the DNRE.
    A farmer named Pete DeNoux capped a coyote that had been killing piglets. Pete hurried his shot, didn’t nail the rogue cleanly. Gut-shot him, he thought.
    That would have been sufficient for some folks. The wound would likely prove fatal. The predator would crawl off into the brush and bleed out. Even if he survived, he’d be minus his taste for bacon.
    But DeNoux was a wood-smoke boy, born in the north. Raised on some unwritten rules. If you shoot something, you damn well put it down. You never leave a wounded animal to suffer. Ever. Not even a thieving coyote.
    Pete had no trouble following the blood spoor through the snow. Trailed the rogue male back to the farthest corner of his land, near his fence line.
    He found what was left of the animal near its den at the base of a toppled pine. The poor bastard had made it home, only to have his own pack turn on him. Maddened by the blood scent, they ripped him to pieces.
    The deep-woods wild has countless graces, but mercy isn’t one of them. It’s a human concept, and not all that common with us.
    Satisfied, if a bit dismayed, Pete turned to leave, then hesitated. There were a lot of bloody bones around that den. Too many for a rogue coyote. The pack had been working over another carcass. DeNoux took a closer look, expecting to find the remains of his piglets. The bones weren’t from a shoat, though. Nor a deer, nor anything else he recognized.
    At first.
    Pete was no biologist, but he’d butchered enough game to know the basics of bone structure.
    Even so, it took a good twenty minutes for his mind to accept what his eyes were