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

seeing. Even then he harbored some doubts.
    Until he found the remains of a torn tennis shoe . . .
    DeNoux was so shaken, he wasn’t sure who to call. So he rang up the conservation department. And they called me.
     
    Ordinarily the district attorney would check out a crime scene personally, but Derek Patel’s skeletal remains were tied to a case Todd Girard had stepped away from. I guessed he’d be stepping away even farther now. Faster than a buck on the run.
    ADA Harvey Bemis arrived at the coyote den dressed for heavy weather. In his L.L. Bean down-filled parka, with matching tanker cap and furred earmuffs, he looked ready for a trek across the polar ice cap. I was wearing my usual leather car coat and jeans. In the shelter of the tall pines, twenty degrees doesn’t seem that cold. Especially when you’re seething.
    “Is there any question the remains are the Patel boy’s?” Harvey demanded.
    “Not much,” I said. “We haven’t found the skull yet, but the shoe is the brand and size described by the family and the blood type’s a match.”
    “Why haven’t you . . . found the skull?” Harvey asked, glancing around the savaged ground as though my officers and the state police CSI team had overlooked it somehow.
    “This isn’t the original dump site,” I explained. “My partner and a conservation officer are backtracking it now. Most likely the body was ditched out near the shore highway. The coyote pack found it there, tore it apart, then carried the pieces back to the den.”
    “I thought coyotes were afraid of people,” Harvey said.
    “That was before the Internet boom, when folks realized they could do business anyplace you can plug in a laptop. The population along the north is exploding, Harve. We’re crowding onto their habitat, and coyotes don’t read Darwin. As they get used to seeing us around, they lose their fear. If they find us dead on their turf, we’re lunch. Like roadkill, chickens in a coop, or a fawn frozen in the snow.”
    “Coyotes didn’t kill this boy,” Bemis said grimly. “We both know who did this.”
    “Actually, we don’t. Whatever the time frame for the killing turns out to be, I guarantee you Carl Novak’s going to have an alibi the KGB couldn’t break. A family reunion, a christening? He was there, surrounded by fifty witnesses.”
    “Then he hired it done!”
    “You’re exactly right. He did. And we helped him.”
    “Helped him? What—?”
    “Novak was working two jobs just to keep his daughter Julie in school, Harvey. He didn’t have two nickels to rub together. Then she was killed and Avery wrote him a check. Tipped him like a bellhop. Two hundred thou for his daughter’s life. And now?” I gestured at the savage clearing. “Look what a backwoods boy can accomplish with a few bucks.”
    “He’s not going to get away with this,” Bemis said furiously. “Alibi or no alibi, I want that sonofabitch arrested! I want him hauled into the House in cuffs—”
    “No,” I said.
    “What do you mean, no?”
    “I mean I’m not going to bust him, Harvey. He’ll just lawyer up, and we’ll get nothing. Novak’s not the one I want anyway.”
    “Of course he is! What are you talking about?”
    “His daughter died in the snow, and nobody was held accountable. And now we’ve got another dead kid, or what’s left of one. We gave Novak money instead of justice. So he used our cash to buy his own justice.”
    “He bought
murder!
”
    “Damn right. And that’s the guy I want. The sonofabitch who killed this boy for money. And Novak is going to give me his name. Because he’s angry and hurting, but most of all, because he feels
justified!
He thinks he bought retribution. When I tell him the truth, that he killed the wrong boy, he’ll unravel like a cheap suit.”
    “But you can’t tell him! It was revealed in confidence!”
    I almost decked him. It was a near thing. I snatched up a piece of Derek Patel’s shattered femur instead, and dragged the