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“Why drag him all the way out here?” Dreyfus mused.
Jason shook his head. Why this location? Why that tarot card? Those were just two of a slew of questions that needed to be answered. But not by him.
At this distance, he could not hear Sam, but he could see the effect of his words on the men he was speaking to. They looked varying shades of sheepish and angry.
Having delivered God only knew what verdict, Sam turned and came toward them, his boots grinding the gravel and sandy soil to dust. Dreyfus straightened up as though bracing for impact.
“Ready to go?” Sam asked Jason. His eyes were colder than old ice, but that was not for Jason. It would be for the perceived incompetence of everyone else on this mountaintop.
Jason’s hand tightened on the knobby handle of the blackthorn walking stick that had once belonged to Sam’s grandfather, and pushed to his feet. “Yep.”
Sam turned to Dreyfus. “You’ve got a briefing scheduled for ten a.m. tomorrow with the coroner, and an eleven a.m. conference call with your SAC and Sheriffs Luna and Corday. Phone me afterward.”
Dreyfus said faintly, “Okay.”
Sam gave her one of those steely, steady looks, but said nothing else. Dreyfus looked at Jason. He winked at her. She managed a faint grin.
She said to Sam in a firmer voice, “Yes, sir.”
“Thank you for not saying I told you so,” Jason muttered as they passed another group of deputies.
They were making their way down the increasingly muddy track back to the rental car. Thanks to the lousy weather, it was nearly dark by now, and the poor visibility wasn’t helping matters. Lying around Sam’s mother’s place, Jason had seriously overestimated his strength. Despite the extra support of tape beneath the brace, his ankle was more painful with every step. His back hurt, his hip tingled, and his knee throbbed. He wasn’t being as careful as he needed to be about where he stepped, and more than once the only thing that kept him from planting his face on rock was Sam’s grip.
Like now, when pebbles skittered out from beneath Jason’s boot and Sam’s hand tightened on his elbow.
“You’re welcome.”
The stern tone brought a smile to Jason’s mouth, but the march back to the car was way worse than the hike to the crime scene. He could not have made it without Sam’s help, and he was mad at himself for insisting on coming along and making Sam’s job harder.
To distract himself from the pain of his ankle and other physical woes, he said, “What do you think?”
“I think it’s not my case. And it’s sure as hell not your case.”
“You don’t believe the two crimes are connected?”
“I have no idea. Your involvement relates strictly to the missing art.”
“I know that. I’m not talking about my involvement.” Jason could hear the testiness in his voice. He tried to sound less irritable. “I’m thinking about your involvement. You’ve agreed to act as an advisor, if—when—needed. So? What do you think about the staging of the body? Could this be—”
Sam cut him off. “It’s too soon to think anything. We—they—haven’t even received the coroner’s report yet.”
“Right, but the staging of the body? The tarot card in the dead man’s pocket?”
Sam let out a long, weary breath. “I know you know this, but I’m going to remind you anyway that sometimes—in fact, with depressing frequency—a body is staged in an effort to make it look like something it isn’t.”
“Yes, I do know. But we’re talking about more than a few candles or hair clippings or smeared words in blood. It took effort and planning to get that body out here. It takes effort to hang a full-grown man from a tree.”
“That’s why they call it premeditation. Because it requires planning and effort.”
Jason was silent, partly because he needed his breath for this stretch of the trail. As usual, Sam was correct. Trying to stage a body to look like the first in a serial killing was a common trick of murderers hoping to deflect suspicion from themselves and their usually too obvious motives. It was especially popular with kids and spouses—though it had been known to happen in the art world on dreadful occasion.
The logistics involved in a lone woman transporting the dead weight of an adult male up a hillside and then hanging him in a tree would be discouraging, but not impossible given that the suspected woman would be someone whose job would make her familiar with things like leverage and locomotion. Besides, if Minerva Khan was in the process of moving out of her marriage, there was a reasonable chance she had a new romantic interest in her life, and that new romantic interest might very well have ended up as an accomplice in homicide.
On the other hand, if Mrs. Khan was going to knock off her old man anyway, why bother to steal his art collection?
* * * * *
The shadow of your smile
