Body Brace (Caught Dead in Wyoming, Book 10)

by Patricia McLinn

He gestured for us to come to him.

  I gestured for him to come to us.

  Diana shoved me in the back.

  My stumble forward cut the distance in half. He angled slightly, cutting it more, without appearing to.

  “What did you see? Briefly.”

  I told him.

  As I finished up, Needham caught my eye and raised a hand to me. I reciprocated.

  Shelton looked over his shoulder, then back to me.

  “From the time I left Mrs. Parens down below where they were getting ready, I didn’t see anyone around — coming out or going in this channel from either side until the reenactors arrived. I didn’t have my eyes on it every second, but I was gauging distance as I came up, so I checked pretty regularly. Plus, it’s open on either side. No place for someone to duck into.

  “None of the reenactors did it — at least not when they went charging in there. They were one right after the other,” I said of the riders. “None entered this area far enough ahead of the others to have time to arrange anything. No time at all.”

  Shelton grunted.

  “Not to mention he was already dead.”

  He slitted his eyes. “You’re a Medical Examiner now?”

  “Common sense. He didn’t bleed when however many of those horses ran over him. So he was already dead. Not to mention the body staying in that position.”

  “You keep that off the air, Danniher.”

  “No promises.”

  “You ever want anything more from me—”

  “Hah. When have I ever gotten anything from you?”

  “I can see to it you get less. Blocked, stonewalled, banned from the department.”

  “And I can see to it that that’s reported all over KWMT-TV.”

  “All right, you two,” Diana said. “We won’t report it unless we get confirmation from a non-law enforcement source. And we’ll let you know before we put it on-air. In turn, the sheriff’s department will give us the okay to have it as an exclusive when it can release the information.”

  “Fine.” I pretended not be at my most gracious. Though, since I counted as a non-law enforcement source, we could use it any time.

  Shelton gave a sharp nod.

  In truth, we both knew it was likely moot. Even if no one else recognized the significance, Needham Bender would. And I strongly suspected O.D. Everett and Mrs. P had, along with half of the reenactors.

  On the other hand, the next edition of the Independence wouldn’t be out until Tuesday, so we could afford to hold off a bit.

  Shelton left us without even a word of farewell. Someday, that man will hurt my feelings.

  “Why did you ask that young reenactor about when they put their paint on?” Diana asked.

  “Theirs looked sharper than the victim’s. More deliberate. His looked … worn, weathered. Possible his were made from a different substance. If it was the same stuff, it might help with the timeline of how long he was out here.”

  “Huh. I’m sure I got good shots of that, but can’t hurt to be sure…”

  She stepped right up to the tape, adjusting the camera as she went, zeroing in on the body.

  And Shelton zeroed in on her.

  “Sampson. Move the circle back on that side. All the way to the wall.”

  He glared at me as he said it, which was entirely unwarranted, since I hadn’t moved.

  Deputy Lloyd Sampson looked at us apologetically, but he picked up the tape in his gloved hands and used it to gently herd Diana back to me.

  “To the wall,” Shelton repeated.

  Sampson kept us moving back, looping the tape over the bushy plant at the base of the wall, near the entrance to the cave, leaving the reenactors and their horses on one side and us on the other, but both groups outside the investigative circle.

  The reenactors had considerably more space. In contrast, with the tape on the other side of us also touching the butte wall, we were forced into the cave’s opening.

  Needham Bender grinned at us from the opposite side of the taped off crime scene, because he was now a good ten feet closer to the action than we were.

  How to make one journalist happy and another grumpy in one stroke.

  “It would serve Shelton right if it turned out the murderer hid in the cave and there’s all sorts of evidence here,” I grumbled.

  “We checked it out earlier in case,” Sampson assured us earnestly. “No footprints or any tracks going in or out except coyotes.”

  “Coyotes?” I looked over my shoulder into the cave. Its darkness could hide interminable depths.

  “Lots of ’em.”

  If it had been Shelton or Sheriff Russ Conrad or even Richard Alvaro, I would have scoffed. But Lloyd, bless his literal heart, did not say things to get a rise out of people. I turned on my phone’s flashlight and scanned deliberately into the dark for multiple pairs of yellow eyes.

  What I saw were rocks and dark space.

  A good start, but it was a quick and dirty approach that covered only a small portion of the area.

  I came back to my left and methodically scanned, working my way toward the right. I deliberately kept the scan low.

  I’d been in caves before when small eyes glowed at me.

  Bats.

  Not my favorite, swirling around my head. On the other hand, they weren’t likely to take a chunk out of one of my legs. Or both legs.

  But this cave stayed nicely dark, until I reached the far right-hand side.

  It wasn’t a pair of eyes that dully showed in the flashlight’s beam. It was a slightly curved string of at least five evenly spaced dots. Like a gap-toothed Cheshire Cat keeping a secret while lying on its side.

  “Diana?”

  She did not interrupt shooting to respond, “Hmm.”

  “When you get to a good spot to stop, come look at something back here.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  With Diana still shooting what was available to her of the crime scene, I edged inside the cave, keeping my flashlight fixed on the dots.

  I kept my light on the area for maybe ten minutes.

  Or at least thirty seconds.

  Barring my Cheshire Cat theory, the pattern didn’t make sense to me.

  I moved farther to the right to get a new angle. The dots maintained their spacing from each other, though now they looked more vertical.

  “Okay, what have you got?” Diana came inside the cave, standing on my left side.

  “See the line of dots?”

  “Not very well.” She flipped a light on. Nowhere near the power of even the smallest of the standalone lights she used if we had a nighttime set-up, yet significantly more powerful than my flashlight app. “Move more to the right.”

  With our lights hitting from different angles, she turned on the camera without a word.

  Unless she had a better view than I did, she still wasn’t sure, but she followed the cameraperson’s instinct to shoot now and decide later.

  She moved in closer, and I followed, keeping the same angle between our lights.

  Then I swung further right, but closer to the dots.

  We sucked in a breath simultaneously. A sound that echoed away into the cave.

  “Can’t do much more, Elizabeth. Not without better light. I’ve got decent footage, considering the circumstances. But you know we can’t use it on-air.”

  “Yeah. I know. It would break the dead body rule.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “We won’t get it on-air because KWMT-TV, like most stations, won’t let our viewers be exposed to the direct sight of a dead body, though if it’s covered or in a body bag, that’s fine. Like nobody knows what inside those bags.”

  She made a sound.

  “Okay, okay, you’re right. I’m not really lobbying to have dead bodies on-air. I agree with the rule. And the cable stations have gone way too far the other way. But when we see what you got, we might consider arguing that this is more like showing a mummy and those have been on-air. Plus, a shot of the back
of the belt with the studs helps humanize it, without showing the rest of the body.”

  The studs were what had caught my attention. From where I stood now, the belt appeared roughly vertical on a likely male body on its side, with its back to us.

  At some point a rock slide had covered most of it, leaving visible that span of belt, a scrap of checked fabric above it and denim below it.

  Another opening in the flow of rocks was roughly where one might expect to see a head. Or a skull.

  “See if you can get anything in that gap a little higher up. If there’s anything visible in there.”

  She grunted acknowledgement. “Probably not enough light, but I’ll try. Anyway, that’s not a bad argument about maybe getting something of this on-air, though I wasn’t thinking of journalistic standards. I was thinking of Shelton. Because he’s on his way over here. And he’s not going to want us to use the footage — and before you say we can use it anyway, do you want to torch that particular bridge.”

  “Bridge? One made out of fraying rope, swinging over an abyss, and only going one way, from us to them without reciprocating. What’s the use of that?”

  “They could have kicked us out completely, sent us back to the vehicles.”

  “What are you two doing in there?” Shelton asked.

  “We might get sent a lot farther away than that,” I said to her grimly. I turned to him. “Sergeant Shelton. We were just coming to get you. There’s something here you need to see.”

  * * * *

  Diana and I were pushed back out of the cave, but they couldn’t push us too much without letting us into the crime scene. The other crime scene.

  At some point, they’d figure out they needed to open an alleyway for us to leave, but for now, we were stuck on the fringes of each of the scenes.

  The only good news was we still had hours until air time to get this story back to the station.

  Thurston would have a hissy fit because this breaking story would intrude on his litany of churnalism stories — reports churned out from news releases and, in Fine’s case, called-in “exclusives” his cronies wanted on-air.

  The additional footage and detail on discovery of the body in the cave multiplied the news value of what we had on the body found during the reenactment.

  Especially since all other news outlets — in other words Needham — had been consigned to the far side of the main crime scene and could only gather what was happening in the cave from eavesdropping on bits and pieces law enforcement blabbed when they wandered his way.

  I saw him take out his phone and try to make a call. To us? Or to his staff at the paper?

  Didn’t matter, because there was no connection up here.

  Diana kept shooting, inside and outside the cave. I tried to edge closer to pick up words from law enforcement.

  I hoped she was having better luck with her camera than I was with my ears.

  The light had improved in the cave, because law enforcement brought in major illumination. It showed the cave wasn’t very deep, with no apparent outlet.

  The downside was all the law enforcement figures standing between us and the body. We couldn’t see past them except in snatches as they shifted positions. But that meant there were far fewer bodies between us and the original crime scene. Diana was happy with a sequence of a sheriff’s deputy from a neighboring county taking photographs while crime scene techs continued with the first body.

  Shelton turned and came directly toward me, lifting the police tape out of his way. This time, no messing around with gesturing for me to come to him.

  As soon as he passed Diana, she slid toward the cave and aimed her camera into the gap he’d left.

  Focused on me, he didn’t appear to notice.

  “How’d you spot this guy?” he demanded.

  “I told you, Sergeant. I was surveying the cave with the flashlight on my phone. And—”

  “Why?”

  “Does it matter why?” That was a mistake.

  A dry glint of amusement at my expense came into his eyes. “Afraid of critters?”

  “It’s always wise to know what’s behind you.” I might have had my own glint of amusement at his expense as I said that, since, at the moment, what was behind him was Diana getting footage.

  “Uh-huh. You were waving your phone around and—”

  “Methodically scanning the area.”

  “—what caught your eye?”

  “The studs on the belt. Not bright, but enough to form a pattern. A sort of vertical line, which didn’t match anything I could think of.”

  “Yeah, snakes don’t often have spots that shine in the dark.”

  Snakes. I hadn’t thought of that. Wasn’t about to let him see that. “Or go straight up walls of rock.”

  “Oh, they can do that. But not many around here glow in the dark even a little bit.”

  He was trying to rattle me — pun intended — and I refused to give him that pleasure. Bridge or no bridge to the sheriff’s department.

  “I went closer to examine the pattern, then Diana joined me with a better light and we saw it was a belt and the belt was still on what was left of a body.”

  “Did you have reason to suspect a body was here? Is that why you came up here in the first place?”

  “What? No. My coming up here was Mrs. Parens’ idea. So, if you’re going in for conspiracy theories, try her. But why on earth would I suspect there’d be a body here?”

  “No telling with you,” he grumbled.

  But his tone was slightly less hostile, which generally passed as friendly for Shelton.

  While keeping it conversational, I lowered my voice slightly, hoping to encourage him to spill. “It looks like quite an old body.”

  He grunted.

  “That could complicate identification.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “The University of Wyoming must have an anthropologist who could help with a forensic examination.”

  “Imagine so.”

  His mildness raised my suspicions.

  I probed more. “And if not, there’s the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification, which is excellent.”

  He stuck his hands in his pants pockets and rocked front to back on the soles of his boots. “That so?”

  “That’s so. They’ve helped resolve many missing, unidentified, and unclaimed cases.”

  “That’s real interesting,” I didn’t recall Sergeant Shelton ever describing anything I’d ever said that way. “Me? First thing I’d do is check out the wallet, see if there’s identification there.”

  “Wallet?”

  I pivoted my head toward the inside of the cave, and what I’d taken as a century-or-more-old mummy. I couldn’t see much through the thicket of law enforcement.

  “Yup. Wallet. In his back pocket. In his jeans. From Sears Roebuck.”

  “It’s a recent body?” I heard my voice climb in surprise. That rock slide sure didn’t look recent.

  “Didn’t say that.”

  “You said recent enough to have a wallet.”

  When did men start carrying those in a back pocket? And jeans from Sears. When had the catalog started? I’d have to look that up, but almost certainly more recently than I’d been thinking.

  The denim, checked shirt, and the location had seemed to my reenactment primed mind to indicate someone from that same late 1860s period.

  Shelton was — gleefully — saying I was wrong.

  Did that mean—?

  “Is there a connection to the death of—?” I jerked my head toward the body behind me.

  “Didn’t say anything like that. Don’t go jumping to another wild conclusion and putting it all over TV for everyone to start calling us with leads that waste our time.”

  “Who is it? Wait— Don’t answer that yet. Do you know who the first body is? The one out here.”

  “The Cottonwood County Sheriff’s Department is not releasing an identification at this time. If there’s a news conference, yo
u’ll be notified.”

  I scoffed at that. “But you do have an inkling about this body.”

  “Didn’t say that.”

  “But you said—”

  “We can see there’s a wallet. We’re not fooling with the evidence until the experts get here. Since we’re professionals.”

  He was slipping if he thought that dig would get to me. “How long ago did he die? How long has he been here?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “But you have an idea.”

  “Maybe.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “You think you know who it is.”

  “Might have a thought or two based on knowledge and observation, but that’s all the more reason not to blab to you. It will take the experts some considerable time to get here, examine the remains, take them back to where they can do their science, then get us the report.”

  “You could take a peek at the wallet.”

  His brows clamped down in a mighty scowl that I liked to think was necessary to conceal a temptation to grin.

  “Interfering with evidence. We don’t operate that way in the Cottonwood County Sheriff’s Department.”

  His harumph served as a good-bye.

  “Don’t go away angry, Sergeant,” I said a little louder than necessary.

  He pivoted toward the cave, taking a second to glare at Diana, who had stepped back from where she’d bowed the police tape into the cave just in time.

  She looked back at him blandly.

  He grunted, ducked under the tape, and returned to his spot in the semicircle of law enforcement types.

  As Diana adjusted the body brace, she curled her fingers around a strap with her thumb pointing skyward.

  She’d gotten something.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “We’ll have to see how well the body brace worked and what the camera picked up,” Diana said, when we were in the Newsmobile and, finally, away from prying ears. “But with all that light it should be better than what I got to start.”

  After our descent, we’d debated doing a quick setup on site, with the butte as my backdrop, but decided against it. Shelton had left a couple deputies down at the Newsmobile’s level with hand-held radios that allowed him to issue orders from up above.