special training in the discovery and handling of forensic evidence, a crew of the sheriff’s men searched the graveled shoulder of the highway, the slope beyond, and the swale at the foot of the slope in which the victims had been found.
The perpetrator had not returned directly to his vehicle after killing the woman, but had angled through the meadow to a stream, trampling the tall grass and leaving drops of blood on some of those flattened green blades. They found his discarded bloodstained shirt, plus a shoulder holster without a firearm.
The bodies were taken to the county morgue.
A tow-truck operator who had a contract with the county loaded the Shelby Super Snake onto a flatbed and, always in the company of a supervising deputy who could testify that the chain of evidence had not been broken, conveyed the vehicle to an impound garage in the same complex as the sheriff’s department HQ and the morgue.
The bloody shirt and the shoulder rig were brought to Carson Conroy in a brown paper shopping bag.
At forty-two, after he’d risen through the ranks of the medical examiner’s office in Chicago, murder capital of the nation, Carson had become dispirited because homicides so often went unsolved. Most of the murders were gang related, and the city’s governing elite had proved unable or unwilling to deal with the gangs.
The violence became as personal as it could get when his wife, Lissa, was killed in a drive-by shooting that had all the signs of a gangbanger initiation, some wannabe thug offing a civilian to prove that his balls were big and his heart was too small ever to trouble him with doubt. That was the hardest kind of case to solve, because no rational motive existed, no provable cause and effect. Carson knew Lissa’s killer would never be found, and he couldn’t live in a city where the triggerman who took her life still enjoyed a life of his own.
That was five years earlier, and still her murder had not been solved. Some nights, in canyons of restless sleep, Carson sought the satisfaction of bloody vengeance, scenarios in which he prowled mean streets, as though he were Denzel Washington in an Equalizer movie, found the shooter by dream logic, and cut him down dead. However, he had zero expectation of justice in the waking world.
Four years ago, having moved from an elected-coroner system to the establishment of a medical examiner’s office, Pinehaven County had hired Carson from a wide field of applicants. His task had been not merely to do professional forensic autopsies, the discoveries of which would stand up in court, but also to establish an adequate crime lab that would free the sheriff’s department from the need to farm out aspects of its investigations to state-level authorities. The county’s coroners had nearly always been retired doctors or active morticians who did their best, although none of them had sufficient training to understand the precise procedures necessary to avoid contaminating evidence derived from an autopsy.
During his first year on the job, Carson worked eighty-hour weeks and thrived on the schedule, which allowed him the forgetting that he sought. Year by year, he remained busy, but he settled into his position with confidence and pleasure. Born and raised a city boy, and black, he had expected that adjustment to this rustic environment would be taxing, to say the least; but it was smooth beyond all expectation. He enjoyed the modest scale of life here, the majesty of the Sierra Nevada, the natural beauty. He loved that deer sometimes wandered along Main Street as if they were tourists who were curious about the ways of Pinehaven’s inhabitants, loved even the nasty but industrious raccoons that worked assiduously to defeat each new and more complex latch that he installed on the lids of his trash cans. The people were not as he had been warned to expect. For forty years or longer, in most of the country, there had been a sophistication and fair-mindedness in rural counties and small towns about which many city dwellers and members of the media seemed clueless. Carson was happy here, charmed by the quiet flow of events, grateful to be free from the metropolitan bustle that made life a competitive marathon race without end.
In the past year or so, a disquieting change had come slowly to Pinehaven County: occasional outriders from MS-13 and other Central American gangs, scouting for opportunities like remote and easily concealed locations for meth labs, checking