Grave Sight Page 0,7

the steep slope, all I felt were the faint pings of ancient deaths. The world is sure full of dead people.

When I was convinced that no matter how stealthily he might be able to move, Paul Edwards could not have followed us, I paused at a rocky outcrop and took off my dark glasses. I looked at Tolliver.

"Bullshit," he said.

"No kidding."

"The gun's missing, but it's suicide? Shot twice, and it's suicide? I could swallow one of those, but not both. And anyone who's going to kill himself, he's going to sit on the log and think about it. He's not going to stand downhill of a landmark like that. Suicides go up." We'd had experience.

"Besides," I said, "he fell on the hand that would've been holding the gun. If by some weird chance that should have happened, I feel pretty confident that no one would be reaching under the corpse to steal the gun."

"Only someone with a cast-iron stomach."

"And through the eye! Have you ever heard of anyone shooting himself like that?"

Tolliver shook his head.

"Someone done killed that boy," he said. Some days Tolliver is more country than others.

"Damn straight," I said.

We thought about that for a minute. "But we better keep on looking for the girl," I said. Tolliver would expect me to make up my own mind about that.

He nodded. "She's out here, too," he said, a little question in his voice.

"Most likely." I cocked my head to one side while I considered. "Unless the boy was killed trying to stop someone from taking her." We started walking again, and the ground became easier going; certainly not a flat surface, but not so steep.

There are worse ways to spend a fall day than walking through the woods while the leaves are brilliant, the sun dappling the ground from time to time when the clouds shifted. I felt out with all my senses. We tracked a ping that, upon attaining, proved too old by a decade to be the girl. When I was standing a foot from the site, I knew the body to be that of a black male who had died of exposure. He had become naturally buried under leaves, branches, and dirt that had washed downhill over the course of the past decade. What you could see was blackened ribs with tattered cloth and bits of muscle still clinging to the bones.

I took one of the red cloth strips I keep in my jacket pocket, and Tolliver took a whippy length of wire from a supply he kept stashed in a long pocket on his pants leg. I tied a strip to one end of the wire while Tolliver ran the other end into the ground. We'd walked maybe a quarter of a mile southwest from the fallen tree, and I jotted that down.

"Hunting accident," Tolliver suggested. I nodded. I can't always pin it down exactly, but the moment of death had that feel: panic, solitude. Long-suffering. I was certain he'd fallen out of his deer stand, breaking his back. He'd lain there until the elements claimed him. There were a few pieces of wood still nailed way up in the tree. Named Bright? Mark Bright? Something like that.

Well, he wasn't part of my paycheck. This man was my second freebie for the town of Sarne. Time to earn some money.

We started off again. I began working my way to the east, but I felt uneasy. After we'd proceeded maybe sixty feet from the hunter's bones, I got a welcome, sharp buzz from the north. Uphill, which was slightly odd. But then I realized that we had to go uphill to get to the road. The closer to the road I climbed, the closer I approached the remains of Teenie Hopkins - or some young white girl. The buzzing turned into a continuous drone, and I fell to my knees in the leaves. She was there. Not all of her, but enough. Some big branches had been thrown across her for concealment, but now they were dead and dry. Teenie Hopkins had spent a long, hot summer under those branches. But she still made more of a corpse than the hunter, despite insects, animals, and a few months of weather.

Tolliver knelt by me, one arm around me.

"Bad?" he asked. Though my eyes were closed, I could feel the movements of his body as his head turned, checking in all directions. Once we'd been surprised at the dumpsite by the killer returning with another body. Talk about