to me as if she had died with enough blood left to keep her alive at least a while longer. ‘How cold did it get last night?’
‘Right around freezing, per the Weather Service guy. That’d be airport temps, which I’d guesstimate might run a degree or two higher in a spot like this, with all these conifers around.’
I said, ‘Time of death?’
‘Full livor with coag,’ he said. ‘Max rigor by the time we got here. Say at least four hours ago, probably not over twelve. Best I can do for now.’
Meaning she was probably still alive when the weather front came through. I tried to imagine dying like this, in the cold rain with blue-white lightning strobing the sky and thunder shaking the earth.
‘So, what the hell was this about?’ I said.
Wayne cleared his throat again. ‘Been hoping you’d tell me,’ he said. ‘All I know is, something’s not right here, Lou.’
‘That true,’ observed Mouncey. ‘Lady got dead all over her.’
‘That’s not what I mean,’ Wayne said.
‘Then what do you mean?’
‘I mean this just ain’t natural.’
Mouncey snorted again, moving up for a closer view of the face, narrowing her eyes. ‘Maybe them Romans figure she a Saviour or something.’
Dropping the flashlight back into my pocket, I looked at Wayne.
‘Uh, well, okay,’ he said. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but the whole show took a hell of a lot of figurin’ aforethought, and nobody does something like this for a pair of earrings.’ He removed his bifocals and shook off the beads of rain. ‘Which’d knock out robbery and random.’ Back on with the glasses. ‘Leavin’ us with personal and premeditated. No immediately lethal wounds that meet the eye. Anybody’s guess what the actual COD’s gonna turn out to be.’
‘How many doers are we thinking?’ I said.
‘Well, the beam’s six feet long,’ Wayne said. ‘It and the woman together are gonna weigh a little south of two hundred pounds. She was bound to be thrashing to beat hell on top of that – no one guy’s gonna manage it. Even two’d be a stretch.’
Mouncey folded a stick of Doublemint into her mouth.
‘And while we’re amazin’ ourselves,’ said Wayne, ‘there’s this.’ He produced a little zip-lock evidence sleeve containing what looked at first like an irregularly shaped silver button a half-inch or so in diameter but actually turned out to be a crudely struck, heavily tarnished coin with some kind of profile on one side and a standing figure on the other. Taking it from Wayne’s hand, I felt an odd heat through the clear plastic.
‘How’d it get so warm?’ I asked, thinking Wayne was right; there was an eerie wrongness here, one that somehow wouldn’t let itself be pinned down.
Wayne frowned. ‘Didn’t feel warm to me.’
Mouncey touched the coin with her fingertips. ‘Feel like pocket temperature, Lou.’
I shook my head. Maybe I had a fever or something. Already knowing the answer, I said, ‘What kind of coin does this look like to you, Wayne?’
‘Had to guess, I’d say Roman.’
One of Mouncey’s eyebrows went up.
Wayne shrugged, looking a little embarrassed, the way he always did when confronted by something beyond his rational understanding.
‘“The footprints of a gigantic hound”,’ I said.
‘Huh?’ said Wayne. Mouncey stared at me.
‘My grandmother said that sometimes. It’s from Sherlock Holmes – means something strange that you can’t explain.’ I held the coin up to the light. ‘Doesn’t look like this thing’s been in the dirt long.’
‘Wasn’t in the dirt at all,’ Wayne said. ‘One of the techs found it by her shoes, just layin’ there in the leaves and litter.’
I handed the coin back to him. ‘Show me where it was.’
He stepped over and indicated the spot, a couple of feet from the base of the tree and maybe eight inches from the nearest shoe.
I stared at the coin, trying to make sense of it being here instead of in the ground somewhere in the Holy Land, or maybe Europe. But for some reason the strangeness didn’t seem to run very deep, as if the situation made some kind of non-logical sense to me.
‘How they carry they money anyway, them little dresses they wore?’ wondered Mouncey. She shook rain off the fingers of one long pink-palmed hand.
‘Who?’
‘Romans.’
‘Maybe they kept it in those tin hats with the bristles on top,’ Wayne said thoughtfully.
I said, ‘Could her connection with the department be what got her killed?’
Wayne looked up at the dead face for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Nothing here to tell us, Lou,’ he said. ‘But that would have been a good while back, and it don’t sound like she was ever real tight with the job anyway – all she ever actually did was them screens, right? You feature anybody dreaming this up because she kept him off the job with a bad report?’
I nodded, but my mind was somewhere else.
‘How about a whole chariot-full of ’em get together and dream it up?’ said M. ‘Be like a focus group.’
‘And still wouldn’t tell us anything about the coin,’ I said.
‘Crime provide more of a challenge for our mind this way,’ Mouncey philosophised. ‘Too easy, we apt to fall into sloth.’
I turned up my collar and walked a loop around to where the techs were examining the ground, what was left of my knees screaming at me in the wet cold. I thought some more about dying out here alone in the night, the interstate roaring with cars, vans, SUVs, eighteen-wheelers – all those safe, dry bubbles of warmth less than two hundred yards away but for Dr Gold as unreachable as the stars. I’d read somewhere that on the verge of death everybody prays if there’s time, but I wasn’t sure how the author got his information. I wondered if Gold had given up, maybe even welcomed death, releasing her spirit to whatever eternity she thought was waiting. Or had she died saying the Shema, still trying to hold on, praying for her life?
Shema. An image of the word floated up in my consciousness, and behind it came Aleha ha-shalom. Then – before I could slam the door on it – a face. I stood still and took a couple of deep breaths, then walked back to where Wayne was watching M try to shield her notebook from the rain with her body as she wrote in it.
I said, ‘Wayne, you might as well go ahead and bag her as soon as you’re done here.’ I glanced back at the milling reporters. ‘These guys will be in trouble if they don’t get some close-ups and quotes, so how about you give them a few?’
‘Anything
