First page Friday: On th Night Road.
Jun. 18th, 2010 05:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
valarltdThis piece is, as yet, unpublished.
Another rat-gnawed skeleton dumped in a deserted field was no way to start a Monday morning, Sheriff Gary Redhorse decided. Kissed awake by a twink bearing breakfast in bed, sometime around elevenish, would have been much preferable to tramping around a dew-soaked field at the ass-crack of dawn, staring at scattered bones with teeth marks on them.
Gary knelt and prodded one of the bones, an ulna he guessed. The animals had cracked this one open to eat the marrow. He wrinkled his nose in disgust. Twinks at elevenish looked better all the time.
It was somewhere after eleven, but before midnight, when he managed to get home. The guy in the field had been dead when he'd been dumped about six months before, the examiner said. It looked a little like a case from about twenty years before and a lot like the last five skeletons that had been found in that same field. All eaten by wolves and rats and all decapitated. No skulls had been found.
A killer picking his county as a dumping ground was a load of shit Gary didn't need. Especially one that took the heads with him. He tossed his hat on its hook and started stripping down for a shower.
He did some of his best thinking under the hot water. Tammy, the dispatcher, joked about installing a shower in his office so he could solve the crimes there. Gary liked his quiet county, with its population of about three thousand people and its low crime rate. A few boosted cars, some brawls, a lot of domestics, a couple rapes and usually less than three killings a year made up his blotter. Or they had, until these skeletons had started turning up out by Crow Lake.
Another rat-gnawed skeleton dumped in a deserted field was no way to start a Monday morning, Sheriff Gary Redhorse decided. Kissed awake by a twink bearing breakfast in bed, sometime around elevenish, would have been much preferable to tramping around a dew-soaked field at the ass-crack of dawn, staring at scattered bones with teeth marks on them.
Gary knelt and prodded one of the bones, an ulna he guessed. The animals had cracked this one open to eat the marrow. He wrinkled his nose in disgust. Twinks at elevenish looked better all the time.
It was somewhere after eleven, but before midnight, when he managed to get home. The guy in the field had been dead when he'd been dumped about six months before, the examiner said. It looked a little like a case from about twenty years before and a lot like the last five skeletons that had been found in that same field. All eaten by wolves and rats and all decapitated. No skulls had been found.
A killer picking his county as a dumping ground was a load of shit Gary didn't need. Especially one that took the heads with him. He tossed his hat on its hook and started stripping down for a shower.
He did some of his best thinking under the hot water. Tammy, the dispatcher, joked about installing a shower in his office so he could solve the crimes there. Gary liked his quiet county, with its population of about three thousand people and its low crime rate. A few boosted cars, some brawls, a lot of domestics, a couple rapes and usually less than three killings a year made up his blotter. Or they had, until these skeletons had started turning up out by Crow Lake.
