Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #1: Books 1-4 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [classic children's novels txt] 📗

was a relief to see patches of blue among the gray. We crossed the bridge over the Missouri, from Chamberlain to Oacoma, at eleven the next morning. I had called ahead and arranged to meet Sheriff Pete Marlow at Al’s Oasis at eleven thirty, but he was already there drinking coffee when we arrived.

He was a big man with a beard and an easy smile. He offered us coffee, but I said I’d like to see where the skull was found, and the skull itself. He gave that smile that says “city folks is always in a hurry” and led us out to his Ford pickup.

We clambered in and he glanced at Dehan in the mirror. “It ain’t far. Shoot! Nothin’s far in Oacoma.” We crossed the I-90 and drove through the town. It was leafy and quiet, and sometimes you could imagine you were not in a town at all, but driving through open parkland. We crossed over a small rail track and turned onto Gilbert Avenue, and then took a dirt track down onto rolling green slopes that were dotted with occasional copses. He drove to the top of a small hill and stopped.

“We’ll walk it from here,” he said. “It’s about three or four hundred yards down, through them woods.”

There was an icy wind sweeping down from the north. It clawed its way through your clothes and bit into your skin. I saw Dehan wince and shudder as she pulled her hair from her face.

We were in a small delta valley. On my left, I could see the Missouri about a hundred and fifty yards away, huge, slow, and green, snaking past. Ahead of us, at the bottom of the valley, was a dense woodland that said there was a creek down there, feeding the trees with water on its way down to the big river. As if to confirm my thoughts, the sheriff pointed down and said, “That there is the North Fork creek, runs down to the river, yonder. That’s where we found it.”

We started to walk down the slope toward the woods, with condensation billowing from our mouths as though we were all smoking cigarettes. Dehan asked, “Who found it?”

“It was a family out walking their dogs. It’s nice ’round here, and the town folk like to go out in the evening or on the weekend. It was the dog found it, in the creek. God knows how long it had been there.”

The trees had grown dense, and you could hear the sound of water running and splashing below. Finally, we came out onto a narrow riverbank. The creek was maybe twenty feet across and fast flowing. Marlow pointed upstream.

“We figured maybe the body was upstream. If it wasn’t buried, the coyotes would get to it, and if the head come loose, maybe the water carried it down. We went up and searched. We took a couple of dogs, but we never found anything.”

I asked him, “Did you look downstream too?”

“Yup, but we never found anything there, neither. Plus, when the boys at the lab had a look, they said she hadn’t decomposed in water. There was very little sign of water erosion on the skull. They said their best guess was that the skull had only been in water for a short while. What a short while was they didn’t care to say.”

I pointed upstream, where he had pointed moments before. “So if I follow this creek back up that way, I will eventually come to the I-90…”

“Yup. You got three bridges side by side. You got the eastbound and the westbound, and then you got Highway 16. They all cross over the creek at the same point.”

Dehan was breathing into her hands and said, “The I-90 is going to take you all the way to Seattle. But before you get there, you are going to come to Butte, where the I-15 is going to take you south all the way to San Diego MCAS Miramar.”

The sheriff looked at her like she might be crazy, but he was too polite to say so. I said, “What are you, an atlas?”

She shrugged. “I know my roads.”

I turned to the sheriff. “Can we see the skull?”

He began making his way back up the slope through the trees. “I figured you’d want to. It’s in the truck. I made you a copy of the file we have on it. It ain’t much, but it’s all what there is.”

We got back to the truck, and he yanked open the back. There was a blue-and-white cooler, which he opened and withdrew a cardboard box from. From that, he extracted a human skull. It gave me a frenzied grin which, oddly, was devoid of all humor because the eyes were dark and hollow. The jaw was still attached, but when I tipped the skull back I could see there had been some dental work done.

I asked him, “Were any attempts made to extract DNA?”

He shook his head. “We haven’t got many resources, Detective Stone. There was nobody missing from my county, nor any of the neighboring counties.”

“Sure. Can I borrow the skull? I can get my commander to submit a formal request…”

“I’ve already prepared the paperwork. All you have to do is sign the receipt. Ain’t no darn use to me, and if you can find out who the poor girl was and give her family some peace, I figure it’s more use to you than me.”

We took care of the paperwork and then went and checked in at the Oasis Inn. There was a cute parade of shops whose fronts were made out to look like old Western buildings, but inside they were the same prefab shops you’d find in New York or Los Angeles. Dehan stood staring at them a while and said, “It makes you wonder, doesn’t it, Stone? They had the