By DB Dakota -- Mystery/Crime, 365 pages
Cover art by Gracie Gralike
What an awful thing it is to happen upon
the body—your friend—ID’d only by a scrap of clothing. The law alleges he
jumped off the bridge—600 feet? Fell? Thrown? Racing home to the victim’s Taos
adobe, you find him there and on TV being interviewed: He must sell his art,
over a hundred paintings. Yet he’s famous, so why the backlog? And on the
screen is your own portrait right there in the home of the NY TV host. What is
going on? You need a private investigator. No need for the sheriff, he hates
Indians. And sheriff is the brother of the artist’s agent.
Does
the PI see a connection here? You bet, strong enough to launch a sequence of
psyche stratagems to break the brothers, because the TV pitchman is really the
agent, impersonating his own client. You happen to know music—you have a little
band—and so does the PI, so here it comes: The brothers in the nightclub being
entertained by the ballad reenact to what happened at the bridge. They scramble
to the crime scene to cover up something overlooked when they murdered. The
PI’s hi-tech gadgetry at the scene cuffs them.
Excerpt:
“Mark, come back!” Thornburgh shouted and
waited. “I want to show you something.” He was twenty yards farther down, about
to step off the groomed fill onto the natural cañon ledge. Hearing her call, he
returned to her side. “Come right here and stand beside me.” She pointed far
down to the river. “I want to know if from this point right here you can see
the spot where the body was way down there. Take these.” She handed him
binoculars.
“Hard to make out from here, but, yeah, I
think… in the general vicinity—yeah, I do.” Markeen pointed and handed her the
glasses. “See that boulder beside a huge log?”
“I see several logs. The one running this
way?” She gestured.
“No, the one that looks like it’s resting
on something. It’s backed up against another log. It’s kinda short, running
like so,” he traced a line in the air. “It’s pointing toward the water.”
“Gotcha. Okay, now I want you to stand
still right where you are and turn right around and tell me what that is.”
Thornburgh faced the bridge’s underpinning and pointed.
“That, Mack, is a chain. What do you think
it is?”
“A chain,” she smirked and fluttered her
eyes.
“So?”
She stepped up close to it. “What’s it
doing wrapped around this big girder?”
Following her, Markeen fingered his hair
back. “Nothing, it’s just dangling there, not holding anything.”
She scrambled upon a rock and placed a hand
on a modest steel claw, which was attached to one end of the chain. “What do
you call this thing?”
“I think that’s what they call a grab-hook.
Loggers use them, for one. There are all sorts of uses.”
“How’s it work?” Thornburgh stepped aside.
Markeen took her place and began to handle
the steel link chain as if throwing it. “In this case, you’d toss one end of
the chain around the back side of this girder.” The steel I-beam, one of
several, angled from a buried concrete footing upward to a point near the
bridge floor, serving as anchor and brace. “Then you’d crawl up on that rock under
there;” he knelt and pointed. “Pick up the end of the chain with one hand and
pull it back around the girder to the starting point, right here.” He stood and
indicated. “So you’ve made a loop around the girder. That’s about a ten-foot
chain. Then you’d slap the grab-hook across the chain like so. You’d grab a
link and hook it, see?”
No comments:
Post a Comment