A Darkness Absolute (Casey Duncan #2)(66)

And then the smell vanishes. I stop. I turn around, but I still can’t smell it, and even when I retreat a few paces, the scent eludes me.

“Want a clue?” Cypher says. “Just ask nicely.”

“It’s the wind,” Dalton says.

“Hey, don’t be stealing my thunder.”

I ignore him. I see what Dalton means. Facing north, the light breeze blows straight at me. When I turn around, I lose that, which means I’ve gone too far. I’ve passed my goal.

I back up and catch it again, but faint, meaning I’m still upwind. I keep going and … I get a face full of the breeze and a nose full of the stink of decomposing flesh.

I survey the landscape. Then I walk step by step until the smell just begins to fade.

I turn. I look. I see nothing.

“Red hot,” Cypher says. “You sure you don’t want that clue? I’ll trade you for—”

Cypher takes a step toward me, and Dalton’s foot shoots out, kicking Cypher in the back of the knees. The big man goes down, then scrambles to flip over, stopping when Dalton presses the gun to his shoulder.

“That’s some seriously bad aim, boy,” Cypher says. “Guess that’s what happens when you don’t go to a proper school. Your sense of anatomy gets all fucked up.”

“My sense of anatomy is just fine.”

“Why—” Cypher stops and chortles. “Wait. I know this one.” He glances at me. “When I was sheriff, I’d grab a guy and twist his index finger. He’d wonder why I did that, instead of twisting his arm.”

“Because you might hesitate to break his arm,” I say, “but you’re not going to mind snapping his finger. It isn’t an empty threat.”

“Good girl. Seems your boss picked up a few of my tricks. Too bad he also learned from his daddy, with his over-re-li-ance on firearms. A real man would put that gun down and take me on properly.”

“Then I guess your idea of a real man is a functional idiot,” Dalton says.

Cypher throws back his head and howls a laugh. “Oh, that is good. You just forgot to follow it up with ‘and that’s not surprising, considering where it’s coming from.’”

“That’s another of those things that goes without saying.”

Cypher grins at me. “The boy’s real good at learning his lessons. When I was sheriff, sometimes, I’d give guys the option of skipping chopping duty by going a few rounds with me in the town square. You know how many lacked the brains to refuse? Small brains. Big egos. Plenty of entertainment for all. Now, boy, if you’d given me a second, you’d have seen I wasn’t making a move on your cute detective. I was just going to point her in the right direction.”

“Up,” I say.

“What?”

I squint into the treetops. “The right direction is up. Silas is somewhere…” I trail off as I walk, my gaze fixed on the trees until I see a shape. It’s so high I need my binoculars. I look through and see what is definitely a man’s hand dangling from a branch.

Cypher says, “If you think I put him up there, you’ve got a very generous opinion of a big man’s agility level. I can tell you what happened, but you’re going to need to take my word for it, ’cause that’s one crime scene you’re not reaching without wings.”

Dalton hands me his pack. Then he unzips his jacket.

“You’re seriously going to climb up there?” Cypher says. “Guess you really are part ape.”

Dalton ignores him and hands me his jacket. He’s wearing a T-shirt, and as he grips the tree trunk to scale it, his muscles flex. Cypher whistles.

“You got some guns, boy. Not exactly my .45 Specials, but you’re not as skinny as I remember. You sure you don’t want to take me on? I’m getting to be an old man. You might actually win.”

Dalton snorts.

Cypher laughs again. “You really did grow some brains, didn’t you?”

Dalton starts to climb. It’s not easy—he has to scale the lower trunk like a fireman’s pole before he reaches branches thick enough to support him. Once he’s up there, across from Cox, he calls down, “Tell me what you need in situ, and then I’ll have to bring the crime scene to you.”

I ask him to make note of Cox’s position along with a preliminary assessment of injuries. He does and then says, “I’m bringing him down.”

He manages to lower Cox about ten feet before he runs out of decent branch steps. Then he says, “He’s coming express,” and I step back. He lowers the body as best he can and then lets Cox fall.

The corpse hits the snow face-first. Resisting the urge to turn him over, I assess his back. He’s wearing a parka. Boots, too. One at least. The other is gone, along with the leg that once occupied it. I brush snow away from the severed leg. It’s been pulled off, not cut. The flesh is mangled and decomposed enough to tell me Cox has been in that tree for about a week. Which means he’s not our man.

Dalton hops down as I move to checking the only other obvious area of injury I see from the rear—Cox’s neck. It’s been bitten from the back, with perfect puncture wounds on either side of his spine. Bitten and broken, his head at an impossible angle. Dalton confirms the neck was like that before he moved the body.