Dead Sleeping Shaman Read Online Free Page A

deep blue sky, or all those high puffy clouds. I vowed I’d never come here again. My feet dragged like big cement blocks. I didn’t want to get to where she lay. Even more than last time, I didn’t want to see her. I was hoping that when we turned the last bend she’d be gone. Let Dolly and Lieutenant Brent think me crazy. I’d take the blame if she’d come out of some catatonic state, gotten up, dusted off her wild skirt, shaken herself, and gone off the way she’d come.
    Dolly, ever the sprinter, hurried ahead then turned to give me one of her exasperated, face-wrinkling looks.
    “You coming or what?” she demanded, hands at her hips, the drooping gun belt showing under her heavy cop jacket.
    “Coming,” I mumbled as I took the last turn that would bring me to the woman, all her color, and that moveable hat.
    The crows were still on guard, cawing when they saw us. Their numbers had grown. Like astonished spectators at an accident, they bowed and flew in and out of the jack pine, stopping to turn their nervous eyes down toward the woman and then toward us.
    The turkey buzzard at the top of the tree was gone. I figured crows can sometimes be too much for anybody.
    She was there. The big straw hat had fallen off completely and lay beside her, tipped up against her immovable body. Her blue, red-rimmed, eyes stared out across the path, toward the woods. The look on her face would have been benign if it weren’t for the many flies that had gathered, making her features seem to move. Two medics were stepping back from the body.
    “That her?” Dolly asked me ingenuously, standing with her feet apart, heavy shoes planted firmly in the sand.
    I wanted to say “No, that’s another one,” but didn’t because my stomach was turning again and I knew I had almost nothing left down there to give up.
    She looked at me over her shoulder. “Know her?”
    I shook my head.
    “Me either. Sure dressed funny. Think she’s a gypsy?” She bit her lip and looked hard at the woman. “Probably a suicide, you think?”
    “How?”
    “Poison. Pills.”
    “You see a pill bottle? Poison?”
    She shook her head, set her crime scene bag and clipboard down, then whisked her hands off on her pants. “Could be in her pocket. I’m not touching anything.”
    Dolly greeted the medics, her hand out. “I’ll be the officer in charge on this one,” she said. “She dead?”
    The two guys wore white suits, booties covering their feet, and clear latex gloves on their hands. Hard to tell what they looked like, other than Pillsbury Dough Boys. One nodded. “Dead all right.”
    “Anything obvious?”
    He shook his head.
    Dolly set her bag on the ground, asked the two guys for their names, then wrote them on her clipboard. The men went back toward their ambulance.
    “Gotta keep a scene log,” she told me as she held her clipboard out importantly. “You’re on it, too. Anybody who gets near this woman goes into my log.
    “And I gotta tape the area.” Dolly busily drew a big roll of yellow police tape from her bag. She handed one end of the tape to me, hollering for me to watch where I walked, then, carefully staying away from the body, she ran the tape around a few of the big trees, making a large square with the dead woman at its center.
    “That should do it,” she said, eyeing our work. I said I thought it looked fine, the tape taking in the entire area around the body—to the back, both sides, and way down in front. Dolly pulled out her camera and began to take photos of the scene. Behind her, I slipped my camera from my pocket and took photos of my own. Quickly, before she noticed and yelled at me, I snapped the area, not just where the woman lay, but wider shots—all around her. I knelt and took contrast shots. The sun was directly overhead—not much shadow, but still I thought I saw one place that was different from the rest. Standing, looking down, I couldn’t see what the photo had shown. I would look at it again, after I