Lake of Tears Read Online Free

have to face—someone put another person into the bottom of the boat, hoping they would burn away to nothing
at all.
    How could this have happened? How could one human being do this to another? And worse yet, it was probably someone she knew, passed in the grocery store, filled her car with gas next to them. Sometimes she hated the world, just hated knowing how bad it could be.
    She exhaled slowly out her nose, then filled her chest with new air. “Nope. Hope it was an accident, but I’ve got a bad feeling.”
    “I called Petey. He’s grabbing the camera and he’s on his way.”
    “Good. I want lots of shots, and not just of the bones and the fire, but of the whole area.”
    “Got it.”
    Claire continued, “I don’t want anyone to touch anything. Nothing. Don’t move a twig until we get the forensics done on this. Let’s cordon off all the way to the road. Keep people away from the beach, too. Don’t let any campers come in and pitch their tents or park their three-wheelers. Although I’m not sure it’s worth the effort; after all, there were about five hundred people down here last night. Who knows what we’ll be able to find.”
    Amy glanced up at the sky. “I hate to tell you this, but it’s looking like it might rain.”
    Claire stared west, across the river, the direction their weather came from. A slow slurry of iron-gray clouds was moving in. At least the clouds didn’t look like they would produce a thunderstorm, but they still needed to act fast. “Shit. We need to put up tarps. Take care of that. I want the whole area not just cordoned off, but covered.”
    Amy craned her head up toward the sky and then asked, as if the clouds might know the answer, “What do you think? Do you think someone did this? Put the body in the boat?”
    “Could be. I’ve seen it before. Some guy murders someone and then tries to burn the evidence, thinking they can completely burn a body—which is pretty hard to do—and that if there is no body, they can’t be charged with a murder, which is not true either. In Minneapolis, some guy killed his wife, then put her body in the car and started it on fire. When they managed to put the fire out, he told the fireman that she had been drinking and smoking and probably set herself on fire. The medical examiner noticed the bone fractures in her skull when he was doing the postmortem. Traces of her blood were found in the kitchen on the rolling pin, of all things. Some argument gone very wrong.”
    Amy smiled at her. “Thus ends the lesson for this day.”
    “Okay, but you asked. Get on the horn and get some tarps down here. We need to get this area secured.”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    Claire looked at the ground around the burn site: trampled grass, weeds bent over, but surprisingly, not much of the surrounding area was burned. She had seen the fire department at the scene last night, the guys leaning against their red behemoth, enjoying the spectacle. Maybe they suggested to the crew of the Burning Boat project to wet down the grass around the boat before they lit it on fire. Wouldn’t be hard to carry water up from the lake.
    She walked up to the remnants of the fire and squatted down, getting her first real close look at the bones. They were not that easy to see, discolored as they were by the fire. If you looked for them, they almost disappeared. Like one of those Magic Eye games where if you squinted your eyes or blurred your vision, you could see the outline of the bones more easily that way.
    Claire leaned in and smelled the damp smokiness of the burn. The skull looked like one of the malformed pots the kids had made, turned on its side, its eye sockets like holes in a bowling ball. It looked like a couple of the ribs were broken, and she wondered if this had happened as the boat had burned, wood collapsing on top of the body—or if it had happened before the body had been moved to the boat.
    A bundle of bones, that’s all that was left of someone who was probably