Scent of Evil Read Online Free Page A

got?”
    “It’s over here.” He led the way under the bridge, keeping to the rocks to avoid disturbing the damp soil.
    Once in the shade, I paused and blinked to get used to the low light. It was suddenly delightfully cool, with the sound of water splashing off the concrete bridge that arched overhead, and the shadows flickering with reflected spots of sunlight. There was a slight but permeating odor of rotting vegetation.
    “Nice place.”
    Klesczewski pointed to the narrow wedge where the bank met the underside of the bridge, some six feet up from the water’s edge. “You’re not the only one who thinks so.”
    Running parallel to the brook, a small shelf had been scooped out of the embankment, and on it was a two-inch-thick mattress of old newspapers. Scattered around the shelf was an assortment of everyday trash—bottles, food wrappers, odd scraps of paper, most of it fairly fresh.
    “The Dew Drop Inn, complete with air-conditioning—and recently occupied.”
    Klesczewski nodded. “That’s not all.” He retraced our steps to the opening, so we were half in the shade and half back in the glare. He pointed again to the ground.
    I squatted down, keeping my hands on my knees. Resting on top of the moist, pungent earth was an unusually fat, chewed-up wad of gum, still pink and clean.
    “What do you think?” I asked.
    Klesczewski looked vaguely uncomfortable. He hadn’t led me all the way down here to hear me ask that. But he had led me, so I knew he’d reached some conclusions.
    “Somebody’s living here, or at least they were, up to a few hours ago. Maybe they saw something.”
    I looked again at the gum, poking at it with a pen I’d removed from my pocket. It was dry, but not rock hard, and its cleanliness attested to its having been spat out within the last half day. “We can’t afford a twenty-four-hour watch on this place, but tell Patrol to keep an eye peeled for anybody coming back here in the next few days. I’d like to talk to the gum-chewer.”
    I glanced over my shoulder, straight across the water and up the opposite bank to where I could see Tyler and his team bent over their work. He didn’t know it yet, but Tyler’s day was going to be full of excavating. At least here, he’d be in the shade.

2
    BY LATE AFTERNOON WE WERE ALONE , the body and I, in the cool basement embalming room of the McCloskey Funeral Home on Forest Street. Along the walls were a sink and counters, a roll-around cart with a variety of nonsterile surgical instruments whose role here I didn’t want to know, and shelves stocked with row after row of identical plastic bottles filled with variously colored liquids, designed to be injected into bodies to give the skin a perking up. I was sitting in the corner on a metal folding chair. The corpse lay face up on a fiberglass table, the bottom of which sloped slightly, so that any fluids accumulating at his feet could be washed down a drainpipe that paralleled one of the table legs.
    Not that there were any fluids. The black-rubber body bag had been completely unzipped, revealing a man still fully clothed in a pair of pale blue slacks and a polo shirt and covered with dirt. He looked like a well-dressed tunnel digger who’d chosen this incongruous spot to catch a couple of minutes of shut-eye.
    The door-to-door canvass for witnesses was continuing, Dunn had finally returned to his office, and Tyler and his crew had switched from the retaining wall to under the bridge. I was waiting for the regional medical examiner, Alfred Gould, to get off the phone and start giving my roommate an external examination.
    The autopsy would not be done in Brattleboro. Beverly Hillstrom, the state’s chief medical examiner, would do that in Burlington, where her office was located. Usually, in a homicide, Hillstrom traveled to the scene, wishing to keep the preliminary autopsy and the crime scene as close to one another as possible. But timing was a problem here; she’d made it clear that if