Zigzag Read Online Free

the room then. Part of a larder and a makeshift kitchen with a kerosene stove, an open doorway into what was probably a bedroom—and a dead man sprawled across the threshold.
    He lay twisted on his right side, his face turned toward me. A welter of dried blood shone darkly across the fronts of an open leather jacket and white shirt. Shot like the Doberman. How many times I couldn’t tell. Not self-inflicted, even though there was a gun, what looked to be a Saturday night special, loosely clenched in one outflung hand.
    That should have been enough for me to keep from entering, but it wasn’t. One man dead, two vehicles parked in the yard—that didn’t add up the way it should. I went on in.
    Murder, all right.
    Two victims, not just one.
    The second dead man was in a seated posture on the floor, propped against the wall on the far side of the room, his legs spread out in an inverted V. Blood all over him, too, and streaked down the rough-hewn boards above him. Shot while backing up and the force of impact had slammed him into the wall. On the planking beside the body was a large-caliber automatic on an aluminum frame. I couldn’t tell how many times he had been hit, either, but it was plain enough that they’d both cut loose with several rounds each; bullet holes pocked the walls at both ends of the room.
    I’m no stranger to crime scenes, God knows, but a double homicide like this was something new and ugly in my experience. And the way I’d walked into it gave it an even more nightmarish quality. Drive up to the Russian River on a routine job, get a name I’d never heard before as a possible accident witness, come out here and stumble onto a shed full of marijuana and a dog and two strangers shot to death. One of those crazy zigzags that leave you feeling unlucky and faintly disoriented.
    I stood motionless for several seconds, sucking deep lungfuls of cold air, automatically taking in details. The corpse on the floor between the two rooms: forty or so, short red hair, fireplug build, dressed in the once-white shirt and corduroy jacket and a pair of slacks. The one sitting against the wall: a few years older, thickset, beard-stubbled jowls, bald except for thin comb-over strands of straggly brown hair, wearing Levi’s and a plaid lumberman’s shirt. Mears? The room was cold and damp—no fire in the woodstove in a long while; the all too familiar stench of sudden violent death was faint, and from the appearance of the bodies, rigor had come and gone. The shootings must have taken place sometime last night.
    Marijuana deal gone bad, the way it looked—the kind of thing that happens all too often these days, though it usually involves large and street-valuable amounts of weed. Both men armed, an argument of some kind, out came the guns like a couple of trigger-happy cowboys drawing on each other in a western B movie, and they’d blazed away until they were both down for the count. That kind of stupid scenario.
    A little funny that such a thing would happen here, considering the kind of small growing operation I’d seen in the shed. Not that it mattered as far as I was concerned. The local law’s headache, not mine.
    I backed out of there, opened my cell phone on the way to the car. The fact that I was able to get a clear signal in a place surrounded by dense forest was a relief.

 
    4
    Crime scene investigation, whether big city, suburban, or rural, pretty much follows the same established pattern. Slow, methodical, meticulous routine. I’d been through it so many times, as investigating officer and witness both, I could write a full-length, dully repetitive book about my experiences. When you’re in the position I was in here, it’s a tedious and seemingly interminable process made even worse by the fact that I was dealing with strangers in unfamiliar, somewhat isolated territory.
    The routine is unpleasant no matter which side you’re on,