Killer Heat. Brenda Novak

sobered. “Like the others. You can bet she’s got plenty of broken bones to go with that fractured skull.”

      Hunsacker rolled his feet to the outside in his habitual way. “So you think this might be the work of the same killer?”

      “Dead Mule Canyon’s only a few miles away,” Jonah said. “The victims there were beaten, too.”

      “Shit.” Hunsacker spat on the ground.

      “Once word of this gets out…” Finch didn’t finish.

      Francesca was listening but it felt as if she stood at a distance too removed to participate. Mostly, she could hear her own heart pounding in her ears. The body wasn’t easy to look at, but would’ve been worse if those wounds had been recent. The coagulated blood surrounding the woman’s injuries appeared to have dried a day or two ago, based on the blackish color. It was the dirt that Francesca found curious. Tiny granulated rocks, the kind so characteristic of desert soil, clung to the woman’s hair and her gaping wounds, suggesting she’d been buried and subsequently disinterred.

      Why? Why would a man kill a woman, bury her, then dig her up and prop her in such a public place? How could anyone be so morbid?

      Francesca didn’t ask this question, but when she tuned in to the conversation again, she realized Finch had inadvertently answered it.

      “He’s proud of his work, eh?”

      Jonah thrust his hands in his pockets. “He definitely wants it to be seen.”

      “What a monster,” she murmured, but was this monster the same man who’d sat in her lawn chair last night throwing rocks at her window? Was it Butch?

      The image of him wielding that bat popped into her mind. It was a frightening memory. But his audacity, his lack of fear, provoked her at the same time. He wouldn’t get away with this. She’d make sure of it.

      Anger provided some much-needed adrenaline, making it easier to stay on her feet, breathe, think. “A bat could’ve done this.”

      Hunsacker didn’t seem impressed with her detective skills. Either that or he wasn’t willing to credit her with much intelligence. “So could plenty of other things.”

      “How long do you think she’s been dead?” she asked Finch, but it was Jonah who answered.

      “At least thirty-six hours.”

      Francesca tried to rub away the goose bumps that’d jumped out on her arms. The temperature was quickly climbing and would likely top yesterday’s high before the day was over, but somehow she felt chilled to the bone. “How do you know?” she asked. Having switched her specialty from employer-solicited background checks to missing persons only a year ago, she hadn’t seen a lot of death.

      Obviously warmer than she was, Finch loosened a tie that’d already been loosened once. As usual, he looked uncomfortable in his work clothes. “He knows it’s been at least that long because there’s no rigor. Rigor generally comes on in the first twelve hours, remains unchanged for twelve hours and dissipates in another twelve.”

      “From the bloating, I’d say it’s actually been longer,” Jonah added. “See the marbling? Takes a while for that to set in, even in this heat.”

      Because Francesca couldn’t think of a worse indignity than being left sprawled on the ground, naked, for the whole world to see, and in such a horrific condition, she hadn’t let her gaze fall any lower than the neck. Now that she had a reason to look, however, she could see that the woman’s stomach had swollen to the size of a large watermelon. Her belly had also taken on a grayish-green cast, much like a bruise, and the inky weblike veins that showed on the torso seemed to be traveling up the neck, toward her face.

      This corpse could’ve stepped right out of the movie Zombieland, Francesca thought sadly. No one should have to suffer the way this woman had. No one should be displayed in such a state.

      “So how long would you say?” she pressed.

      “We’ll let the M.E. determine that,” Finch said, but Jonah spoke at the same time.

      “I’d say a good five days.”

      Five days… That took the murder back to Sunday, which was awfully close to Saturday, the night April Bonner had met Butch Vaughn at the Pour House.

      Francesca sat alone at a table in the Palace Restaurant and Bar in downtown Prescott. Touted as the oldest frontier saloon in Arizona, the Palace had been in operation since 1875 or thereabouts. But, according to the story she’d read on a placard posted here in the historic district, in 1900 a drunken miner kicked over a kerosene lamp and started a fire that destroyed most of the town, including the Palace and a lot of other saloons on what was then called Whiskey Row. Even the state’s first capitol building, a log cabin, had burned to the ground.

      Fortunately, some of the men who were there that night were either sober enough or smart enough to drag the highly carved bar, which had come all the way from New Jersey, out of the Palace and into the street. They continued to drink and watch the fire from there, but when the saloon was rebuilt a year later, the bar took its rightful place once again. Now it stretched along the wall to Francesca’s left. Memorabilia, including guns, ammunition, money and other artifacts from the 1800s, as well as bits and pieces of information about Palace regulars like Doc Holliday, the Earp Brothers and Big Nose Kate, hung on the rest of the walls. She studied these relics as she listened to a honky-tonk piano player, who was dressed in period costume, and waited for her burger.

      Hungry though she was after skipping breakfast, she doubted she could eat. What she’d witnessed in Skull Valley was too new, too present in her mind. She’d spent an hour with Jonah and the investigators at the sheriff’s station afterward, sharing what she knew about April, but that suddenly seemed like a thimbleful of information compared to what there should have been to adequately represent a life. April had never been married. She’d had just two romantic relationships in her life, only one that lasted a year. She’d been thrilled to finally meet someone when she began e-mailing back and forth with “Harry Statham.” All the other teachers at her school, even the principal, talked about how happy the promise of their “love” had made her. And Francesca could see why. Harry had pretended to be everything a woman could want. Claiming he was a widower who’d lost his wife six months earlier, he’d flattered her with compliments on her picture and the cleverness of her responses, told her he wanted to take care of her for the rest of her life and keep her safe. He’d sent her gifts, too.

      Francesca had read the e-mails she’d found on April’s computer, but thinking of them hit her harder today than ever, and she wasn’t ready to drive home yet. After losing her purse, her cell phone, her car and office keys, even the security she’d once enjoyed at her house, she felt she’d been cast adrift, somehow cut off from regular life. She couldn’t even retreat to Adriana’s, which would’ve been natural for her under any other circumstances. Suddenly, after more than a decade, Jonah stood between them again. No way did she want to discuss his presence at her place this morning, but she knew any conversation they had would be awkward if she didn’t.

      So she’d chosen to recuperate at the Palace. The old saloon wouldn’t remind her of the years she’d spent in the police academy and, subsequently, as a rookie cop with Jonah, her confrontation with Butch yesterday, the body at the gift shop or the fact that this morning’s find might be connected to April Bonner’s disappearance as well as seven other murders. She loved history, spent at least one weekend a month visiting Arizona’s many ghost towns. But the upbeat music, the chatter of the tourists who streamed through, the high ceilings and wooden floors, didn’t carry her away as she’d hoped. She kept picturing the abused corpse propped outside the gift shop and thinking about the bat Butch had wielded so eagerly.

      Whoever had killed that woman had done so in a brutal manner. If it was Butch, he was one sick bastard. And that sick bastard seemed to have become fixated on her. She even wondered if he’d dug April—assuming this was April—out of the ground and placed her in the center of Skull Valley as some sort of message.