Page 62 of Race With The Devil

“What’d you find, Beetle? Did you ‘go get it’? What’d you ‘go get’?”

He dropped it and sat obediently in front of me.

I picked it up, then dropped it and screamed.

It was a human finger.

Tanner

The split second Unity screamed, I shoved the controller into Wolf’s chest and bolted down the trail. She recoiled from something on the ground, flapping her hands around helplessly.

“Eyew! Gross!” she shrieked. She crawled backward like a spider, wiping her hand on the front of the leather jacket I’d loaned her. This caused Beetle to leap side to side barking at her, as if they were playing a game.

I fell to my knees next to her, taking her shoulder in my hand. “Unity! What is it?”

She pointed with a shaky hand. I looked.

I reached out to take the thing before I realized what it was. I realized it was a finger about the time mine came in contact with it. This was the last thing I expected, and I started a bit, but I continued to pick the thing up. The flesh was bloated, purple-orange, in line with someone who had been deceased for a week or two. I reckoned it was a ring finger, minus a ring. Which would make sense if Tutti wanted his glamorous, bling-heavy ring back from Lavinia.

“I’ll just put it up on this ledge,” I told the poor woman. Crouching next to her, I took her shoulders in my hands. “Maybe coyotes got to her body.” Was that any more reassuring?

“Maybe it’s not her!” Unity cried desperately. I realized the extent of her denial, how much she wanted Lavinia to be alive. It was a futile hope.

“I did hear about someone falling off the path a few weeks ago,” I said lamely. “Listen. I’m taking Beetle down and see if he can show me where he found that finger. You’re staying here, do you hear me?”

She nodded, tears poised to drip at the corners of her eyes.

I kissed her once on the forehead and encouraged Beetle. “Beetle! Let’s go! Let’s go get it! Go get it!”

He took off down the path at a good clip, so I had to follow, jogging. I shouted over my shoulder, “Tell Wolf to keep looking for the body!”

Under the circumstances, it was beautiful the way the canyon unfolded its enigmatic splendor. Though I was a pilot, I felt I’d never been so high, the horizon of the opposite cliffs so far away. The ethereal landscape lifted my spirit, formed an intensity which only the most sorrowful hours can lend.

Beetle kept on trotting as I exhorted him to “go get it!” He’d pause once in a while and look back at me over his shoulder. We’d already reached Coconino Saddle, a narrow trail where an angry, foolhardy person could easily fling a much lighter body. Actually, Tutti’s stature and photos of Lavinia Dock led me to believe they weighed about the same, so depending on the declivity, she may not be far from the trail.

The manner in which the finger had been sliced from the hand with a blade led me to not blame coyotes.

Tutti had no doubt done it prior to shoving the woman, dead or alive, over the edge, probably to take his ring back. Around the middle of the saddle, where I felt like a tightrope walker between two skyscrapers, Beetle stopped and barked downhill at something. Wolf’s drone came sweeping and buzzing up the canyon toward us, wanting to see what we saw.

“What is it, Beetle? Go get it!”

Beetle skittered down about twenty yards, coming to a stop, sort of crashing into a mesquite bush. I side-stepped and slid my way down, too.

Next to the bush, lying out in plain sight in the sun, was a torso. Shreds of a shirt clung to various portions of it, but it had been stripped by the elements and coyotes. The putrid odor was enough to drive anyone but canines away. Maggots, which at this stage conglomerated in orifices like the eyes and mouth, crawled all over the tight, bloated skin where the head had been removed—and between where the legs had been.

I had to kneel down, shoving Beetle aside as he attempted to get a taste of the maggots. “Out.” In some places the bloating had become so severe that the body had begun to “purge,” where skin ruptures and fluids leak. The woman’s torso was lying in a puddle of almost black fluid. I persevered long enough to determine that no coyotes had originally torn into her stomach. That was the even, crisp cut of a very sharp knife, as though someone wanted to find out what was in her gullet.

I cracked a stick off the mesquite bush and, with head turned aside, poked the torso in the shoulder and rolled it. Her hands were clasped behind her back and I wanted to see how he had cinched them there.

Handcuffs.

Okay. That was enough evidence for me, for now. I stood, tossing away the stick, and pointed at the drone to continue looking downhill. Wolf made the drone dip in a little nodding action before turning and zipping off like a hummingbird down the canyon. Beetle became interested in the maggots again, so I snapped,

“Beetle. No. Leave it. Leave it.”

I took a few photos with my camera, but when I turned to go back uphill some nearby branches snapped. Like a hunting dog, my head whipped in the right direction, and I instantly saw the prey. Tutti Morgan was showy this time of year with his silver hair and lavender stripe. But he wasn’t clad in any preening finery. He wore a T-shirt and jeans and even tennis shoes as he gripped a semiauto that made his hand look even smaller than usual. He looked to be gritting his teeth so heavily his eyes popped from his skull. But at least he held his Sig Sauer at his side, not pointed at me.

Because I was facing him, and didn’t know where he’d been, I didn’t know if he had noticed my own semiauto stuffed in the back of my jeans.