Read Beneath the Bones for Free Online

to.
    Thinking of Terry made her long for his presence. Right now she wanted nothing more than to feel his strong arms wrapped around her, to press her ear to his chest and hear the reassuring sound of his heart beating, to feel his breath warm and tingly on her neck, feel his moist gentle lips slide against hers. For a moment she was tempted to give Terry a call and ask him to come over, but the moment passed. She didn’t want to wake him, not after he’d been out to a crime scene so late. Let him sleep. Maybe they could get together tomorrow night.
    Joanne took a sip of her water, wishing it were something a hell of a lot stronger. She had booze in the house — half a bottle of merlot in the fridge and a bottle of Royal Crown whiskey Dale had given her for her last birthday that she still hadn’t opened. But she resisted the temptation. She’d gotten in around three, and though she’d only been asleep for a couple hours, she needed to get back to work as soon as possible. Homicide investigations weren’t exactly the kind of thing you could put off until you were well rested. She knew from experience that she would have a hard time going back to sleep after a nightmare bad enough to cause her to sleepwalk, and the amount of booze it would take to put her down would make it damned hard to get back up when she’d need to. Better to stick with water for now, as unsatisfying as it might be.
    She closed her eyes and once more saw the mutilated corpse of the teenaged boy lying in the ditch. The image in and of itself didn’t disturb her. Cross County didn’t have the amount of crime that urban areas did, but the boy wasn’t the first dead body she’d seen in her career, and she knew he wouldn’t be the last. What bothered her was the feeling she’d experienced at the crime scene — the nauseating, overpowering sensation that Something Was Wrong. She was a pragmatic person, not given to putting stock in hunches and intuition, though she knew law officers who swore by them. She believed in gathering evidence and making rational inferences based solely on that evidence. That was how she’d been trained, and that was how she operated.
    Usually. But there were times …
    The electronic tone of her cell phone made her jump, causing her to spill water onto the table. She put the glass down and looked in the direction of the sound. Though she’d left her phone on the nightstand when she went to sleep, it now rested atop the counter next to the stove. Evidently she had brought her cell into the kitchen with her when sleepwalking. She couldn’t stop being sheriff, it seemed, even when unconscious. She couldn’t decide it that was comforting or not.
    She got up, walked over to the counter, and answered the phone, half-hoping it was Terry.
    “Sheriff Talon.” She didn’t say
hello
, just in case this wasn’t a personal call.
    “You should be asleep.”
    Joanne couldn’t help smiling. “So should you, Dale.”
    “I don’t need much sleep these days. I pulled out my notes on the Coulter murders.”
    Dale would never say
Carl the Cutter’s murders
. He was never flippant when it came to death, not even indulging in gallows humor as many cops and reporters did in order to come to terms with the darkness that too often accompanied their jobs. Dale had too much respect for death to ever treat it lightly.
    Joanne tore a paper towel off the roll attached to the bottom of a cupboard and walked back to the table to mop up the water she’d spilled.
    Just hearing Dale’s voice made her feel better. “If you’re in a mood to work, why don’t you come over here?” Joanne said. “My shower needs to be re-grouted.”
    “Sorry,” Dale answered. “Typing’s the only manual skill I possess, and even then I’d be hopeless if it wasn’t for spellcheck. I don’t have any of the crime-scene photos from Coulter’s murders, but I do have some sketches of Coulter’s calling card that Stan made for me. The design looks exactly