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gear and my motorcycle.” Luther
Jamison pulled the helmet from his head. His close-cropped Afro fit
his small frame. There was barely any gray in his hair or lines on
his face yet he was pushing sixty.
    Padre worked the lock picks in the rusted
padlock. He could just as easily have cut the chain but that might
encourage others to travel the gravel road down to the floor of the
pit. Padre pointed with his chin to the binoculars. “Check it out.
Just about two o’clock on the floor of the quarry.”
    Luther peered through the binoculars and
swept down to the approximate area. Puzzled, he adjusted them
again, glared at the target, then lowered the binoculars. “This
what I think it is?”
    “ Yep. Shoes and lots of bone fragments.
We need to gather what we can and get them back to your
lab.”
    The lock pick finally did its magic. Padre
jerked the stubborn lock open and threaded the chain off the gate.
“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”
    “ Huh. That means Chase Dagger is
involved.” Luther climbed on his bike and nodded for Padre to do
likewise. He fired up the engine and tore down the gravel
road.
    Padre hung on for dear life as the tires
slipped and jerked on the gravel. He made a sign of the cross when
they finally hit bottom. “Sweet Mary and Joseph. You trying to kill
me?”
    Luther just smiled, pulled his kit from the
back of the bike and moved closer to the battered shoes. He grabbed
his recorder, then stopped. “This official?”
    “ Not yet.”
    Luther turned off the recorder and picked up
his camera. “I need these for posterity. Cases you dump in my lap
always make for great plots in the mystery series I’m planning to
write about a highly intelligent medical examiner.”
    “ Yeah, you and me both.”
    Padre waited as Luther snapped pictures and
snorted, shook his head, sighed. He walked in a wide circle. There
were pieces of bone, clothing, and dried blood spread over a
four-hundred- square-foot area. It hadn’t rained in days so Padre
was sure the rust colored walls were from the victim’s blood which
told Padre this guy did explode on his way down. He pressed
fingertips to his temples and mumbled, “Dagger, I’m going to kill
you.” A small voice he called his skeptical angel said, “Wait for
proof. This may have nothing to do with Dagger.”
    Once he was done snapping pictures, Luther
started to collect the fragments from the outer edges and work his
way in. “Hope we have enough daylight left.”
    “ Let me give you a hand so we can move
this along.” Padre snapped on latex gloves.
    “ I remember back in 1994 they
discovered a meteorite in this place.” Luther lifted one of the
shoes and sniffed. “It weighed about a thousand pounds and thought
to be over four billion years old.” He set the shoe in a paper bag
saying, “Been dead no more than a day.” He sniffed
again.
    Padre felt his dinner rise as he looked at
the bone and muscles jutting from the shoe. The top of the sock had
been burned away.
    “ Anyway, they believe the meteorite hit
the Earth about four hundred million years ago and landed in the
quarry when it was a coral reef. And this is actually three
quarries connected by tunnels. In its heyday it produced seven
million tons of rock products annually.”
    “ Thanks for the lesson. Maybe it will
come in handy if I’m ever on Jeopardy .”
    Luther picked up pieces of cloth and dropped
them in the bag. “Fabric is singed. This guy went up like a torch
but the skin isn’t black. What the hell?” He studied the
surrounding area. “Where’s the head?”
    Padre shrugged and pointed. “There…there…and
there.”

    The man opened the door and listened. The
conference call had started so the representatives from area
parishes should be busy for a while. He closed the door then sat at
the conference table, the laptop fired up and ready to go. After
inserting the flash drive, he waited for the prompts, clicked on
EXPLORE and opened DRIVE E. It didn’t take