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anymore till I have a chance to take a closer look. Naturally, liver temp won’t do any good and I may never be able to give you a time of death.”
    “Those Bones guys over at the Jeffersonian could do it,” Nancy said. “They’d just get a frozen blowfly larvae out of her ear, do a holographic 3-D analysis of the larvae’s intestines, and then figure out she died on January 13th at 1:32 a.m.”
    “They’d also have the crime solved by the third commercial break,” growled Kent. “So you’d better get cracking!”

Chapter 5
     
    I hadn’t been to church in a couple of weeks. I did go on the Sunday after Epiphany though. I remember because Kimberly Walnut, St. Barnabas’ Christian Formation Director, had managed to dress three of the ushers as kings and send them down the aisle to the opening hymn, We Three Kings . Epiphany (January 6th) fell on a Thursday, but January 9th was close enough. The Burger King crowns were a nice touch, bright gold cardboard with just a whiff of fries. Easter would be late this year, Ash Wednesday still more than a month away.
    Edna Terra-Pocks was at the organ in the choir loft in the back of the church. Most churches are not set up like this, preferring to have their choirs in the front. There was some discussion about repositioning the choir after St. Barnabas had burnt to the ground a few years ago, but it was decided to build the church back just as it was with the exceptions of all the behind-the-scenes improvements; a state-of-the-art sound system with plug-ins for the hearing-impaired; topnotch security including cameras in the nurseries that Moms could log into and watch their darlings during the service on their smart phones; wireless internet throughout the building; radon and carbon dioxide detectors; in short, everything the modern church might need to worship the Creator in beauty and holiness.
    I sat in the back, last pew, on the end by the door. Meg was up in the loft with the others, the choir having already warmed up, rehearsed their music, vested, and now waiting for the service to begin. A stricter director might have quieted them down a bit. As it was, it sounded like they were having a frat party up there. I supposed that Edna was tired of battling with them and since this was her last Sunday as my sabbatical replacement, she was now marking time as far as choir discipline was concerned. The congregation wasn’t anywhere near as noisy, although there was a good crowd. I thought about going up the stairs in the narthex and shushing them. Nah.
    The large crowd was due mainly to the appearance of our new interim priest. Anytime St. Barnabas had a new priest show up, interim, supply, or regular, the pews were always full for a few weeks. In the dead of winter, the crowd also varied depending on the weather. Today was overcast and cold, but not bitterly so. Too cold to work outside though, or to take a long walk in the mountains. A good day for church.
    Bev had told me that the new interim priest was an Anglo-Catholic. Something new for St. Barnabas. Bev knew this because she was on the search committee for the new, full-time rector. Their first job was to find an interim priest and they’d done that rather quickly.
    St. Barnabas had never been what anyone might characterize as “high church.” We weren’t low by any means, just somewhere in the middle, and the music had always been pretty good. We followed the prayer book, sang the psalms, and enjoyed great hymns, singing them lustily and with good courage. We had days when high church seemed appropriate and on those days, the incense and chanting abounded, but since our last priest, church had become much more “howdy” than I was used to. There was a lot of superfluous chatting between the priest and congregation, bad show tunes couched as worship songs, cutesy children’s moments that had begun to wear thin, and a casualness that I, quite frankly, found off-putting. This is just me, of course. As Meg often