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would fetch him a hell of a clout.”
    â€œYou’re saying that the pole hit him?”
    â€œI’m guessing,” I said. “That’s all.” I pointed upward. “Check that butt of the pole for tissue and blood, and that’ll confirm it. But in order for that pole to end up so far in the air…see there? It jacked over that juniper corner post and boom. That would be the sucker punch of all time.”
    Perrone grunted something as he pulled clothes out of the way and then hiked Boyd’s T-shirt up. He found not a mark on the ghostly white skin, not a bruise or nick. Rolling the corpse over, an examination of the back found only some faint scuffing, most likely from landing back-first in the gravel. One elbow had found a patch of cacti.
    â€œAnd where’s the saw?” I asked. “Have you had the chance to walk the line back east to the first cuts? If we stick to the tracks of the service road, we can do that without wrecking the scene before daylight.” We, we, we. But hell, I wasn’t the one who had invited me out here. “ See, this whole thing makes me nervous.” I turned in a semi-circle. “We have six poles down. Three sets of two. Now, you cut the first one,” and I waved toward the east, “and they’re just going to hang there, maybe all crooked and saggy, but they won’t go down. I’m willing to bet on that.”
    â€œIt takes a special kind of crazy to chain saw a major power line,” Estelle said. “That’s a lot of voltage hanging overhead. And you couldn’t possibly predict which way they’d fall…or sag, or whatever.”
    â€œTrue. And even worse with the second set. You already have the weight of one pair hanging out of place, their weight on the wires. You whack a second set, and something is going to give way. And a third set?” I shook my head, and touched a toe of my boot to the stump. “What do you think?”
    Estelle remained silent as she knelt down, holding her flashlight to illuminate the back side of the power pole’s fourteen-inch diameter stump. After a moment, she turned and let the light track the few feet over to the county road. “This pole has been hit a number of times.” Her voice was so quiet and husky that I could hardly hear. Maybe the thought hadn’t been intended for me, but I barged in with my two cents anyway.
    â€œYou got this pull-out on the county road,” I said. “A handy turn-around after the cattle guard. Miscalculate a bit and the stock trailer takes a chunk out of the pole. Or somebody backs into it trying to do who knows what.” With a crackle of joints, I knelt beside her, letting my hand run over the rumple of scarred wood on the back side of the pole. “Huh. With all the damage over the years, there isn’t as much wood as maybe our guy thought there was.”
    Estelle stood and beckoned to Linda Real, whose plump figure had materialized out of the shadows. “We need portraits of this every way you can, Linda.”
    â€œAbsolutely.”
    â€œDitto all the others. Both the stumps and the downed poles. Number them starting at the eastern-most set, one-two, three-four, and these five-six. Northern member of each pair is odd—one, three and five. And I’m more interested in the backside of the cut, how much was left when he jerked the saw out of the wood.”
    â€œYou got it.”
    â€œGood close-ups of the saw cut and the break point.”
    Linda nodded, but she was already selecting a lens from her camera bag as well as some gadget for the strobe to mute the burst of light.
    The undersheriff applied some upward force to my left elbow, and I tried to remain graceful as I rose to my feet.
    â€œAre you up for a little walk, sir?”
    â€œOf course,” I said with feigned enthusiasm. For years, various doctors like Alan Perrone and Francis Guzman had been cajoling me to walk, walk,