Dead Watch by John Sandford Page A

it later. It might not be a coincidence,” Jake said.
    “All right, all right. You go, I’ll take care of it at this end,” Danzig said. “Call me back for anything significant. Anything, even if you think I might already know about it. Call me.”

    He kept the car at eighty, screamed through Dyllwyn, a fast right, then another right onto Highway 60 at Sprouse’s Corner, seventy miles an hour past the county courthouse at Buckingham—hell, none of the cops would be there, he thought—a left on 24, six miles, a helicopter overhead the last mile of it, rolling through the intersection of 636 and coming up on the forest headquarters complex as the black helicopter put down in a graveled parking area.
    Three Buckingham County sheriff’s cars waited on the edge of the parking area, their light racks turning. As Jake pulled in, Novatny and Parker did the weird getting-out-of-a-helicopter hunched-over high step that everybody did. They were trailed by a senior citizen who clutched a hard plastic briefcase. A sheriff’s deputy got out of one of the cars and jogged toward Jake, who parked just inside the turnoff.
    “Sir, this is a restricted area.”
    “I’m with them,” Jake said, pointing at the chopper.
    Novatny and Parker were talking to another uniform, Novatny waving Jake over. He and the cop walked over and Novatny nodded at the senior citizen and said, “Jake, this is Clancy, he’s with our crime-scene unit, and this is Sheriff Bill Winsome, his people are working the scene right now.” Then Novatny asked, “What the heck did you do? You start talking to people and we get a burning body the next day.”
    Jake said, “Hey, I just put out the word.”
    Parker said, “Somebody sure as shit got it. We’ll want to know who you talked to.”
    All the cops looked at Jake for a beat, then Novatny turned back to Winsome. “You were saying . . .”
    “Somebody tried to burn the body with brush and gasoline. You can still smell a little gas,” Winsome said. He was an elderly man, with a round pink face and white hair growing out of his ears. He had the sad liquid eyes of a bloodhound. “The wood is still damp from all the rain and didn’t burn. They had it stacked around the body like one of them pyres.”
    “What about the head?” Parker asked.
    “Still no head,” the sheriff said.
    “What about the head?” Jake asked.
    “The head’s missing,” Winsome said. “It’s hard to tell what happened, exactly, because . . . well, if you’ve ever seen a burned body, they sorta melt. This one’s pretty bad, the hands are gone, most of the feet . . . but there should be a skull, or indications of a head, and there isn’t one. A head. Of course, we haven’t been all the way through the ashes, but I don’t think there’s gonna be anything there.”
    “Who found the body?” Jake asked.
    “Guy who lives down there—Glenn Anderson—saw a fire last night. Where there shouldn’t be one—”
    “He didn’t go over and check it?” Parker interrupted.
    “No, that happens from time to time, you get people out on them hiking trails. Anderson was out working in his shop, changing the oil in his brush cutter, and he heard this whoosh, and he looked, and here’s a fire as big as a house. It died down pretty quick, and wasn’t any threat because it’s been so wet. He figured some camper poured white gas on his campfire and got more than he bargained for. But then he got to talking to a neighbor this morning—they could smell something bad—and they went over for a look.”
    “Roast pig,” Novatny said.
    “Where’s the scene?” Jake asked.
    “Mile or so up the road, there’s a trail head, a hiking trail goes back into the woods,” the sheriff said. “It’s pretty narrow up there, lots of trees, thought it’d be better to put the chopper down here.”
    “Who knows about this?” Parker asked.
    “Nobody, except the people out here,” the sheriff said. “Won’t nobody find out about it