Stone Maidens by Lloyd Devereux Richards

team has collected a large sampling from the scene, including an atypical bird’s feather—not of a type you’d expect to find in an Indiana forest.”
    “How does it tie in, Christine?” The same cell phone distortion she experienced talking with Howard on the previous daymarred her call with Thorne, whose voice wafted in and out as if he were speaking through an elongated tube.
    “I don’t know, sir. We’ll need to run lab tests back in Chicago. I’ve yet to examine the victim’s body.”
    “Call me when you have any solid news to report.” Thorne clicked off.
    Immediately Christine retrieved her pewter pillbox from her purse. She held the small metal container in her hand for a moment, deliberating. She’d been relying more heavily on her Xanax ever since the discovery of the first victim’s body. It wasn’t a good sign, to say the least. But she needed to manage her anxiety if she had any prayer of keeping her thinking clear. At least that’s what she told herself. She removed a small tablet and swallowed it dry.
    The wind buffeted the mobile unit violently, spraying road grit against the outer paneling. A few large raindrops darkened the pavement. Stuart Brewster was nowhere in sight. Howard paced outside the RV’s side door, oblivious to the approaching bad weather. He was talking into his cell phone, and Prusik thought she heard him laugh. She distinctly made out the words “she just arrived” followed by more laughter.
What the hell was so funny?
    A flash of lightning followed by a roll of thunder cleared her mind of the thought. The rain started to come harder. She had a body to examine, a case to solve. Prusik stepped into the darkening landscape and prepared herself for whatever was next.

    Ever since he was a young boy, David Claremont had shown a penchant for carving wood. A set of shelves in his room displayed a vast assortment of wild animals, some carved from pictures in books, some from memory. Resting on the fireplace mantel downstairs was a matching pair of tigers that his mother loved, two of his finest creations. The image of the big cats had been imprintedindelibly in his mind when his father took him to see a traveling circus years ago. A showman had stood in a cage between the two tigers, who were balanced on barrels, with only a bullwhip separating him from ivory teeth that looked ready to bite. The bullwhip cracked again and again. One beast had tensed, flattening its whiskered face, and then suddenly it had lunged skyward, hissing, sending a paw the size of a catcher’s mitt against the cage wire.
    Shortly after his twenty-second birthday six months ago, Claremont’s interest had abruptly changed to carving rock. One morning he had imagined himself wandering a cavernous hall in which great columns rose high into the overhead shadows, not unlike Ely Jacob’s cave down the road, which was open to visitors. But in Claremont’s dream he wasn’t stumbling down rickety wooden steps in the dark. The great hallway was made of slab-smooth marble. Voices echoed off a domed ceiling as high as a cathedral. When he tried to remember what it was about the dream that was so riveting to him, all he could see in his mind’s eye was a series of small figurines carved of garnet, jade, and tourmaline.
    Claremont had begun carving stone the very next day. He spent hours on collecting forays along the creek bottoms that ran through the ravines past his father’s fields. Sometimes he’d drive to better spots he knew. Obsessively he tumbled the stones in coffee cans filled with sand, rolling them down the driveway to smooth the chert, eventually turning out a finger-size figurine that his mother said was good enough for a chess set. Claremont hardly gave chess a thought. He didn’t like playing games. He liked carrying the carved stone around in his front jeans pocket. He considered it a lucky charm, like a rabbit’s foot, though he couldn’t exactly say why.
    “David?” Lawrence