Page 5 of Shadows Reel

“Maybe lightning?” Tibbs speculated.

“In November?” Joe asked.

“Good point.”

Tibbs pulled on a pair of black nitrile gloves and approached the body. He held his breath and reached down to touch the victim’s throat.

“Dead for sure,” he said. He looked up at Joe. “Been dead for a while, I’d say. At least a few hours, like you thought. The body is cooling off, but rigor mortis hasn’t yet set in.”

Joe closed his eyes and sighed with relief. He hadn’t left a person to die.

“Our victim is definitely a man,” Tibbs said while turning the head to its other side. The victim’s face was not completely burned and he wore an inch of gray beard that had not caught fire. A single light blue eye was open and filmed over. Joe noted that the stripped finger bones of the man’s outstretched hand were broken, but not detached. That seemed incongruous to the state of the body.

Although Joe couldn’t yet place him, there was something familiar about the victim.

“Know him?” Tibbs asked.

“I think so. It’ll come to me.”

“When it does, please notify your local sheriff,” Tibbs said. Then: “What was he doing out here that got him burned up? I don’t see any signs of an accelerant. Who knows—maybe he was welding somewhere, and he had an accident?”

They were rhetorical questions Joe couldn’t answer.

“How did he break his fingers?” Joe asked.

“Maybe he fell after he climbed the fence,” Tibbs offered.

“Maybe.” But the theory didn’t jibe with what Joe could see.

“Was he out here hunting?” Tibbs asked as he groaned his way to full height.

Joe looked around for a hunting rifle or any other evidence to suggest why the victim was located there. The man appeared to be wearing slippers or light shoes, not hunting boots. But it was difficult to tell exactly what his footwear consisted of because they were burned and had melted into the skin of his feet.

Theprop-ityline was marked by a taut four-strand barbed-wire fence mounted to T-posts just behind the brush where the body was curled up. Trumley, Joe knew, was a stickler for a good tight fence. On the other side was an ancient overgrown two-track road. He could see that the grass in the ruts was pressed down.

Joe said, “Look at that top strand of wire.”

Tibbs did so and saw bits of burned clothing and skin hanging from the barbs.

Joe said, “I’m thinking he either climbed the fence and died here or he got tossed over it from the other side.”

Tibbs grunted, apparently agreeing with the theory. “Don’t touch anything,” he said.

“You don’t need to tell me that. There was a vehicle on that road,” Joe said. “The tire tracks look fresh.”

“I see that,” Tibbs said. “I’ll get Norwood to climb the fenceand take a good look at that road. We might be able to find a tread pattern.

“But who would do such a thing?” he asked. “And why?”

“Maybe they thought the predators would clean it up before anyone found the body,” Joe said. “Like you said, it wouldn’t take very long. It’s lucky for us that Lorne just happened to come this way this morning. Otherwise, that body could have been there for the entire winter before anyone noticed it, if they ever did.”

“Which suggests some planning,” Tibbs said.

He shook his head and moaned. “This is quite a bit worse than I thought it would be.”

“Yup.”

“Do you think we should question the rancher?”