Untitled by oliver

Author:oliver
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hewlett-Packard
Published: 2013-01-17T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

On Friday morning John was sitting in Zak Branham’s office, watching the fat sheriff pecking inexpertly away at his keyboard. He was tired, but in no way bored, and felt slightly sick in his stomach from nerves and lack of sleep. It had been almost a week since he had had a nightmare about the quarry, but last night’s was a bad one, though the details were sketchy. There had been bodies and bones, guns and strange faces, and as always that crushing cold blackness of the water. He looked at the photographs on the wall behind Zak to take his mind off the memory. In the glass of one of them he could see a reflection of the computer screen, and he casually leaned forward in his chair to try to make out some detail. He wouldn’t have been surprised if he saw a solitaire game in progress.

They had both been down at the quarry early that morning. John had left Jo and Elly sleeping when he left the house at eight. It turned out to be a pretty pointless trip; there was nothing to see, the body had already been removed and sent to the county coroner’s office for autopsy. So he took a couple of token shots of the lower water level and the spot where the body had been found. For the first time ever he had seen the pneumatic hammer that had been in part responsible for Jo’s brother’s death. It was so long ago now, and his forced return to the scene over the last week had somewhat desensitized him, but still the thought of being in that water gave him a mild panic attack. He wondered if he would ever swim again, in something other than a heated, chlorinated, indoor pool. He wrote down the names of the fireman and the deputy that had made the discovery, and noted the time. Then he had followed sheriff Branham back into town for a ‘meeting’.

Zak finished tapping away at the computer and leaned back in his expensive public-owned leather chair. John noticed that he hadn’t been offered coffee and that things were distinctly chillier with the sheriff this morning. Zak just held his gaze without saying a word, seemingly trying some textbook interrogation trick that was supposed to make John feel uncomfortable and obliged to speak. He wondered if he did open his mouth the sheriff would cut him off with some barking comment. So he just stared placidly and unblinkingly back. The sheriff cracked first. ‘So we have victim number two. And in this case I mean murder victim. The body we pulled out of the quarry this morning had extensive bruising around the throat and, uh. . . private parts, and was missing a couple of fingers.’ Jesus, John thought, this man is in charge of the investigation and he says ‘uh. . . private parts’. He would probably have been shocked or sickened, but in light of everything else that had happened of late this was just par for the course.

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