Mesa Verde Victim. Scott Graham
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to side with the swerving truck.
Chuck slid around a final corner and roared onto their block. Several black-and-white Durango Police Department sport-utility vehicles crowded the street ahead. The police SUVs were parked at haphazard angles in front of the house, their bar lights flashing.
Chuck slammed the truck to a stop in the middle of the street, hopped out, and ran for the house.
Janelle had left home at five that morning for a fill-in paramedic shift with the Durango Fire and Rescue Department, taking the place of a full-timer who needed the day off. Her shift wasn’t over yet—but what if she’d returned home for some unknown reason while he and the girls were at the climbing gym?
He charged up the sidewalk. A twenty-something police officer in uniform blues, brass badge gleaming on her chest, stepped off the covered front porch of the house. The officer’s skin was the color of mocha, her dark brown eyes lined with black makeup.
“Slow down,” she warned Chuck, raising her left hand as she crossed the front yard. Her right hand hovered above the pistol holstered at her waist.
Inscribed on a tag beneath her badge, her last name, Anand, identified her as East Indian, an anomaly among Durango’s mostly white citizenry interspersed with Latinos and Native Americans.
“This is my house,” Chuck said as he reached her on the sidewalk, aiming his chin at the one-and-a-half-story brick Victorian behind the young police officer. His throat was tight, his breath constricted. “My wife.”
“You’re Mr. Bender?”
“Yes.”
“ID.”
“What?”
“I need to see some identification.”
He slapped his hands to the side pockets of his sweats. “I left my wallet in my bag in the truck.”
“You’ll have to go get it.”
“Not a chance.” Chuck shoved his way past the officer.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” she said, following him.
He yanked his phone from his pocket. Its screen glowed with the texts from the police department. He waved it behind him at her as he walked. “I came as soon as I saw these.”
She huffed as she trailed him across the front yard. When he neared the porch, she said, “Not that way. Around back.”
Changing course, Chuck put his shoulder to the faded wooden gate at the side of the house, slamming it open and striding along the narrow passage beside the head-high wooden fence separating the house from Beatrice’s house next door.
“What can you tell me?” Chuck demanded over his shoulder to the officer.
“I’m on perimeter.” She jogged to keep up. “You’ll have to talk to the others.”
They reached the back of the house. A single-car garage filled one corner of the compact backyard. In the other corner, the branches of an apple tree extended over a fallow, raised-bed garden.
Between the garage and garden bed, the gate that led through the back fence to the rear alley stood open. On the cracked asphalt of the alleyway, framed by the open gate and covered by a white sheet, lay what was, based on its shape, clearly a human body.
Chuck came up short in the middle of the yard, staring through the gate.
The body lay on its back. Red stains spotted the sheet, which stretched over the human form from head to toe. A sizable stomach pressed the sheet upward at the middle.
Chuck quaked at the sight of the corpse, his legs growing weak with a combination of relief and horror. The dead body was not Janelle; it did not have her slender frame. But who was it?
He resumed walking toward the back gate, his eyes locked on the body. A uniformed police officer stepped from the alley into the yard and swung the gate closed behind her, blocking his view.
The officer was Sandra Kingsley. Like Chuck, she was in her mid-forties. She was tall and willowy, her sandy brown hair falling from her Durango Police Department ball cap to her chin in a blunt-cut bob. “It’s okay, Chuck,” she said, stopping in front of him. “It’s not her.”
“Who is it, then?”
She hesitated. “I can’t say.”
“But you know,” he said in response to her hesitation.
She tipped her head forward, the brim of her cap momentarily hiding her luminous, green eyes.
“I know who it is, too, don’t I?” Chuck asked.
She nodded again, a quick dip of her dimpled chin. Her gaze moved past him to the house, where another officer exited the back door. The officer was even younger than Officer Anand. Peach fuzz covered his upper lip and acne pocked his cheeks. A shock of auburn hair showed beneath the visor of his ball cap.
The boyish officer descended the three wooden steps from the rear of the house, the screen door swinging shut behind him. He hustled across the backyard and through the rear gate.
Sandra said to Chuck, “It appears everything started in your house.”
“In my . . . in our . . . ?”
“In your study, to be exact. It’s a mess in there.” She fixed him with unblinking eyes. “Did you have anything in there someone might have wanted?”
He glanced past her in the direction of the body in the alley beyond the fence. “I’m an archaeologist. What could I possibly have that would be cause for that?”
“You’ve made some big discoveries over the years, headline-
making stuff. Everybody in town knows it.”
“I never keep anything of value in my house, ever.”
“It would seem someone thought otherwise.”
“Can I see?”
She pursed her lips, frowning. “You can’t go inside, but I guess you could peek in the window. Maybe you’ll spot something.”
Chuck climbed the steps to the back door. Gripping the doorframe, he leaned sideways and peered through the window into the small room at the back of the house that served as his office. Inside the room, his scarred oak desk was swept clean. Spiral notebooks, photographs, a desk lamp, notecards, and pens and pencils that normally sat on the desktop or filled the desk drawers were scattered across the hardwood floor, along with his laptop and monitor.
Opposite the desk, the drawers to his two file cabinets were pulled open, their contents strewn on the floor with his desk items. A framed picture of Janelle and the girls had been lifted from the wall and lay on the floor as well.
Chuck cursed. He pushed himself upright from the window. “You’re right,” he said with a shake of his head as he returned to Sandra in the yard. “It’s a mess in there.”
“Somebody was looking for something.”
“Obviously.”
“And . . . ?”
“I have no idea. My laptop is still there. You’d think they’d at least have taken that.”
“Think harder. It would appear somebody thought something in your study was worth killing over.”
He pivoted at the cry of “Chuck!” from Janelle.
She rounded the rear corner of the house and rushed to him.
“Thank God, you’re okay,” Chuck said to her as they embraced.
She stepped back. She wore her Durango Fire and Rescue
uniform—navy shirt and black cargo pants with large side pockets. Her smooth, olive face was lightly made up. Her black hair, long and straight like Carmelita’s, was corralled in a bun at the back