LITMIR.BIZ

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a car without a license plate and they had no identity documents. Dr. Stevenson has just finished the autopsy and failed to establish the cause of death, and to make matters worse the bodies were found in the wooded area that we swept several times last night in search of James's son. The Coroner would put his hand on the fire that those two were already there, dead at least from the day before, how is it possible that none of us noticed anything?"

      "It's strange," the giant Joe considered with his cavernous voice.

      "That's right," Helen agreed.

      "Then they may have died elsewhere and been dumped there tonight," said Claretta Jones in a faint voice because of her shyness.

      "It's impossible since the car doesn't work," explained the Sheriff.

      "And couldn't it have broken down afterward?"

      "No, the control unit indicates that the car has stopped approximately when they supposedly have died."

      "It's a nice brain teaser..." Claretta commented.

      "Exactly ... and this means that we all must work to solve this case as soon as possible, because, in a small village like ours, voices run quickly. I'm sure that a lot of looky-loos will come soon and when this happens we will have to be able to answer their questions."

      "So what do we do now?" Asked Agent Benelli.

      "It has absolute priority, we must give up everything we are working on at the moment to dedicate ourselves exclusively to this case. We don't know who those two were, but sooner or later someone will surely come alive to look for them."

      "How should we proceed?" Dower asked.

      "Claretta, you're going to take a nice stroll around, to ask here and there, showing their pictures.

      You will start from Spring, then you will pass by the Country Hole and the Boe emporium, then from the gas station, and since you are there you will also go to the pharmacy... maybe someone noticed them and will give us some information. Benelli, you go and take another look at the place of their discovery, I want a nice photo book. Dower, you go to the Motor Vehicle Office with the car's chassis number to see if you can trace the owner, then call the mechanic and ask him if he has figured out what caused its stopping. Coming back from the Motorization, stop everywhere to ask questions. Joe, go to the terminal and look for cases like this, if you find something we could have a trail to follow." Joe nodded silently but deep down he was unhappy, she hadn't let him go for a while because he was old, and being confined within those four walls, he did not like it at all. In addition, Helen had assigned him a computer task and he hated computers because his fingers were so big that he always took at least two keys at a time. He thought, resignedly, he was going to have a nervous breakdown , but he didn't protest because he knew it would be useless.

      "Finally you, Cindy, call the phone company and ask if they have the tape with the recording of the anonymous call, because what we have is barely understandable. The call was made by a public telephone, if it is part of the chain of those monitored, we could have something more to work with."

      Harry had been working on his model for a while, but James was so upset by his behavior that he couldn't find the right concentration to devote himself to his beloved plants. He looked at the last one he had fixed and judged he had really sucked, so much that for a moment he was tempted to squash them for good, in order to vent his anger. Furthermore, his headache rather than fading, it had intensified and his temples were pounding ruthlessly. Realizing that he was no longer fit to continue, he decided to settle down and then finally bring Harry to buy his new glasses.

      He also thought he had been selfish because he should have taken him first. He consulted the clock and thought that if he hurried, they would still be able to get to the store before closing time. He bent over his tools and as he put them back in the wooden box he stared at the circular flowerbed of violets, convinced of being in a dream: the plant Harry caressed an hour before, it was practically resurrected. The slender trunk had regained its vigor and had almost completely straightened, soaring upwards, the ties, that held it to the stick, which he attached as a reinforcement, had loosened, the leaves and petals had spread out again and appeared smooth and shiny, alive. James was wondering how it was possible when he thought he caught a movement in the bush beyond the hedge, something very similar to a fast-moving black shape.

      He jumped up scanning the spot where he thought he saw it, but there was anything strange. Immediately after that, he was seized by slight dizziness, because he had risen too quickly and his temples were hammering even harder.

      "This whole thing has shaken me too much, I'm becoming paranoid," he said to himself aloud as he bent down again to pick up the toolbox, but again he suddenly felt like he was not alone. He brandished his hoe and walked uncertainly toward the edge of the woods to check the situation, but found that everything was perfectly still. Perhaps too much still, he told himself, it wasn't singing a single bird and not even a poor cicada. But he seemed to perceive, from far away, the dull sound of the Black Hawk that he had just seen circling above the roof of his house. Suddenly, he reminded Harry's terrified face and words, he turned to look at the house and noticed that the front door was open. Caught by a bad feeling he let go the hoe to run and take a look, but before he could move a single muscle, he felt a sting in his neck and his strength abandoning him; a moment later he was lying unconscious on the ground.

      After spending a couple of hours intensely studying documents and photographs, notes and scribbles, Helen went to the locker room and removed her uniform to wear shorts, a T-shirt and sneakers. She has been running on the treadmill for several minutes now and kept staring at the material she had scattered on the floor. She used to do so when she felt the need to isolate herself to reflect and trigger inspiration, and more than once this ploy worked. But this time the right intuition just seemed not to arrive and she kept wondering what she could do to solve the mystery that bordered on the absurd. At the moment she had no pretext to hold on or a single trace to follow. Benelli's first inspection of the crime scene, if it could be called a crime, had been completely unsuccessful. The agent did not find a single print of feet or tires that did not belong to the corpses and their car, but nor even a piece of fabric or hair, or any other element that could in any way indicate a track to follow, a modus operandi, a physiognomy. Research at the local Telephone Company had been in vain because the anonymous call was so brief that it gave no indication as to which equipment had been used to make the call, so they could not go to the site to attempt to take fingerprints. Furthermore, they did not have a decent registration because the author of the call had disguised his voice, it was not even clear if that hoarse whisper belonged to a man or a woman. All she had in his hand was, therefore, a tape in very bad condition that he should have sent to some technician to try to clean it up, and this would have taken days. Besides all this, some things prevented her from reasoning clearly: it was the anguishing sense of unreality that took over her because of her sleepless nights, the inexplicable temporary disappearance of Harry.

      The chilling image of those lifeless fluorescent bodies that did not want to leave her mind. Moreover, the fact she had found the same unusual luminescent powder on the bike of James's son also indicated that between the two accidents there must necessarily have been some kind of connection, but she absolutely could not get an idea of what it could be. Thinking of the powder, associated with the sweat, woke the itch on her finger. She looked at it and realized that Stevenson was absolutely right, it was shabby; on her first phalanx a sort of plague had formed but did not secrete any liquid, it was quickly drying himself like a dead appendage. And yet, judging by the pain and itching it gave her, his little finger was far from dead. She made up her mind to go to check it as soon as possible, she scratched it again, holding back a groan of pain, and began to reflect. The first hypothesis that occurred to her was that Harry found the bodies, or even witnessed the double murder and ran away scared, hiding who knows where. Then, after many hours, he would finally find the courage to come out and return home. In reality, this hypothesis seemed too trivial, but the alternative saw Harry more directly and more deeply involved in the affair. Thinking about it she judged that such a thing was impossible, it should have gone in another way, but even though she tried hard, she could not get even a vague idea. During the morning, the temptation to call James repeatedly, she raised the receiver and started

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