Page 21 of Red Boar's Baby

“There,” Diana said, pointing.

Caine nodded again. He began moving around the plane, looking at everything and somehow managing to fade into the background in spite of his incongruous appearance.

The interns, having received no instructions, stood around awkwardly.

Caine, Diana inferred, was not used to working with a team. Well, it wasn’t as if she was a stranger to either teamwork or crash site investigations, so she took the lead.

“Does anyone here have a good sense of smell in their shift form?” she asked the interns.

“I’m a capybara,” Fifi said eagerly. “We have a very good sense of smell.”

“Horse,” said Jessie. “We’re not bloodhounds, but we’re all right.”

There was no response from Caine, who was only intermittently visible on the far side of the wreckage. Diana decided to let him do his thing unimpeded. If he had a problem with her giving his interns instructions, he could complain to Costa about it.

“Well, I’m a roadrunner, so either of you is probably better than me,” she said. “What I want you to do is shift, spread out around the crash site, and sniff around.”

“For what?” Jessie asked, though she was already unbuttoning her shirt.

“That’s up to you. Anything out of place. There will have been a lot of people tramping around this wreck in the last twenty-four hours, so you might find things they dropped, cigarette butts or water bottles. But try to pick out anything unusual,” she finished weakly.

The instructions might be vague, but the interns, happy to have something to do, went to it with a will. They vanished in separate directions to undress, but soon Diana heard crashing sounds in the bushes and caught a glimpse of something large and brown moving through the brush. After holding still for a minute to be sure it wasn’t a wild animal, she made out a pink bow on top of its head and relaxed.

Leaving them to it, she leaned into the plane to have a better look. She had intentionally dispatched them elsewhere, even though the inside of the plane was the most likely to have actual helpful evidence, because she didn’t want to hand them the potential trauma of sniffing around where someone had died. They would probably have difficult cases later on. Better ease them into it. She smiled ruefully, remembering the first S&R she’d worked on that had involved fatalities. She hadn’t handled it well.

“Do you know what this is?” Caine asked, appearing out of the shadows in the back of the plane’s cargo area.

“Gah!” She’d had no idea he was there. In fact, a minute ago she would’ve sworn she was alone inside the plane. It didn’t look big enough to conceal someone in the small cargo area.

But Caine was crabwalking forward, crouched under the low ceiling. He held out a hand with a small square of cardstock.

Diana took it. A business card, she thought—it was the right size and shape. But there was no writing on it. One side had a stylized red lion, looking like something that might be found on an English pub sign. The other side was blank.

“Where did this come from?”

“I found it on the floor.” Caine sat down so he could stop crouching. “Tucked into one of these.” He touched a recess in the floor, meant for securing additional seats. “It looked like it slipped down inside. The investigators probably didn’t see it.”

“I have no idea what it is. Should we be handling it?”

Caine shrugged. “No telling if it’s important.” But he produced a small plastic bag from his pocket and sealed it inside. “Other than that, there’s not much of anything. No sign of drugs.”

Diana nodded. “The investigators probably conducted swab tests. The results will be in the information Qui—Chief Costa gets from the sheriff’s department, I expect.”

“The fact that the place isn’t crawling with DEA agents suggests it’s not drug-related anyway.” Caine eeled out of the open cargo door and stood up. “Who owns the plane?”

“A small company based near Tucson. Flightseeing and cargo hauling. I’m not sure if the pilot’s identity has been released yet.”

“I’d love to know what he died of.”

“The crash, I assume,” Diana said.

“Did he? The weather was clear yesterday. No reason why a competent pilot would crack up in the mountains on a clear day.”

“There are always reasons, trust me. Lots of sharp updrafts in this part of the country. Someone who’s new to it could easily lose control if they were flying too low.”

“How old was he?”

Caught slightly off guard, Diana thought back to her brief glimpse of the pilot. “Uh, fiftyish, I guess. Middle-aged white guy.”

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