Page 47 of Threat of Danger
The risk would have been worth it if someone’s lifewasat stake. But a leap like that just to show off ... What the hell had gotten into him?
His hands were all scraped up. He was pretending that his left leg didn’t hurt like a sonofabitch from that hard landing.
Jess remained silent, but looked as if the restraint was killing her. Her cheeks flushed pink. She shoved her hands deep into her pockets, probably to stop herself from reaching out and shaking him.
“Anyway,” Derek said, “I’m off on my daily walk. I just thought I’d stop by to see how you two were doing. Have fun. Don’t get hurt.”
He strode over to the river to wash off the smattering of blood and the pine pitch from his hands, hating to limp in front of Eliot. He tried like hell for an even stride as he started on his walk, down the riverbank, without looking back.
After a dozen or so feet, he picked up a long branch. He always carried some kind of a stick to search through the leaf mold, to dig if he saw anything that might be a bone sticking out of the ground.
He toughed out the first mile, but had to slow down for the second. Then he slowed even more when he heard crows fighting in the woods to his right.Caw! Caw! Caw!
He limped that way to investigate.
He walked a hundred feet or so before he saw about two dozen black birds arguing over a chunk of food on the ground. Derek caught sight of something bloody and small among the flash of beaks. Looked like the birds were tearing apart a mouse, or maybe a baby squirrel.
They had it sorted out by the time he reached them, and flew off. Whatever the object of contention had been, the birds had carried it away. He searched the leaves with his stick, but found nothing beyond a few drops of blood.
He looked up. The birds were high in the trees now, looking down at him. For a second, the sight brought back memories of another day long ago, and he felt as if his skin was shrinking and squeezing his bones. Then he drew a deep breath from the crisp, fresh air of the woods, and the odd sensation went away.
He kept looking up. He spotted two crows’ nests almost directly above him, both on the same tree.
On a whim, he tossed his walking stick and decided to climb, scraped-up hands or no scraped-up hands. The nests were only forty feet up, definitely doable. He jumped for the lowest branch of the winter-bare oak, then pulled himself up. He’d been trained on SEAL obstacle courses. He’d climbed hillsides under machine gunfire. He could climb a friendly tree in his sleep.
His limp didn’t matter here. He had no problem with his arms. Hand over hand, he made it up pretty fast. But not unnoticed. A couple of crows flew by, probably the owners of the nest next to him.
They cawed at him, but didn’t dive-bomb. They didn’t have eggs in the nest yet, nothing to protect.
Yet Derek saw a glint of white.
Two slivers of bone, one about two inches long, the other an inch and a half.
Every cell of his body focused on those pieces as he collected them, bagged them right there on top of the tree, and stashed them in his pocket. Probably a mouse or a squirrel, yet he couldn’t help the sense of excitement that he might have something at long last.
He climbed back down and continued his walk, all the way to the river bend and back, but found nothing else even remotely interesting. By the time he reached the cliffs again, Jess and Eliot were gone.
Since the plastic box in Derek’s glove compartment was full, he decided to swing by the vet’s house and ask for an evaluation.
Jared Sabin, an old friend of Derek’s, was with a patient, so Derek left the box with his wife, Selena, who was also the receptionist. Jared would know what to do with the bones. He was used to Derek stopping by with similar packages now and then.
Derek swung by the newspaper office next.
“Maxwell in?” he asked the twenty-year-old receptionist, a gangly college boy.
“Out covering the sugaring. This time of the year, he’s out in the sugar bush every single day,” the kid said, picking up two cardboard boxes of what looked like outgoing mail from the counter. “People like regular updates.”
Since the kid was headed out, probably going to the post office, Derek held the door open for him.
“Thanks, man.”
“Sure thing.” Derek watched him go, then turned back inside.
TheTaylorville Timesheadquarters consisted of two offices in the back, one probably for the senior editor and one for the accountant. A general bull pen took up the rest of the space, a dozen or so gray-walled cubicles. Only two were occupied, a woman in each, both on the phone and working the computer at the same time.
Derek walked past the reception counter. He stuck his head into the first empty cubicle, looked around, then checked out the next and the next. He found Maxwell’s on the fourth try. His picture was tacked to the wall. The guy was holding some kind of a journalism award. Difficult to believe. Although, not more difficult than the hunting photo next to it, Maxwell kneeling proudly behind a twelve-point buck, holding the rack up for the camera. Derek had always thought of Maxwell as a desk jockey, not as an outdoorsman.
He had a laptop docking station, but no laptop. He’d probably taken it with him. His drawers were locked. Derek checked the plastic bin under his desk and pulled out the wad of papers on top.
