Читаем The Hunter полностью

Rushborough is dead, all right, and Cal can’t argue with Trey’s conclusion that someone killed him. The flies are thick on his chest; when Cal waves them away, they rise in a furious clump, and Cal sees the crust of blood blackening most of his shirtfront. They’re clustered on the back of his head, too, and under those is a deep dent. Bone splinters and brain matter show for a second, before the flies settle again.

Trey is watching, keeping her distance. There’s a dark stain of blood soaked into the dirt under the body, but nowhere near enough blood. The uppermost side of Rushborough’s face is a clabbered white; the underside, next to the ground, is mottled purple. He was moved after he died, but not long after.

Cal knows better than to touch a victim, but he also knows it could be hours before a medical examiner gets way out here, and there’s information that might not wait that long. He takes the latex gloves out of his pocket and puts them on. Trey keeps watching and says nothing.

Rushborough’s skin is cold; it feels colder than the air, although Cal knows that’s an illusion. His jaw hinge is clamped stiff, so is his elbow, but his finger joints and his knee still move. The medical examiner can factor in temperatures and whatnot to work out an approximate time of death. The flies, resenting Cal’s intrusion, come at his face with a whine like bombers.

“We oughta cover him up,” Trey says. “From them.” She motions with her chin at the flies. “You’ve that tarp in the back of the car.”

“Nope,” Cal says, straightening up and peeling off the gloves. “We do that, we’ll get fibers and dog hair and what-have-you all over him. We just leave him.” He catches himself fumbling for his radio to call Dispatch. He pulls out his phone instead and dials 999.

The cop he gets put through to hasn’t had his coffee yet and is clearly expecting some farmer bitching about his neighbor’s bird scarer, but Cal’s tone wakes him up, even before the situation is laid out. Once Cal manages to get across where they are, which takes a while, the guy promises to have people at the scene inside half an hour.

“You sounded like a cop there,” Trey says, when Cal hangs up.

“I still got it when I need it,” Cal says, putting his phone away. “It got his attention, anyway.”

“Have we gotta stay till they come?”

“Yeah. If we leave, someone else is gonna come along and mess up the scene some more, and call the cops all over again. We’ll stick around.” He doesn’t offer to stand guard and let Trey go home. He’s not letting the kid out of his sight.

The heat is building. Cal was going to get back in the car, where the air-conditioning mostly works, but a couple of crows have settled on the higher branches of the trees overhanging Rushborough, eyeing the situation below with interest. Cal leans up against the hood of the car, where he can eye them right back and warn them off if needs be. Trey pulls herself up to sit on the hood next to him. She seems unperturbed by the idea of waiting around for the Guards; apparently, and reassuringly, there’s nothing else she feels the need to be doing.

Cal has no problem with waiting around, either; he welcomes the opportunity to sit and evaluate. He can’t see much downside to Rushborough’s death, in itself. As far as he can tell, the guy contributed nothing but a heap of trouble to anyone. More to the point, with Rushborough off his back, Johnny is likely to waltz his scrawny ass straight out of this townland, to someplace that has more to offer a sophisticated guy like him. From Cal’s standpoint, that looks like a win-win.

He’s aware that the Guards don’t have the license to see it that way, though, which is where the potential downside kicks in. Depending on who killed this fuckball, and how hard they are to identify, that downside could be considerable. In a perfect world, Johnny would have knocked off Rushborough, and done it incompetently enough to land himself in cuffs by this evening. Cal doesn’t dare to hope for that level of luck. There are too many other, less welcome possibilities.

Among them is the possibility that whoever killed Rushborough doesn’t consider the job to be finished. There are plenty of people around who have reason to be seriously pissed with Rushborough, and who might extend that emotion beyond him. Mart said Trey wouldn’t get any blowback, and Mart’s say-so holds weight in this townland, but Mart isn’t God, regardless of what he might think, and he can’t make guarantees.

“Where’s that road go after your place?” Cal asks, nodding to the lower path. “Alongside some bog and into trees, and then what?”

“Nothing for a good way,” Trey says, “and then Gimpy Duignan’s. After that there was the Murtagh brothers, only Christy died and Vincent went into a home. Then it’s just bog.”

“What about up that way?” Cal tilts his chin to the upper fork. “Malachy Dwyer, and then who?”