Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

makes his first appearance in front of the judge tomorrow morning.”
    “Even if he’s innocent?”
    “They all say they’re innocent and some of them are, but everybody has to go through a first appearance. That’s just the way it is.”
    And so she left Joe with the criminals.
    It was time to meet Cyril. The two-faced nature of what she was about to do struck her hard. She was going to hit Cyril up for money, then try to convince the sheriff that Cyril’s brother was a murderer. She hated like hell to do it, but Cyril could take care of himself. Joe couldn’t.

    When Sheriff Mike moved quickly, it was a sign that he was troubled in his mind. He was fairly well hustling as he entered the office where Deputy Claypool sat.
    “Explain to me again why you arrested him,” he said in an oddly gentle tone of voice, given his level of agitation.
    “Who?”
    “Who do you think? Joe Wolf Mantooth. How many arrests you made this morning?”
    Claypool cocked his head and spoke slowly, as if he were explaining the obvious. “I arrested him because he told me he killed those people we found yesterday. Not many people confess to murder unless they did it.”
    “Not many, but it happens. You should be checking your facts, right now, instead of sitting there drinking your coffee. Hell, keep your coffee. You can drink a pot of it, as long as you’re doing your job while you drink.”
    Claypool dropped his Styrofoam cup, still full of coffee, in the trash. “I’ll be glad to do my job, if you’ll just tell me what it is you think I should be doing.”
    “How old is your suspect?”
    “He’s a classic vagrant. No driver’s license, no papers of any kind. We had a devil of a time filling out the paperwork to book him. No address or phone. His place of birth is just ‘Oklahoma.’ Couldn’t even remember his birthday.”
    “How old do you think he is?”
    Claypool pursed his lips. “Thirty-five? Forty?”
    Sheriff Mike rolled his eyes. Claypool was no fool. He had five years of experience and he’d performed well, but there was no overcoming the handicap of being twenty-seven years old. Life experience was a complement to law enforcement experience and Claypool would accumulate both in time.
    “Son, I’ve seen Mr. Mantooth. He’s lived a hard life, but he moves loose and his eyes are young. I’ll buy you a scotch-and-soda if that man’s as old as you are.”
    Surprise was evident on Claypool’s pale babyface. The boy needed a scotch-and-soda. He’d never known life without air conditioning and he’d spent his adolescence at the business end of a video game controller, rather than a fishing rod. Claypool’s grandfather’s face had likely worn a weather-beaten tan by the time he was twenty-seven but, for Claypool, the aging process would be a long, drawn-out affair.
    “Say he’s your age,” the sheriff continued. “It took somebody man-sized to fracture that skull we dug up. And it took somebody man-sized to put those bodies in the ground. How old were you when you got big enough to do something like that?”
    Claypool had committed thousands of video-game murders by the age of twelve, but his electronic victims had just fallen down and evaporated. “I don’t know. Maybe fifteen or sixteen.”
    “So if Mr. Mantooth did it, it’s been in the last ten years. How long you think those bodies have been in the ground?”
    “Well, the flesh was all gone, so they weren’t put there yesterday, but you can’t always tell by the rate of decay. Bodies break down at different rates, depending on things like soil chemistry.”
    Sheriff Mike was pleased. Claypool never forgot anything he learned from a book. Life experience would sneak up on him and he’d be a real good officer.
    “Then there’s the roots,” Claypool went on. “It surely took some time for them to disrupt the bodies that way. I’m not sure if they could do that in ten years or not.”
    The sheriff gave him an “Attaboy” nod, and said, “The coroner, the forensics people, and the archaeologists—they all think those bodies were buried before you and Mr. Mantooth were born.”
    “So we let him go?”
    “You brought a trespassing vagrant with no proper ID in on murder charges, and now you want to let him go before he makes his first appearance before the judge? Hell, no, we don’t let him go. It will not hurt Mr. Mantooth to spend a night in our air-conditioned jail and eat a few hot meals. Besides, I want to talk to him. You can