St Kilda Consulting 04 - Blue Smoke and Murder

sprawl.
    She didn’t move.
    Swearing, Score looked at the red slash across his forearm. Blood was welling up, but not in spurts. A cut, that was all. Not even deep enough for stitches. Grappling with his temper, he looked at the old woman.
    She seemed smaller, like a bundle of rags instead of a person.
    He cursed steadily as he squatted beside her. He’d seen enough bodies to know what death looked like. A simple black-bag job on an old lady’s house had turned into murder.
    “What are you—stupid?” he snarled at her. “No way you were going to take me.”
    He eased his fingers underneath her head. She still had her glasses on, crookedly, but that no longer mattered. Her eyes were dim from more than cataracts. Beneath thinning white hair he felt a depression in her skull. She must have been dead a second after she hit, because there was no blood.
    “Crazy old bitch,” he said, standing up. “Why didn’t you listen?”
    With a final disgusted curse, he went to search the pantry.
    He didn’t find anything but canned goods and bags of rice and flour, sugar and beans. No trick shelves, no trapdoor, no false ceiling. Nothing but food.
    He searched the rest of the house.
    Nothing.
    He went to the back porch and looked over at the sagging barn forty feet beyond the kitchen. The wind swirled around him, plucking at his coveralls with hard, impatient fingers, then racing away to batter the old barn.
    He didn’t have time to search the old building. He’d let the wind take care of it.
    He picked up the can of fuel oil from the back porch and went back into the kitchen. It wasn’t the first time he’d dressed a crime scene to look like an everyday accident.
    If the paintings turned up, it wouldn’t be the last time, either.

2
    ON THE COLORADO RIVER
AUGUST 27
8:00 A. M.
    H oly shit,” Lane Faroe said reverently.
    The lanky teenager looked at Jillian Breck, grinned, then realized what he’d just said.
    “Oops,” he said. “Sorry.”
    “No problem.” Jill smiled without looking away from the thunder and boil of a river narrowed to half its size by a bottleneck of basalt, a rock as hard as the water was determined to reach the sea. “That’s what I say to myself every time I see Lava Falls.”
    And every time it’s different.
    That’s why she loved it. The water flow from Lake Powell, two hundred miles upstream, changed from day to day. Rocks and boulders on the riverbank got undercut and tumbled into the current. Wherever they stuck, they piled waves in new ways, creating new currents, rips, holes, and eddies.
    Running the Colorado was always different, yet always the same. Dangerous.
    Exhilarating.
    “Looks like a big chocolate snake somebody stepped on,” Lane said.
    Jill nodded. “A mean one.”
    That was the other thing she loved about the river. It tested her. She was going to miss river running when she gave it up, but she knew the time was coming. Soon. She had a restlessness that even the wild river couldn’t cure.
    Maybe she would turn the old Breck homestead into a dude ranch. Bring back horses and buy more cattle, dig a trout pond, organize camera and painting and hunting safaris, feed people from kitchen gardens watered by the old windmill.
    Maybe she would keep on being a river bum, following the seasons down Western rivers, teaching kayaking and rafting and wilderness survival skills.
    And maybe I should concentrate on this river in front of me. Lava Falls changed with the last monsoon rain. I’ll need a slightly different approach.
    Today she felt like an adrenaline ride, something for the tall, good-looking teenager to remember. Lava Falls would provide it. A hundred feet below her cliff overlook, rapids coiled and boomed and frothed. Whirlpools and back eddies hid behind the shoulders of huge rocks along the bank. The roar was constant, insistent, almost numbing.
    The right side, she thought, nodding to herself. Plenty of room today. Head for that big boulder sticking out from the bank like a house, let the power of the river turn the raft, dig in hard with the right oar, and shoot across to the other bank.
    Lane looked sideways at the river guide who was rowing him and his father Joe Faroe down the Colorado. Lane figured Jill was older than he was by at least a decade, but it didn’t stop him from noticing how hot she was. She had the lean, smooth body of a gymnast, but she had hips and boobs, too. Since everybody wore sunscreen and not much else in the summer heat, he’d had