The Mystery Megapack

his note, Parker identified the female with him as his girlfriend who’d decided to die with him. Said she was Lori Crawford of Aspen, Colorado. So far, no further info.”
    “Just got something back about her,” Bill said, dark eyes intense. He held up a fax. “A week ago, police and firemen put out an arson fire at a ski lodge. Inside they found the bodies of the owners, a man and wife. They’d been tied to chairs and shot to death. It being summer, the building was empty except for the two of them. Aspen law enforcement thinks the place had been ransacked for valuables. Want to guess the names of the owners?”
    “Wouldn’t be Crawford?” the Marshal said.
    “Right as red rain.”
    “So it looks like Parker murdered and robbed his girlfriend’s parents,” the marshal said.
    “I wonder if the body we found was really Parker.” Frank knifed his hand through his thick shock of yellow hair. “I mean he was already wanted for murder, couldn’t he have killed someone else and made it seem as though he committed suicide? Why else would he burn down the shack unless he wanted to make identification difficult?”
    “You got a good point there,” Marshal Simmons agreed. “There’s only one way to know for sure.” He phoned the medical examiner’s office.
    “We got a little problem,” John Robinson, the county ME told him. “An inexperienced investigator gathered up the burned bones, along with a lizard skeleton also lying in the ashes, and well, he jumbled them all together in a body bag.”
    The marshal felt his blood pressure rising. “We photographed those skeletons before your man took the bones. We did our job right. Why couldn’t you do the same?” Nothing infuriated him worse than incompetence. He felt like cursing but kept a tight rein on his temper.
    “Now listen here, I think we can do something about this,” the ME said in a placating voice. “There’s a forensic anthropologist, Dr. Sarah Whitney, who helps criminal justice agencies, She’s with the university. I’ll personally bring the bag of bones over to her.”
    “All right,” Simmons agreed, but he didn’t hold out much hope of solving the case after a major mistake like this one. Still, it seemed worth a try.
    * * * *
    The marshal had almost forgotten about the Parker matter. Then several months later something happened to bring it to mind again. Simmons received information from the Colorado police. In investigating the deaths of the Crawfords, they’d discovered that Parker had tried to pawn expensive jewelry in Denver. He had claimed the jewels belonged to his deceased wife. The pawnbroker was suspicious, thought the man was lying and reported it to the police. Parker had been dating the Crawford girl and according to the employee of the ski lodge who’d been the one to find their bodies, the parents had quarreled bitterly with Parker. The Crawford girl had not been seen by anyone since the murder of her parents. There was a good chance he’d kidnapped her. A warrant for Parker’s arrest had been issued.
    Simmons decided it was time to take action. He got into his car and began to drive. Expectation, located in Southwest Montana not far from Butte, had once thrived, but with the decline of the local mines, it became little more than a small, dusty town. Simmons loved calling it home, just as he loved riding or driving through the big sky country with its shining mountains and wide open spaces.
    He planned a visit to the university to find out just what the anthropologist was doing with the sack of bones. He was not intimidated by university people; he’d gotten his degree in Missoula before he entered the Marine Corps as an officer and considered himself reasonably well-educated.
    * * * *
    The first thing he noticed when he met the doctor was how petite she was, a slim, dark-haired woman in her mid-thirties with a bright smile and warm as toast brown eyes.
    “It’s been the world’s biggest, macabre jigsaw puzzle,” she told him. “That bag contained around 10,000 burned bone fragments, lizard and human. Since they were all broken up, it‘s been difficult to tell which ones belong to man, woman or reptile. But my students and I have pieced together key portions of the skeletons. We took x-rays of the reconstructed bones. I compared them with medical and dental x-rays taken of Parker and Ms. Crawford when they were alive. I was able to make some progress.”
    Simmons was encouraged. The doc sounded as if