Haven by Kay Hooper

with tendons and shreds of muscle still attached.
    And there was the smell he recognized. Blood soaked into the earth, and decomposing flesh.
    Death.
    Not much was left of her. Not much at all. He didn’t even see askull, just a few strands of blond hair clinging to a shriveled bit of scalp at one end and tangled among sticky briars at the other. He imagined some animal grabbing the skull and tugging, making off with all but the few pitiful hairs anchored to the briars and the patch of scalp that wouldn’t let go.
    With an effort, he shook off the image, hoping it
was
just his imagination and not a flash of what had actually happened. As a matter of fact, something about that image bugged him, and when he knelt to look closer, he realized what it was.
    Her spine around the base of her neck had been severed, and the cut was too clean to have happened naturally. Nothing had wrenched her head free of her body.
    Someone had cut off her head. And though there was no way for him to know for certain if she had in fact been running and had fallen to her death, every instinct he had told him that was what had happened. Which meant that someone—either an unspeakable ghoul or an unspeakable murderer—had found the remains later and had removed her head and taken it away.
    His money was on the killer. The question was, had the killer left the rest of her because this was the way he always disposed of his victims, letting the weather, scavengers, and nature clean up after him? Or had he left her here as some kind of punishment for escaping him?
    Or for some other reason entirely?
    Navarro rose to his feet and continued to frown down at what was left of the victim. He never got used to this. No matter how many times he found himself looking down at some variation of this too-familiar scene, he never got used to it. Which was probably just as well.
    Getting used to unnatural death was probably a pretty good indication that it’d be time to hang up his spurs.
    For now, however, this was still his job, or part of it. So he looked, making various mental notes. One such note was that it didn’t take a forensics expert to know that these remains had been out here at least a week, and possibly a couple of months.
    No, not that long. Between the heat, summer rains in the last week or two, and wildlife hungry after a rough winter, human remains would be consumed and/or decompose and be scattered in a fairly short amount of time.
    If he was looking at a victim of a possible killer in the area—and one glaring omission from what he was looking at told him it was more than possible—then she had died recently.
    Navarro pulled out his cell phone, figuring it was worth a shot since he was so high up and possibly near one of the cell towers he had spotted earlier in these mountains, but was still mildly surprised to find he had a signal. He hit a speed-dial number.
    “Didn’t you just check in?” Maggie asked by way of a greeting.
    “This morning. Right now I’m hiking in the mountains west of town. And I’ve found something. Someone.”
    “Send me a picture,” she said immediately.
    Navarro got the best angle he could and snapped a shot with his cell, sending it back to Haven.
    “There isn’t a lot to see,” he told Maggie once he’d done that. “I’d say the animals got to her quickly. Probably drawn here fast because of the blood from the impact. The drop from the cliff above me is at least seventy-five feet, and underneath the fallen leaves and shit here is mostly granite. She hit hard.”
    “You think the fall killed her?”
    “I think somebody could have dumped a body off the cliff, but this is a pretty damned inaccessible place, and why bother? If he planned to leave her out in the open for the animals to clean up, I’ve passed dozens of ravines off the main trails that would have done the trick. One good shove and she would have rolled down a rocky slope, into some fairly nasty underbrush and, for all intents and