Longarm and the Missing Husband by Tabor Evans Page B

others before it had been feeding on. What remained no longer appeared to be human. A good many of the bones had been torn away and gnawed. Coyotes, Longarm supposed. A bear would simply have taken the entire carcass away.
    The smell at this point was of rotting meat, long overripe.
    The head was fifteen feet or so away. It showed a bullet hole low in the back. A few scraps of hair clung to the dark, bloody skull, but both eye sockets were empty. Those would have been pecked out by magpies.
    The murder had been coldly deliberate, the shot having been delivered while the victim was either kneeling or standing quietly in front of the killer. Longarm guessed that Hank Bacon had not known he was the target of a murderer. Possibly the surveyor assumed he was being robbed. At this point only the killer could tell the full story of what happened here.
    But Longarm could see enough.
    What he sorely wanted to see, but could not, was the identity of the killer who’d murdered Bacon.
    Longarm spread the sleeping bag over what remained of the decomposed and half-eaten dead man and weighed it down with some rocks, hoping to keep the magpies and other carrion eaters away.
    A dozen yards from the camp he noticed an iron stake driven into the ground. Curious, he walked over to it. A generous length of rope was attached to the stake and a halter lay at the other end of the rope.
    Bacon had had a pack animal and had taken care of it the evening—Longarm assumed it to have been evening right after the camp was set up—shortly before he was killed.
    The killer, Longarm saw, had thought to free the animal, either to steal it or to allow it to run loose. No, not to steal it. He would have kept the halter on the animal if he’d been stealing it. So he turned it loose to keep it from suffering the pangs of starvation.
    Thoughtful of the son of a bitch, he was sure.
    And doubly interesting now that someone was also trying to kill Bethlehem Bacon. More likely trying to have her killed. If he had been trying to do the job himself, the attempts would have stopped back there in Rawlins.
    Trying to cover the fact that Hank Bacon had been murdered? Perhaps, Longarm thought.
    Beth was only causing problems, looking for her husband and bringing a Federal lawman along with her when she did it. That would be reason enough for a coldhearted killer.
    But who? And why? A competing railroad? That was not impossible. Improbable, perhaps, but certainly not impossible.
    Longarm had many questions and no answers. The one thing he knew for sure was that now he had to go back and tell Beth that her search was over.
    It was not a duty he looked forward to performing.

Chapter 47
    â€œHe didn’t suffer,” Longarm said. It was what one nearly always told the grieving family members but in this case it was probably true. A bullet to the back of the head meant virtually instantaneous death.
    Beth stiffened her back and raised her chin. She was the one doing the suffering and was trying not to show it. “I thought he was gone,” she said. “All along I thought he was gone or he would have come back to me. We were in love. He wouldn’t have just disappeared.”
    She walked out of the firelight on the far side of the camp. Longarm could dimly see her at the edge of the circle of light. She stood there for several minutes. Composing herself, he supposed. Willing herself to accept this tragedy without showing her pain. Then she turned and came back to the fire, where he had poured himself a cup of coffee to ward off the creeping chill of the night.
    â€œI want to see him,” she said firmly.
    â€œNot possible,” Longarm told her. “It’s too dark now anyway.”
    â€œIn the morning then,” Beth said. “I want to see my husband’s body. I want to know for myself that he is gone and how it happened.”
    â€œI told you—”
    â€œI want to see,” she declared. “If you won’t go