Midnight Crossroad (Midnight, Texas #1) by Charlaine Harris Page A

large clump of yucca. She wondered if she could transplant some to her front yard. She crouched to figure out if the plant could be divided. Fiji never liked to leave a hole in a natural landscape. But now that the air currents were gusting down the riverbed and apparently floating up to hit her nose, she was aware, abruptly, that something had died. That something lay very close to where she knelt.
    Fiji pushed awkwardly to her feet and stepped closer to the edge. At this point, the undergrowth was significantly thinner than at any other spot. She noted a broken bush, long dead. She looked down. There was only a slight impression of a tire in the dirt; some rain, some wind, had altered it but left its memory intact. So she was fairly sure the bush had been run over.
    She held on to a stunted oak while she leaned out to look down the slope to the partially exposed round rocks of the riverbed. At the moment, the river was more of a small stream that burbled its way across the submerged stones, making them even smoother. After a heavy rain, the water speed would be almost frightening, but right now the sight and sound of the river was playful and delightful.
    The thing lying close to the streambed was not. Though she was not a fan of CSI shows or detective novels, Fiji knew a decayed corpse when she saw one. And she knew the corpse was human.
    Fiji didn’t know whose name to call first. For a fraction of a second, she was tempted to say nothing at all to anyone, but her sizable conscience would not permit it. Though she’d never predicted the future and she’d never been interested in any of the methods used to do so, for this one moment Fiji could see the futures of all the people present changing at this moment, their lives altering as this body toppled all their pursuits in a domino effect, and she was profoundly sorry that hers was the finger pushing the first tile.
    “Olivia!” she called. She could not have said why she’d chosen Olivia, but Fiji was confident she’d called the person most competent to deal with death.
Instinct at work,
she thought.
    Olivia had a tortilla chip topped with guacamole in her hand, and she popped it into her mouth as she walked. She looked good-naturedly resigned, as if she were assuming that Fiji would not have anything very interesting to show her or tell her. She stopped by Fiji and looked down the slope at what Fiji had discovered.
    There was a long moment of breathless silence. The wind wreaked havoc with Fiji’s curls, while Olivia’s ponytail danced around.
    “Fucking hell,” Olivia said. Then, after another moment’s contemplation of the pathetic and grisly sight, she said, “
Very
fucking hell.”
    “Right.”
    “I better go down and look closer,” Olivia said.
    “Why?”
    “Sheer curiosity.” Olivia went effortlessly down the slope, then bent over the body for a few long moments. She straightened, shook her head in a dissatisfied way, and came back up to Fiji in a rush, as if she were getting her cardio in.
    “There’s a hole in her sternum,” Olivia said. “I don’t know if it’s a bullet hole or not.”
    Fiji had fished her cell phone from her jacket pocket, and for the first time in her life she punched in 911.
    “What’s your emergency?” asked a brisk voice.
    “I guess this isn’t really an emergency, since it’s clearly been dead quite a while, but we just found a body,” Fiji said steadily.
    “Where are you? Have you checked for signs of life?”
    “Well, we’re at the big boulder on the Río Roca Fría, having a picnic,” Fiji said. “Though one of us did go down to check, this body has been here for a while. It’s”—
a nightmare, a woman, a pile of bone and gristle
—“decomposed.”
    “You’re sure it was a human being? Not a deer or horse?” The dispatcher sounded skeptical. It was like she didn’t
want
there to be any problem.
    “Not unless deer and horses have started wearing clothes,” Fiji said. “We’ll wait here