Parallel Lies by Ridley Pearson

yellow tape around tree trunks to contain a herd of wild horses. They probably didn’t get the chance that often to play with their toys. A man and woman in plain clothes—detectives—poured coffee from a steel thermos for a young woman in her early twenties whose cross-country skis were leaned up against the tree, snow melting off them in silver lines. Her ski tracks cut through the area now cordoned off by the yellow tape—she must have come very close to the corpse. Tyler could see that she had stopped there in the snow and shuffled a little closer—perhaps not believing her eyes—moving her skis to the right and tamping down the snow in the process. Then she had pushed hard and fast and had skied away in a hurry. If he had it right, she had vomited only a few yards later. Had fallen over, gotten back up, and fallen over again.
    “She skis with a cell phone in her pocket,” Tyler told Priest as the two stood studying the area, still too far away to see the corpse. “We’ll need to know who else she called about this. And if she won’t tell us, then we’ll need to check her phone records.”
    “Why?”
    “Because we don’t know why she was out here,” he explained. “She’ll tell us it was morning exercise. But look where we are! It could have been us on those skis, right? You. Me. Out here looking. So who knows why she was out here, or who she is? And we
need
to know. It’s our job to know. We don’t need any media leaks on this—it’ll only send our boy deeper under.”
    “Are you always this paranoid?”
    “Most of the time.” He added, “And impatient, too. One of my better qualities.”
    “Maybe the hatchet guy did this,” she stated, suddenly very solemn. “When do we get a look at the body?”
    “We get their permission,” Tyler said, indicating the detectives.“Even though we don’t need it, it’s how we do it.” He asked, “Are you scared?”
    She answered, “Should I be?”
    “Yes,” he told her. “Hatchets are no fun at all.”

    Tyler and Priest followed the route through the snow and stopped several feet short of the frozen corpse. It wasn’t a hatchet—not unless the blunt end had been used. Tyler spotted the problem immediately. He called back to the detectives, “I need to look a little closer.”
    Priest looked at him like he had to be out of his mind—
closer to that!
her eyes said. “Oh …shit,” she moaned.
    “Don’t touch anything!” the male detective hollered back.
    Tyler stepped toward the corpse and squatted. Lacerations covered the man’s bloodied face, but it wasn’t like any knife fight Tyler had ever seen. The skin above his eye had been ripped open a good inch or two so that the eyeball hung partly out of its socket, and though the wound was frozen shut now, it appeared to have been the primary source of all that blood. A bunch of loose ends came together for Tyler: so much so that he cautioned himself not to jump to any conclusions. The dead man was big—real big—and seemed to fit the lumberjack description provided by the wounded rider in the hospital bed. The dead man’s hair had been cut by a professional—albeit, a while ago—not by gardening shears. No rider, this man. He’d lost enough blood through the various tears in his skin to drain him of all color. Enough blood loss to account for the boxcar they’d found. But his face had been burned as well, the frozen skin bubbled and raw. He thought back to the frozen chili. Tyler studied more closely what had drawn him to his knees in the first place. He asked Priest, “What do you want to bet this comes back as canned chili?”
    “As in the boxcar?”
    Tyler called back to the detectives, “Will your photographer bring a Polaroid with him?”
    “With her,” the woman detective answered. “As in
me.
Yes, she will. The gear’s in the trunk. Give us a minute.”
    No local law enforcement ever welcomed the feds’ involvement.
    Priest looked shaken. It didn’t surprise him. The