Private #1 Suspect (Private 2)

“What? She’s down there? ”

Del Rio walked a few yards to the edge, pointed his light straight down, and saw a patch of white. He was pretty sure that he was l

ooking at Piper Winnick’s splayed and broken body, a hundred yards down in the canyon.

Del Rio stared for a long moment, hoping he was wrong. The girl looked dead, but maybe she was unconscious. It was a slim possibility, but he had to check.

He went back to Danny, grabbed him by his hair, forced the blubbering kid to look him in the eye. “What happened, Danny? What did you do to her?”

“I can’t…carry her out of there,” Danny wailed. “I want to die.”

Del Rio said, “What did you do, you piece of shit?”

The kid kept crying. Del Rio stood up and walked back to the lip of the canyon.

The canyon wall was at a treacherous forty-five degree angle to the floor. Del Rio looked for footholds, saw jutting boulders, some ledges running parallel to the ground, flat places where he could put his weight. If he watched where he was stepping, he could maybe get all the way down.

Pressing his left hand to the hill, gripping his light with the other, Del Rio started his descent, doing a good job of being a mountain goat even though his heart was slamming hard against his rib cage. He was about halfway to the bottom when, without any warning, his feet slipped across the smooth surface of a rock and shot out from under him.

Del Rio twisted his body, grabbed at the branches of a manzanita with both hands. His flashlight jumped away from him, bounced, and rolled downhill—and then Del Rio lost his tenuous hold and began skidding downward, his whole body sliding over rocks and dirt and grasses until, forty or fifty feet later, the ground came up and dumped him hard on his ass.

CHAPTER 77

DEL RIO WAS scraped and shaken, but he hadn’t slammed into anything on the way down. He rested for a moment, then got to his feet and made for his flashlight, which was, miraculously, still throwing light. Huffing, he picked his way across the rough terrain and closed in on young Piper Winnick.

She was on her back, her arms flung out like broken wings. Her white cotton nightgown was ripped and dirty, hiked up to her breasts, exposing her panties. She was wearing one shoe, a match to the slipper Danny had been holding in his hand.

Del Rio knew Piper was gone, but he hunched down beside the girl and put his hand to her neck.

He couldn’t find a pulse. He listened to her chest. No heartbeat. Her body was still warm to his touch. He didn’t want to accept it, but Piper was dead and that was a sin. No other word for it.

Del Rio wanted to straighten her limbs, cover her body, close her eyes—acts that would destroy the crime scene, which this almost certainly was.

He flashed his light over Piper’s face, tracked the dried blood to a wound at her temple—and saw that her skull was crushed there, caved in.

He used his light and his camera phone to catalogue the skull wound, the bruise on her arm, scrapes on her thighs, the blood trailing down her pale skin, indications that Piper had been alive when she’d gone over the cliff.

Playing his light up the canyon wall, Del Rio saw dozens of big rocks, any one of which could have cracked Piper’s skull.

Danny. That fucking kid.

Screwing young girls wasn’t enough. He’d moved up a few levels to physical aggression. Had Piper tried to get away from him, made a misstep, and fallen? Or had Danny shoved her over the edge on purpose?

Del Rio remembered the way Piper had looked yesterday morning, giddy with life. He could still see her in that yellow dress, holding on to her hat, saying her lines in a girlish voice with an Italian accent. He remembered the look of joy on her face when she got into that fast car with Danny.

He tried to remember what Danny had looked like when he’d floored the accelerator, but he couldn’t picture him. Del Rio had been looking at the girl.

Del Rio imagined getting his hands on Danny, knocking his teeth out, breaking the bones in that too-pretty face. He was twenty years older than Danny, but he could still do some damage to a wimpy piece-of-crap kid like that.

Del Rio stood up. He had tears in his eyes as he looked at Piper’s body. Her last minutes had been filled with fear and pain. A nice young girl like that.

“You were having a good day, Piper. A good life. I’m sorry this happened to you.”

Del Rio opened his cell phone and dialed Justine.

CHAPTER 78

BUGS CIRCLED JUSTINE’S dying beam. She whacked her flashlight with her palm, and the light flared briefly, then dimmed again.