A Mammoth Murder by Bill Crider Page B

out the location soon enough without any help from the paper. And pictures or no pictures, I’m still coming along.”
    â€œYou can ride in the Jeep with Bud, then,” Rhodes said. He didn’t plan to be trapped in the car with her.
    Even that didn’t discourage her. “That’s fine,” she said.

8
    TOM VANCE WAS QUIET AS THEY DROVE SOUTH. RHODES FIGURED that the teacher was thinking about the possibility of digging for the mammoth, or maybe he was more concerned with the possibility of being attacked by feral hogs while looking for old bones.
    Rhodes didn’t mind the silence. He was trying to remember a little about the autopsy report that he’d hardly had time to look at before Vance arrived at the jail.
    In the report Dr. White made it clear that Colley had died at the place where he’d been found. The postmortem lividity indicated that quite clearly.
    Dr. White had also concluded that Colley had been killed by the traditional blunt instrument. Not a tree branch or something handy in the woods, because there was no sign of anything like that in the wound. More likely it had been something metal, like a jack handle. Dr. White had made a cast of the wound, in case Rhodes turned up a weapon that he’d like to try to match to it.

    Rhodes wasn’t sure he’d ever find a weapon, certainly not before he found a lot of other things. He’d looked all over the area where the body had been found, but there was no sign of a heavy piece of metal. So what Rhodes was wondering about was how Colley had gotten to Big Woods, and why he’d gone there. There had been no sign of a vehicle, and since there was nobody living in the area, there was no chance that anybody had seen one.
    The county car was passing through Thurston about that time. Someone in the little town might have seen the killer’s car, but because the road through town was a fairly busy highway, no one would have paid any special attention to a car driving through.
    There was one person who might have noticed a car, though. Louetta Kennedy. Rhodes told himself that he’d have to stop by her store on his way back to Clearview and have a little talk with her.
    As it happened, the route Turley was driving took them right by Louetta’s store, which meant that Turley and Colley had been near the woods at the same time. Louetta’s old Ford was parked in its usual place. Rhodes looked for Louetta on the porch, but the plastic lawn chair was empty. Maybe it was cooler inside, or maybe Louetta had some shelves that needed stocking.
    Rhodes followed Turley’s Jeep past the road he’d taken the previous day through Bolton’s land to Big Woods, but not far past it. Turley pulled off to the side of the road just before he came to an old wooden bridge over Pittman Creek. He parked the Jeep with two wheels on the road and two off in the ditch beside it, leaving the Jeep leaning to the right at a sharp angle. It didn’t seem to bother Jennifer Loam, who climbed out without any trouble. Turley, who was going uphill, had a harder time of it, but not much.
    Rhodes parked the county car behind the Jeep. He and Vance had to contend with heavy doors, so it was harder for them to get
out than it had been for the passengers in the open Jeep. Rhodes let the door on his side slam shut behind him. Vance left his open while he took off his tie and tossed it inside the car. Then he shoved hard on the door and closed it.
    Rhodes and Vance walked to the bridge where Turley was standing with Jennifer. Turley was telling the reporter how he’d found the mammoth.
    â€œAll that rain we had this summer really washed along this creek,” he said. “And naturally it washed away a lot of soil.”
    Rhodes looked down at the trickle of water that ran along the creek bed. It was hard to believe, now, that earlier in the summer water had been rushing along it at a depth of eight or nine feet.
    â€œIndians