Dead Man’s Fancy by Keith McCafferty

over his own feet?”
    â€œLet’s let the evidence talk before we speculate.” Hanson pulled the sheet down to the line of the man’s pubic hair, exposing the gaping wound. The skin was darkly reddened in a softball-sized area surrounding the puncture.
    â€œOkay, Doc. I’ll bite. What does the evidence say?”
    Hanson’s voice assumed a professorial tone. “Typically, one would suspect that head trauma or spinal injury was at least an ancillary cause of death. In a fall, that’s the most likely scenario. But that is not the case here. This man died from massive blood loss from a rupture of the common iliac artery, where it is formed by the junction of the external and internal iliac arteries. The antler tine was the sole cause of this poor man’s death, the G4 to be precise.”
    â€œI heard Walt refer to it by that designation. What’s it mean?”
    â€œG is the section of the Boone and Crockett Club scoring sheet relating to the length of antler tines. Over time, it became convenient for scorers who judged big-game heads to simply refer to the tines as G1, G2, and so on. On a typical six-point bull, the G4 is the fourth from the bottom, usually the longest tine on the antler.”
    â€œI didn’t think you were a hunter.”
    â€œI’m not. I was given a lesson by Julie McGregor. She’s the game biologist who examined the elk. The head’s over in the FWP barn. The length of this particular tine was forty-six centimeters, or just over eighteen inches. It entered through the skin of the back, punctured the thoracolumbar fascia and the internal oblique muscle before punching through the body cavity—that smell is from the ruptured small intestine—and came out through the lower right quadrant of the abdomen, with approximately seventeen centimeters protruding. The abdominal depth is twenty-three centimeters, a little less. He was impaled on the lower section of the tine, more or less wedged down against the base, where the tine reaches its greatest circumference. The puncture wound is nearly eleven centimeters in circumference at the entry point, tapering to just under seven centimeters where it exited the abdomen; that’s one hell of a big hole. I’d estimate he died within five minutes.”
    â€œHmm.” Martha steepled her fingers so that her forefingers rested against her nose, with her thumbs under her chin.
    â€œYou look lost in prayer, Martha.”
    Ettinger didn’t answer. She took her hands from her face. “You’re a strong guy, Bob. What if you were to throw me down on an antler tine like the one that skewered this guy? Would I be impaled the way he was?”
    â€œThat’s the question I posed to Julie when she showed me the head of the bull. She said she’d check it out with Wilkerson.”
    â€œOuija Board Gigi?”
    He nodded.
    â€œWhy don’t I know about this?” Martha’s brow furrowed. “I knew when we stole her from Custer County that she was the best CSI in the state. I didn’t know she’d bypass chain of command and go cowgirl three weeks into the job.”
    â€œThat’s something you’ll have to take up with her.” Hanson glanced at the bird call clock on the wall. “You go over to the barn before the chickadee sings, you should catch her. Julie said they’d be conducting their experiments at three o’clock.”
    â€œThen we’re done here?”
    â€œAlmost. You asked me to look at the right ankle, where you thought he could have been stepped on by his horse.”
    Martha nodded. “His boot was cut. I was looking for a reason he’d stumble and fall onto the elk.”
    Hanson drew the sheet back over the head and went to the other end of the table. He pulled the sheet to expose the feet. Ettinger stared at the ugly line of bruise over the instep.
    â€œYou see there’s a corresponding contusion on the outside