Dead Man’s Fancy by Keith McCafferty Page B

elk.
    â€œHigh enough?”
    â€œLet’s do a couple more steps.”
    â€œOkay, okay,” McGregor said, blowing like a weightlifter. “On three. One, two, three.”
    The mule deer fell through space. The squishing thud that reverberated through the barn was followed by a moment of dead silence. Then a peal of laughter rang off the steel walls. Martha could see two tines of an elk antler poking up through the rib cage of the deer.
    â€œWhoa! That was way cool.” McGregor tossed her head, her mop of hair flying. Wilkerson was laughing so hard she started to cough. The women climbed down from the ladders and high-fived each other over the carcasses.
    Martha thought
When did everyone get so young?
She cleared her throat. “Ahem.” The laughter died down as she approached.
    â€œWe were just having a bit of fun,” Wilkerson said, still out of breath. She was a pear-shaped brunette, not unattractive, but with a blotchy indoor complexion and small hands that flitted like bats. Her glasses magnified her eyes, giving her a permanently startled expression.
    â€œAnd you, Miss McGregor, you were having fun, too, it appears.”
    The biologist, dressed in a khaki shirt embossed with the head of a grizzly bear over Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks, blew back an errant strand of hair that had fallen across her nose. Freckle-faced tomboy to the core, she was a fair-skinned towhead with crinkly eyes that had seen a lot of weather.
Where the hell are her hips?
Martha thought.
    McGregor looked down at the mule deer, the elk antlers skewered through it like the tines of a giant fork. “There’s been a couple fellas I wouldn’t mind dropping onto a sharp G4,” she said. McGregor glanced sidelong at Wilkerson, immediately initiating another round of laughter.
    Ettinger, recalling Doc Hanson’s wisdom, told herself to stay calm. She offered a grudging smile. “I suppose I could say the same about my first husband,” she admitted. “And the second, come to think of it.” Her eyes went from one to the other. “So what’s this little experiment prove?”
    â€œWe were just seeing how far you had to drop a deer before it got stuck on the antler,” Wilkerson said. “You know, instead of bouncing off.” She dug into her shirt pocket and produced a notebook. “I started to do some calculations in the lab, but it’s hard because of the variables. You have to take into account mass, weight and profile of the victim, the size and configuration of the antler tine, drag coefficient and velocity at impact, how much force it takes to impale through skin, fascia, organs and then skin again . . .” She shook her head, her eyes swimming. “If Doc had a John Doe in the drawer it would be perfect, but Julie said she had some confiscated game we could use and this mule deer dresses out around one-seventy, which is approximately the same weight as the victim. Of course it’s minus the guts, which throws a wrench into the equation, but I thought I’d learn more here than with the calculus.”
    â€œSo what’s the verdict?”
    Wilkerson cocked her head. “Even with a skinned deer dropped from two meters we didn’t have penetration, that’s with an impact velocity of twelve point three miles per hour, so it’s clear that he didn’t fall onto the elk and impale himself. Certainly not to a depth of forty-six centimeters; I’m sorry to be trading back and forth on measures, but we use imperial for velocity and metric for most everything else. Should I call you Sheriff?”
    â€œEverybody calls me Martha. So what you’re saying is he had help.”
    â€œI’m saying that he could not have been impaled by simply falling onto the antler tine. Considering the mass, the tine itself, which looks sharp but is technically blunt, puncturing the involved tissues would take at least forty-five