Old Sam squinted at the ravens. Yeah, well, like you said. We were in a bit of a hurry.

Jim used a pen to hook the skull through the eye socket and drop it into another evidence bag. He sealed it and raised it to eye level.

His heart lifted. There were still some teeth attached to the jaw, and a couple of the teeth had fillings.

Twelve

Kate had to wait until noon for a seat on a flight out to the mine, and this time she flew in the Beaver with the new guy. He was in his late twenties, cocky and capable, and was hitting on Kate before they‘d been in the air five minutes, Mutt sitting just behind them notwithstanding. Kate advised him to attend to his flying. He gave her a comprehensive once-over, a cheerful grin. Can‘t blame a guy for trying. The reappearance of Dewayne Gammons a month after he‘d been pronounced dead had reawakened all of the niggling little doubts she‘d had a month ago over the presumption of suicide. There was no real reason for this, since it didn‘t appear that the body in question had been the victim of foul play. It didn‘t stop her from reviewing the points one by one as the land passed beneath them and the rocky arms of the Quilaks rose up before them.

The round of .22 ammunition found rolling around in the truck. Where was the box it came from? Where was the firearm it was made for? Who did both belong to? It was Gammons‘s truck, which argued the ammunition was his. He‘d had no pistol on him when he had crashed headlong into Kate‘s yard, although he could have dropped it somewhere in the past month. But why take a pistol if you were planning to die? Unless you were going to shoot yourself with it. But he hadn‘t. Maybe he‘d tried to, and missed.

The size of the round and the size of the firearm it was made for led to another question. Who in their right minds took only a .22 into the Park with the bears just up? A .22 would most emphatically not stop anything bigger than a lemming. It would, however, be useful against another human being.

Lyda Blue had not recognized the writing on the suicide note. Okay, Jim was right, it was a printed note. The crime lab had compared it with the little of his handwriting to be found in his personnel file and declared that there wasn‘t enough of a sample to say one way or another. Nor had they been able to find enough left of a fingerprint either in the file or on the note to make a match. Still, Kate remembered that split-second moment of hesitation between when Lyda had first seen the note and when she had dissolved into tears. Kate was sure Lyda had seen something in that note, something she had chosen not to share.

Or maybe Jim was right and all of this was just a product of her fevered imagination. The round, the missing gun, the note. What else?