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“Defleshed the bones? Maybe. There’s some pitting probably from bleach.” I tilted my head upward. “Full sun this time of year could help with decomposition too.” I squinted at the bones again. “Look how white they are. Clean. Yeah, they were soaked in bleach probably. I don’t see any sign of leftover tissue, no pieces of ligaments, tendons, cartilage. Just the cleaned bones.”

There was no blood either, but the scarf, rippling in the gentle wind, was a convincing enough representation.

The handiwork was … impressive.

Our boots grinding into the brittle earth again, we circled around the skeleton. Our path wasn’t easy as we had to veer around jumping cactus. The jumping wasn’t real, but the needles from the sloughed-off stems didn’t hurt any less because of it.

The sheriff asked, “What do you think?”

I startled and then I hesitated. I’d been asked that question more than a few times. My immersion into the life my father had set in motion for me, as well as my own curiosity that had taken me away from Black Vulture for a time to study more deeply, had qualified me to offer all sorts of opinions regarding bones and crime scenes, but not without some consideration first. As I looked into the sheriff’s eyes today, confirming they were, indeed, pinched in fear, I knew he wanted something fast. He had no idea what this was about. In fact, I didn’t either, but I knew some things he didn’t.

I looked at the ends of the humerus bones, the ones that made up the top parts of the arms. I skimmed the others too, knowing all of this would require a closer look.

“Okay, well, I can say with reasonable surety that the limbs were disarticulated–cut off–before being put in bleach. I spot knife knicks at the ends of the bones, but whoever did the cutting kept it at the joints, I think.” I squinted and moved my head in again. “They don’t appear to have been too impatient.” I stepped back around to the front. I glanced into the empty eye sockets, the open mouth. “Teeth are there. That could help with ID.”

“Cause of death?”

I shook my head. “I’m not seeing the hyoid bone.” I put my fingers to the top part of my throat. “It’s a horseshoe shaped bone that usually gets damaged when someone is strangled. This might mean the victim was, indeed, strangled, and the hyoid was damaged, so it wasn’t included to give us that clue. But I don’t know. I can’t give you a COD right now.”

“Okay. Anything else?”

There was something else in Calloway’s tone now. I studied the skeleton again. The pose was familiar—on all fours, the carefully placed arms, the way the finger bones, attached to wires, curled inward, the mouth forced open, making the exposed teeth seem bared in a howl.

My pulse was beating in my ears. “It’s been posed to look like a coyote, its throat cut and bleeding.”

“That’s what I thought too. A mount.”

“This isn’t taxidermy,” I said quickly.

“I know.”

“Who found it?”

“A hiker coming back to town. He passed this way two days ago and it wasn’t here then.” The sheriff paused. “You have a coyote in your museum, don’t you?”

I nodded, but my eyes returned to the skeleton. “Two. One is posed very much like this. Sheriff, this wasn’t easy to do. I can’t … quite grasp how unwieldy it must have been, how much time it took. The bones might have been defleshed quickly, but this … sculpture was work.”

“Right. The perpetrator or perpetrators might have known … I don’t know, about taxidermy, typical poses maybe.”

“Maybe.”

A long, silent pause later, he said, “Are you in touch with any taxidermists?”

“There are still quite a few out there, lots of them not on the books, not legal. Taxidermists who take poached animals make much more money than those who don’t.”

“Do you know who around here is doing it, legally or not?”

“There’s a guy in Tucson—”

“Closer than forty miles.”

I squinted at him under the brim of my old black felt cowboy hat. He was getting at something. I didn’t think he was accusing me of anything, but maybe he was. “Are you asking me if I had something to do with this?”

“No, Hazel, but …” He sighed. “All right. Look at its left hand.”

I hesitated, went down on all fours, and leaned in, the scent of bleach now even stronger. My eyes went to the left hand.

Stuck in between the first and second fingers that had been curled under to make them closer to the size of a coyote’s paw, was a separate phalanx—the singular term for a finger bone. Phalanges was plural. It wasn’t easy to immediately identify which phalanx you were looking at. The middle ones attached to the tips and were smaller than the proximal ones, the ones attached to the metacarpals, the hand bones. But it was probably a good guess to think we were seeing a middle phalanx, maybe from a middle finger, a digitus medius.