Vanished by James Delargy (free novel 24 TXT) 📕

The ground shifted beneath her feet as she descended the bank, burying into the cool sand. She got close enough to see that she was right. The dingoes weren’t protecting a kangaroo or camel. The body had been torn apart, the soft belly and thighs targeted, the skull savaged to get to any available flesh. A bloodied rag that looked like a shirt and something grey lay against the golden sand. A bone. Possibly a forearm. Detached from the main body.

Emmaline held her eyes on the body and held her guts tight. Instinct told her that she had found Lorcan Maguire.

34

Emmaline

Emmaline had seen dead bodies before. But never one ripped apart by wild animals. In her head, in the space where there should have been logic and planning there was nothing, neither the inclination to throw up, nor the capacity to determine what to do next. Even the howls and cries had faded into inconsequence. Finally a thought emerged from the morass. A callous thought but a thought nonetheless. Would the animal’s interference affect the assessment of how the victim died?

That thought allowed others to charge forward. Slowly her wits returned. She raised her guard again, the dingoes keeping their distance but not retreating further than the skiff of trees surrounding the dune she was at the bottom of. She reached for the phone in her pocket. As she assumed, there was no signal. She would have to leave the body to get help but didn’t want to in case any remaining evidence was further destroyed.

Aiming into the sky she fired off a shot. The silence of the night exploded with a sharp crack. The dingoes scattered. Hopefully it would bring someone to investigate, and she could get them to guard the body, or better yet raise the alarm.

The report from the gunshot died away. There was a return to guarded silence. From the shelter of the trees the glowing eyes watched her, awaiting her next move. If no one came she would have to wait it out until daylight when maybe the dogs would leave her alone.

Needing to stay awake and with nothing else to do she made a quick study of the scene. Along with the once off-white shirt were a pair of ripped khaki knee-length shorts, the crotch a mass of blood, the victim no doubt savagely emasculated. The clothing told her that he had tried to escape during daylight. A small, scuffed backpack covered in cartoon dragons lay ripped open near the body with no food inside. Unless the contents had been scavenged by the dingoes. It suggested he – and Dylan, whose body was unaccounted for – were fleeing from something. And that Lorcan didn’t make it far, only a couple of kilometres from Kallayee.

The arm bone lay apart from the body, gnawed at given the rough edges. It was broken too, a nasty fracture, the marrow licked clean. She wondered if the dingoes’ teeth could do this but she doubted it. It certainly wasn’t the cause of death. The neat round bullet hole in the shirt proved that. Near the middle of the chest, the fibres singed at the edges.

It took ten minutes of close study for the stench of decaying flesh to cause her to step away from the scene as a cloud swept over and covered both dead and alive in an eerie darkness.

She would be blamed for not finding the body sooner but the area was vast and they’d had no leads. She had to both thank and curse the dingoes for leading her here. She’d been lucky to find the body at all. She could only hope that Forensics could make something of it.

Taking a seat on the side of the dune, she commenced her cold and lonely vigil. Someone would have heard the gunshot. They would be rushing to investigate. Surely.

The dingoes stayed too, holding their own vigil, stalking around the edge of the trees, waiting to see what the interloper was going to do, waiting to see if she would leave and let them scavenge what remained.

35

Emmaline

Daylight. The sun rose turning the land and everything on it from black to violet to orange to yellow like a bruise slowly fading in time. Emmaline was certain that the memory of this night wouldn’t fade quickly.

No one had responded to the gunshot. There had been no shouts, no search parties.

With the rising sun came the heat. Her problem remained. A dead body and ten hungry animals. Ready to pounce and reclaim their meal. An idea arose. From her pocket she fished out the matchbook Matty had given her. His number. That had been a new experience, like some hard-boiled noir where the leading man gives his number to a damsel in distress. But Matty was no leading man and she was no damsel in distress. Just a damsel with a problem she now knew how to solve.

Gathering some twigs and dried leaves from a straggle of trees the dingoes weren’t huddled in, she constructed a small fire near the body. Splitting the six matches in half to give herself two attempts, she struck three in conjunction. The grey-topped matches fizzled into life. Placing them beneath the kindling of dried spinifex grass, it caught immediately, smoking for a few seconds before bursting into flame. She piled on more twigs and a couple of dead branches, watching as they blackened and finally caught fire.

Praying that the unnerving presence of fire would hold the dogs off for a while, Emmaline sprinted back to the caravan, over the sand dunes, rocks and tufts of spinifex, her legs running through treacle. Reaching it she grabbed her keys and sped off in the 4x4 barrelling towards Hurton, one eye on the road and one on the phone. Close to Hurton, one bar flashed up. Braking suddenly and searing two dark tyre marks into the tarmac she called it in, her breathlessness