Read Online Proof Positive: A Joe Gunther Novel (Joe Gunther Series) by Archer Mayor - Free Book Online Page A

want company tomorrow? I got a light load on my desk.”
    He admired how she wasn’t letting this go. “Absolutely. I’ll be leaving the office just after eight.”
    *   *   *
    Sam and Joe arrived at Ben’s the following morning in the midst of a truck convoy, making Rachel’s diminutive, two-door Mini Cooper look like an imperiled eggshell.
    Resembling an amphibious invasion, the flatbed trucks fanned out around the house, ready to unload the heavy equipment Joe had described earlier.
    Joe, Sam, and Rachel met to one side to exchange introductions and avoid being run over by the men in hard hats who were scattering to their respective posts.
    “You got all you need to start shooting?” Joe then asked the young woman.
    Rachel pulled a surprisingly small camera from her bag.
    “That’s it?” he asked.
    “They make ’em smaller than that, boss,” Sammie said softly. Having taken an immediate shine to Rachel, she added, “I’d love to get my hands on one of those, especially the way Emma’s coming along.”
    Joe shook his head. “Okay. Rachel, your mom told me the cleanout crew knows you’ll be lurking around.”
    “I already signed the death and injury waiver they faxed me last night,” Rachel said cheerily. “All I need is a hard hat.” She turned to Sam and told her, “I bet I can get you a camera cheap. I got this through the school.”
    For his part, Joe thought that a hard hat might be the one missing touch. Rachel was already dressed in a pair of oversized work boots and an insulated Carhartt jumpsuit with a T-shirt over the top of it, boasting, I SHOOT PEOPLE, and featuring the picture of a camera. That aspect of her made him think of an exuberant kid who’d wandered by accident onto a construction site.
    With the ignition of several diesel engines, all conversation became challenging, so the three of them migrated to the foreman to receive hard hats and instructions on where not to stand. Rachel stepped away to film as the first of the crew began exposing the building’s interior by pulling down a wall while simultaneously driving props under the roofline to maintain the structure’s integrity.
    In short order, they were confronting a second barricade comprised of Ben’s belongings, as shaggy and disheveled as the wall containing it had been bland and smooth.
    “Jeez ! ” Sam shouted into Joe’s ear. “It’s creepy—like the inside of a body.”
    “It is, in a way,” he replied.
    They moved back as two Bobcats approached to wolf down large mouthfuls before twisting around to deposit them into a waiting truck. Rachel continued darting around, following the action.
    Slowly, attended by men with bags and shovels, the Bobcats crept into the wound they’d created. Joe and Sam approached the ragged edge of the hole to watch the room before them gradually regain definition.
    This wasn’t the same section that Joe had entered earlier, with the entrance tunnel leading to the large expanse of waist-high debris, but another one, more clotted and filled. The stacks reached virtually to the ceiling, and the Bobcats—in order to create more manageable divots—occasionally crashed into the piles to make them collapse like crumbling cliffs of shale, revealing more strata of paper beyond.
    Joe was drawing just this comparison, when, with the abruptness of a magic show’s apparition, a newly exposed cross section revealed the curled-up body of a man encased about three feet up from the floor. He resembled an oversized beetle, snugly fitted into an elaborate casting.
    Joe and Sam simultaneously sprang forward amid the moving machines and men. “Whoa!” Joe shouted. “Stop your engines!”
    But the operators didn’t need telling, nor did Rachel Reiling, who stood stock-still in shock, her camera running.
    In the sudden, complete quiet, the two cops clambered across the broken field to where the body lay exposed in the slanting daylight.
    “That explains the smell,” Sam said, noting the