Solve This: Part 1
In which the body is discovered
Two things caught Detective Sergeant William Caldicott’s attention. First, a puff of musty wind escaped from an old house whose windows and doors, shuttered for a decade, had suddenly been thrust open. And that was strange because this stretch of the riverbank was devoid of homes. The land rose from the pebble-strewn shore to a gravel road that hugged the base of a thirty-foot slope awash in ankle-high grasses and shaggy stalks crowned with tiny flowers of red, yellow, and blue. Across the river, a state highway passed behind broken stands of oak and maple in full summer leaf. This was farmland lightly sprinkled with factories. What had birthed that breeze?
But it passed quickly as it came, leaving Caldicott’s second and more significant observation: the corpse on the shore.
The patrol officers had already closed the gravel road two hundred feet north and south of the body. Caldicott parked at the north blockade and walked in. Even from the road, certain details were clear. The deceased was female, age around sixty. Sprawled face down, head and chest in the water, her graying hair was feathered in the current, tracing its flow as iron filings trace a magnetic field. She wore nearly spotless charcoal jeans and a white cotton T-shirt. No holes, no blood, no spatters of mud. Not the least sign of struggle. She…
