LITMIR.BIZ

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Knowing Mouncey would have used one of the tac frequencies to talk to somebody on Wayne’s crew as she was bringing the car around, I said, ‘Get anything at all from out there?’

      ‘Uniform name Hardy catch it and buzz Wayne,’ she said. ‘Call from a pre-pay, sound like a white lady, most likely local, but wouldn’t give ’em no name. Crime Scene up there a half-hour now. It that field across the interstate, west side the tracks.’

      I visualised the area, which I remembered as being mostly deserted, and started pawing around in my pockets in search of camphor.

      Noticing this, Mouncey said, ‘Told me this a fresh one, Lou.’

      I stopped pawing and said, ‘Any civilians at the scene when Wayne got there?’

      ‘’Bout a bo-zillion of ’em, way he carryin’ on. Man just cain’t handle people jackin’ with his clues. I told ’em leave ev’thing like it is till we get there and e’body stay sharp cause the Man on his way.’

      ‘Why the hell’d you do that?’

      ‘Keep they sphincters tight,’ she said. ‘Discipline crucial, got a outfit like this one.’

      Humming a tune from ‘More Than A Woman’, she swung left through the red light at Hancock, setting off a massive chorus of horns and squealing brakes, made a hard right under the trestle and took Springer north between the lake and the wooded railroad right-of-way to the zigzag below the double bridges of the expressway.

      Coming out from under the vaulted concrete, we rounded the curve under a high billboard and saw what looked like every patrol car, fire truck and EMT unit in town parked at random angles along a quarter of a mile of the access road shoulder and out across the field wherever the ground was solid enough, their red and blue roof lights twinkling.

      ‘Be a good time to stick up the town,’ Mouncey observed. ‘Protectors and servers all out here gawkin’.’

      We rolled to a stop next to an Arkansas-side pumper and Wayne’s Crime Scene bus, and I climbed out. A hundred yards away at the edge of the pines and assorted oaks on the low bluff above the tracks several dozen uniforms along with city councilmen, courthouse civilians, off-duty fire-fighters and EMTs – basically everybody in town who had a scanner – were milling around and trying to look involved. Seeing Dwight Hazen among them surprised me a little, but I didn’t take time to analyse the feeling. Outside the yellow tape the media people, bristling with cameras, microphone booms and lights, stood around in knots and cliques looking restless and surly.

      They swarmed me as I bent to duck under the tape, video cams, flashing still cameras and microphones converging a few inches in front of my nose, all of them demanding information and comment. Sticking with the rule that when you know nothing, that’s what you should say, I tried to look reasonable and trustworthy but kept my mouth shut.

      The temperature felt like forty or so by now, with no wind to speak of, the rain still fairly light but coming steadily. Low streamers of mist drifted over the uneven yellow and brown weed-fields surrounding the site, almost obscuring an abandoned-looking storage warehouse a quarter of a mile to the west, leaching the colour and depth from the mixed hardwood and pine woodlands to the north and giving them the look of an old oil painting. If you didn’t know about the country club and the upscale suburbs beyond the trees you might think the scene was completely rural, but we were actually almost half a mile inside the city limits.

      As we worked our way up the slope toward the gathering under the trees, Mouncey picking her way along behind me like a deer, trying to keep the mud off her lime-green platforms, I caught sight of Wayne, suited out in white Tyvek, nitrile gloves and a surgical cap. He saw my wave, broke away from the group and came over to meet us. He was a tall, slightly awkward, middle-aged, east Texas country boy with a strawberry-blond moustache, wire-rimmed glasses and a flash-mounted Nikon hanging from a strap around his neck, like everybody else on his crew. To him the proposition that you could overspend on photography gear, or that there was any such thing as too many pictures, would have been nothing but crazy talk.

      ‘Howdy, M. Howdy, Lou,’ he said, a drop of rain hanging from the tip of his nose. Stripping off one surgical glove, he stuck out his big hand and we all shook. ‘Y’all ready to join the workin’ stiffs?’ He tried with no success to kick some of the clingy red clay off the surgical booties covering his size-thirteen Noconas.

      I took the gloves he handed me, pulled them on and looked around at all the people who thought Do Not Cross applied to everybody but them. Hazen and a younger man who looked like a staff gofer or maybe an intern of some kind were working their way toward us, Hazen locked in on me with a grim, concerned expression, the rain plastering a couple of spitcurls of dark hair to his temple. I had once heard somebody called ‘Joe College at forty’, and it wasn’t a bad description of Hazen except for being maybe five years low. The assistant, a sort of scared-looking, unfinished version of the city manager in a dark suit that I thought would have looked silly out here even if it wasn’t plastered to him like wet tissue paper, glanced uneasily back and forth between Hazen and me, trying to decide which flag to salute.

      ‘Uh, Lieutenant, I thought I’d get your take on this – ’ Hazen began.

      ‘Yes, sir,’ I said, wondering what it was about him that irritated me so much. ‘I’ll be happy to give you that as soon as I know something. Right now I’d appreciate it if both of you would wait behind the tape.’

      Hazen looked at me with a questioning expression, like a man who’s not quite sure he heard right, took in the kind of breath you do when you’re about to give somebody an attitude adjustment, but then apparently had second thoughts. He glanced back at the reporters, made a show of shrugging and flashing his let-the-man-do-it-his-way smile, then retreated, the gofer hopping from one weed clump to the next behind him until they reached the tape and stooped inexpertly under it.

      Turning back to Wayne, I said, ‘So what have we got?’

      ‘I’ll show you,’ he said, leading the way toward the medium-sized possum oak at the centre of what was left of the gathering, which now consisted mostly of Wayne’s crew, a dozen or so uniforms and a few EMTs waiting for their cue.

      ‘Don’t worry where you step along here,’ Wayne said. ‘We did all we could with the ground, but you know what that’s worth when it’s already trompled to pieces before you get to it.’

      I’m not sure what I’d expected, but this definitely wasn’t it. The oak’s lower branches had been hacked away with a heavy-bladed tool, probably a machete or axe, and what looked like a six-foot length of four-by-four had been lashed to the trunk with coarse-fibred rope to form a cross-beam. Pinned by two thick bridge spikes driven through the wrists, with several loops of rope binding the arms to the beam, was the corpse of a woman, head fallen forward as if she were looking down at us with dull eyes as we stood before her slack body. All my life I’d heard of corpses having expressions of horror or pain on their faces, reflecting the manner of death, but the job had taught me better. The only expression death leaves the dead is indifference, and that was all I saw in the woman’s features now.

      Stepping in for a closer look, I could pick out individual drops of rain refracting the light like jewels in her dark hair. A strip of silver duct tape that had apparently been placed across her lower face had been pulled back to expose the bloody mouth and chin. A torn and bloodstained ecru cashmere pullover sweater still covered most of her torso but she was naked from the waist down. The insides of her thighs were black with congealed blood. Her feet had been turned to the side and a third spike had been driven through the heels and deep into the wood of the tree trunk. More blood had run down from the arms and feet to form a black puddle in the wet grass.

      Wayne said, ‘Them spikes up there at the top went through between the radius and ulna just proximal to the carpals on both sides and didn’t cut either one of the radial arteries, even with all the struggling she did.’

      Looking up through the rain at the dead, grey face, I said, ‘I know her.’

      All eyes came to me.

      ‘It’s Deborah

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