physical well-being, trimming his hair and toenails and
seeing that he bathed properly. On Sundays, she had
taken him to church for his spiritual well-being.
According to the statements given when Mitchiner
228
HARD ROW
first went missing, he liked to visit the graveyard where
his wife and parents were buried and to walk the old
neighborhood, so that’s where their first search efforts
had been concentrated. How had he wound up in the
creek, miles from his childhood haunts?
And Buck Harris.
Everyone said he was a bull of a man, a physical man
who still liked to climb on a tractor and stay hands-on
with every aspect of his crops, yet always up for sex.
Whose ox had
The possibilities were almost endless. One of the
migrants at the camp? Someone he had done business
with? Someone whose woman he’d taken? Certainly
someone familiar with that empty shed. Mrs. Samuelson
had said the killer must be “a hateful and hating man.”
He couldn’t argue with that. To kill and butcher and
then strew the parts around for the buzzards?
And yeah, spouses and lovers were usually their best
suspects, but surely no woman would have done what
was done to Harris? On the other hand, that missing
part of his anatomy certainly did seem to suggest a sex-
ual motive. But what in God’s name could he have done
to inspire such cruelty? Think of gaining consciousness
to find yourself lying there in chains, naked and vulner-
able as a killer lifts an axe and swings it down on your
bone and flesh. The killer clearly meant for him to know
it was coming, otherwise why the chains? Why not just
go ahead and kill him quickly and cleanly?
If Harris was lucky, the first blow would have made
him black out from the shock to his system. If he wasn’t
lucky—?
Dwight tried to cleanse the images from his mind.
229
MARGARET MARON
Mayleen Richards and Jack Jamison were waiting for
him near the rear of Buck Harris’s homeplace. Two
old-fashioned bench swings hung from the limbs of an
enormous oak tree and the deputies seemed to be enjoy-
ing the warm afternoon sunshine, although Richards’s
dispirited greeting made Dwight think that Jamison
must have told her about his resignation.
“Where’s Denning?” he asked.
“He’s back at the shed, going over the car with a fine-
