“Looks great, Thelma. Thanks.”
“What she was pointing to was what looked like a scarecrow standing there at the side of the carport. Sarah says it moved-that was why she noticed. Doc Oldham says no way, the body’d been dead four, five days. So we figure something else moved.”
“Field mice, most likely,” Bates said. “We build subdivisions where they used to live, the mice don’t know they’re supposed to leave.”
“Especially if provisions keep getting shipped in,” I said.
“Right. Seth gets out of the car and goes over to look. Male, mid- to late forties, Doc figures. He’s wearing two or three shirts, a pair of Wranglers so old the rivets are worn away. Been homesteading under the carport for a while from the look of it. Had a bedroll there, couple of sacks of belongings, an old backpack with one strap.”
“He’d been chewed on some. Eyes and tongue, mostly.”
“Postmortem?”
Don Lee nodded.
“Cause of death?”
“The developer had finished up the subdivision in a hurry and moved on. Yards still had these stakes set out in them, eighteen inches long, sharpened at one end. Someone pulled up one of those and drove it into his chest. Someone’s seen one too many vampire movies, Doc said.”
“That’s not gonna be easy,” Bates said. “Takes some industry.”
“Broken fingernails,” Don Lee went on, “maybe from the struggle, maybe from before, hard to say. Splinters in his palms. Tried to pull the stake out, we figure.”
“Or keep it from going in.”
“We found him pinned against some latticework, trellis kind of thing. Arms crossed above his head, wrists turned out. He’d been fastened up there with picture wire.”
“So the body was repositioned once he was dead.”
“Way it looks. Doc said the stake missed his heart but nipped the vena cava.”
“Meaning it took him a while to die… Understand that I don’t mean any disrespect here, but what facilities do you have for processing a crime scene?”
“State issues us kits. Back when I started, I got sent up to the capital for a couple of months, passed along what I could remember. Don Lee’s studied up some on his own. We did the best we could. But like I told you up front, we’re in over our heads here.”
“I went back through the manual, did it all by the numbers,” Don Lee told me. “Multiple photographs of the scene and the body. Bagged clothes and belongings, including a notebook-kind of a diary, I guess. Cellotaped a half-footprint I found at the edge of the carport. Took scrapings, blood samples.”
I looked at Bates. He shrugged. “What can I say? Me, I blundered into this. He’s meant for it.”
“Thing is,” Don Lee said, “I can go on scraping, photographing and logging stuff in till kingdom come, but I still just have a bunch of bags with labels on them. All potatoes, no meat.”
“Where’s the forensics kit now?”
“Back at the station.”
“You don’t usually send them through to State?”
“No usually to it,” Bates said. “Never had occasion to use one of the things before. Fact is, we weren’t even sure where we’d put them.”
“State said seal it, they’d pick it up when they got here.”
“No identification on the body, I’m assuming.”
Binaural nods.
“And when you canvassed, showing a photo, no one knew him, no one had seen him. Just another of America’s invisible men.”
Yep.
I’d finished my salad and sandwich and drunk three or four cups of coffee-Thelma kept creeping up and refilling. Altogether too fine a waitress. Don Lee’s toast was crumbs on a plate and four empty jam containers with tops skinned back. Clots of yolk and a pool of runny ketchup competed on the sheriff’s plate.
“What I have to ask is why you’re pursuing this at all. You’ve got a good town here. Clean, self-contained. Obviously this guy’s from outside, no one’s visible father, no visible mother’s son. Not a single city or PD I know, whatever size, would spend an hour on this. They’d write the report, skip it over the water into the files, move right along.”
“Well, they’d be used to it, of course. We’re not.” Bates looked to the door, where an attractive, thirtyish woman in gray suit and lacy off-white blouse stood looking back. “Tell me that’s not our State guy.”
“That’s not our State guy,” Don Lee said.
“You know damn well it is.”
As though to confirm, she strode towards us.
“We don’t trip over bodies too often ’round here,” Don Lee said.
“And when we do”-this from Bates-“they don’t usually have the mayor’s mail in their pocket.”
Chapter Six
Basically they don’t get any more missing.
It wasn’t a missing-persons case. In fact it was just about everything but a missing-persons case. Robbery, assault, murder. God knows what else. And that’s the way it got passed out to us: they don’t get any more missing.
The Captain himself took roll call that day. Gentlemen, he said. Officers. Has there been a misunderstanding? When I asked that you pool your efforts and give your collective best, I had expected that you would understand this was to the end of finding the suspect. Instead you seem collectively to have lost him.
There was laughter, uneasy laughter of a sort we all got used to over the next few months. Little by little the laughter subsided, till finally we sat stone silent through roll call No jokes, no catcalls, none of the endless badgering that marks men thrown together in close quarters and shaky pursuits. We sat, we listened, some of us taking notes, then rose, claimed cars, and went stolidly about our business.
It had begun long before that, of course, on a Saturday night almost two months before, when a scumbag by the name of Richards found his way into an apartment house off campus of Memphis State where ten students lived. Most of them were out on dates. The three that weren’t, he attacked. Tied them down with lamp wires and went from one to the other, back and forth. He’d come in with his member hard as a rock, one of them said, put it in her, and leave. Then after a while he’d come back. Never climaxed, or seemed to gain much pleasure from it. Lot of blood on it there at the end, one of the young women said. I kept wondering if it was my blood or someone else’s, what he’d done to the others.
Richards spent his childhood in a series of foster homes, a social worker called in as consultant told us later, often shut into a room and ignored, brought food when they remembered, other times beaten or abused. My heart bled.
Anyhow, although Richards had been a busy boy, with a string of store robberies, B amp;Es of various sorts, auto theft and assault, rape was something new for him. But, like a chicken-killing dog, he’d got the taste. And he liked it.
Over following weeks we got to know that campus well, spent more time there than its students did. Ants at a picnic and just about as inconspicuous. But the next time Richards struck, it was across town, at a dorm next to Samaritan Hospital where nurses in training lived. The hospital put them up free, they attended classes half a day and helped take care of patients the rest, and after a year or so they got certified as LPNs. Women with poor and no prospects came up from all over the South. Richards went in there on a Friday evening about nine o’clock. Of the fifteen residents, eight were on duty, helping cover the evening shift as nurses although legally they weren’t. Five more had gone out together for pizza and a movie. They’re the ones who called it in when they got back home around midnight and found Mary Elizabeth Walker (Mobile, Alabama) and Sue Ann Simmons (Tupelo, Mississippi) strapped to their beds with duct tape. There was so much tape, one of them said, they looked like mummies, or
