where the skin had split, eyes and tongue eaten out, much of his flesh torn by the buzzards, a long lazy line of entrails snaking away in the water.
Silas thought he smelled cigarette smoke and was about to turn around when someone tapped him on the back.
“Shit,” he said, nearly coming off the log.
Standing behind him, French set his investigator’s kit down. “Boo,” he said.
“That ain’t funny, Chief.”
French, a former game warden and a Vietnam vet, laughed and showed his small sharp teeth. He was late fifties, tall and thin, pale green eyes behind his sunglasses and close-cropped red hair and matching mustache. He had a blade for a chin and ears that stuck out and that he could move individually. Said his nickname in Nam had been Doe. He wore blue jeans and a tuckedin camo T-shirt that showed a Glock 9 mm in a beefy hand, aimed at the viewer. YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT, his chest said, FOREVER. The pistol on his belt was a dead match to the one on his shirt.
He said, “M &M?”
Silas flapped his hand toward the body. “What the buzzards and catfish done left of him.”
“You go out there?”
“Hell naw.”
“Good.”
Above all, the CI hated having his crime scenes disturbed. He bent to see Silas’s face and smirked. “You go puke in that water yonder the catfish’ll eat it.”
Silas ignored him, looked up at what sky showed through the trees and swirling buzzards. He thought of M &M when they were kids, how every time you bought a candy bar at recess he’d be there asking for a piece. If not for school lunches, he and his red-eyed sisters would’ve starved.
French sat with a Camel hanging on his bottom lip and slipped off his boots and set them side by side on the log and pulled on a pair of waders, adjusting the suspenders.
“Watch out for gators,” Silas said.
French smushed out his cigarette on the log and put the butt in his shirt pocket and pulled on a pair of latex gloves.
“I shall return,” he said and rose and walked off like a fisherman, not even pausing as the swamp began, slogging out, lowering with each step as if descending a staircase, his wake gently dissolving behind him.
Overhead, crows were swirling, too, their caws something Silas had been hearing awhile, saying whatever crows said.
Near the body and in water to his waist, the chief bent, seemingly unperturbed by the smell or sight. He fished his digital camera from his pocket and began to take pictures, sloshing around to get every angle. Then he stood for a long time, just looking. From Game & Fish, he’d got on at the sheriff’s department and worked his way up the ladder to his current position. Rumor was he might run for sheriff when the present one retired next year.
After a while he came back and sat on the log and shrugged the suspenders off and kicked out of the waders, flexing his feet.
“How deep’s it get out there?” Silas asked.
French grunted, pulling on his boots. “Deep enough to dump a body, somebody thunk. All this rain brung him up.”
“You figure his hat floated all the way to Dentonville?”
“Upstream?”
“Somebody trying to thow you off then.”
“Be my guess, honcho. I’d say we dealing with above-average criminal intelligence.”
“That eliminates Deacon.”
“Maybe.”
French pulled his boots on and rose and took more pictures from the bank, shook out another Camel.
Soon the birds went all aflutter again and a pair of paramedics and the coroner came bumbling out of the trees slapping their arms, cursing. One of the EMTs was Angie, a pretty, light-skinned girl, petite, slightly pigeon-toed, that Silas had been seeing a few months now, getting more exclusive by the week. Thing he liked best about her was her mouth, how it was always in a little pucker, off to the side, always working, like she had an invisible milk shake. She sniffled, too, from bad sinuses, and weird as it was, he found it cute.
Tab Johnson, her driver, an older white man who always seemed to be shaking his head, was doing so now, chewing his Nicorette gum.
Angie stood behind Silas and touched her shoulder to his back and he leaned into her thinking of the night before, her on top and her face buried in his neck, her slow hips and breath in his ear. Now her hand was going up his spine. She smelled like her bedsheets and suddenly what she called his “wangdangler” moved his pants. She sniffled and he looked down at her, over his shoulder.
“You coming over tonight?” she asked.
“Gone try.”
She moved her hand. Here came the coroner, a young chubby white man in a denim button-down, glasses on forehead. Had a few years on the job. He’d ridden out with Angie and them and came between the two with his bag and his shirt out at the back and walked to the lip of the land, shading his eyes with his hand.
He said, “I pronounce it dead. Yall go ahead.”
“Yuck,” Angie said, glancing up at Silas. “You couldn’t a found this on second shift?” She stuck out her tongue and headed down the bank, snapping on a pair of rubber gloves, fastening a surgical mask to her face.
Now the reporter who had the police beat and a couple of deputies were coming down the hill, and Silas took the occasion to walk around some more, hoping to find a cigarette butt floating, a thread snagged in a spiderweb. And to avoid seeing them roll the pieces into the body bag.
A COUPLE OF hours later, back at the office, he sat brooding. He and M &M had fallen out of touch when he left in high school and now he wished he’d stayed in better contact. Maybe he could’ve done something. But who was he kidding. M &M wouldn’t have had anything to do with a constable. He’d be polite, that was all. No friendly visits. No fishing.
Silas was at his computer, deleting e-mails, but paused at one from Shannon Knight, the police reporter, called “follow-up question.” He opened the e-mail and pecked out an answer. Even though he’d found the body, he knew Shannon would interview French as well, and he would be the one quoted in the paper.
Silas sat back in his chair. He shared the one-room building of the Chabot Town Hall with Voncille, the town clerk, her desk to the left by the window that faced trees. She got the good view, she said, because she’d been here longer than him and the mayor combined, plus neither of them was ever at his desk. Fine with Silas. Except for when he left the seat up in their shared bathroom, he and Miss Voncille got along fine. They were Chabot’s only full-time employees, their benefits coming through the mill. Morris Sheffield, the mayor, part-time, kept a desk in the back; he was a real estate agent with an office across the lot. He bopped in Town Hall once or twice a day with his BlackBerry and loose tie and loafers with no socks. He and Silas were both volunteer firefighters and only saw each other at monthly office meetings and the occasional fire.
“You okay, hon?” Voncille asked, rolling her chair back. Her desk was behind a cubicle wall she’d bought herself. She had blue eyes and a pretty, fat face and looked at him over her reading glasses. She was white, early fifties, divorced a couple of times. Her stack of stiff red hair seemed unperturbed by her morning of directing traffic.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I will be.”
“Poor ole M &M,” she said. “Didn’t yall play ball together?”
“Back in the day we could turn the double bout as good as any two boys anywhere.”
“Yall still talk? I mean before.”
“Not really.”
She bunched her shoulders, both understanding and disapproving at the same time. But who did he see but other cops and the people he arrested? Just Angie. Who else did he need?
Voncille was back to work and Silas leaned forward. Out the window by his desk, propped up with an old Stephen King book, were Chabot’s other buildings: Mayor Mo’s real estate, the post office, a bank that was more of a credit union for the mill, a diner/convenience store called The Hub, an IGA grocery store and a drugstore, both going out of business because of the Wal-Mart in Fulsom. The third-to-last establishment, the Chabot Bus, was an
