“Still no head,” the sheriff said.
“The head’s missing,” Winsome said. “It’s hard to tell what happened, exactly, because . . . well, if you’ve ever seen a burned body, they sorta melt. This one’s pretty bad, the hands are gone, most of the feet . . . but there should be a skull, or indications of a head, and there isn’t one. A head. Of course, we haven’t been all the way through the ashes, but I don’t think there’s gonna be anything there.”
“Who found the body?” Jake asked.
“Guy who lives down there—Glenn Anderson—saw a fire last night. Where there shouldn’t be one—”
“He didn’t go over and check it?” Parker interrupted.
“No, that happens from time to time, you get people out on them hiking trails. Anderson was out working in his shop, changing the oil in his brush cutter, and he heard this whoosh, and he looked, and here’s a fire as big as a house. It died down pretty quick, and wasn’t any threat because it’s been so wet. He figured some camper poured white gas on his campfire and got more than he bargained for. But then he got to talking to a neighbor this morning—they could smell something bad—and they went over for a look.”
“Roast pig,” Novatny said.
“Where’s the scene?” Jake asked.
“Mile or so up the road, there’s a trail head, a hiking trail goes back into the woods,” the sheriff said. “It’s pretty narrow up there, lots of trees, thought it’d be better to put the chopper down here.”
“Who knows about this?” Parker asked.
“Nobody, except the people out here,” the sheriff said. “Won’t nobody find out about it until I say so, either, or somebody’ll wind up with their ass kicked up around their ears.”
Jake drove, trailed by the two cop cars, Novatny, Parker, and the sheriff riding with him. Clancy rode in one of the sheriff’s cars. The sheriff, in the backseat, said, “I think maybe they got more of a fire than they expected, panicked, and ran. People think you sprinkle a gallon of gas on a bunch of wood and you get a campfire. What you get is more like an explosion. You can burn your ass off if you’re not careful.”
The road was narrow, snaking through the woods, past a clear-cut the size of a couple of football fields, then over a hump and down a barely noticeable incline to the trailhead.
A half dozen cop cars with LED racks, a couple of unmarked cars, and a van were pulled into the trailhead parking area. A farmhouse stood on the other side of the road, most of a half mile away, Jake guessed. Maybe a couple of city slickers thought they could get away with a fire, that far from anything. Maybe . . . But why didn’t they just bury the body?
Two uniformed deputies and two men in civilian clothes were leaning on car fenders; when Jake pulled in, they straightened up and looked toward the newcomers. Jake got out with his cane, followed by Novatny, Parker, and Winsome. Clancy got out of the sheriff’s car and joined them. The odor of roast pig was thin, but definitely in the air. They all turned their noses toward it, looking back into the trees.
Winsome introduced them as FBI investigators, and one of the plainclothesmen, an investigator with the Virginia BCI out of Appomattox, whose name was Kline, said, “Better come on back.”
The body was fifty yards into the woods, a small end-of-the-trail clearing, clumps of old toilet paper in the brush, a few bottles and cans, a collapsed plastic trash barrel. The odor of burned pig was thicker here, with the smudgy underscent of petroleum. Though he’d seen people incinerated by napalm, Jake didn’t immediately recognize the body when they stepped into the clearing. It looked more like a rotting tree stump, with a new tree growing up out of the old roots.
“Jeez,” Novatny said. They all sidled toward it. The closer they got, the more the body looked like a stump, until the last few feet, when they could see bloody raw fissures in the blackened flesh. It still didn’t look human, until Jake went a bit sideways and saw the shoes. The shoes were badly burned, but still recognizable. The victim had been bound with wire to the tree, in a kneeling position, one foot on each side of the tree.
No head.
“Not just wire,” Novatny said. “Barbed wire. Wonder if we could trace that? Where they got it.”
“Could’ve just clipped it out of a fence in the night,” the sheriff said. “That’s what I would’ve done—if I was going to do this.”
“Was he alive? Were they torturing him?” Jake asked.
“Have to wait for the autopsy,” the sheriff said. “But nobody heard anything. No screaming, or shouting. No commotion. I don’t know why you’d wire him up if he was dead—why not just lay him down on a big stack of wood, and pile some more up around him?”
“Nobody saw a car?”
“No. After the fire died down, Anderson went back to changing his oil, he never saw a car leave. They must’ve come in here with a car, though. Didn’t see much in the way of tracks, it’s all gravel and bark in the parking area.”
“You done with the photos?” Clancy asked, looking at the sheriff.
“Yeah . . . got video and stills both. We were waiting for you before we did any more.”
Clancy walked once around the body, then stepped close, knelt on a bare patch of ground, took a short metal rod out of his case, and began pushing a shoe off the remains of a foot. The shoe fell apart, exposing a patch of reddened flesh. Clancy took another instrument from his case, a nine-inch-long polished steel tube that looked a bit like a syringe, cocked it by sliding the barrel, as if it were a tiny shotgun, pressed the tip against the red flesh, and squeezed. The instrument snapped, they all jumped, and Clancy pulled it back and stood up.
“How long?” Novatny asked.
