Max glanced around. In the distance, the sheriff and Gerard talked on their phones, most likely calling in help. Max gave me a look I couldn’t interpret, but I knew he was worried. He nodded at me and walked back to the old man. I stayed glued to his side. “John, you remember Clara Jefferies. She’s a detective in Dallas,” Max said. “We invited her here on a consult. You need to tell us what happened.”
Mr. Proctor was missing his lower teeth, and his chin crumpled so flat it nearly disappeared as he apparently considered how to respond.
Not far away, the forensic unit cordoned off a semicircle around the body with yellow crime scene tape. A deputy started to draw a map of the area. Another had a video camera rolling. I saw Jeff Mullins, the Alber PD detective who’d railed against my presence that morning, circulating with a pad of paper, recording the names of everyone who’d made the scene.
Mullins saw me and immediately tracked toward us. “Max?”
“Yeah,” Max responded.
“It’s okay that she’s here?” Mullins said, giving me a sideways bob of the head, frowning.
Max heaved a sigh. This was the second time since we arrived at the scene that he’d been asked to vouch for me. “Yeah. It’s okay, Mullins.” He shot the guy a look that signaled him not to protest. “I’ll take responsibility. Put Detective Jefferies on the log.”
Mullins gave me a sour look, wrote down my name, and walked off. Max turned back to John Proctor and said, “We’re still waiting. Tell us what happened.”
If the moment wasn’t so tense, the reason for our meeting so serious, it could have been amusing. It appeared that Proctor had figured out a way to cooperate, while technically keeping in line with the prophet’s decrees. Max was one of the lost boys, not a traitor to the faith.
The old man could talk to Max; he just couldn’t talk to me.
“Well, you see, Max, I was watching the women pulling off the cobs, the men felling the stalks, when it was time to take Bruno and Jazzy out for a walk. I take them on the same route every day and let them run along the front of the field. But today, since it was so congested and noisy with the work, I took them behind the field. I let them loose, so’s they’d get a good run. And that’s when they found it.”
“Describe what you saw,” I said.
Still refusing to look at me, he focused intently on Max. “The dogs did it. I let them loose, like I was telling you, and they took off. We’d never been this far back before, so close to the mountain. No one comes back here. It’s hard to walk, too rocky. But the dogs had a great time, jumping over the rocks, chasing each other. Then Bruno, the Lab, got interested in that pile of rocks over there.”
At that, Proctor pointed at the mound in the center of the section being cordoned off.
“Pretty soon, Bruno started nosing in between the rocks, pushing at them with his paws, his nose, like he was after something. Jazzy angled over and joined him, did the same thing. I walked over and…”
“And what?” I asked.
“Max, that was when I seen it.”
“Describe what you saw,” Max nudged.
The old man’s head bowed and his eyes focused on his tattered tennis shoes. For a moment, he appeared too overcome to say anything. Proctor wasn’t being evasive. It’s not unusual for witnesses, after seeing something traumatic, to have to have information dragged out of them. He hadn’t assimilated it yet. The experience fresh, he needed time to make sense of it.
“What I saw, I’m not positively sure about. But it kind of looked like something that used to be a face,” Proctor said.
I thought about his choice of words: used to be a face. I considered what I knew about decomposing bodies, how bacteria causes them to bloat and turn different colors: reddish-purple from lividity where the blood settles, then a nasty greenish-yellow, before they finally darken. These changes suggested a timeline, by giving an indication of how long a body had been dead. Delilah had been missing four days. If that was her…
“What did the skin look like?”
Apparently wrapped up enough in his story to forget he was violating the rule of God, Proctor turned to me. His bushy white eyebrows bunched the skin between them into vertical rows. “I don’t know. I didn’t take a good look. I never saw anything like that in my life before. I got scared. I rounded up the dogs, ran and called for help.”
Max took notes, writing everything down, including Proctor’s contact information, while I walked away a bit. Once I reached the crime scene tape lying on the ground and secured with rocks, I stopped. I stared at the rock pile and thought about the body hidden inside it.
Was it Delilah?
I approached the sheriff and Chief Barstow standing back, arms folded, watching as the video tech recorded the scene. A cameraman taking still shots followed him. “We’re going to wait for Doc Wiley before we uncover it, right?” I asked.
“Yeah,” the sheriff said. “Not that it’s any of your concern, Detective.”
I didn’t argue with him. “You have them looking for shoe prints, too, I bet. So they’re not wiping out evidence? Any tire prints.”
The sheriff frowned, but shouted to one of the techs. “Y’all are looking for shoe prints and tire marks, right?”
“Yeah,” one of the men called out. “Nothing yet.”
“Probably won’t find anything. The ground’s too hard and rocky,” I said. “Also, Hannah said you had rain last Thursday morning. It most likely would have destroyed any, assuming the body was buried out here before then.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Chief Barstow said.
I nodded at him, not believing he’d even considered the possibilities. “Doesn’t hurt to look, though.”
Barstow frowned. “You know, we’re not children. We’ve got experience with these
