“I can’t search five hundred square miles of Mississippi, either.”
“So zoom in on the perpetrator. Narrow it down.”
“How?”
“No woman can bleed out twice,” I said. “Her throat was cut in some unknown location, blood sprayed everywhere, she died, and that’s all she wrote. Then she was dumped in the alley. But whose blood was she lying in? Not her own, because she’d left it all back in the unknown location.”
“Oh, God,” Deveraux said. “Don’t tell me the guy collected it and brought it with him.”
“Possible,” I said. “But a little unlikely. It would be tricky to cut someone’s throat while simultaneously dancing around with a bucket, trying to catch the spray.”
“There could have been two guys.”
“Possible,” I said again. “But still unlikely. It’s like a fire hose, flipping all around. Here, there, and everywhere. The second guy would be lucky to gather a pint.”
“So what are you saying? Whose blood was it?”
“An animal’s, possibly. Maybe a deer. Freshly slaughtered, but not quite fresh enough. There was some time lag. That blood was already congealing. A gallon of liquid blood would have spread much farther than that pile of sand. A little goes a long way, where blood is concerned.”
“A hunter?”
“That’s my guess.”
“Based on not very much. You didn’t see the blood. You didn’t test it. It could have been fake blood from a joke store. Or it
“Still a hunter,” I said.
“Why?”
“There’s more,” I said. “It continues to get worse.”
Chapter 18
At that point the old lady I had seen in the diner stuck her head in the door. The hotel’s co-owner. She asked if she could bring us anything. Elizabeth Deveraux shook her head. I asked for coffee. The old lady said sorry, she didn’t have any. She said I could get it to go from the diner, if I really needed it. I wondered what exactly she was offering, therefore, if anything. But I didn’t ask. The old lady left again, and Deveraux said, “Why are you fixated on hunters?”
“Pellegrino told me she was all dressed up for a night out, as neat as a pin, just lying there on her back in a pool of blood. Those were his words. Is that a fair summary?”
Deveraux nodded. “That’s exactly what I saw. Pellegrino is an idiot, but a reliable one.”
“That’s more proof she wasn’t killed there. She would have fallen forward on her face, not on her back.”
“Yes, I missed that too. Don’t rub it in.”
“What was she wearing?”
“A dark blue sheath dress with a low white collar. Underwear and pantyhose. Dark blue shoes with spike heels.”
“Clothes in disarray?”
“No. They looked neat as a pin. Like Pellegrino told you.”
“So she wasn’t put into those clothes postmortem. You can always tell. Clothes never go on a corpse just right. Especially not pantyhose. So she was still dressed when she was killed.”
“I accept that.”
“Was there blood on the white collar? At the front?”
Deveraux closed her eyes, presumably to recall the scene. She said, “No, it was immaculate.”
“Was there blood anywhere on her front?”
“No.”
“OK,” I said. “So her throat was cut in an unknown location, while she was dressed in those clothes. But she had gotten no blood on her, until she was dumped on her back in a pool that was separately transported. Tell me how that isn’t a hunter.”
“Tell me how it is. If you can. You can help the army all you want, but you don’t have to believe your own bullshit.”
“I’m not helping the army. Soldiers can be hunters too. Many of them are.”
“Why is it a hunter at all?”
“Tell me how you cut a woman’s throat without getting a drop of blood on her front.”
“I don’t know how.”
“You string her up on a deer trestle. That’s how. By her ankles. Upside down. You tie her hands behind her. You haul her arms up until her back is arched and her throat is presented as the lowest point.”
We sat in the shadowed silence for a minute, not saying a word. I guessed Deveraux was picturing the scene. I sure was. A clearing in the woods somewhere, remote and lonely, or a room far from anywhere, with improvised equipment, or a hut or a shack with roof beams, Janice May Chapman hanging upside down, her hands hauled up behind her back, toward her feet, her shoulders straining, her back curving painfully. She was probably gagged, too, the gag tied to a third rope looped over the trestle’s top rail. That third rope must have been pulled tight, arching her head up and back, keeping it well out of the way, leaving her throat completely accessible.
I asked, “How did she wear her hair?”
“Short,” Deveraux said. “It wouldn’t have gotten in the way.”
I said nothing.
Deveraux asked, “Do you really think that’s how it was done?”
I nodded. “Any other method, she wouldn’t have bled out all the way. Not white as a sheet. She would have died, and her heart would have stopped pumping, and there would have been something left inside her. Two, three pints, maybe. It was being upside down that finished the job. Gravity, plain and simple.”
“The ropes would have left marks, wouldn’t they?”
“What did the medical examiner say? Have you had his report?”
“We don’t have a medical examiner. Just the local doctor. One step up from when all we had was the local undertaker, but not a very big step.”
She said, “Will you come with me?”
We walked back to the diner and took Deveraux’s car from the curb and U-turned and headed back down Main Street, past the hotel again, past the pharmacy and the hardware store, and onward to where Main Street turned into a wandering rural route. The doctor’s place was half a mile south of the town. It was a regular clapboard house, painted white, set in a large untidy yard, with a shingle next to the mailbox at the end of the driveway. The name on the shingle was Merriam, and it was lettered crisply in black over a rectangle of white paint that was brighter and newer than the surrounding surface. A new arrival, not long in town, new to the community.
The house had its ground floor given over to the medical practice. The front parlor was a waiting room, and the back room was where patients were examined and treated. We found Merriam in there, at a desk, doing paperwork. He was a florid man close to sixty. New in town, perhaps, but not new to doctoring. His greeting was languid and his pace was slow. I got the impression he regarded the Carter Crossing position as semi-retirement, maybe after a pressurized career in a big-city practice. I didn’t like him much. A snap judgment, maybe, but generally those are as good as any other kind.
Deveraux told the guy what we wanted to see and he got up slowly and led us through the house to what might once have been a kitchen. It was now tiled in cold white, and it had no-nonsense medical-style sinks and cupboards all over it. In the center of the floor it had a stainless steel mortuary table, and on the table was a
