quick glimpse of piled clothing and a stack of rain-soaked magazines.
Once at the entrance, Ben swept back the sheet. A wave of foul odor burst from the drain. It was thick and sickly sweet, and Ben recognized it immediately. He fanned the air and a swarm of flies lifted from the pile of clothing, hung a moment in the sickening air, then swept down again, buzzing loudly.
Ben crawled inside the pipe and jerked at the clothing. First one article gave way, then another, until he finally found a hand, blackened, the skin split open and quivering with hundreds of maggots. A small, slender ribbon weaved in and out of the dark swollen fingers, white with tiny red hearts.
For a moment he simply stared at it, as if it were some holy object, then he returned to the pile, digging furiously through the clothing, flinging tattered shirts and soiled trousers right and left until he found the face. It was large, and staring upward with enormous faded eyes. It had a look he had seen before, only more so. Not just surprise, amazement.
‘He’s in here,’ he said finally, as he glanced back toward the entrance to the drain.
Coggins peered in. ‘Bluto?’
‘Yes,’ Ben said.
Coggins did not move. ‘You want me to come in there? I mean, you need me for anything?’
‘No, not in here,’ Ben said. He pulled a card from his jacket and wrote down a number. ‘Go call this number,’ he said as he tossed it to Coggins. ‘It’s the Coroner’s Office. Tell Leon Patterson to get out here as soon as he can.’
He could hear Coggins’ footsteps rushing up the side of the embankment as he turned back to the twisted clothes and the face that stared up at him from their tangled ruin. The eyes had dried, and a crusty film now covered them, hut they still offered up the strange animal woundedness of something damaged to the core. For a little while he stared at the eyes as if there was something in them that could tell him what had happened. Then he returned to the hand, and the small ribbon that wound itself delicately through its fingers like a sad unraveled bow.
A half hour later the ambulance from Hillman Hospital arrived to pick up the body. Leon Patterson finally showed up almost an hour after it had left. The heat had been building steadily since early morning, and now a hard bright light swept down upon the ravine. For a long time after the ambulance had departed, there had been no sound but the incessant buzzing of the flies.
‘I want this done right,’ Ben told Patterson as the two of them stood in the gulley a few feet from the drain. ‘I don’t want a lot of rookies throwing things all around.’
‘I understand,’ Patterson said.
‘I want everything bagged and catalogued,’ Ben added. ‘I mean everything.’ He nodded toward Coggins while he stared at Patterson pointedly. ‘We’ll all work together. You got any problem with that, Leon?’
Patterson shook his head. ‘Nope.’ He grabbed the sheet and pulled it back. ‘Let’s get started.’
Inside the drain, the heat was stifling. The sweet smell of putrescent flesh seemed to sink into everything, the piled clothes and candy wrappers, the sodden magazines, even the old junk television which rested on a stack of bricks a few yards away from the body.
Patterson worked methodically, his gloved hands picking relentlessly through the clothing, folding it into neat stacks, then bagging each article in its turn. Beneath the clothing, the body lay on its back, entirely naked. Its right hand still clung loosely to the handle of a twenty-two-caliber pistol. A single sheet was stretched beneath it. There were bloodstains near the top and around the middle.
‘Turn him over,’ Patterson said unemphatically, once the body was exposed.
From crouching positions inside the drain, Ben and Leroy rolled the body over onto its side, then let it tip, facedown, onto the sheet.
‘You got fixed lividity on the back,’ Patterson said routinely. He looked at Ben. ‘You don’t have it anywhere else. And that pretty much means this boy died right here. Nobody moved him, turned him over or anything like that. He died right here in this drain.’
‘When?’ Ben asked.
‘Hard to say,’ Patterson said with a shrug. ‘The heat throws things off. But I’d say sometime on Sunday night.’ He pointed to the side of the head. ‘And there’s the cause of death right there.’
Ben glanced down and saw a small hole about a quarter of an inch above the entrance to the ear.
‘Shot in the head,’ Patterson said, ‘just like that little girl.’ He picked up the small plastic bag that held the pistol. ‘Probably with this little twenty-two.’ He glanced down at the the body, his eyes moving from the wound, down to the shoulder, then along the arm to the outstretched hand. ‘From the angle, I’d say he could have done it to himself.’ He looked at Ben. ‘Murder-suicide,’ he said. ‘Neat as a pin.’
‘So he raped the girl,’ Ben said.
‘We can make sure the semen in her body and this boy’s blood type are the same,’ Patterson said, ‘but I’d guess that the blood at the top of the sheet is this boy’s, and that the blood in the middle of the sheet belongs to the girl.’
‘But even before that, he’d already killed her,’ Ben went on.
Patterson nodded.
‘Then he buried her in that ballfield,’ Ben continued. ‘Came back here and shot himself.’
‘That’s my guess,’ Patterson told him.
Ben glanced about the ravine, then looked at Patterson. ‘Where’s the shovel?’
‘What?’
Coggins smiled. ‘Where’s the shovel?’ he repeated.
‘The one he buried her with,’ Ben said. ‘We didn’t find it anywhere around the girl’s body. And we haven’t found it around here.’
‘He could have tossed it anywhere,’ Patterson said.
‘Why would he?’
‘To get rid of evidence, of course,’ Patterson said.
‘But he kept the gun he killed her with,’ Ben said, ‘and he kept a ribbon from her hair.’ He looked at Patterson doubtfully. ‘Does that make any sense to you, Leon?’
Patterson’s face darkened. ‘No.’ His whole body seemed to shift into a higher gear. ‘I’ll get all the lab stuff done as quickly as I can, Ben,’ he said. ‘It’ll take a few hours. Will you be home tonight?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll call you the minute I have anything,’ Leon assured him as he gathered the bundles of clothing into his arms and headed quickly toward his car.
After he’d gone, Ben walked back into the storm drain. It was almost entirely empty now, except for the battered television with its cracked screen, and a few fluttery bits of string and paper. Blood had soaked through the sheet and left wide rust-colored stains in the cement, but aside from them, the drain looked as if no human being had ever lived or died in it.
‘It’s not right, that ole boy having to live out here,’ someone said suddenly.
Ben turned toward the entrance to the drain, half-expecting to see Leroy crouched down and staring into it. But it was the watchman, his stooped body backlighted by the hard noon sun, his dark-blue eyes peering into the drain.
‘How well did you know him?’ Ben asked immediately.
The watchman shrugged. ‘Well as you could, him being the way he was.’
‘Did you ever see anybody else out here?’
The watchman shook his head. ‘He was always alone. But it didn’t seem to bother him all that much.’
‘Ever talk to him?’
‘Sometimes. So he killed himself, huh?’
Ben duck-walked his way out of the drain and stood beside the watchman.
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Or maybe he was murdered.’
The watchman looked surprised. ‘That right? I’d never of thought anybody’d want to hurt that boy. He was just like a little kid, you know.’ He smiled gently. ‘I mean, he didn’t know that there was anything wrong with him. With his head, I mean. He was just sort of happy-go-lucky.’ He looked back toward the drain. ‘Thought he was all growed up,’ he said, ‘just like you and me.’ He laughed silently. ‘Wasn’t afraid of nothing. Went out all the time. Claimed he was a policeman.’
