Blackbird

  Something about this thought caught at me. I stepped in for a closer look at the hands, seeing no significant injuries anywhere other than the wrists. I thought about the hundreds – maybe thousands – of crucifixes and images of Jesus on the cross that I’d seen in my life, filing the question away for later.

  ‘Now look here,’ Wayne said, gloving up again. He reached up and placed one thumb against the corpse’s forehead to push the head upward and back, and with the other prised open the jaw to reveal a mass of bloody flesh and clotted, curly hair.

  I shone my pocket flashlight into the cavity. ‘What is this?’ I said. ‘Doesn’t look like any tongue I ever saw.’

  ‘It ain’t, Lou,’ he said. ‘Matter of fact, I don’t think her tongue’s even in there.’

  I turned to look at him.

  ‘Then where it at?’ Mouncey asked.

  ‘Question of the hour,’ Wayne said. ‘First thing we did was grid the area out about fifty yards around the site and all the way down to the road and the tracks over there, but no luck so far. We’ll keep opening up the circle if we don’t find it.’

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘What’s this in her mouth?’

  Wayne cleared his throat. A quick glance at Mouncey. ‘Believe that’d be her snatch, Lou,’ he said.

  ‘Law,’ said Mouncey, bending down for a look at the bloodied groin. ‘Wait by the river long enough, e’thing in the world gone float by.’ She straightened up and looked at me. ‘How you figure it, Lou? We lookin’ for Romans or what?’

  Wayne gave her a strange look, then turned back to me, saying, ‘There was some camouflage netting wrapped around her when we got here. That’s it in the evidence bag over there.’

  Keeping to the grass tufts as best I could, I excuse-me’d my way around the tree through the cops and EMTs, the pine needles, dead leaves and bracken looking mostly undisturbed behind the tree, at least out to a distance of a yard or two.

  Joining Wayne and M again, I looked closely at the wrists and the spikes that had been driven through them. The heads of the big nails showed an impressed waffle pattern.

  I said, ‘What leaves a mark like this?’

  ‘Framing hammer,’ Wayne said. ‘Most likely a California.’

  I glanced at him.

  ‘Daddy was a carpenter,’ he said.

  Working at the horse farm as a kid, I thought I’d swung every kind of hammer there was. I knew about framing hammers, but the idea of individual state models was new to me.

  I said, ‘What makes it a California?’

  ‘Longer handle, straighter claws. Wider face with checkering, like you see there.’

  ‘And she was alive when she was hung up here,’ I said, leaning in and shining my light on the sleepy-looking eyes, seeing no sign of petechial haemorrhaging. The visible skin of her face, hands, belly and upper thighs was pale as boiled pork, but the lower legs and especially the feet had darkened to a plum colour. It looked to me as if she had died with enough blood left to keep her alive at least a while longer. ‘How cold did it get last night?’

  ‘Right around freezing, per the Weather Service guy. That’d be airport temps, which I’d guesstimate might run a degree or two higher in a spot like this, with all these conifers around.’

  I said, ‘Time of death?’

  ‘Full livor with coag,’ he said. ‘Max rigor by the time we got here. Say at least four hours ago, probably not over twelve. Best I can do for now.’

  Meaning she was probably still alive when the weather front came through. I tried to imagine dying like this, in the cold rain with blue-white lightning strobing the sky and thunder shaking the earth.

  ‘So, what the hell was this about?’ I said.

  Wayne cleared his throat again. ‘Been hoping you’d tell me,’ he said. ‘All I know is, something’s not right here, Lou.’

  ‘That true,’ observed Mouncey. ‘Lady got dead all over her.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean,’ Wayne said.

  ‘Then what do you mean?’

  ‘I mean this just ain’t natural.’

  Mouncey snorted again, moving up for a closer view of the face, narrowing her eyes. ‘Maybe them Romans figure she a Saviour or something.’

  Dropping the flashlight back into my pocket, I looked at Wayne.

  ‘Uh, well, okay,’ he said. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but the whole show took a hell of a lot of figurin’ aforethought, and nobody does something like this for a pair of earrings.’ He removed his bifocals and shook off the beads of rain. ‘Which’d knock out robbery and random.’ Back on with the glasses. ‘Leavin’ us with personal and premeditated. No immediately lethal wounds that meet the eye. Anybody’s guess what the actual COD’s gonna turn out to be.’

  ‘How many doers are we thinking?’ I said.

  ‘Well, the beam’s six feet long,’ Wayne said. ‘It and the woman together are gonna weigh a little south of two hundred pounds. She was bound to be thrashing to beat hell on top of that – no one guy’s gonna manage it. Even two’d be a stretch.’

  Mouncey folded a stick of Doublemint into her mouth.

  ‘And while we’re amazin’ ourselves,’ said Wayne, ‘there’s this.’ He produced a little zip-lock evidence sleeve containing what looked at first like an irregularly shaped silver button a half-inch or so in diameter but actually turned out to be a crudely struck, heavily tarnished coin with some kind of profile on one side and a standing figure on the other. Taking it from Wayne’s hand, I felt an odd heat through the clear plastic.

  ‘How’d it get so warm?’ I asked, thinking Wayne was right; there was an eerie wrongness here, one that somehow wouldn’t let itself be pinned down.

  Wayne frowned. ‘Didn’t feel warm to me.’

  Mouncey touched the coin with her fingertips. ‘Feel like pocket temperature, Lou.’

  I shook my head. Maybe I had a fever or something. Already knowing the answer, I said, ‘What kind of coin does this look like to you, Wayne?’

  ‘Had to guess, I’d say Roman.’

  One of Mouncey’s eyebrows went up.

  Wayne shrugged, looking a little embarrassed, the way he always did when confronted by something beyond his rational understanding.

  ‘“The footprints of a gigantic hound”,’ I said.

  ‘Huh?’ said Wayne. Mouncey stared at me.

  ‘My grandmother said that sometimes. It’s from Sherlock Holmes – means something strange that you can’t explain.’ I held the coin up to the light. ‘Doesn’t look like this thing’s been in the dirt long.’

  ‘Wasn’t in the dirt at all,’ Wayne said. ‘One of the techs found it by her shoes, just layin’ there in the leaves and litter.’

  I handed the coin back to him. ‘Show me where it was.’

  He stepped over and indicated the spot, a couple of feet from the base of the tree and maybe eight inches from the nearest shoe.

  I stared at the coin, trying to make sense of it being here instead of in the ground somewhere in the Holy Land, or maybe Europe. But for some reason the strangeness didn’t seem to run very deep, as if the situation made some kind of non-logical sense to me.

  ‘How they carry they money anyway, them little dresses they wore?’ wondered Mouncey. She shook rain off the fingers of one long pink-palmed hand.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Romans.’

  ‘Maybe they kept it in those tin hats with the bristles on top,’ Wayne said thoughtfully.

  I said, ‘Could her connection with the department be what got her killed?’

  Wayne looked up at the dead face for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Nothing here to tell us, Lou,’ he said. ‘But that would have been a good while back, and it don’t sound like she was ever real tight with the job anyway – all she ever actually did was them screens, right? You feature anybody dreaming this up because she kept him off the job with a bad report?’

  I nodded, but my mind was somewhere else.

  ‘How about a whole chariot-full of ’em get together and drea
m it up?’ said M. ‘Be like a focus group.’

  ‘And still wouldn’t tell us anything about the coin,’ I said.

  ‘Crime provide more of a challenge for our mind this way,’ Mouncey philosophised. ‘Too easy, we apt to fall into sloth.’

  I turned up my collar and walked a loop around to where the techs were examining the ground, what was left of my knees screaming at me in the wet cold. I thought some more about dying out here alone in the night, the interstate roaring with cars, vans, SUVs, eighteen-wheelers – all those safe, dry bubbles of warmth less than two hundred yards away but for Dr Gold as unreachable as the stars. I’d read somewhere that on the verge of death everybody prays if there’s time, but I wasn’t sure how the author got his information. I wondered if Gold had given up, maybe even welcomed death, releasing her spirit to whatever eternity she thought was waiting. Or had she died saying the Shema, still trying to hold on, praying for her life?

  Shema. An image of the word floated up in my consciousness, and behind it came Aleha ha-shalom. Then – before I could slam the door on it – a face. I stood still and took a couple of deep breaths, then walked back to where Wayne was watching M try to shield her notebook from the rain with her body as she wrote in it.

  I said, ‘Wayne, you might as well go ahead and bag her as soon as you’re done here.’ I glanced back at the milling reporters. ‘These guys will be in trouble if they don’t get some close-ups and quotes, so how about you give them a few?’

  ‘Anything special you want left out?’

  ‘Let’s hold back the missing jewellery, the shoes and the coin. Don’t give them anything they don’t already have about the mutilation, and don’t say “crucifixion” or “Jewish”.’

  By now it was well past noon, and I thought about Danny. We’d planned to meet at the Auction Barn steak-house for their once-a-month skillet lunch special, but my appetite was gone, and I had at least one good reason for not expecting it back any time soon.

  THREE

  Like a lot of things that had completely and permanently changed my life, it hadn’t seemed like much at the start: the day after Braxton Bragg’s Homecoming – I’d just walked into the Skillet, looking back when I thought I heard somebody call to me and almost bumped into a girl I didn’t recognise under the orange and white GO TIGERS! banner spread across the wall.

  ‘Hey, you’re number twenty-two, aren’t you?’ she said, holding out her thin warm hand to shake. ‘I’m Kat Dreyfus. I watched you play last night!’ I could see the name Katherine engraved in flowery loops on the gold ID bracelet she was wearing. In her loose-fitting khakis and baggy white cotton sweater, she looked like a little girl lost in her big brother’s hand-me-downs. But there was nothing little-girl about her clear, bottomless sea-green eyes, shining black hair, and lips that looked almost as if she were about to blow me a kiss. ‘It was hard to hear the announcer,’ she said, ‘but it sounded like he was calling you Jay Bonham.’ Her accent was strange, like something from a movie, the sound of far places and unknown worlds.

  ‘It’s James, but everybody calls me Biscuit,’ I said. ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Boston.’

  ‘Sorry I didn’t see you last night.’

  ‘You had other things on your mind,’ she said. ‘Come on, sit with us.’

  At the table she introduced me to Ronnie Geddes, a pale, thin-faced guy about our age with curly blond hair and very little to say, and Father Beane, a redheaded man in his thirties wearing jeans and a white polo shirt, probably a tennis player, I thought – or maybe in Boston it was squash or something.

  ‘Father Beane’s our supervisor,’ Kat said. ‘He’s a Jesuit.’

  He was cheerful-looking, but I could sense that under the surface he was sure of himself and had a certain kind of controlled toughness, his eyes intelligent and quick. I had the same thought I always had about Roman Catholic priests: how could their job mean more to them than sex? Which probably tells you something about the state of my knowledge at the time.

  He reached out to shake, saying, ‘Pleased to meet you, Biscuit. That was some unbelievable running you did last night.’ His hand was soft but strong.

  ‘Thanks, Father.’

  ‘Call me Al.’

  We talked football and the playoffs for a while until the waitress came with her order pad and a paper bag full of carrot tops and apple trimmings, Saturday being beef stew and apple pie day at the Skillet. She took my order for a Coke, stuck the pencil in her hair and went back behind the counter while Kat eyed the sack.

  ‘Any scholarship prospects?’ asked Al, sipping from his drink.

  ‘Yes, sir. A couple of scouts have been down.’

  ‘Where are you going to college?’ Kat asked.

  ‘TCU, probably. How about you?’

  ‘I’m already enrolled, at Wellesley. But I’m taking my first year off for this.’

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘VISTA,’ said Rick, looking at Kat with some expression or other.

  She said, ‘It’s to keep poor and black kids in school down here, get people registered to vote, help them find better jobs, stuff like that.’

  ‘Where are you staying?’

  ‘Zion Hope Church.’

  Zion Hope was the little black COGIC church out toward Spoon Bottom on Elam Road, where the pastor, a retired felon whose name I remembered as something like George Washington Hooks, could be heard from at least a quarter of a mile away when the windows were open and he was in the spirit. Visualising white faces scattered through Spoon Bottom like dimes in a dark pool, I said, ‘We’re cooking out tonight – why don’t y’all come over?’

  Al shook his head. ‘Too much paperwork, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I’ve got a meeting at eight.’

  ‘Thanks a lot, but I think I’ll pass,’ Rick said in an accent from somewhere farther west than Boston. Halfway smiling, he looked me up and down in a way that made it clear he and Kat were not together.

  Kat was watching me and thinking, her ocean-coloured eyes seeming to radiate a delicious heat at me.

  ‘It’s just me and my folks,’ I said. ‘We’re gonna barbecue burgers out at the horse farm.’ The Flying S was really more of a ranch, but it was called a farm because we grew crops on it and because its main purpose was breeding quarter horses.

  ‘Horse farm!’ Kat said. ‘That’s what the scraps are for, the horses! Hey, c’mon, Al, how about it?’

  Al looked at Kat, then me, thinking it over. Finally he nodded to her. ‘Bed check at twelve,’ he said.

  My old sunblasted red and used-to-be-white Ford pickup sat at the curb just outside the Skillet, the antenna lopping over a little and the rear fender rusted through in a couple of places. I walked to the passenger side, kicked the back corner of the door with the heel of my boot and opened it for her. Sliding in behind the wheel, I cranked the engine and we rattled up through the gears and out to the Lone Oak road, heading north toward the farm and my family.

  Now, turning my collar up against the rain, imagining I could still smell the old Ford’s permanent bouquet of gasoline and exhaust fumes after all these years, I tried without much success to picture Dr Gold as part of a family, or as anybody’s wife. But I knew she had been; the last I’d heard she was married to a guy who owned a local data-services company called QuikCom. After a few seconds his name came to me: Andy Jamison.

  The rain actually seemed to be getting colder, and the body looked more bedraggled than ever, causing me to wonder if this was going to create any additional problems at the autopsy.

  Again remembering my lunch date with Danny Ridout at the Auction Barn, but still having no appetite, I called him to ask for a rain check.

  ‘That must be what the learned among us refer to as a “wisecrack”,’ he said.

  ‘It was a waggery.’

  ‘Naw, you’re thinkin’ of a whim-wham there.’

  I went around checking the name tags of the uniformed cops I didn’t know until I found Hardy, Jason L.
and asked him what he’d seen when he got here.

  He glanced over at the body with a focused but not self-important expression, organising his recollections. ‘Naturally the first thing I noticed was her, just like she is now,’ he said. ‘I gloved up and checked for a carotid pulse, but it was obvious there wasn’t gonna be one. About a dozen civilians milling around, so I was thinking no footprints that would do us any good, but I herded them back anyway and went ahead and secured the scene. All the tyre tracks I could make out down there were accounted for by the vehicles present, and the vehicles were all accounted for by the onlookers. That’s basically it until the geeks and suits got here.’ He glanced down at my street clothes and cleared his throat in embarrassment. ‘I mean – ’

  ‘No problem,’ I said. ‘I’m undercover. Any other thoughts?’

  ‘Well, I looked inside all the vehicles the best I could without touching them, but I didn’t see anything.’

  ‘What were you looking for?’

  He shrugged. ‘Nothing in particular – a bloody knife maybe, rope, tape, maybe a mallet or some big nails – just anything that looked interesting.’

  I nodded. ‘Anybody volunteering theories, talking like a cop, trying to posse up with you?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘How about anybody hanging back, watching the crowd instead of the body, antsy, looking flushed or too pale, anything like that?’

  ‘No, sir. When I was looking into the cars I’d give it about a five-count, then turn and check the crowd. Nothing looked funny.’

  I wondered if I’d been anywhere near this smart when I was starting out.

  ‘Hear anybody say anything at all that made you take notice?’

  ‘No, sir.’