Eleven Days (39 page)

I saw Hester and 216 talking to the two elderly Heinman brothers. They were near the mailbox, looking toward the area ahead of his patrol car. As I approached, a body came slowly into my view in front of 216’s car. It was lying kind of on its left side, parallel with the direction of the road, with its feet pointing away and downhill from me. I started making mental notes as I walked. Faded blue plaid flannel shirt, blue jeans, one black tennis shoe … and hands bound behind its back with yellow plastic binders. Damn. We called them Flex Cuffs, and used them when we ran out of handcuffs. They were like the bindings for electrical
wiring. Once they were on, they had to be cut off. What we had here was an execution.

Two more steps, and I saw the head. More accurately, I saw the remains of the head. You often hear the phrase “blow their head off,” but it’s rare to actually see it.

Hester and 216 joined me at the body.

“Hi, Carl,” said Trooper 216.

“Gary. Glad you could come.”

“Notice the hands?”

“Right away,” I said. “One shoe. And the head … or what used to be the head.” From what I could see, the head from about the ears on up was gone. Although nearly all the bones of the cranium seemed gone, lots of skin was left, and had sort of flapped around back into the cavity. One ear, still attached to the neck by a flap of flesh, seemed to be perfectly intact. Seeing things like that has always had kind of a sense of unreality about it.

“Uh, yeah,” said Gary. “Used to be is right. I think I’m parked over the top of some, uh, debris, from the head and stuff. I didn’t even see it until I was just about stopped.”

“Okay.” His car was about fifteen feet from the top of the body’s head, and still running. That was fine. We could have him move his car back when the crime lab got there.

Hester spoke to him. “Doesn’t leak oil, does it?”

He looked offended. “No.”

“Just checking.” She smiled. “Wouldn’t want oil all over the … debris. Just make sure your defroster or air conditioner’s off. It’s a lot easier if we don’t get condensed moisture on the stuff.”

“Right. Uh, you two better talk to the two old boys over there. Very interesting stuff.”

“Just a few seconds more,” I said. “Tell ’em we’ll be right there.”

Hester and I just stood and looked at the scene. You only get one chance to see it in a relatively undisturbed
state, and I’ve learned to take in as much of it as I can when I have the chance. An ambience sort of thing, you might say. You try to see, smell, and hear as much as you can. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn’t. But if you don’t do it, you always seem to regret it later in the case.

A sound was the first thing that struck me. The Heinman brothers had some galvanized-steel hog feeders near the roadway. Looking like huge metal mushrooms, they had spring-loaded covers on them, and every time a hog wanted to eat, all he had to do was press his snout into the mechanism and open it. When he was done, out came the snout, and that spring-loaded lid slammed down with a loud clank. Usually two or three clanks, in fact. One, a beat, and then two very close together. All the time we were at the crime scene, those hog feeders made a constant racket in the background.

Bodies look smaller dead than they do when they’re alive. This one was no exception, and it wasn’t just the fact that he was half a head shorter, so to speak. Even with the legs straightened out, he’d probably only be about five three or five four. It was sobering to see this wreck of a corpse, and think that he’d been alive and well only a few minutes before. I looked around for his other shoe, but didn’t see it.

“Sure looks dead,” I said.

“You must be a detective,” said Hester.