Back of Beyond (4 page)

The pack was heavy and he rooted through the balled-up damp clothing. He found a Ziploc bag with residue of marijuana.
See,
he thought to himself,
everybody is guilty.
He wondered if they’d purchased it from a sapphire miner. He put it back, and dug further, thinking maybe he’d find matches and an accelerant and close the case like a supercop. Instead, he closed his fingers around the loving and familiar and understanding neck of a full bottle of Jim Beam.

He whispered, “Oh, no.”

Then:
I’ve got to make another call.

Then:
To whom? Especially now.

Then:
This is not happenstance. This is fate. And Fate says, “You need to drink this. It’s why I left it for you to find. You’ll need it to get through this.”

Before he made the decision he knew he’d make, he looked up and saw Larry walking toward his Ford. And he shoved the bottle back into the daypack and pushed it aside.

*   *   *

“Well?” Cody asked, opening the door
and sliding outside. His boots hit the mud with two
squish-plops.

Larry’s shaved head beaded with rain and a rivulet ran down between his eyebrow and pooled on his upper lip. “I’m thinking accidental death with an outside chance of suicide, so I’m happy.”

Cody grunted. They’d discussed it before, how at every death scene they hoped like hell it was a natural or an accidental or a suicide, that they’d be done with it in a matter of hours after they turned it over to the coroner.

“Show me,” Cody said, “show me what led to your thinking suicide.”

“Which means you’re not so sure,” Larry said.

“Which means nothing at all.”

“Is suicide on your mind?”

“Constantly.”

“You know what I mean. So, did you call Skeeter?”

Cody sighed, “Yeah. But given the distance and the rain, I figure we’ve got an hour before he gets here.”

“Sheriff coming?”

“Don’t know.”

The two of them slogged down the flagstone path toward the scene, when Larry suddenly stopped. “Hey,” he said, “An hour for
what
?”

“To come to a consensus,” Cody said, widening the beam on his light to encompass the burned half of the cabin. “Okay, walk me through it.”

Larry pinched down the beam of his Mag to use as a pointer within the wide pool of light. He started with the blackened woodstove.

“First thing I noticed,” Larry said, “is the door to the stove is open. I don’t see that happening after the fire started, do you? The handle locks down from the top, so a falling beam wouldn’t hit it and knock it open. So I conclude it was open before the fire started. So what likely happened was our victim had a fire going—it’s sure as hell cold enough this summer—and left the door open for some reason. The logs inside shifted or sparks flew out or something. Thus starting the blaze.”

Cody said, “Go on.”

“It’s speculation until the arson team comes and looks things over, of course,” Larry said while he slowly moved the beam of his light from the open door of the stove to the black muck that was the former hardwood floor, “but it looks like the fire started here a few feet from the open door and spread outward. The floorboards are completely gone right here, burned completely through to ash.”

He danced his light around the edges of the structure, where the floor butted up against the concrete foundation. “See, there’s still some floor left up against the foundation. So I’m thinking the fire started in the middle of the room and took off from there in all directions. Probably caught some curtains or the walls and climbed up to the ceiling, and then spread across the inside top of the ceiling. With fire burning the floor and all four walls and the ceiling, it was like an incinerator in the room. A fire like that sucks all the oxygen out, so our vic could have died from smoke inhalation before he barbecued—but that’s for the autopsy guys in Missoula to tell us. My guess from working a few of these fire cases is he was dead before he burned, and way dead before the roof came down on him.”

“Okay,” Cody said, “why’d the victim leave the stove door open and crash on the couch?”

“The question at hand,” Larry said, playing it like a game, “the question we must answer in order to declare it a suicide and go home and climb into our dry beds with our hot mamas.”

Cody snorted. He had no hot mama at home, and neither did Larry.

Larry stepped carefully over the exposed foundation and sank ankle deep into the black muck, cursing. He shuffled toward the couch frame and the body, the beam of his flashlight bouncing all over until it settled on a black stalk jutting up from the surface a few feet from the couch.

“You got pictures of this, right?” Larry asked, hesitating before he reached out.

“Yeah.”

“Okay then,” he said, leaning forward and grasping the black stalk and pulling it free. He held the bottle by the neck. “Here’s our answer. Judging by the shape of it, I’d guess Wild Turkey. One hundred proof.”

Cody concurred. He knew the bottle, even though the fire had puckered in the sides of it.

Said Larry, “No way to tell if it was empty, half full, or full. If there was any left when the fire burned this hot it would have boiled anything inside into vapor, which is a sad loss of pretty good bourbon. But it appears there wasn’t a cap on it. Does Wild Turkey have a metal screw cap?”

“Nope,” Cody said. “It has a cork plug kind of thing.”

“Hmmm, then we’ll have to get it analyzed to see if there’s any cork or plastic residue inside the neck of the bottle. But I’d guess our victim opened this baby up and didn’t cap it. Which means serious drinking to me. I mean, when a guy doesn’t bother to put the cap back on between drinks, he’s on a good toot. Right, Cody?”

Cody grunted with recognition.

“So the way I see it,” Larry said, moving the flashlight to the blackened arm and hand sticking out from the couch and debris, “is our victim was feeding the fire and getting pounded at the same time. Except maybe toward the end of the toot he didn’t latch the handle on the stove completely. He staggered back to the couch with his bottle of Wild Turkey and had another drink and likely fell asleep. When the logs in the stove shifted they pushed open the door.

“Of course,” Larry said, raising his flashlight to illuminate his face so Cody could see Larry’s index finger posing pensively alongside his cheek, “first impressions can be wrong, especially in these conditions, and I’m never one to jump to conclusions no matter how much I want to will them to be what I want them to be. For starters, this isn’t an optimal crime scene. In fact, it’s a fucking horrible crime scene, which is why I don’t want it to be anything other than a suicide. The rain changes everything, as we know. There’s both bad and good aspects of this scene because of this goddamned weather.”

Cody could tell Larry was at his best and wanted to be prompted.

“Like what?” Cody said.

“Well, the bad aspects are legion. It’s been two or three days since the fire occurred, for one, so the scene isn’t fresh. Rainwater has contaminated it if we try and look for trace evidence of any kind. Animals have been in here.”

“They have?” Cody said, genuinely surprised he’d missed it.

Larry squatted and trained his beam so it shone from a lower angle into the tangle of debris around the body, illuminating a swatch of dark red striped with white. Bone white: ribs.

“Yeah,” Larry said. “A badger or something got in here and fed through the meat to the bone. So that’s just gross.”

He stood, and said, “Continuing, the slop of ash and water within this foundation is wet enough not to retain any prints or tracks. So we can’t tell if anyone besides us and the hikers were in here. Not that it makes that much difference, since dead is dead. But if there was someone else here with the victim we have no evidence of that. No empty glasses, or cigarette butts, or anything like that. If there were tire tracks out in the parking area or footprints in the dirt they’re gone. We’ve only got what we’ve got. And if anything was left in this part of the cabin before the place burned down it’s literally in the soup now.

“If an accelerant was used as part of a suicide I doubt there would be any trace of it left. Of course, hundred-proof whiskey might have had the same effect.”

Cody nodded.

“But there’s some good things,” Larry said.

“Which are?”

Larry shined his light on the unburned half of the cabin. “The rain put the fire out before it took the whole place down. We might find something in there. That’s where the kitchen and dining room are, and a bedroom. There’s a lot of smoke damage, but who knows? We might find something.

“And the rain and cold might work a little in our favor,” he said. “If the rain hadn’t come no doubt the body would have been subject to the wick effect, because our victim was big and had plenty of fuel.”

The wick effect was when fat smoldered—sometimes for days—and rendered the carcass a mass of black gelatinous goo.

“So because we have a great deal of the body left, the autopsy boys might be able to determine cause of death.”

Cody centered his light on the frame of a metal desk and the black melted hulk on top of it. “We might even be able to recover something from the hard drive of the computer, I just don’t know. I don’t know if data on a hard drive can survive that kind of heat and this damned rain. But we might be able to recover something, if it’s even worth trying.”

Larry said, “And there you have it, folks,” bowing and sweeping his hand toward the body like a performer done with his act, “an accidental death in a remote mountain cabin.”

Cody said nothing. The rain drummed.

“What?” Larry asked, finally. “Are you thinking something else?”

“Let’s take a look inside the rest of the cabin,” Cody said. “Let me grab my gear.”

“You’re thinking something else,” Larry said, his disappointment palpable.

*   *   *

All the walls were black
with smoke, but the kitchen was neat and uncluttered. The table was cleared except for salt and pepper shakers designed to look like rising trout. It felt good to get out of the rain.

There were no dishes in the sink. There were unopened packages of meat and vegetables still in the plastic bags from the store in the refrigerator.

“Looks like he’d just been shopping,” Larry said. “There’s no old stuff in here at all, like maybe he’d been gone and just came back with groceries. And there’s plenty here—two big steaks, some potatoes, salad in a bag. Like he was expecting someone or maybe just eating for two. I bet these steaks are still okay, considering how cold it’s been.”

Cody opened the dishwasher, hoping there would be dirty glasses or dishes inside.

“Shit,” Cody said. “He ran the dishwasher before the place burned down, so we won’t pull any prints from the glasses or plates.”

“He was a clean drunk,” Larry said, rooting through cupboards. “I’ll leave all these doors open so you can shoot ’em if you want. It might be better in the daylight, though.”

Cody checked under the sink. Cleaning supplies, garbage bags, the usual. He shined his flashlight into the garbage can, which was lined with white plastic. Garbage cans often held good stuff, he knew.

There were a few items inside, and he took the can out and emptied it on the table. Crumpled paper Dixie drinking cups, wadded-up Kleenex, shreds of cellophane, and the missing cork cap to the Wild Turkey bottle. Cody photographed the contents.

Larry saw the cap in the flash of the camera and whistled. “So we can assume he was on a bender after all.”

Cody pushed the cellophane strips around with the tip of his pen.

“What are they?” Larry asked.

“Cigar wrappers, I think.”

“So maybe he was smoking a cigar as well,” Larry said. “But I still think it was the open stove.”

Cody bagged the cellophane and the Dixie cups and the bottle cap and marked them with evidence numbers.

“What’s with that?” Larry asked, observing.

“You never know,” Cody said. “Maybe a print can be pulled.”

Larry nodded his head but eyed Cody with suspicion.

*   *   *

“Got something here,”
Larry called from the bedroom.

Cody entered. Because the door had been closed, there was little smoke seepage or damage. The room was pristine compared to the kitchen; i.e., white walls, made bed, a half-full closet. Larry had his flashlight trained on an open suitcase on a cedar chest. Clothes were folded neatly inside. “He just got back from somewhere and hadn’t even unpacked yet.”

“That’s what it looks like.”

“Either that, or he was one of those anal types who packs the night before. But that doesn’t account for the fresh food in the refrigerator. Plus, the place just doesn’t seem lived in. It seems like it was closed up for a while and he just got here and immediately decided to get hammered. That’s kind of weird.”

“Yeah,” Cody said. Cody’s beam slid off the suitcase and rested on a battered leather briefcase next to the cedar chest.

“And something else, I just realized,” Larry said. “There weren’t any other liquor bottles in the kitchen. None. So unless he kept his bar out in the den where he burned up and every trace of it melted into the mud, the only bottle here was the one he was drinking.”

“Um-hmmm.”

“Which kind of makes me think he picked it up on the way here.”

“Um-hmmm,” he said, taking several photos of the suitcase, the closet, the bed.

“Hold it,” Larry said, moving farther into the room. He illuminated a dresser with several items on top; a comb, a Delta Air Lines envelope, a paperback, a pile of coins, and a wallet. “ID,” he said.

“Wait a minute,” Cody said. “Before you pick it up let me take some shots of the layout and the stuff on the dresser. Then I want to superglue the room. Then you can check it all out.”

Larry stared at him and Cody could feel his eyes on him in the semidark.

“Cody,” Larry said, “what the hell are you doing?”

“Investigating,” Cody said. “We’re investigators, remember?”