Blackbird (3 page)

The plastic ID she’d just used a corner of to winkle out a popcorn hull stuck between her incisors said Mouncey, Jacquanda S., Detective II-CID, but everybody called her M. She didn’t look much like police, but she had been a major-crimes detective for almost ten years and earned three commendations for things she’d done while being shot at, two of the shooters having had to settle for obituaries.

Looking over her outfit, I said, ‘You put me in mind of a fleeing felon.’

‘The job just a day gig,’ she said. ‘Nights, I out perpetrating.’

The passing landscape of miscellaneous storefront businesses started phasing into classier re-zoned conversions, upscale shops and finally older homes set back on spacious
lots under mature oaks, sweetgums and longleaf pines, surrounded by acres of tailored, unseasonably green lawns with automatic sprinkler systems. Maybe money didn’t buy happiness, but it bought lots of grass.

M said, ‘How the single life treating you, Lou?’

Listening to the dull cardiac thumping of the wind-shield wipers for a minute, I took in a deep breath and blew it out along with the half-dozen bullshit answers that had occurred to me. I wasn’t much good at casual social lies and hardly ever wasted time or energy on them any more.

‘I don’t seem to be very good at solitude, M.’

‘Like to see the man that is,’ she said. ‘Y’all just be layin’ around suckin’ Bud Lite till you stufficate under all them dirty socks and pizza boxes.’ She looked at me with some expression or other for a couple of seconds before deciding to go directly for the throat. ‘Seen them two girls of yours waiting for they ride after school yesterday,’ she said. ‘Both of ’em lookin’ a little floopy, Lou.’

The only replies that came to mind were defensively self-serving and useless, and I didn’t respond. Knowing Mouncey would have used one of the tac frequencies to talk to somebody on Wayne’s crew as she was bringing the car around, I said, ‘Get anything at all from out there?’

‘Uniform name Hardy catch it and buzz Wayne,’ she said. ‘Call from a pre-pay, sound like a white lady, most likely local, but wouldn’t give ’em no name. Crime Scene up there a half-hour now. It that field across the interstate, west side the tracks.’

I visualised the area, which I remembered as being mostly deserted, and started pawing around in my pockets in search of camphor.

Noticing this, Mouncey said, ‘Told me this a fresh one, Lou.’

I stopped pawing and said, ‘Any civilians at the scene when Wayne got there?’

‘’Bout a bo-zillion of ’em, way he carryin’ on. Man just cain’t handle people jackin’ with his clues. I told ’em leave ev’thing like it is till we get there and e’body stay sharp cause the Man on his way.’

‘Why the hell’d you do that?’

‘Keep they sphincters tight,’ she said. ‘Discipline crucial, got a outfit like this one.’

Humming a tune from ‘More Than A Woman’, she swung left through the red light at Hancock, setting off a massive chorus of horns and squealing brakes, made a hard right under the trestle and took Springer north between the lake and the wooded railroad right-of-way to the zigzag below the double bridges of the expressway.

Coming out from under the vaulted concrete, we rounded the curve under a high billboard and saw what looked like every patrol car, fire truck and EMT unit in town parked at random angles along a quarter of a mile of the access road shoulder and out across the field wherever the ground was solid enough, their red and blue roof lights twinkling.

‘Be a good time to stick up the town,’ Mouncey observed. ‘Protectors and servers all out here gawkin’.’

We rolled to a stop next to an Arkansas-side pumper and Wayne’s Crime Scene bus, and I climbed out. A hundred yards away at the edge of the pines and assorted oaks on the low bluff above the tracks several dozen uniforms along with city councilmen, courthouse civilians, off-duty fire-fighters and EMTs – basically everybody in town who had a scanner – were milling around and trying to look involved.
Seeing Dwight Hazen among them surprised me a little, but I didn’t take time to analyse the feeling. Outside the yellow tape the media people, bristling with cameras, microphone booms and lights, stood around in knots and cliques looking restless and surly.

They swarmed me as I bent to duck under the tape, video cams, flashing still cameras and microphones converging a few inches in front of my nose, all of them demanding information and comment. Sticking with the rule that when you know nothing, that’s what you should say, I tried to look reasonable and trustworthy but kept my mouth shut.

The temperature felt like forty or so by now, with no wind to speak of, the rain still fairly light but coming steadily. Low streamers of mist drifted over the uneven yellow and brown weed-fields surrounding the site, almost obscuring an abandoned-looking storage warehouse a quarter of a mile to the west, leaching the colour and depth from the mixed hardwood and pine woodlands to the north and giving them the look of an old oil painting. If you didn’t know about the country club and the upscale suburbs beyond the trees you might think the scene was completely rural, but we were actually almost half a mile inside the city limits.

As we worked our way up the slope toward the gathering under the trees, Mouncey picking her way along behind me like a deer, trying to keep the mud off her lime-green platforms, I caught sight of Wayne, suited out in white Tyvek, nitrile gloves and a surgical cap. He saw my wave, broke away from the group and came over to meet us. He was a tall, slightly awkward, middle-aged, east Texas country boy with a strawberry-blond moustache,
wire-rimmed glasses and a flash-mounted Nikon hanging from a strap around his neck, like everybody else on his crew. To him the proposition that you could overspend on photography gear, or that there was any such thing as too many pictures, would have been nothing but crazy talk.

‘Howdy, M. Howdy, Lou,’ he said, a drop of rain hanging from the tip of his nose. Stripping off one surgical glove, he stuck out his big hand and we all shook. ‘Y’all ready to join the workin’ stiffs?’ He tried with no success to kick some of the clingy red clay off the surgical booties covering his size-thirteen Noconas.

I took the gloves he handed me, pulled them on and looked around at all the people who thought Do Not Cross applied to everybody but them. Hazen and a younger man who looked like a staff gofer or maybe an intern of some kind were working their way toward us, Hazen locked in on me with a grim, concerned expression, the rain plastering a couple of spitcurls of dark hair to his temple. I had once heard somebody called ‘Joe College at forty’, and it wasn’t a bad description of Hazen except for being maybe five years low. The assistant, a sort of scared-looking, unfinished version of the city manager in a dark suit that I thought would have looked silly out here even if it wasn’t plastered to him like wet tissue paper, glanced uneasily back and forth between Hazen and me, trying to decide which flag to salute.

‘Uh, Lieutenant, I thought I’d get your take on this – ’ Hazen began.

‘Yes, sir,’ I said, wondering what it was about him that irritated me so much. ‘I’ll be happy to give you that as soon as I know something. Right now I’d appreciate it if both of you would wait behind the tape.’

Hazen looked at me with a questioning expression, like a man who’s not quite sure he heard right, took in the kind of breath you do when you’re about to give somebody an attitude adjustment, but then apparently had second thoughts. He glanced back at the reporters, made a show of shrugging and flashing his let-the-man-do-it-his-way smile, then retreated, the gofer hopping from one weed clump to the next behind him until they reached the tape and stooped inexpertly under it.

Turning back to Wayne, I said, ‘So what have we got?’

‘I’ll show you,’ he said, leading the way toward the medium-sized possum oak at the centre of what was left of the gathering, which now consisted mostly of Wayne’s crew, a dozen or so uniforms and a few EMTs waiting for their cue.

‘Don’t worry where you step along here,’ Wayne said. ‘We did all we could with the ground, but you know what that’s worth when it’s already trompled to pieces before you get to it.’

I’m not sure what I’d expected, but this definitely wasn’t it. The oak’s lower branches had been hacked away with a heavy-bladed tool, probably a machete or axe, and what looked like a six-foot length of four-by-four had been lashed to the trunk with coarse-fibred rope to form a cross-beam. Pinned by two thick bridge spikes driven through the wrists, with several loops of rope binding the arms to the beam, was the corpse of a woman, head fallen forward as if she were looking down at us with dull eyes as we stood before her slack body. All my life I’d heard of corpses having expressions of horror or pain on their faces, reflecting the manner of death, but the job had taught me better. The only expression death leaves the
dead is indifference, and that was all I saw in the woman’s features now.

Stepping in for a closer look, I could pick out individual drops of rain refracting the light like jewels in her dark hair. A strip of silver duct tape that had apparently been placed across her lower face had been pulled back to expose the bloody mouth and chin. A torn and bloodstained ecru cashmere pullover sweater still covered most of her torso but she was naked from the waist down. The insides of her thighs were black with congealed blood. Her feet had been turned to the side and a third spike had been driven through the heels and deep into the wood of the tree trunk. More blood had run down from the arms and feet to form a black puddle in the wet grass.

Wayne said, ‘Them spikes up there at the top went through between the radius and ulna just proximal to the carpals on both sides and didn’t cut either one of the radial arteries, even with all the struggling she did.’

Looking up through the rain at the dead, grey face, I said, ‘I know her.’

All eyes came to me.

‘It’s Deborah Gold.’

‘The psych doc?’ said Wayne.

I nodded absent-mindedly, thinking about Jerusalem thieves, Texas psychologists, and dying hard. Dr Gold had been a department consultant at one time, mostly doing the pre-hire psych screening of new applicants, and she and I had a history.

Mouncey squinted as she took another look at the face. ‘Believe you right, Lou,’ she said. ‘Look like some hard miles on her since then.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Especially the last few.’

‘Be damned,’ Wayne said, squinting up at the empty eyes.

Lying in the weeds not far from the base of the tree I saw a pair of expensive-looking alligator shoes which, by reason of living mostly with women all my life, I knew were the kind called pumps. Bloody earlobes and grooves around three of the curled fingers meant the victim must have been wearing jewellery, which the killer had apparently taken while she was still alive. The hands themselves were fairly slender and long-fingered with what looked like a clear lacquer covering the well-manicured nails.

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?’