Drummer Boy: A Supernatural Thriller (21 page)

Instead, it was just another drunk staggering off from what was likely a sleepless night of porking Louise Templeton at 50 bucks a pop. Elmer had dipped his bucket in that well a couple of times himself, but the last time he’d reeled it back in with a dose of the clap, and he was worried what else she might have picked up in the meantime. Plus, 50 bucks was 50 bucks, and Vernell was cheaper, and his hand was free.

“You know him?” Elmer said.

“Check out that tunic.”

“Tunic? Looks like a coat that the squirrels have been sleeping in.”

“Wool. And the canteen.”

Canteen?
Nobody carried canteens anymore. Even hunters had gone to bottled water. The last time Elmer had actually seen somebody sip from a canteen, they’d all been dressed up in Civil War costumes and gathering for a bivouac in Charlottesville. “He’s walking a mite wobbly.”

“Man on a mission.”

Elmer didn’t want to add that the guy’s boots didn’t appear to be touching the ground. Jeff left the window for a minute, rummaging in the broom closet, and Elmer licked his lips, wondering if it was too soon to cadge another beer. Jeff returned with some field binoculars and squinted into them.

He whistled low. “I thought it was a replica, but damned if it doesn’t look authentic. Even has the C.S.A. stamp in the tin.”

There were plenty of counterfeiters skilled at taking a replica, beating the hell out of it, then cramming a century-and-a-half’s worth of grime into the crevices until it could pass for the real thing. And the weekend soldiers who collected such items couldn’t tell the real from the fake, and they didn’t really care that much as long as they had bragging rights. But Jeff was pretty hard to fool, even from a distance.

“Maybe he’s come for the Stoneman re-enactment,” Elmer said, punctuating with a belch that mocked the contrived elegance of the Davis living room.

“This early? I know the 37th is coming in, but they won’t be here until Friday.”

“Well, if he’s not in the troop, I guess we ought to recruit him.”

Jeff smiled and lowered the binoculars. “Saddle up, soldier.”

Elmer gave a wistful glance at the kitchen but Jeff was already out the door, so Elmer followed. The wobbly wino was a good 100 yards ahead, nearing the trailer park’s entrance, where a walking path veered off to a strip mall and gas station.

Jeff broke into a jog, a benefit of Titusville Total Fitness and its $40-a-month membership. Elmer padded along in Jeff’s wake as best he could, embarrassed by the jiggle in his belly. He half expected Vernell to shriek at him from a window, but he actually would have welcomed it, because it would have given him an excuse to drop the pursuit.

Because the wino creeped him out big-time and made him think of the disappearing man in the bowling alley.

For one thing, the man’s legs were moving like he was hellbent for home and nothing would stand in his way, but his feet skimmed over the ground as if he were ice skating. Like he was moving forward faster than his steps should have carried him. And, Elmer wasn’t a nature freak by any means, but he’d noticed the birds in the neighboring trees had fallen silent. The shithead Baker pit bull, staked to a clothesline post and ready to bark every time a gnat farted, had not even uttered a growl.

Jeff was now a good 20 paces ahead of Elmer, and that was just fine by him. Elmer slowed down a little, breathing hard, acid from the rising beer gas scorching his throat.

A tractor trailer rumbled down the highway, air horn blaring because the wino was nearly to the road and didn’t follow the standard rule of looking both ways before crossing. The wino didn’t slow a step and the buffeting force of the passing trailer didn’t shake him in the slightest.

“Hey,” Jeff shouted, breaking into a jerky middle-aged sprint.

Elmer stopped and waited for Jeff to catch the man. The wino stepped onto the asphalt and kept hoofing it, and a Honda screeched its brakes to avoid him. Then he was on the other side, into the scrub vegetation bordering the creek, and he disappeared into the tangled growth with barely a rustle of leaves to mark his passage. Jeff was delayed by a string of traffic, and by the time he crossed the road, the trail was cold.

Elmer reached the creek by the time Jeff had given up. “Too bad you couldn’t recruit him,” Elmer said. “The guy had the makings of a good soldier.”

“Yeah, too bad,” Jeff said.

As Jeff turned and headed back to the trailer park, Elmer looked down at the muddy creek bank where the man had vanished in the brush.

No footprints.

“Why couldn’t you wait six more months before you brought me another hard-to-figure corpse?” said Perry Hoyle, Pickett County’s white-haired medical examiner of record. “Then I’d be retired and a younger idiot would be around to clean up your messes.”

“It’s not much of a mess,” Sheriff Littlefield said. “Looks like a cut-and-dried bullet hole to the head.”

“Ain’t all the way dried yet, but it’s plenty cut,” Hoyle said, motioning to the spray of blood-stained hair and brains that were scattered across the dirty leaves. “Looks like a high-caliber bullet, but something is a little off.”

“What’s that?”

“The back of his skull is blown out like you’d expect from a close-range shot, but his forehead is cracked, too. Almost like he was struck with a blunt object instead of a bullet.”

Littlefield knelt and peered at the corpse, which now lay on its back on a stretcher. The man’s eyes stared up as if communicating his shock to the heavens. Hoyle had wiped around the wound, but it still resembled a tarry third eye that had wept mud. The edges of bone that showed were chipped and broken.

“I don’t guess there’s much chance of finding the bullet,” Littlefield said. Morton was surveying the area behind the bulldozer, checking the tree trunks for signs of an imbedded fragment, but it could just as easily have ricocheted off the bulldozer and disappeared into the leaves. That would almost literally make the task like looking for a needle in a haystack.

“I’d say you got bigger problems than that,” Hoyle said. He brushed back his wild Einstein hair and pointed to the yellow crime-scene tape that cordoned off the clearing.

“One set of footprints besides the guest of honor’s. Sneakers.”

“And they’re little, a size eight maybe. Not much of an impression in the mud, so you figure somebody lightweight.”

“A woman or a kid.”

“Why can’t you just have a normal murder once in a while?”

“Because you’d get bored.”

Hoyle waved to the ambulance attendants who stood waiting at the scene’s perimeter. Bill Willard, who had been sitting in his pickup, rolled down his window and shouted at Littlefield. “Hey, can I come in now?”

“We got to get some plaster casts of these footprints first.”

Budget Bill exited the truck and joined the attendants at the yellow tape. “Good thing he wasn’t on payroll. That would have sent my workman’s comp through the roof.”

“You’re a man of compassion, Bill.”

“Hey, it’s not like I’m the one who shot him. Carter was the best damned dozer man in the county. This will set me three days behind schedule.”

“If Christ rose from the dead in three days, I’m sure you can find another dozer operator in that time.”

A vehicle engine wound up the rough-cut road through the forest below. “Dadgum,” Bill said. “May as well set up a circus tent and sell tickets.”

Hoyle said, “I’ve got all the photos I need. May as well get this one back to the morgue and dig around in his head.”

He motioned the attendants to the body and they dragged the stretcher, its wheels miring in the mud. Littlefield checked the bulldozer’s engine and noticed it was a little warm. He was about to ask Morton if any evidence had turned up when a rusty, primer-spotted Honda sedan emerged from the trees, an “I Brake For Unicorns” bumper sticker flanking one that supported Ralph Nader for president.

“Wonderful,” Littlefield said aloud.

“Can she just drive up like that?” Bill said, his cherubic cheeks reddening. “Isn’t it trespassing?”

“Technically, this is private property, but it’s also a public crime scene,” Littlefield said. “So it’s a gray area, and I’m sure she could sic the state press association, the American Civil Liberties Union, and an army of liberal legislators on both of us if we tried to stop her.”

Cindy Baumhower got out of her car, dangling a camera with a telephoto lens, a small steno pad tucked in her armpit. “Howdy, gentlemen,” she said, her face bright enough that it looked like she might start whistling like a lark.

“You look pretty happy about a dead man,” Littlefield said.

“I don’t make the news, I just report it,” she said. “Hello, Mr. Willard. Do you have any comment for the record about the first fatality in your planned development?”

“First?” Bill was wary, heeding the unwritten rule that it was bad strategy to piss off anybody whose company bought ink by the barrel. “You say that like there’s going to be more.”

“Depends on how I spin it,” she said, bringing the camera to her eye as the attendants began loading the corpse.

“Come on, Cindy,” Littlefield said. “Have a little respect for Carter’s family.”

“Shucks, Sheriff, you know I won’t run anything red on the front page. But I have to give my editor something to prove to readers we were here.”

“Okay, then. I won’t check your images. I’ll trust you.”

“Sheriff, you touch my camera and I promise I’ll pull every public-records request in the book and tie up your staff for the next two years on paperwork. Push your solve rate way down and kill your reelection bid.”

Littlefield turned to Budget Bill. “And they say the liberal media has no heart these days.”

Cindy clicked a few photos of the attendants struggling to ferry the corpse to the back of Hoyle’s station wagon, then Littlefield affected a somber study of the crime scene as Cindy took his picture. Bill Willard put his hand over his face when she pointed the camera at him.

“So, what do you have, Sheriff?” she asked. “Hunting accident? Suicide? Maybe a crime of passion or a dispute with his boss?”

“Hey!” Bill said, raising his voice enough to cause both the attendants and Morton to stop what they were doing and look. “I don’t give a hoot about your Green Party, Green Peace, lesbian-ecoterrorist act, because I’ve got a legal right to rip this mountain down to pebbles and sawdust if I want. But a smart little reporter like you surely knows slander and libel law.”

She shrugged in feigned innocence. “I’m just generically speculating. Are you confirming that Mr. Carter was employed by you at the time of his demise?”

Bill’s face twisted as if wanted to spit out whatever poison was sitting on his tongue. He moved over to inspect the bulldozer.

Littlefield kept his face neutral, though half of him wanted to laugh despite the grimness of the death. The spilled blood had soaked into the mud and turned brown, and the next rain would erase it forever, drawing nutrients to the worms and beginning Carter’s slow return to dust. He focused on the footprints and realized what had troubled him.

Judging from the way the body had fallen, the person in the sneakers-and Littlefield was leaning toward “kid” instead of “woman”-couldn’t have been the killer. The wound was from the front, and the sneaker prints were beside or behind Carter’s prints. They were slightly deeper and more smeared where the kid had apparently dashed toward the woods, possibly after the gunshot, though there was no easy way to tell if the sneaker prints had been made before or after Carter’s death.

Cindy started to duck under the yellow tape, but Littlefield yelled at her. “We got evidence to collect still. This scene isn’t cleared.”

“I can get a better picture of you standing over here.”

Littlefield debated the value of giving her a little ground. Bill Willard was glaring at him as if promising to never contribute another dime to his campaign coffers, but with the low contribution thresholds, Willard’s money meant nothing. He faced more damage from an antagonistic reporter. Plus, despite his proclaimed devotion to bachelorhood, she was still way cuter than Budget Bill Willard.

Morton came from the woods shaking his head, carefully circumventing the footprints. “Nothing out there I could find,” he said. “We can come back with a metal detector and go over it.”

“Let Perry Hoyle dig around in the skull a little first. Sometimes bullets bounce around in there and do their damage without ever leaving. What do you think of these footprints? Maybe one of the kids you and Perriotte chased yesterday?”

“We can go over to the Hole and make some plaster casts, assuming the footprints are still there. But lots of kids come up here to party, fool around, do all the things we did when we were kids.”

Littlefield gave a terse nod toward Cindy. “That was off the record.”

She gave her grave-robber smile. “Sure, Sheriff. Anything you say.”

“Well, I know one of the kids. Dexter McAllister. His dad’s supposed to bring him by the office today for questioning.”

“Be easy to run a match on his shoes, or pull a warrant and go clean out his closet.”

“Nah. Even a homer judge like Bleucus needs a little more evidence than this to issue paper, especially with a juvenile suspect.”

“So you already have a suspect?” Cindy asked. She’d eased closer, pretending to focus her camera, and Littlefield had seen through the ploy and let it slide. He was annoyed at himself for so obviously playing her game.

“He’s only a person of interest at this point.”

The attendants had loaded Carter into Hoyle’s big Chrysler station wagon, where the man would be taking his last ride until the undertakers came to drain him and dress him for his going-away party. Littlefield didn’t know the man, but a search of his pick-up had turned up a copy of “Guns & Ammo” under the front seat, a six-pack of RC cola, a box of clean and well-oiled tools, and a plastic crucifix hanging from the rear-view mirror. No drugs, no firearms, no pornography, nothing to suggest a seedy character that would have lots of enemies.

Hoyle was right: Littlefield had a lousy record of serving up sensible corpses. At least this one had died from a bullet. Or so it seemed. This was Mulatto Mountain, and all bets were off.