Eleven Little Piggies (3 page)

‘What's this?' he said, looking around the field strewn with blood and feathers. ‘Somebody get bored shooting ducks?' His youth on the run across Europe gave him that little cynical tic – working for the county hasn't dented his deeply entrenched suspicion of most of society's rules, and all of its rulemakers.

Recently I asked him, ‘Pokey, haven't you noticed by now that you're
part of
the establishment?'

He'd looked embarrassed and kind of pawed at his sparse hair for a few enjoyable heartbeats before he said, ‘Some science for police, is mostly for fun . . .' When I smiled at him, he said defiantly, ‘Listen, Jake, you got to question everything that comes down from the top.'

‘I do,' I said, ‘including your attitude.'

‘OK,' he said, ‘smart ass,' and we'd finished eating lunch together in unruffled amiability. Pokey is angry, permanently and always, at The System, which he has reason to believe is rigged. To those nearest him, like me and other law enforcement types he encounters, and the girls in his office and his patients and especially his wife, Pokey is the soul of kindness and affability, never out of patience.

He appeared in particularly good spirits as he stood looking at the body and the ground surrounding it while the photographer took a few more shots. Then he ducked under the tape, knelt by the dead man and opened his bag. For Pokey, death is a beginning, not an ending, and he enjoys the journey from there to his own conclusions. He used a probe to take the temperature of the liver, shone a light in the eyes, looked at the hard, dirty fingertips and broken nails.

Ray Bailey, my Chief of People Crimes, had followed Pokey across the field and stood beside me now, ready to help if he was needed. I brought him up to date with details of the discovery. The gunshot wound in the chest he could see for himself. I told him the victim was not registered to shoot here and nobody knew who he was or where he belonged. He nodded, made a couple of notes in his tiny handwriting and said, ‘I found all my crew. They'll be right along.' Ray's not a chatterer.

Pokey had unbuttoned the victims' jacket and shirt to look at the wound. It was about the size of a golf ball, and surrounded by a pattern of tiny bloody holes made by shot that had scattered out of the cartridge. He laid the clothes back down, stood up and looked down at the ground around the body.

‘Lotta boot prints like this around him when you found him? Or just a few?' The scene was hopelessly compromised, churned by many feet.

The two hunters looked at each other, embarrassed. The younger one said, ‘We never really looked.' Their faces said they didn't want to look at it now. Or even talk about it. They had come out to kill a few geese and wanted no part of dead humans.

‘Pokey,' I said, ‘most of these tracks aren't new – they were here when I first looked at the body.'

‘Huh,' he said. ‘Wonder why so many? There's just a pasture over there, right?'

‘And a two-track, I think – a farm lane. I haven't had time to get over there yet.'

‘Mmm. Lotta tracks,' Pokey said, sounding dissatisfied.

‘Can we leave now?' the two hunters kept asking. ‘We really need to get home.' To which Ray or I, whichever one they asked, invariably said something like, ‘Just hang on here a little longer, please, till we sort a few things out.'

BCA guys were itching to take their samples and go, too; they were just waiting for the last of the pictures. So everybody looked happy when Pokey said, ‘Guess you could roll him now,' pointing away from himself, toward the fence.

Ray and I stepped inside the tape. I took the head; Ray took the feet. The victim felt rigid and heavy as a log. When we rolled him onto his side the indentation from his big thick body stayed in the snow. A little blood and tissue clung in clumps in the snow where he had lain – much less than I'd expected to see.

There should have been quarts of blood, I thought, looking at the hole in his back – about twice the size of the one in front – and at the snow beneath him. And fragments of bone and tissue – where had it all gone?

Pokey looked down at the almost-clean hollow under the victim, twitched his nose like a rabbit, and made a tiny noise like, ‘Hmmmp.'

A piece of bloody tissue, bright orange from the cold, fell off the body into the hollow. Shreds of his jacket and shirt hung off his back, soaked with blood and frozen stiff. A couple of nuggets of birdshot gleamed in the packed snow and, as I watched, another tiny metal fragment fell out of the jagged cavity.

‘Can you two hold him right there while I get those?' Pokey asked us. He pulled a baggie out of a box and leaned in with tweezers, grunting with concentration as he plucked small pellets carefully out of the snow. The job was so nearly impossible, we all held our breath while his pincers grabbed the tiny pieces of slippery metal. When he had all three fragments we let out a collective sigh.

‘Now me,' Baines said, and quickly got his pictures. He backed into a wild raspberry bush on his way out of the taped area, and treated us all to a master course in swearing as he freed his corduroys. As soon as he finished his tantrum he ran to join his teammates in the BCA van and they roared away.

Ray's crew had come across the field and stood outside the tape, waiting for marching orders. Ray nodded at them and went back to staring at the body we were holding. As Pokey pulled the torn garments aside to inspect the wound, Ray said, pointing at a back pocket, ‘That looks like the outline of a wallet.'

‘You want it? Here,' Pokey fished it out and handed it up.

‘Funny,' I said. ‘Never knew a farmer to carry his wallet in the field.'

‘Me neither,' Ray said. ‘Too easy to lose.' He was already rummaging through it, reading off cards. ‘Owen Kester.' He looked around. ‘Anybody know him?'

‘Kester,' Arlo said. ‘That's funny. Hey, I bet that's why he looks familiar. The guy I rent this field from is named Kester. He's a lawyer in town, though. But maybe they're related?'

‘Let's find out,' Ray said. He gave the address to Rosie Doyle and said, ‘Put that in your GPS and tell me how far away it is.' I expected her to trot back to her car but she just pulled out her smart phone and started cranking in numbers. Meantime, Ray handed Clint Maddox his iPad and asked him to see how many Kesters he could find on Google. Then he took Amy Nguyen a little aside and said ‘Winnie . . .' which is what we all call her ever since the chief, after listening to her say ‘Nguyen,' several times, introduced her to us all as ‘Win'. It was some time before he figured out whether that was her first or last name, and while he was pondering we all started calling her Winnie.

‘Winnie,' Ray said now, ‘I want you to take these hunters for a little walk, get them to show you their pissing area—'

‘Ah, boss, come on,' Winnie said, wincing. She has the courage of a lion running a marathon or, as she recently did, facing down a loaded gun in a raging river. But thanks to a strict upbringing by her super-tough grandmother, the boat lady who got the family here from Vietnam, she is much more demure than the average street cop.

‘No, listen, you're perfect for this job, it'll throw 'em off their game a little,' Ray said. ‘I want you to talk to them very sweet and polite till they show you their piss-holes in the snow. Then get all touchy-feely with your questions – insist they tell you exactly what they felt when they first saw it. Did they realize right away that they were looking at a dead man? If they say no, ask them what they thought was wrong? And why did they think that? Stuff like that.'

Winnie frowned. ‘“Stuff like that” – what does that mean?'

‘Feelings. Men don't like to talk about their feelings and the younger one especially wants to go home and bury this incident in several straight shots. See how he keeps blinking? He's afraid he's going to puke. I'm counting on you to get these guys to open up and talk about finding that body. First impressions are important! Keep your recorder on!'

Winnie went away looking as if he'd told her to eat a frog – but she went. She'd overcome long odds to get on the force; hardly anybody thought she had it in her to be a cop. But she spent five years as a by-the-book, spare-no-effort cop. Then she had to work extra hard to get assigned to investigations – petite and pretty, she fits nobody's image of the steely-eyed police detective. But she passed all the tests with scores so high they made her take some of them over (she scored even higher the second time). To keep this job she's worked so hard for, she'll follow orders, even the ones that make her grimace with distaste.

I had not observed Ray at work in the field for some time, and was impressed by his progress as a team leader. As a detective, he always had good focus and bulldog tenacity on a case, but when I was head of People Crimes and he was one of my detectives, he was a silent loner whose hardest task was telling me what he knew. The chief was dubious when I picked him to head the People Crimes section. He said, ‘People aren't exactly his favorite thing, are they?'

‘He's very smart and he never quits till he's found all there is to find,' I said. ‘I think I can teach him to talk.'

Ray believed me when I told him communication was the key to success from here on. He's still quieter than the average sleuth, and gloomier-looking because he's a Bailey and Baileys have gloom in their DNA. But he's learned to tell his crew what he wants in simple sentences. And he never has any agenda – only a passion for facts you can take to the bank. So he runs a pretty happy ship. He needs one more investigator than he's got, and he knows I'll get one for him as soon as the chief can winkle out the funds from the tragedians on the city council.

‘And Andy,' Ray said when Winnie was gone, ‘why don't you mosey around in this tree line, and behind it in the field on the other side there, and see what you can find?'

‘Like what?'

‘Like the insides of a dead man or maybe a fresh casing for birdshot. Or a tire track or boot print good enough to make a casting, or any other sign of how this man got here. If you find any of those things give me a call and I'll send somebody to help you tape it off. You got gloves?'

‘Sure,' Andy said, and trudged away. Andy Pittman, a tough and resourceful street cop for most of his twenty-seven years on the force, does not require much supervision.

‘Here, I found him,' Rosie said, coming back with a map with the victims' house address on it. ‘Less than three miles from here. Looks like it's in that section the city annexed a couple of years ago,' she said. ‘The streets over there are mostly mapped but not built yet. They've even put some street signs out there, so the volunteer fire crews can find them if they need to. How much you bet me, though – it's going to be on a gravel road, used to be a county road and now it's just inside the city limits?'

‘Why don't you go and find it,' Ray said, ‘and have a talk with –' he turned to Clint – ‘is there a Mrs Owen Kester?'

‘Uh . . .' Clint whizzed back through a row of names, ‘yes. Doris Kester, nee Kleinschmidt.'

‘Probably one of those horsey Kleinschmidts that win all the trail rider classes at the fair,' he told Rosie. ‘Go find her. Come back and tell me if we got the right Mrs Kester, and where she thinks her husband might be.'

‘Do I have to tell her we think her husband's been shot?' She shook her head while she asked the question, willing him to say no. Red curls seized the opportunity to spring out of her cap and wave around.

‘Um . . . should be two people for that.' He turned to Clint. ‘You go with her.'

‘Why me? I'm no good at that: I always cry if they do. Send Winnie.'

‘She's busy with the pissers. You go – in fact, you drive so Rosie can take pictures on that smart phone. Here, give her my iPad – how about this, we're unwired for success! Take notes on that, Rosie. Wait, you got a picture of the victim?'

‘Yes, Baines sent me a good one to my iPhone,' Rosie said.

‘Good! Bring me back descriptions of everybody you find, and pictures, plenty of pictures. Fast as you can, please! We don't have much time left here; everything's starting to freeze!' He meant the body, which was, I could attest, stiff as a board.

Everybody had a job now except me, which was OK because my ride was suddenly double parked at the curb, calling on my cell phone to say, ‘I'm late already, come right now!'

I said, ‘Ray, give me a call later when you have time, will you?' and trotted toward the car that had a state seal on the door. After my first near-header, I slowed to a walk, schedules be damned. The colder the day got, the more that field resembled a skating rink covered in snowdrifts.

In the car, I called Trudy to say, ‘Ride's here, I'm on my way.'

‘Good. Benny's just waking up, so I'll feed him right away. And the beans are ready any time. Shall I start the grill?'

‘I'll do it when I get there. Going to take me a while to thaw out anyway.'

‘Thaw out, that's code for toddies, isn't it?'

‘And canoodling, if you can put up with cold hands and a few feathers.'

‘Ah, you're such a bad old bird.' Her giggle started warming me up, inappropriately, right there on the cold plastic seat covers belonging to an HHS guy with a thick casebook and an expression that said he ate small children for lunch. To be fair, I was raised in foster homes as a ward of this state, so all social workers look pretty ominous to me.

I felt like asking him if he owned any shotguns. But it was his ride so I clammed up and began counting overtime hours. There was a woefully small balance left in the Rutherford PD emergency account. I used the rest of the trip to prepare a plea for help from the Mayor's slush fund, ‘. . . the third murder in six months, Your Honor . . .' If that didn't work, Rutherford investigators might be the next ones to discover that crime doesn't pay.