Dead Watch (11 page)

The body was fifty yards into the woods, a small end-of-the-trail clearing, clumps of old toilet paper in the brush, a few bottles and cans, a collapsed plastic trash barrel. The odor of burned pig was thicker here, with the smudgy underscent of petroleum. Though he’d seen people incinerated by napalm, Jake didn’t immediately recognize the body when they stepped into the clearing. It looked more like a rotting tree stump, with a new tree growing up out of the old roots.

“Jeez,” Novatny said. They all sidled toward it. The closer they got, the more the body looked like a stump, until the last few feet, when they could see bloody raw fissures in the blackened flesh. It still didn’t look human, until Jake went a bit sideways and saw the shoes. The shoes were badly burned, but still recognizable. The victim had been bound with wire to the tree, in a kneeling position, one foot on each side of the tree.

No head.

“Not just wire,” Novatny said. “Barbed wire. Wonder if we could trace that? Where they got it.”

“Could’ve just clipped it out of a fence in the night,” the sheriff said. “That’s what I would’ve done—if I was going to do this.”

“Was he alive? Were they torturing him?” Jake asked.

“Have to wait for the autopsy,” the sheriff said. “But nobody heard anything. No screaming, or shouting. No commotion. I don’t know why you’d wire him up if he was dead—why not just lay him down on a big stack of wood, and pile some more up around him?”

“Nobody saw a car?”

“No. After the fire died down, Anderson went back to changing his oil, he never saw a car leave. They must’ve come in here with a car, though. Didn’t see much in the way of tracks, it’s all gravel and bark in the parking area.”

“You done with the photos?” Clancy asked, looking at the sheriff.

“Yeah . . . got video and stills both. We were waiting for you before we did any more.”

Clancy walked once around the body, then stepped close, knelt on a bare patch of ground, took a short metal rod out of his case, and began pushing a shoe off the remains of a foot. The shoe fell apart, exposing a patch of reddened flesh. Clancy took another instrument from his case, a nine-inch-long polished steel tube that looked a bit like a syringe, cocked it by sliding the barrel, as if it were a tiny shotgun, pressed the tip against the red flesh, and squeezed. The instrument snapped, they all jumped, and Clancy pulled it back and stood up.

“How long?” Novatny asked.

“Pretty good sample. Ten minutes,” Clancy said. He put the sampler in his case and snapped the case. “I’ll go back to the car and do it.”

“Ten minutes?” The sheriff’s eyebrows were up. “How reliable?”

“With a good sample, ninety percent,” Clancy said. “I’ve got a digital DNA record in my laptop.”

“How come that doesn’t get down to us?” the sheriff asked. “On-scene DNA could be handy.”

Clancy shrugged. “You could have it if you wanted it—but the machine costs seventy grand, and it’s about two grand per test, counting amortization on the equipment. Regular’s what, a hundred and fifty bucks, for a two-day wait?”

“No head,” Jake said, as Clancy disappeared back down the track. “No blood? Any sign of a struggle, any . . .”

“What you see is what we got, other than the ID,” Winsome said. “We’ve already bagged the ID. We could do some soil tests, but we wouldn’t learn much. The autopsy ought to tell us if he was alive.”

Jake looked at Novatny: “Christ, I hope it’s not him.”

Parker said, “Chuck, it’s him. You know it, I know it. The media is gonna go exactly berserk. This is gonna be worse than a Hollywood murder. This is gonna be worse than anything we’ve ever seen.”

They all looked glumly at the body for another ten seconds, and Novatny said, “Well, at least we’re not gonna be bored.”

“Don’t usually smell the gas afterward,” Jake commented.

“What?” The sheriff looked at him.

“The gas usually burns up and the smell of the fire cloaks whatever is left. This smells like they either spilled some that didn’t burn, or they deliberately sprinkled it around where it wouldn’t burn.”

“Why?”

Jake shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m just telling you that you usually can’t smell gas afterwards. At least, you can’t smell jellied gas—napalm. Not the day afterwards.”

“Well . . .” The sheriff looked for a moment at Jake, then turned to the state investigator and said, “Make a note, I guess.”

Jake said, “When the Klan was big, a hundred years ago, they’d lynch black guys they thought had raped or killed or smart-assed a white woman.” He nodded at the body. “Sometimes they’d use barbed wire and wire the victims to trees, or light posts, and set them on fire. They often castrated them. I never heard about them taking a head, though.”

“Is that right?” the sheriff asked.

“That’s right,” Jake said. “The barbed wire was kind of a
thing.
It’s also the kind of thing that’ll get the attention of the TV people.”

The sheriff said, “Huh.”

Jake said, “So it’s possible that they poured the gas on him and got more fire than they expected. But why didn’t they just bury him? They could have put him two feet down, two guys working hard, in the time it took to pile up that wood. If they’d done that, he might not have been found for years. Was the fire really meant to burn him up? Or was it an advertisement? This whole scene looks to me like it was designed to get the media to freak out.”

The sheriff looked at him closely, starting from his shoes, then asked, “What exactly do you
do?”

Novatny said, “You know, if that’s what it is . . . Jake, fifty people are going to look at our reports, the crime-scene stuff. It’s gonna leak.”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Jake said.

The smell of the body had become intolerable, and there wasn’t much to do other than look at it. They were walking out of the woods and met Clancy halfway, coming in.

He nodded. “It’s him.”

Evening was coming on, and with it, the mos-quitoes. Jake walked down the road, kicking up little puffs of gravel dust, working his cell phone; Novatny walked the other way, working his.

Danzig said to Jake, “Jesus Christ. Hang on, Jake, Jesus Christ . . .”

Jake heard him, apparently on another phone: “It’s him. Yeah, ninety percent, they did DNA on him. Naw, naw, it’s him.” Talking to the president.

Then he was back: “Does that leave you anywhere to go?”

“Ah . . . maybe.”

“Do I want to know about it?”

“No. It’s not necessary—yet. And I’m on a cell phone here.”

“Okay. Tell me when it’s necessary to tell me. Has the FBI detailed anyone to talk to Madison Bowe?”

“Not as far as I know.”

“Tell this Novatny guy that I’m calling the director. I want somebody with some rank to do it. I don’t want a goddamn sheriff’s deputy calling her on the phone. Tell Novatny to coordinate it with the director’s office. I’ll call the director right now.”

“Yes, sir.”

Novatny, Parker, and the sheriff were standing in the parking area, waiting for Jake to get off the phone. When he did, Novatny asked, “Now what?”

“The case is yours,” Jake said. “Full-court press. You’re to coordinate with the director’s office on informing Mrs. Bowe. Danzig’s calling the director now. He may send the director himself over to tell her.”

“That’ll put him in a good mood,” Parker said. “The director being such a warm human being in the first place.”

“This is gonna be the mother of all task forces,” Novatny said to Parker. “And we got the gun. We need a full crime-scene crew down here right now. We need guys debriefing the Virginia cops. We need everything.”

The sheriff turned up his hands: “Then I’m out of it. Anything you need, call me.”

“You don’t sound that unhappy,” Parker said. “You don’t mind a bunch of feds trampling around your jurisdiction?”

An excessively thin smile from the sheriff: “I got five hundred eighty-nine square miles to take care of, that don’t have anything to do with U.S. senators getting decapitated and burned at the stake. I’ll take care of the five hundred eighty-nine, you take care of the senator. Of course, anything we can do to help, we’ll do, you poor fuckers.”

Back in the car, heading toward the helicopter, Jake said to Novatny, “About that tip, the guy with the guns.”

“Schmidt,” Novatny said. “I’ve been thinking about that, but I didn’t want to mention it around the cops. What’d you find?”

“I went by the house, nobody home. I looked in the windows. There are four gun safes in one of the bedrooms, their doors are open, they all look empty. Doesn’t look like there’s been anybody home for a while. There’s a note on the door from the Watchmen, asking him to check in. He apparently hasn’t.”

“All right.” Novatny nodded. “You didn’t go inside?”

“Of course not. But I was thinking, you might want to have some of your people take a look at it.”

“I’ll do that,” Novatny said.

“I mean right now. Because I’m gonna call the governor and tell him about the body. He’s gonna find out pretty quick anyway, and I want to be on his good side. Just in case that might be useful. If we have to approach the Watchmen . . . Anyway, you might want to have a couple of your guys on the scene before the Watchmen have a chance to go over the place.”

Novatny nodded again. “We’ve got two Richmond guys at a Holiday Inn in Charlottesville, they’ve been working the case from there,” he said, as they pulled up to the chopper. “Give me Schmidt’s address and a ten-minute head start.”