Eyes of the Predator (16 page)

 Climbing into the truck, he
cranked it up to drive the two miles to the Holsen’s chicken barns for a day of
cleaning up dead chickens and shoveling chicken shit. Most people complained of
the chicken shit in their lives. For him, chicken shit was his life. It was a
recurring joke and one he didn’t mind. He liked his life. He and Margaret had
simple needs and enjoyed the quiet of life in the Georgia backcountry.

The bare siding planks of their
wood frame house were gray and weathered in the morning sun, not as pretty as
in the glow of the sunrise. He didn’t mind though. The bareness now made him
appreciate the sunrise even more. It was all part of the cycle of things, the
rosy, early morning glow, a shadowless noon sun, and the fiery orange glow over
the pines when the sunset came. It was all just fine with him.

Giving a last glance at the old
house in the rear view mirror, he pulled from the yard onto the dirt road.
Margaret walked out onto the porch as he left in a small cloud of dust and gave
him a wave. He raised his hand in the mirror and headed down the road. He did
not go far.

 Tom Ridley drove slowly.
The engine sounds and spinning tires earlier in the predawn dark came to mind,
and he thought he might see something to identify who had been on his road in
the night. He did see something.

 A couple of hundred feet
down the road, there were tire tracks that showed where the dirt had been dug
up by a turning front tire as the driver had turned and backed and turned again
in the soft dirt on the shoulder trying to reverse direction on the narrow
road.

Glancing off to his left, he saw
something that pissed him off. Dammit. It hadn’t been George Mackey after all.
Trash dumping along the dirt road had become a problem, and someone had done it
again while he stood peeing in his yard that morning.

There was a pile of something in
the brush about ten feet off the road. “Sonsabitches,” he muttered. Dumping
their garbage right here on his road. Ridley stopped his truck and walked into
ankle high grass on the side of the road to retrieve the trash and toss it into
the truck.

“Sonsabitches”, he said again,
for emphasis.

 He could see that the grass
was still bent down where someone had walked carrying their damned garbage into
the weeds. When he got to it, he saw that it was a blanket. Some kind of beige
looking bed cover, like the one he and his wife had on their bed. He was going
to pick it up and throw it in the back of the truck, but thought better. No
telling what they dumped, and there could be a snake hiding under there. Good
place for a snake. Snakes were overly common around here, and no one liked
them. Tom was no exception. He lifted the edge of the blanket with the toe of
his boot then quickly pulled his foot away.

“Son of a bitch,” he said,
kneeling down, letting the words come singly and distinctly this time.

Gently, he lifted the blanket
again. It was loosely wrapped around the bundle, but he had seen…something.
Suspecting what it was, Tom, squatting beside the bundle, couldn’t help falling
back into the weeds and grass as he reflexively backed away.

Recovering himself, he lifted the
bed covering slowly once more. A ghostly, pale foot with red painted toenails
was visible. Beyond the foot could be seen the rest of a girl’s body. She was
nude with bruises around her head and neck. The ones around her neck were deep
purple with darker pinprick spots in them. Tom Ridley was no sheriff’s deputy,
but he knew enough to know that the girl had been strangled. He was not a timid
man and life on a farm had accustomed him to  blood and dead things. Death
was part of life…but this. This was different.

Damn! Moving quickly, he let the
blanket fall and ran to the truck. Backing at full speed, kicking up dirt and
rocks, he made the couple of hundred feet back to his house in a few seconds.
When he got there, his wife was on the porch, she’d heard the truck racing down
the road.

“Tom, what is it?” she said as he
rushed into the house. “Tom!”

He ran to the old red dial phone
hanging on the wall and grabbed the receiver off the hook.

“Son of a bitch,” was all he
could say. “Son of a bitch and Goddammit.”

“So what the hell’s going on in
my county?” Sheriff Richard Klineman looked around the small circular table in
his office at the two men and lone woman seated with him.

“We were hoping you might shed
some light on that for us Sheriff.” Bob Shaklee was calm. The GBI frequently
dealt with local law enforcement officials, each with their own issues.
Sheriffs were particularly noted for their agendas, and with all of them, the
number one agenda item was reelection.

Shaklee’s partner, Sharon Price,
amplified Shaklee’s curt response to the sheriff’s bluster. “This is pretty
unusual for Pickham County Sheriff. A murder like this might have local
implications, you might say. It’s possible that you and your people might have
better insight into that than we would.”

“What do you mean? Local
implications? What are you saying…the Klan? Is that what you think?” The
sheriff’s face was red. “The Klan in Pickham County? Ridiculous, at least
nowadays.”

“We don’t think anything. We’re
just asking, for the record. Black man brutally murdered outside a black A.M.E.
Church. The question has to be asked.”

Klineman turned his head
incredulously towards the fourth person at the table, Chief Deputy Ronnie
Kupman. He knew that Kupman was not necessarily his ally in any confrontation.
In fact, he was only appointed the Chief Deputy in order to avoid a mutiny from
the rest of the department. They revered him for his courage and forthrightness
during a career spanning over thirty years. But ally or not, the sheriff knew
that Kupman was an honest man and would respond truthfully to such a ridiculous
question. Kupman returned the Sheriff’s gaze knowing that the Sheriff was
waiting for him to speak to the situation. He sat quietly for a moment,
appearing to be considering the possibility of Klan involvement, which made
Klineman even more agitated. Finally he spoke.

“I would say,” he began
deliberately, “that Klan involvement is very unlikely. That’s not to say that
there might not be a few old throwbacks still living in the last century. But
we would know about their activities. Pickham has a pretty small population and
something like that would be hard to keep quiet.”

Klineman turned back towards the
two GBI investigators with a look of vindication on his face. The GBI knew, of
course, that Klan involvement was a very remote possibility. They, along with
the FBI and a number of other agencies from other states worked very hard to
track the activities of all terrorist organizations, and the Ku Klux Klan was
still ranked near the top of the list of organizations under scrutiny, even in
the age of Homeland Security, and the threat of terrorism from offshore.

It would have been difficult
indeed for a cell to be operating in Pickham County without their knowledge. As
Price had pointed out, the question had to be asked because of the
circumstances. Judging by his red-faced indignation, the only one at the table
who wasn’t really sure of the answer was the sheriff.

“Okay,” Shaklee continued quietly.
“Klan involvement is unlikely.”

“Nonexistent,” Klineman
interrupted abruptly.

“We’ll go with extremely
unlikely,” Shaklee said and continued before the sheriff could interrupt again.
“So here in Pickham County, we have a real whodunit murder. I assume you want
us to handle the lead in the investigation Sheriff?”

“Of course. Not that our boys
can’t do it…”

“No need to explain. We don’t
claim turf Sheriff. Your deputies are well trained and professional; we know
that. The GBI has access to resources that many local jurisdictions lack, along
with a certain expertise in these matters. Happy to support your department
with the additional resources available to us.” He paused to allow the sheriff
an opportunity to comment on the expertise of his deputies. Klineman merely
shifted uncomfortably in his seat staring at his hands clasped together on the
table surface. Shaklee continued, “Happy to do it, and of course, your
department can take as much of the credit as you like. Let’s just solve the
murder.”

“That’s what I need…we need. The
citizens of Pickham County should know that we are diligently pursuing the
investigation in this tragic murder of an innocent black man. I want all of the
additional resources you can gather set loose on this case. And I would appreciate
no further mention of the Klan.”

Klineman made no mention that the
citizens needed to know about their diligent investigation because next year
was an election year. He didn’t have to.

Shaklee couldn’t help the small
smile that flitted across his face. It always came down to that. Like many
Georgia counties, Pickham had a significant black voting population. It was bad
enough for the Sheriff that an elderly black man had been murdered, but if it
was discovered that there had been Klan involvement or even rumored, Richard
Klineman would be a one term sheriff.

Seeing the smile, Klineman turned
to his Chief Deputy for support. “Right, Chief Deputy?”

Kupman took his time responding
as usual to the sheriff’s question and did so with his usual neutral,
objectivity, merely stating the facts. “We must solve this murder, right.”

Klineman stared at him as if he
were from Mars. The two GBI agents were barely able to contain their laughter.

A beeping tone sounded on the
desk phone. The Sheriff reached for it and a moment later, his face blanched.
“What? Repeat that.” Turning the phone to the side, he motioned at Kupman.
“Turn your radio on.”

Seeing the look on the sheriff’s
face, Kupman was already moving his hand to the radio on his belt. They heard
the call being repeated to county and state trooper units in the area.

“…body of a white female on
Ridley Road, half a mile off of Mason Road. Units responding advise.”

The two day shift sheriff’s units
working immediately cleared on the call followed by a bevy of troopers from
fifty miles around.

Chief Deputy Kupman was out the
door running through the building to the lot where his county unit was parked.
The two GBI agents were right behind.

Sheriff Klineman grabbed his
sport jacket off the hook on the back of his office door and stumbled hurriedly
through the outer office, checking his belt to make sure he was wearing a
sidearm and shouting apoplectically, at no one in particular. “Do we have a
fucking crime wave going on in this county? Someone tell me what the fuck is
going on!”

The office staff clerks,
secretaries, and jailers, mostly born-again Baptists, Methodists, and
Pentecostals, outwardly professed shock at the sheriff’s sudden and
uncharacteristic blasphemy. Inwardly, they were laughing their asses off.

The insect buzz-humming
in his ear was incessant and maddening. It seemed to fill his head from the
inside out. He ignored it for a while, or tried to, but the insect was
persistent, fading away in the distance for a moment and then swooping close
around his head. The swooping hum grew louder and more annoying until it pried
him from the beer-induced sleep he had sunk into after leaving the house porch.

 He forced his eyes
open, or at least one squinting eye. Even in the dim, heavily draped room, the
morning light was too strong. Brow furrowed, he squinted harder and tried
opening the other eye. It seemed that he could feel the iris cranking slowly
shut around the pupil to keep the painful light out. Shit.

Lying on his back, slowly gaining
consciousness, George stared through slitted lids at the spotted ceiling. He
put his arm over his face and waited for the pain to subside. The insect
suddenly shouted at him. He reached over and swatted the cell phone vibrating
loudly on the nightstand.

Below his apartment window a
crazed maniac shouted, "Get the hell outta the way. I'll run your scrawny
ass over!"

Felton Tobin accelerated the
riding mower, bellowing at one of the scrawny, feral cats that hung around his
yard. Old Fel hated the cats, but tolerated their existence, as they were adept
at hunting the field mice and other varmints that found their way into his yard
from the surrounding fields and woods. It was a great satisfaction for him to
see one of the cats stalking some unseen prey in the mixture of grass and weeds
that made up his yard. Even better, if there was some struggling little
creature hanging from the feline's mouth as it trotted across the yard, he'd
give a whoop.

“Got the little fucker!" he
would shout triumphantly.

If he was sitting in one of the
old kitchen chairs on the bare wood porch, he'd raise his beer can in salute to
the cat. George knew this because he had sat there many an evening with his own
beer raised in salute to one of the felines.

The insect buzzed at him again.
This time he reached from the bed to the floor and retrieved it. Squinting at
the number, he recognized Ronnie Kupman’s personal cell phone.

“Hello.”

 “George? That you?”

“What’s up, Ronnie?” George
yawned loudly. Dragging himself from the bed, he walked into the front room of
the apartment and stepped out onto the small second story porch in his
underwear. The sun was high, but Fel was still mowing so it couldn’t be too
late. “What time is it, Ronnie?”

“Not quite ten, George.”

“Ronnie, I’ve only been asleep a
couple hours. Can’t this wait?”

“You gotta come in, George.”

“No way, Ronnie, I’ve been up all
night,” he said. “Who called in sick?” He yawned again.

George walked back inside
squinting and scratching. The Sam Brown belt was draped over a kitchen chair.
Dusty boots tumbled on their sides beside the chair, grayish white socks thrown
over them.