Hunting Season (4 page)

"Maybe the..." Shelly looked over her shoulder at the bed with its unsavory burden as if concerned its occupant would overhear them gossiping. "... The deceased," she continued self-consciously, "circled it himself. Like a suicide note."

"Nothing's impossible. Whoever did it had to have left a track in the dust. I missed it. Now it's been obliterated." Both women were standing on the bare wood.

"Oh, gosh, I know," Shelly said excitedly. "Baptists."

"Baptists?" Anna echoed stupidly.

"Yeah. It was done by Baptists. They're real serious about sins of the flesh. Not like Catholics or anything."

"They are?"

"Boy. You're sure not from around here. When you profile the killer are you going to make him Baptist?" Shelly asked hopefully.

"If I'm not mistaken, sixty percent of the state of Mississippi is Baptist," Anna said. She didn't want to go into the fact that garden-variety, one-corpse killers weren't profiled. "The sheriff should be getting here soon. Why don't you go down to the VC and wait for him."

Perhaps feeling contrite about stepping off the rug, or having just had her fill of the vicarious thrill of unnatural death, Shelly Rabine handed Anna the rucksack she'd been holding and left without argument.

Anna took two close-ups of the picture of Christ and its accompanying verse.

"Damn," she whispered. Christians made her nervous, and here she had a corpse that appeared to have been bound and bruised by the Bible belt.

2

 Taking camera and tape recorder with her, Anna walked around the stand to the back. An old grape arbor, leaves brown with the season, stood to one side. Behind the house remnants of a well—a circle of brick—were all that remained. Eric Chamberlain's kitchen garden had been put to bed for the winter. Beyond it lay a field, then the woods. Poison ivy stitched the tree line in scarlet. Beneath the pine and oak, grown through with roots, lay the bodies of slaves. Autumn had taken its toll on the leaves and the sign the NPS had erected showed through the branches. On it were the names of the dead identified so far. Two were familiar: Dinkins and Restin. Whether they were related to Anna's field ranger Barth Dinkins or Paul's deputy Lonnie Restin remained to be seen; the surnames were not uncommon in the local black community. Because of the habit of slaves taking—or being saddled with—the last name of their owners, tracing family history was difficult.

Barth was a curator by training and a historian by nature. Sleuthing out the origins and descendants of the Dinkins buried in the scrub was his pet project.

Anna pulled her attention from yesterday's dead to today's. Turning, she studied the back of the inn. Here, too, was a covered porch, once used as an open-air bunkhouse for travelers. To the left a small bedroom had housed generations of children. To the right was the storeroom that opened both onto the porch and into Grandma Polly's room. The storeroom door was open, the wood in the frame splintered where it had been kicked in, modern lock holding, ancient timbers shattering around it.

Anna took a couple photographs, bracketing for light. The planks of the porch, shuffled over daily by tourists, had collected enough in the way of dust to show obvious tracks. A wide, clean line snaked from the top of the steps in through the storeroom. Shelly's beached walrus had been dragged in the back way. Dragged in dressed; Anna'd noted no dust or splinters embedded in the corpse's ample acreage of epidermis. She turned back to the porch rail and studied the grass, the gravel path. No drag marks. Possibly some on the steps but it was hard to tell. The walrus had been killed or rendered unconscious, carried to the porch then dumped, dragged to the bedroom and stripped down to his undies.

The less-than-appetizing picture forming in Anna's mind was blessedly fragmented by the sound of voices moving up the gentle hill from the visitors center. Not wanting to walk mindlessly over ground she hadn't checked, she retraced her steps around Mt. Locust's south side.

Led by the petite Shelly Rabine, three men crunched up the gravel path beneath the live oaks. The sheriff, resplendent in a uniform that looked as if it had been ironed by a West Point cadet, walked beside the park aide. From the old sweat stains on the man's hat and the scuffed boots a heavy load of polish had failed to make shine, Anna guessed the sheriff of Adams County wasn't usually so formally turned out. Elections were coming. Lawmen all over Mississippi would be sprucing up.

Staying in the shadows a moment, she watched. The sheriff's name was Clintus Jones. Dispatch had given her that. Age was hard to tell. He was a black man with very black close-cropped hair, thin arched brows over wide-set dark eyes. His lips were full and precision cut. A mustache and goatee of incongruous white framed them. Jones wasn't tall, maybe a handspan over Rabine, but his bones were made for a big man: wide flat cheeks, broad shoulders and hips rounded into a barrel shape. "Under the spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stands. The smith, a mighty man is he with large and sinewy hands." Anna whispered a line from a poem she'd presented to Mrs. White's third-grade class at Johnstonville Elementary School, and marveled that the words were still housed in her brain.

"Hey, Anna. The sheriff's got here," Shelly called.

Anna was annoyed, then impressed. Customarily, if she stood still in the shadows out of the natural line of sight she was invisible. She was mentally complimenting the young park aide on her sharp eyes when she remembered she was no longer in green and gray. Wearing a fire-engine red calf-length dress and high-heeled, red patent-leather pumps, she was as obvious as a cardinal in the winter woods.

"Hey," Anna replied, stepping into the clear and perfect sunshine. "Anna Pigeon, District Ranger." She stuck out her hand, and the sheriff took it carefully. Not the fishtail droop of a weak or reticent handshake, more the controlled delicacy of a bird dog trained to retrieve game without crushing it.

"Jones," the sheriff said and opened his fist to let her hand take flight. "This is my under-sheriff, Andre Gates." Gates was only African-American by the dictates of a culture that had once been proud of the premise that one teaspoon of black blood made a person black—and this was a bad thing—a form of insanity groups of northern white supremists were trying to keep alive. Gates was a product of what Anna hoped was intermarriage but was probably generations of rape. Regardless of how the man's gene pool had been filled, he'd turned out very pretty. Not as pretty as Harry Belafonte, but close. By the back tilt of his head and the set of his shoulders, she guessed he was also proud unto arrogance.

"Andre," Anna nodded politely.

The sheriff introduced the third man. "Gil Franklin."

White, portly and sweating through an expensive suit designed for harsher Novembers, the coroner cut Sheriff Jones off.

"Let's get on with it," Franklin said.

Anna half expected him to add the implied, "I haven't got all day," but he restrained himself. "This way, gentlemen," she said and took them up the porch steps to Grandma Polly's room.

Gil Franklin chuffed up the stairs with surprising speed. Either he had somewhere else to be or the thought of a dead body was a treat of the highest order. His leather-soled loafers clattered across the wood, drowning out the embarrassing click of Anna's heels.

"Gil, hold up a minute," Sheriff Jones hollered as the coroner steamed through the door, thrusting his considerable self into the small crime scene. Gil Franklin didn't hear or chose to ignore the request. Anna suspected the latter.

"Jesus, Mary 'n' Joseph," the sheriff muttered.

"I've photographed pretty much everything," Anna said.

"Glad somebody knows what they're doing." Jones's voice was mild but his black irises, set in slightly yellowed eyes, had gotten shiny, as if they'd grown hot enough to spark. Jones carried a lot of anger. That he had it under control only made it the more formidable.

"I'll check around back," Andre said. His smooth face showed nothing. Perhaps there was a hint of disdain in the flare of the nostril or in the curve of the lip. Perhaps Anna only imagined it because he looked too fine for everyday use.

"Gloves," the sheriff reminded him.

Gates nodded, a small tight movement that could be seen as either respect or insubordination, depending on what side of the bed one had gotten out of that morning.

"I'll be jiggered!" The words erupted from the direction the coroner had taken. Anna went to Polly's room, the sheriff at her shoulder.

The coroner had pulled on latex gloves but hadn't taken responsibility for his other extremities. His tasseled shoes were executing an odd little two-step in the tracks in the dust on the floor.

"What you got, Gil?" Jones asked.

"It's Doyce Barnette, Raymond's brother. I figured he'd get himself killed one day. Doyce never could tell 'come here' from 'sic 'em.' I figured he'd run his truck into a bridge abutment or fall off a roof. Now who'd bother to go and kill poor ol' Doyce?"

Despite the less-than-flattering eulogy, the coroner seemed genuinely upset. Anna liked him a shade better than she had.

Jones didn't say anything, but he pulled off his hat. Stepping neatly onto the rug, cognizant of the crime scene, he looked at the body. "Doyce all right. I better go on over after and break it to Raymond. A shame. There was never any harm in Doyce."

"That's a fact," the coroner said. "Rest of the family's mean as a whole nest of snakes, but I never heard anything but stupid against Doyce. I'm pronouncing him dead. I got to get out of here. I'm showing a house at ten-thirty." The moment of sentiment was over.

"What do you figure killed him?" the sheriff asked.

"I'm not saying, but you gotta figure he didn't come in here in his underdrawers and choke to death on a piece of venison. Homicide. Can't tell how long he's been dead. Less than twelve hours at a guesstimate." He prodded the dead man's jaw with a forefinger. "Hard as a
rock. Full rigor. Closer than that I'm not going. The doctors with their doodads'll have to work it out. Let me know how the autopsy comes out." He left at a trot, the pitter-patter of his little feet retreating down the steps.

"Gil's a good enough coroner," Sheriff Jones said evenly. "He's just not big on the amenities." He took a pair of latex gloves from a leather snap pocket on his gun belt and pulled them on, careful to keep their powdery insides away from his spotless uniform. "You've got photos of the body, I take it?"

Anna said she did and Jones stepped carefully into the stir of dust Gil Franklin had left in the tracks on the planks by the bed and bent over the corpse. "Poor old Doyce. Let's see if you can tell us anything."

With delicacy and an innate respect, he began examining the body. Anna hovered nearby, feeling, in red frock and lipstick, like a ghoulish matron.

The marvels of modern science had made in-depth studies of the body on site passé. Too much fiddling by officers on scene was more likely to contaminate trace evidence than uncover a truth. The sheriff was looking for situational evidence, proof of cause and effect that would be lost when the body was moved from where it had been found.

"Quilt's rucked up," he said, pointing to the coverlet bunched under the locked and rigid knees.

"Dragged," Anna said and told him of the track on the back porch. "But not all the way. Carried to the inn, then dragged through it."

"Doyce wasn't just fluffy, he was fat. Well over two hundred pounds. Dead weight, what do you figure? Two, three strong men to carry him? Did you check for tire tracks? Maybe he got drove up out back."

"We'll look," Anna said.

John Brown Brown was coming down from headquarters in Tupelo, a three-hour drive if one broke the speed limit the whole way and didn't run into traffic in Jackson. The section of the Trace that would eventually link Anna's district on the southern end with the rest of the park-way was yet to be finished. At Clinton those northbound had to leave the false wilderness of the wooded two-lane road for the high-speed, commerce-choked freeways through Mississippi's capital city.

Chief Ranger Brown wanted to see the body in situ, but the day was warm and getting warmer. "Poor ol' Doyce," as Anna was coming to think of him, a title at least a hair more respectable than "the walrus," would be getting ripe fast.

"We use Stephen Hayne at the Mississippi Mortuary in Rankin County for autopsies," Anna said. "If that works for you, I'll get an ambulance sent down for poor—for Mr. Barnette."

The sheriff shot her a hard look, seeing if she mocked the dead. Evidently she appeared innocent of that trespass, and he softened. "Hayne is good." He stepped back from the bed and said, "Doggone it, this is looking ugly." His gaze wandered around the small Spartan room as if he hoped he'd find something to ameliorate the darkness of his thoughts. Nothing presented itself. "What do you make of the bruises, the chafing in the groin area, the state of semi-nudity?"

The sheriff was embarrassed. A possible sex crime, particularly one involving the male of the species, had caused his comfort level to collapse. Had he been ten years old, Anna suspected he'd have resorted to crude remarks and inane giggles to distance himself. A careful man, cloaked in the dignity of office, he'd opted instead for stilted formality and averted eyes.

Anna had a wicked desire to shock him just because she could. She contained her sophomoric urges. "The guy's obviously been restrained: straps, belts, ropes, whatever. My guess is straps. The bruise marks are wide and, but for the inner thighs, the skin's not broken. From the color of the bruising I'd guess the restraints were tight, brutally tight. No defensive marks or wounds. He must have agreed to the bondage. At least at first."