Still Life With Crows (2 page)

Hazen stared at the victim, sickness rising in his gut. This was the first homicide in Medicine Creek in his lifetime. The last killing had been during Prohibition, when Rocker Manning had been shot at by the creek while buying a load of moonshine . . . that was back in, when, ’31? His granddaddy had handled the case, made the arrest. But that was nothing like this. This was something else entirely. This was fucking madness.

Hazen turned from the corpse and stared at the makeshift road through the corn, cut to save the troopers a quarter-mile hike. There was a good possibility the road had destroyed evidence. He wondered if it was standard Statie procedure, or if they even had a procedure for this kind of situation. All the activity had an ad hoc air about it, as if the troopers were so shocked by the crime that they were just making it up as they went along.

Sheriff Hazen didn’t hold Staties in particularly high regard. When you got down to it they were basically a bunch of tight-jawed assholes in shiny boots. But he could sympathize. This was something beyond anyone’s experience. He lit a fresh Camel off the stub of his last one and reminded himself that it wasn’t really his first homicide. It wasn’t his case at all. He may have found the body, but it was outside the township and therefore outside his jurisdiction. This was a Statie job, and thank the risen Lord for that.

“Sheriff Hazen?” The towering Kansas state trooper captain came crunching over the corn stubble, his black boots shining, his hand outstretched, mouth tensed in what was supposed to pass for a smile. Hazen took the hand and shook it, annoyed by the man’s height. It was the third time the captain had offered him his hand. Hazen wondered if the man had a bad memory or if he was just so agitated that the handshaking was a nervous reaction. Probably the latter.

“The M.E.’s coming down from Garden City,” the captain said. “Should be here in ten minutes.”

Sheriff Hazen wished to hell he’d sent Tad out on this one. He would’ve gladly given up his weekend fishing—Christ, he would’ve even stayed sober—to miss this. On the other hand, he thought, perhaps this would have been too much for Tad. In so many ways he was still only a kid.

“We’ve got ourselves an artist here,” said the trooper, shaking his head. “A real artist. You think this’ll make the
Kansas City Star
?”

Hazen didn’t reply. This was a new thought to him. He thought of his picture in the paper and found the idea displeasing. Someone walking past with a fluoroscope bumped into him. Christ, the crime scene was getting to be more crowded than a Baptist wedding.

He filled his lungs with tobacco, then forced himself to look out over the scene yet again. It seemed important that he should see it one more time, before it was all disassembled and put into bags and taken away. His eyes played over it, automatically committing every hideous little detail to memory.

It had been set up almost like a scene in a play. A circular clearing had been made in the heart of the cornfield, the broken stalks carefully stacked to one side, leaving an area of dirt clods and stubble perhaps forty feet in diameter. Even in the terrible unreality of the moment, Hazen found himself marveling at the geometrical precision with which the circle had been formed. At one end of the clearing stood a miniature forest of sharpened sticks, two to three feet high, pushed into the earth, their cruel-looking ends pointing upward. At the precise middle of the clearing stood a circle of dead crows spitted on stakes. Only they weren’t stakes but Indian arrows, each topped by a flaked point. There were at least a couple dozen of the birds, maybe more, their vacant eyes staring, yellow beaks pointing inward.

And in the center of this circle of crows lay the corpse of a woman.

At least Sheriff Hazen thought it was a woman: her lips, nose, and ears were missing.

The corpse lay on its back, its mouth wide open, looking like the entrance to a pink cave. It had bleached-blonde hair, a clump of it ripped away and missing; the clothes had been shredded in countless small, neat, parallel lines. There was no sense of disorder. The relationship between the head and the shoulders looked wrong: Hazen thought her neck was probably broken. But there was no bruising on the neck indicating strangulation. If it had been broken, the act had been done by a single hard twist.

The killing, Hazen concluded, had taken place elsewhere. He could see marks in the earth going back not quite to the edge of the clearing, indicating the body had been dragged; extrapolating the line, he saw a gap in the corn rows where a stalk had been broken off. The troopers hadn’t seen it. In fact, some of the marks were being obscured by the comings and goings of the Staties themselves. He turned toward the captain to point this out. Then he stopped himself. What was wrong with him? This was not his case. Not his responsibility. When the shit hit, the fan would be blowing in someone else’s direction. The minute he opened his mouth the wind would shift his way. If he said, “Captain, you’ve destroyed evidence,” on the witness stand two months from now he’d be forced to repeat it to some asshole of a defense lawyer. Because whatever he said now would come up at the trial of the maniac who did this. And there would be a trial. A guy this crazy couldn’t get away with it for long.

He inhaled a lungful of acrid smoke.
Keep it zipped. Let them make the mistakes. It’s not your case.

He dropped the butt, ground it beneath one foot. Yet another car was now bumping carefully along the access road, its headlights stabbing up and down through the corn. It came to a stop in the makeshift lot and a man in white got out, carrying a black bag. McHyde, the M.E.

Sheriff Hazen watched as the man gingerly picked his way among the dry clods, not wanting to soil his wingtips. He spoke to the captain and then went over to the body. He stared at it for a moment from this angle and that, then knelt and carefully tied plastic bags around the hands and feet of the victim. Then he drew some kind of device out of his black bag—it was called an anal probe, Sheriff Hazen remembered abruptly. And now the M.E. was doing something intimate to the corpse. Measuring its temperature. Jesus. Now there was a job for you.

Sheriff Hazen glanced up into the dark sky, but the turkey vultures were long gone. They, at least, knew when to leave well enough alone.

The M.E. and the paramedics now began packing up the corpse for removal. A Statie was pulling up the arrows with the crows, labeling them, and packing them into refrigerated evidence lockers. And Sheriff Hazen realized he had to take a leak. All that damn coffee. But it wasn’t just that; acid was starting to boil up from his stomach. He hoped to hell his ulcer wasn’t coming back. He sure didn’t want to toss his cookies in front of these characters.

He glanced around, made sure he was not being noticed, and slipped into the dark corn. He walked down a row, inhaling deeply, trying to get far enough away that his own piss wouldn’t be found and marked as evidence. He wouldn’t have to go far; these Staties were not showing much curiosity about anything beyond the immediate crime scene.

He stopped just outside the circle of lights. Here, buried in the sea of corn, the murmur of the voices, the faint hum of the generator, and the bizarre violence of the crime scene seemed far away. A breeze came drifting past, only a slight movement of the muggy air, but it set the corn around him swaying and rustling. Hazen paused a minute, filling his nostrils. Then he unzipped, grunted, and urinated loudly on the dry ground. Finally, with a big noisy shake that set his gun, cuffs, club, and keys rattling, he put everything back in and patted it into place.

As he turned, he saw something in the reflected glow of the lights. He stopped, shining his flashlight across the corn rows. There it was, in the next row over. He looked more closely. A piece of cloth, caught high up on one of the dry husks. It appeared to be the same as the material the victim was wearing. He shone his light up and down the row, but he saw nothing else.

He straightened up. He was doing it again. This wasn’t his case. Maybe he’d mention it; maybe he’d let the Staties find it on their own. If it really meant anything, anyway.

When he pushed his way back into the clearing, the trooper captain came forward at once. “Sheriff Hazen, I was just looking for you,” he said. He was carrying a handheld GPS unit in one hand and a USGS topographical map in the other, and his face was wearing a very different expression than it had just moments before. “Congratulations.”

“What’s that?” asked Hazen.

The captain pointed to the GPS device. “According to this reading, we’re inside the boundary of the township of Medicine Creek. Twelve feet inside the boundary, to be exact. Which means it’s your case, Sheriff. We’re here to help, of course, but it’s your case. So let me be the first to offer my congratulations.”

He beamed and held out his hand.

Sheriff Dent Hazen ignored the hand. Instead he plucked the pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket, shook one out, pushed it between his lips, and lit it. He inhaled and then spoke, the smoke puffing out with his words. “Twelve feet?” he repeated. “Jesus Christ.”

The captain let his hand fall to his side.

Hazen began to talk. “The victim was murdered somewhere else and carried here. The murderer came through the corn over there, dragged her the last twenty feet or so. If you follow the row backwards from that broken stalk, you’ll come to a piece of caught fabric. The fabric matches that of the victim, but it’s caught too high on the stalk for her to have been walking, so he must’ve been lugging her on his back. You may see my footprints and the place where I took a piss in the adjoining row; don’t bother with that. And for God’s sake, Captain, do we really need all these people? This is a crime scene, not a Wal-Mart parking lot. I want only the M.E., the photographer, and the evidence gatherer on site. Tell the rest to back off.”

“Sheriff, we do have our procedures to follow—”

“My procedures are now your procedures.”

The captain swallowed.

“I want a pair of certified, trained AKC police bloodhounds here ASAP to get on the trail. And I want you to get the forensic evidence team down from Dodge.”

“Right.”

“And one other thing.”

“What’s that?”

“I want your boys to pull over any arriving press. Especially television trucks. Tie them up while we complete work here.”

“Pull them over for what?”

“Give ’em all speeding tickets. That’s what you boys are good at, right?”

The captain’s tight jaw grew even tighter. “And if they’re not speeding?”

Sheriff Hazen grinned. “Oh, they’ll be speeding, all right. You can bet your ass on it.”

Three

D
eputy Sheriff Tad Franklin sat hunched over his desk, filling out reams of unfamiliar paperwork and trying to pretend that the unruly knot of television and newspaper reporters just outside the plate glass window of the Medicine Creek Sheriff’s Department didn’t exist. Tad had always liked the fact that the sheriff’s HQ was located in a former five-and-ten-cent storefront, where he could wave to passersby, chat with friends, keep tabs on who was coming or going. But now the disadvantages of the office had suddenly become obvious.

The fiery light of yet another hot August sunrise had begun spilling down the street, stretching long shadows from the news trucks and gilding the unhappy faces of the reporters. They had been up all night and things were beginning to look ugly. A steady stream came and went from Maisie’s Diner across the street, but the plain food only seemed to make them grumpier.

Tad Franklin tried to concentrate on the paperwork, but he found himself unable to ignore the tapping on the window, the questions, the occasional shouted vulgarity. This was getting intolerable. If they woke Sheriff Hazen, who was grabbing a few winks in the back cell, things might get even uglier. Tad rose, tried to put on as stern a look as possible, and cracked open a window.

“I’ll ask you once again to step back from the glass,” he said.

This was greeted with a muffled chorus of disrespectful comments, shouted questions, a general undercurrent of irritation. Tad knew from the call letters on the vans that the reporters weren’t local; they were from Topeka, Kansas City, Tulsa, Amarillo, and Denver. Well, they could just ride on back home and—

Behind him, Tad heard a door thump, a cough. He turned to see Sheriff Hazen, yawning and rubbing his stubbly chin, the hair on one side of his head sticking out horizontally. The sheriff smoothed it down, then fitted on his hat with both hands.

Tad closed the window. “Sorry, Sheriff, but these people just won’t go away—”

The sheriff yawned, waved his hand casually, turned his back on the crowd. A particularly angry reporter in the rear of the crowd shouted out a stream of invective, in which the words “redneck in miniature” could be heard. Hazen went to the coffee pot, poured a cup. He sipped it, made a face, spat the coffee back into the cup, hawked up a loogie, deposited it in the cup as well, and then poured everything back into the pot.

“Want me to get a fresh pot?” asked Tad.

“No thanks, Tad,” the sheriff replied, giving his deputy’s shoulder a gruff pat. Then he turned back to face the group through the glass once more. “These folks need something for the six o’clock news, don’t you think?” he said. “Time for a press conference.”

“A press conference?” Tad had never attended a press conference in his life, let alone been part of one. “How do you do that?”

Sheriff Hazen barked a laugh, briefly displaying a rack of yellow teeth. “We go outside and answer questions.” He went to the old glass door, unlocked it, and stuck his head out.

“How you folks all doing?”

This was greeted by a surge and an incomprehensible welter of shouted questions.

Sheriff Hazen held up an arm, palm toward the crowd. He was still wearing his short-sleeved uniform from the night before, and the gesture exposed a half-moon of sweat that reached halfway to his waist. He was short, but short like a bulldog, and there was something about him that commanded respect. Tad had seen the sheriff loosen the teeth of a suspect almost twice his size.
Never get in a fight with anyone under five foot six,
he told himself. The crowd fell silent.