Devil Dead (39 page)

When they finally slugged a path through the trees and to the cliff extending just past the Castle ruins, a brisk, bitterly cold wind stung them square in their already wind-burned faces, but they continued to make their way along the high precipice, but not too close, uh-uh and no way, until they could see the lights down below where three police boats had gathered in the water below them. Buckeye Boyd, Canton County's trusted medical examiner, was already on the scene. They could see him standing out on the prow of one of the boats, bundled up to his ears and directing his top-notch technicians around the crime scene. The other boats had portable floodlights focused on the victim in the falling winter gloom, and she craned over as far as she safely could and tried to locate the body. As far as she could tell from so high above them, the victim had probably tumbled down the open area under the boardwalk and then slid right over the cliff drop and landed far below. She couldn't really make out anything yet, but it was a pretty good guess that the body had to be frozen stiff. Everything else in the park was, including Bud and her.

“Looks to me like he went off somewhere around here, all right,” Bud called out to her over the whirling wind, clapping his gloved hands together for warmth. “Probably bounced around some on the rocks and scrub trees before he tumbled to a stop down there somewhere.”

“Yeah. Our problem is how we're gonna get down there without killing ourselves. Any bright ideas?”

Bud stamped his feet and clapped his gloved hands together some more and pulled the drawstring on his brown fur-lined hood tighter around his face. “Man, what a god-awful way to die, especially if the fall didn't kill him. Just to lie down there alone in the dark, all broken up and slowly freeze to death.”

“If it makes you feel better, they say that when you freeze to death, it gets to the point where it's sorta like just drifting off to sleep.” Claire took out her camera and started clicking photos of the outlook platform on which they stood. It didn't have any disturbed snow or signs of footprints leading to or from it, except for the ones they had made in their approach. Several feet of snow had completely covered one side, sloping all the way up to the top of the handrail. “Maybe he didn't go off from up here, Bud. Maybe a killer dumped him down there and wanted it to look like he fell.”

Bud blew into his gloved palms. Stomped some more. He hailed from Georgia, poor guy. Snow was an anathema to him, certainly not his favorite thing. Winter, either. Or hypothermia. Or thermal underwear. Or electric socks. “Or he might've just jumped and ended it all. Got all despondent for some reason and decided to make the hurting stop. Could've been because of this stupid frigid weather. I think I want to end it all, too, now that we've got to stand out here all night.”

“I feel your pain, Bud.”

“Maybe he bought it even before the storm hit. The ranger probably wouldn't've seen him down there right off the bat. He might've been down there for days. All winter maybe.”

“Well, there've been suicides out here. He wouldn't be the first.”

“Makes sense to me. Still, he chose a hard way to go. Most guys just blow their brains out when they want to end it all. Faster, easier, manlier. Takes guts to put a gun in your mouth.”

Pulling out her phone, Claire considered Bud's theory as she punched in Buck's cell phone number. From her high vantage point, she could see Buck grab his phone out of his pocket. She hoped the call would go through, considering the weather. It did. “Hey, Buck. We're up top. What'd you got down there?”

Claire watched as Buck bent his head way back and gazed up at them. He gave a wave when he picked out their position on the outlook platform. “It's a male victim, I think, completely encased in ice. Looks like a damn grape Popsicle. From what I can tell, appears like he's got some broken bones and abrasions, but we can't see him all that well yet. The ice is clouded. But I'm pretty sure it's a man by the size of the body. Can you see where he went off?”

“Could've been anywhere along here. No signs of struggle or footprints. The snow's covering up everything. Maybe we can find something underneath, but it's gonna take days to shovel all this out.”

“I don't think we'll get much down here, either. Looks like he might've been here a while. See any clothes or a coat up there? Any suicide note?”

“Nope. Nothing. Unless it's hidden under the snow. We'll scrape around and see if we find anything where he could've gone off. I'm taking some photos, but there's not much to see up here. Just smooth pure white snow, untouched.”

“Then he must've come out here in his underwear or swim trunks or something. It looks like he's almost completely nude, but with the body in this condition, it's hard to tell much yet. We gotta get him back and thawed out under the heat lamps.”

“So you think he's been down there a while? Maybe nobody noticed him because of the storm fronts coming in and dumping snow on him?”

“The body looks fairly fresh, but like I told you, there's at least an inch of ice covering his entire body. He's lying half in the lake and the other half is frozen to the rocks. I've got to get him back to the morgue and do the cut before I can tell you anything for certain.”

“Okay, we're gonna look around up here some more and then head down there along the boardwalk. We might find something along the way. How long are you gonna stay?”

“A long time, it looks like. We've got to have a blowtorch to melt him off those rocks and then cut him out of the ice. He's stuck tight from neck to waist. We've been trying to knock him loose with a sledgehammer, but it's not working so far.”

They hung up, and Claire glanced around. “Well, let's tape off the edge along here and get the rest of the photos. I am so cold I can't even feel my toes anymore.”

“Tell me about it.” Bud grumbled some more, mostly under his breath, but he unwound the tape and walked along the edge, hooking it around the handrails.

Claire shot pictures of everything along that area of the drop, most of which ended up as bare white landscapes that showed exactly nothing except undisturbed deep snow. No help that, not for a murder investigation, and that was for damn sure. She also checked out the area inside and behind the Castle for low mounds of snow that might indicate wadded up clothing or weapons or another corpse or any other hidden evidence. They dug off snow anywhere that looked promising but found nothing but more snow. If the guy wasn't wearing clothes, Claire was pretty sure he'd been murdered. Why would he commit suicide in the nude? Who would do something like that? Especially a man. In her experience and unless the decision had been made on impulse, suicide victims usually went the other way and tried to make themselves look as presentable as possible to whoever discovered their body. On the other hand, a killer would not want to leave anything behind, no evidence, no clue to the victim's identity. It would be to his advantage to take any clothes that might be identifiable. Or the victim could've escaped his assailant and tried to flee, but in his panic had run right off the edge and fallen to his death.

After half an hour of searching, they gave up and attempted unsuccessfully to follow the steep boardwalk down in its meandering switchback trail to the lake without slipping and sliding and plummeting themselves down to the crime scene. It was almost impossible to keep their footing on the steeper inclines and they both fell and slid on their backs multiple times. Claire ended up getting snow down inside her boots and up her pant legs and in her gloves, and so did Bud. So by the time they finally found their way to Buck and Shaggy and Vicky and the other technicians, they were not only cold but wet and miserable, too.

There, they found their good friend, John Becker aka Shaggy, Canton County's ace criminalist, where he was being supported by a couple of other techs while he used a small blowtorch to melt through the ice holding the corpse against the rocks. The bottom half of the body was still encased in the frozen water just off the bank. Buck had ordered the lights to be focused on the victim, but dusk had fallen fast and hard now, and it was difficult to see as the snow turned to sleet and began to come down harder and in swift, slanted arrows that felt and sounded like BB pellets.

Shivering like crazy, Claire made her way closer to Buck, where he stood supervising the extraction of the body. There was little she could tell about the victim's face, except that his skin looked purple. As Buck had said, the murky ice distorted his face and made his features unrecognizable. The scene in its entirety looked a lot like textbook photographs she'd seen of wooly mammoths being dug out of Arctic ice. The victim seemed to have frozen to the spot where he had landed in a relatively upright sitting position, head down, chin frozen tightly against his chest. The ice casing followed the contours of his body and made an ice effigy of a human being that created a very surreal and awful tableau of death in those smoky lights and windblown sleet.

“My God, Buck, what'd you think happened to this guy?”

“I'd say murder. There are better ways to commit suicide. But could be that he was on drugs, high on PCP or something like that. Had a bad trip, went crazy, stripped off his clothes and tried to fly off that cliff up there.”

Claire considered that scenario and then shook her head. “Sounds reasonable. Except there aren't any clothes up there. No car, either. No tire tracks. No footprints. No nothing. And this place is pretty much off the beaten path. I doubt if he would've walked out here buck naked in freezing winter weather and then decided to jump to his death. That's just too farfetched.”

Buck glanced at her. “Yeah, but who knows what a suicidal crazy's gonna do?”

“True.”

After another ten minutes, Shaggy turned off the blowtorch and helped the others hack out the lower portion of the frozen corpse with a couple of axes, and then load him on a stretcher, still in a sitting position.

“I guess we can't identify him until he warms up,” Claire said, already knowing the answer.

“Not unless he's got ID on him, but that doesn't seem possible, given what he's not wearing. I'll take him back to the morgue tonight and put him under the lamps. You and Bud might as well go home, get some rest. Nothing else you can do until we get his name and I can go to work on him. And I hear that a second front's movin' in later tonight.”

“That means more idiotic people travelin' the roads tomorrow,” Bud said. “And some more dents in my SUV. Great. Can't wait.”

“Well, at least this gives us a reason not to have to direct traffic for a few days,” Claire cried out above the rattle of sleet pellets striking the rocks. “Come on, let's take another look around topside and then go home. My gut tells me this isn't suicide or drug-related, but we won't know anything until tomorrow anyway. I'm about to freeze to death, and I'm not exaggerating.”

So they switched on their flashlights and trudged through more frigid drifts, slipping and sliding all over the damn place. Oh, yeah, she should definitely have listened to Black and taken a leave of absence and stayed in New Orleans for the rest of the winter. Or better yet, they should have flown to Tahiti and some serious sun and fun on some pristine and private golden beach paradise, which had been Black's second suggestion and quite an enticement that had been, too. Oh, yeah, at the moment, that sounded like the perfect place to be, all right. She was beginning to hate winter, almost as much as Bud did. If that was even possible.