Hunting Season (3 page)

Anna's patrol car, with everything she'd need in the trunk, was parked in front of her house at Rocky Springs, fifteen miles north of Port Gibson. Before heading south, she'd stopped in the Port Gibson Ranger Station and scraped up a tape recorder, camera, gloves, measuring tape and notebook. The camera, long in storage, was dusty; its functioning suspect. Having set the grime-streaked rucksack she'd liberated from behind the seat of the fire truck to tote this hastily assembled investigation kit on a
bench beneath a window, she pulled out two pairs of latex gloves, put one on and handed the other to Shelly.

"Let's take a look," she said. Mt. Locust was painted white, the paneled doors and shutters over the windows done in a bright cheery blue. Heels clacking on porch planks, Anna walked to the half-open door, Grandma Polly's room. Using her fingertips she gently pushed the door until it was completely open. A shaft of early sunlight chased the door's shadow, running across the worn wooden floor to illuminate the old bed, its mattress stuffed with Spanish moss, ropes netted beneath for support.

The sudden light in the gloom threw the object on the patchwork coverlet into glowing relief. Big fish. Landed walrus. The images were apt. "Gross," Anna murmured, unconsciously echoing Shelly Rabine's summation.

Lying on Grandma Polly's bed, drenched in autumn sunlight, was a fat white man. Very white. Fish-belly white. But for a pair of underpants, probably cotton, possibly Fruit of the Loom, he was naked. From her vantage point at the doorsill Anna could see the wide puffed bottoms of two splayed feet, heavy calves and meaty thighs, a great rise of belly as white as lard and folded in on itself near the navel. One arm and hand, so brown from the sun they looked as if they'd been borrowed from a different cadaver, stuck over the side of the bed, elbow locked, palm up. The face was obscured by the mounded belly and one sagging pec.

"You going to wait till somebody else gets here?"

Part of her brain registered both the disappointment and the understanding in Shelly's voice. The young woman thought Anna was afraid to face the dead by herself. In Anna's estimation, dead bodies were about the most trustworthy humans on the planet. It wasn't squeamishness or fear that kept her in the doorway; before she contaminated the crime scene with her presence she wanted to take note of everything she could. Contamination, to her, not limited to the inevitable effluvia of her hair, skin and shoes, but to her mind as well. Once she stepped in the door she became part of the room. She would see it differently.

"Hand me the radio, Shelly. There in the bag." The part of the Natchez Trace Anna served as district ranger ran through four counties: Adams, Jefferson, Claiborne and Hinds. All were held in concurrent jurisdiction with local law enforcement. Investigations were worked by federal, state and county agencies. It was a system that worked well; cooperation was the rule rather than the exception. The other death Anna worked had been at Rocky Springs in Claiborne County, so Paul Davidson had shared that tragedy. Mt. Locust was in Adams County, where Anna had yet to meet the sheriff. That was about to change.

She called dispatch in Tupelo and requested they contact him and the coroner to ask them to come to Mt. Locust.

Handing the radio back to Shelly, who still held the rucksack in front of her like a little kid with a trick-or-treat basket, Anna said, "Camera please." Shelly traded radio for camera, looking serious and professional and happy to have something to do.

Camera to her eye, Anna began framing death; the first step in the compartmentalizing process, boxing off the dead from the living. The last box would be of wood and buried in the ground.

The stand was built in the French style of the early nineteenth century with enclosed rooms or
cabinets.
Bedrooms didn't open into the central taproom where the travelers ate, but onto the porch. In Polly's room a second door exited out the far side into a storage room with access to the back porch.

Anna clicked four pictures: as wide an angle of the room as she could get in tight quarters, showing the rear door, the bed and the window on the left-hand wall next to a shallow fireplace. The other three were close-ups of those areas. Probably a waste of film but it might be important later when wondering if things were open or closed, locked or unlocked, without having to rely on memory.

Lowering the camera, she looked carefully at the floor. It was of worn planks, with a single tied rag rug to soften it. Visitors were not allowed in this room. The public had to stand behind a waist-high, clear plastic barrier, slid into brackets on the doorframe where Anna stood. The floor was clean, swept, but not recently; a thin film of dust coated the planks. Dust had collected on the dressing table by the door and the rocker in the corner. A couple months' worth at a guess.

The sidelight provided by a low November sun was ideal for her purposes. Anna got down on hands and knees and put her cheek on the doorsill.

"What're you doing?" Shelly asked.

"Looking," Anna returned repressively. Between her nose and the rag rug, the dust was unmarked. Beyond the small rectangle of faded cotton, in the area from the storage room door to the bedside, the dust had been disturbed.

"Get on the radio, Shelly. Have dispatch get in touch with the sheriff. Tell him we got tracks in dust. Special paper, kind of a cross between Saran Wrap and tinfoil, will lift them. Several different brand names. Port Gibson District doesn't have any. Tell him to bring some if he's got it." Anna wasn't optimistic. She'd never worked in a park that kept that kind of stuff on hand. There was no reason a small town sheriff's department would. The technology of criminal investigation had far outstripped most law-enforcement budgets. Taxpayers weren't willing to cough up the funds to equip a town with maybe one homicide every four or five years, and most of those straightforward I-shot-the-son-of-a-bitch-and-here's-why situations, with the high-priced bells and whistles, much less the funding to train an ever-changing cadre of sheriffs' deputies to use them. of course, if things got dicey, the public would be up in arms because the combined genius of NASA and the CIA hadn't been brought to bear on whatever backyard slaying the media dictated they take an interest in.

Anna was rather glad that in most places in America crime hadn't reached levels where cutting-edge Buck Rogers goodies were factored into everyday standard operating procedures. In most of the country cops still took pictures, drew sketches and crawled around on their hands and knees with tweezers and envelopes.

Standing up, Anna said, "I'm going in," then nearly laughed out loud. She'd uttered the words with the intensity of Dirty Harry about to clear out a felon-infested warehouse on the New York City docks. Maybe she'd gotten a tad cynical and practiced at looking cool, but the sight of a dead body in suspicious circumstances still triggered an adrenaline rush. It was good to be alive. She reached into the bag Shelly held and took out a tape recorder.

"Uh-oh," Shelly said.

"No danger," Anna reassured her. "I'm just going to step inside."

"No. You got your dress all smeary." The genuine sympathy in the young woman's tone reminded Anna how pretty the dress was, and how expensive.

"It'll wash," she replied, hoping it was true. Stepping through the doorway, she shut Shelly, the spoiled dress and everything else from her mind and took in the sense of the room. Simplicity, the utilitarian nature of pioneer construction and furnishings, lent it a beauty that was rarely evident in late twentieth and early twenty-first century homes: four-poster bed beneath a sash window, a desk, a rocker, a bureau. Beneath the bed was a trunk. Two hooks on the wall above the bed served the needs of a closet for a way of life that required few changes of clothing. Candles in sconces and an oil lamp would provide the room with light. Had the body been an aged family member, laid out in burial garb by loving hands, Grandma Polly's bedroom would have retained its symmetry and peace. It was so steeped in history, death itself did not seem out of place. Nudity, modernity did.

Anna crossed the room and, standing on the bit of carpet so she wouldn't destroy the tracks in the dust nearer the bed, she looked over the body. "Moby Dick," she muttered irreverently as she stared down at the great white whale beached in her park. She clicked on the tape recorder, tested it, then began.

"White male, fifty to sixty years of age, maybe five-foot-ten inches tall, well over two hundred pounds. Hair gray and brown, thinning on top, cut short. Eyes blue." Eyes. Anna was not a big fan of the eyes of the dead. Never was it clearer that they were the windows of the soul than when, looking into them, one saw only emptiness, a place devoid of hope or humanity. Once she'd seen eyes like that on a living person, a boy of eleven in a psych ward she'd visited. He'd been mutilating the family pets. His parents finally brought him in when he'd tried the same thing on his little sister.

These dead eyes were rolled back slightly, as if their owner had been looking out the sash window above his head, trying to catch a last glimpse of the stars before he died. Flesh fell heavily in the bags beneath the eyes and in his jowls, pulling down his cheeks and lips till the tips of straight, white, clearly artificial crowns could be seen.

Her gaze moving methodically down the body, Anna continued her visual exploration. "No jewelry around his neck, no marks of strangulation. No visible wounds on head, shoulders or arms." Standing on tiptoe so she would see over the man's bulk, she checked his other side. "No defensive marks evident on hands or forearms." Her focus shifted down to the torso. Here things began to get interesting. She'd started at the top of the head because thoroughness in police work was worth a great deal more than inspiration. "Torso marked with bruise pattern," she said into the machine. "Bruising evident beneath the arms. Bruising and chafing in a band approximately four inches wide just below the sternum. Abdomen unmarked. Subject wearing white men's briefs. No blood or semen stains visible. On the inner thighs bruising and chafing, contusions having oozed blood."

"Major,
major
yuck," said a voice in Anna's ear. "Like, this is a sex crime! God. I think it'd be a crime for a guy like this to have sex at all."

"Spoken like a young, thin person," Anna said. Drawn by adventure and the macabre, Shelly had drifted in to stand behind Anna's left shoulder. Anna checked to see that she stood on the rug. During the busy season half a hundred visitors a day poked their heads in. Park aides had the run of the place. And soon the room would be populated with the sheriff's people, the coroner and whoever else got sent on the call. A few dark hairs or pale flecks of skin from Shelly Rabine weren't going to obfuscate any clues.

"Don't touch anything," Anna reminded her and left it at that.

"I know not to touch," Shelly said, slightly aggrieved. Everybody knew it and everybody, even seasoned professionals, had to be reminded. Other than on the body itself, maybe the patchwork coverlet and the tracked bit of floor, it didn't really matter. The unbroken veil of dust on planks and furniture made it clear there would be no recent fingerprints to be lifted.

"Maybe it was that auto-erotica thing or whatever you call it," Shelly suggested. "You know, where guys hang themselves while they jerk off."

"No ligature marks," Anna said. "And his underpants are still on."

"Oh. Where are his clothes? You'd think they'd be lying around somewhere."

"I doubt he was here alone. Whoever killed him or found him before we did probably took them."

"Why?"

Anna had no answer for that. It was too early for answers. She said nothing but traded Shelly the tape recorder for the camera and began taking photographs of the body and, as best as ambient light and mediocre equipment would allow, of the tracks in the dust on the floor.

When she finished and looked up, Shelly had moved away from the bed. No longer on the island of rug, she stood in front of Grandma Polly's writing desk. Anna felt a stab of annoyance that the younger woman had not obeyed her to the letter. Shelly's hands were clasped dutifully behind her back, carefully not touching anything, so Anna stifled her waspishness.

"What have you got?" she asked.

"Too weird. Come look." on the writing table an old hook lay open. On the right-hand page was a picture of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. The left side was covered in verse, and half of it had been circled in red felt-tip pen.

Sins against a holy god Sins against His righteous laws Sins against His love and blood Sins against His name and cause Great,
Anna thought sourly.

"What do you figure?" Shelly asked. Either stress or proximity to religion was bringing out the park aide's drawl. Local girl, Anna remembered, from Vicksburg. First summer home from college after graduating from Ole Miss.

"Beats me," Anna said. "Could be a lot of things. Maybe means nothing. An impulse. Murderers are not the sort of folks known for controlling impulses."

"It'd of been night," Shelly said.

"Good point." Anna thought about that for a moment. Mt. Locust, true to its 1802 history, had no electricity. Whatever had transpired in Grandma Polly's room had been done by flashlight. The candles in the sconces had never been lit; the wicks were still white virgin cotton. The globe on the oil lamp was sheathed in a fine, unmarred layer of dust. It was unlikely, though not impossible, that whoever had been there had happened to see the verse. Maybe the picture. Only a religious person would know it was Christ in the Garden. Anna had needed to read the caption.