Lark (3 page)

“Guy who lives here, he didn't give his name.”

“Find him.”

“Anything else?”

“Get moving!” Lark watched Horse lumber back to his car and its radio before he grabbed the sleeve of another cop. “You. Stand here by the body. If anybody comes near the scene shoot them.”

He walked slowly back to his pickup. It was time for a beer before all hell broke loose.

Lark had time to finish his beer before Horse returned, holding firmly to the elbow of a young man dressed in white. Lark crushed the beer can with his right hand and dropped it into the truckbed. Horse's witness was in his early twenties, and dressed in knife-creased white duck pants, an immaculate white T-shirt, white tennis shoes, and had a completely shaved head. Lark groaned.

“This is the fella' that called it in, Lieutenant. I did the other things.”

“Fine. Keep everyone back from the scene.”

The patrolman gave a sloppy salute and moved away.

“I don't know her,” the man in white said.

“What's your name?”

“I am the Magus.”

Lark looked at him coolly and momentarily considered slamming him against the side of the house and patting him down. That usually changed attitudes quickly. “Uh-huh, Magus. Let's try it again? Your name?”

“There is no other. We have stripped ourselves of all outside necessities in order to reach a spiritual nirvana.”

“H. Jesus Christ,” Lark mumbled. “A cult yet. All right, kid, what's on your driver's license and social-security card?”

A pause. “Winthrop Rutledge.”

“And you live here with the deceased?”

“I live here with others of similar belief and persuasion, but not the departed one in the rear yard.”

Lark gestured toward the group held behind the police line. “And which of those are of similar belief and persuasion?”

“The ones in white,” Winthrop replied.

Lark saw them: four young women dressed in what looked like scruffy prom gowns. “You live here with four women?”

“At the present. We expect more converts shortly.”

“I'll bet. All right, Winthrop, as straight as you can, tell me how you found the body.”

“We only have one bathroom and it was occupied and I had to take a piss.”

“So you went into the backyard and found her?”

“Yes. We don't have a phone, so I went next door and dialed nine-one-one.”

“And that's all?”

“Yes, sir. I didn't touch the body.”

“Does that cross and pedestal in the rear yard belong to your group?”

“We use it for certain ceremonies.”

“That boggles the imagination,” Lark said, and wondered if they sacrificed virgins by the light of a full moon—which would of necessity be an occasional ceremony, considering the lack of virgins these days. “Don't you and your group go anywhere for a couple of days. I'll talk to you later.”

A dark-blue Mercedes pulled into Mark Street and double-parked by the side of Lark's pickup. Dr. Damon Wainwright unwound from the car, grabbed a black medical bag, and came toward Lark with a frown on his face. He was dressed in a well-tailored pinstripe whose cost Lark estimated at eight hundred dollars. He was a very angry doctor.

“I have an office full of patients, Lieutenant. I don't need this.”

“You evidently needed it twenty years ago when you got yourself on the list of assistant medical examiners,” Lark replied with a smile.

Wainwright glared. “Where's the body?”

“In the back.” He led the way. Tomorrow, if not this afternoon, Damon Wainwright, M.D., would have his name removed from the list of assistant medical examiners of the city of Middleburg. The chief medical examiner in Farmington must have been out on another case, as she always handled the homicides, if she could, before assigning them to one of the assistants at a local level. Nevertheless, Lark knew she would be the one to perform the autopsy.

They reached the body and Wainwright stood looking down at it silently for a moment. “Anything touched?”

“I haven't even been through the clothing for an ID.”

“Dammit,” Wainwright said as he continued looking down at the corpse.

“Is she dead, Doctor?” Lark asked ingenuously. He was almost enjoying the pompous doctor's discomfort and wondered how long it was going to take this ass to realize that he had no choice but to kneel his pin-striped knee on the dirty ground next to the body.

“People with bullet wounds in the cranium are usually dead.”

Lark nodded. “I guess you're right. You are going to examine her?” He had a canvas drop cloth in the truck, but he'd be damned if he would get it for this unpleasant man.

A police sergeant arrived and immediately began snapping a series of pictures at different angles of the body and its location.

Dr. Wainwright gave a sigh of resignation and dropped to his knees next to the body. He spoke in a monotone. “It would appear to be a bullet entrance wound at the rear of the cranium. I see no exit wound. Putrefaction has occurred to a minor extent, which means that she has been dead for over twenty-four hours. Rigor mortis is present and all extremities are rigid. There is lividity and algor mortis or cooling.” He stood up, brushed his hands, and stared sadly down at his stained knees. “That's all I can say at this point. I would suggest a homicide.”

“Considering that shooting yourself in the back of the head is very difficult, I tend to agree,” Lark said as he squatted by the corpse. He carefully went through the jean pockets and even slipped a finger into the small blouse pocket, but they were all empty. He ground his teeth. “I guess we have a Jane Doe, there's no ID of any sort.”

“Can I go now, Lieutenant?” Wainwright asked in mock formality.

“Thanks for coming, Doc.”

“I'm getting off the list, they don't pay enough,” Wainwright said as he spun on his heel and strode toward the Mercedes.

“Want to take a guess as to how long she's been here?” Lark called after the retreating doctor.

“Between twenty-four and forty-eight hours,” Wainwright said without turning.

Lark slipped acetate evidence bags over the small hands of the victim and secured them with rubber bands at the wrists. It was important that the hands not be further contaminated, as the medical examiner's office would need to make prints and also take scrapings from under the fingernails in a search for bits of flesh or fabric.

A semblance of frenzied order began to replace chaos. Officers who had completed their house-to-house interviews reported back to Lark. All reports were negative. No one in the immediate area had heard any shouts, screams, or shots during the past several days.

A maze of thin white rope began to grid the crime scene and the wooded area between the yard and highway. These uneven squares were set out in ten-meter groupings and would be diagramed on a master control sheet and minutely searched by officers. The location of any discovered evidence could be accurately charted on the master sheet before being bagged.

Lark stood near the body as the paramedics lifted the childlike form into the rubber body bag and levered it on the wheeled stretcher. They awkwardly maneuvered across the rear yard to the open doors of the ambulance.

Lark watched the ambulance turn the corner before climbing into the pickup and switching on the radio. “This is Lark. We have a Jane Doe homicide,” he told the communications clerk at headquarters. “I need a computer check on possible runaways or missings of the following description. Dammit! Are you taking this down, Forbes?”

“Yes, sir, I'm ready, but this isn't very good radio procedure, Lieutenant.”

Lark ignored the comment. “A white female between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two, approximately five foot two, weight around a hundred and ten pounds. Hair and eyes brown, no visible scars.” He described the clothing in detail. “Got that?”

“Christ, Lieutenant, with a description as general as that, we're going to have a bunch of possibles.”

“Get me a printout on all of them and have it on my desk by tomorrow morning,” Lark snapped. He'd try, but felt that it would be difficult to make any identification on the description they had unless the girl was local. She was far too ordinary, but something might turn up at the autopsy that would help; and then there were the L.L. Bean shoes. They looked fairly new and might be included in one of the printouts. “Patch me through to the chief.”

Frank Pemperton was on the air in seconds. “What do you have, Lark?”

“A young female homicide without ID.”

“For God's sake, Tommy! Half this town have police scanners. You mean you have a sixty-ten.”

Lark ignored the comment. “Looks like a small-caliber bullet wound to the rear of the head fired at close range.”

“That sounds like a mob MO,” Frank said, ignoring his own command.

“She's young for a hit like that.”

“All right, you know what to do. And for Christ's sake, in the future, try to sound professional on the radio.”

Lark clicked the radio off in irritation. There was a discreet tapping on the truck window and he turned to look at Horse Najankian. “What is it?”

“We found a couple of things, Lieutenant. You should come take a look yourself.”

He followed the lumbering police officer back to the small clearing where the body had been found and the inverted cross still stood on the pedestal. “What do you have?”

“There's something on the far side of the column that looks like blood.”

Lark circled the column and saw the stains on the far side near the base. They could be bloodstains, and he looked over at the clumsy officer with a new regard. “You spotted them?” Lark had missed them in his own inspection of the column.

“We found something else in the woods.” He led the way down a barely visible overgrown path that led from the yard through the second-growth timber to the highway beyond. Midway to the road another cop stood by a bramble bush. “Look at this.” Horse pointed. “About waist level.”

Lark bent over the bush and followed the pointing fingers. Then he saw them; a few strands of thread at waist level were snagged on a branch. “Looks like it could have come from her jeans. The state lab can tell us if they're from the same dye lot.” He straightened and turned to the two officers. “Get me exact measurements from the edge of the highway to this bush on one side, and from where the body was found on the other.” He pulled a Swiss army knife from his pocket and snipped the branch holding the threads and dropped them into an evidence bag. “I'll take the threads so that we keep the chain of evidence simple.”

“Seems to me that if a man were carrying a body at waist level from the highway to where we found her, her pants could get snagged about here,” Horse said.

“I think you have a point,” Lark replied. “The lab will tell us if you're right. I'm still not ruling out that it happened in the house.”

The officers nodded.

It was ten at night by the time they were finished at the crime scene. A guard was left at the site. Tomorrow Lark would prepare an “Affidavit and Application Search-and-Seizure Warrant” for the pedestal and cross. He would also try to get a judge to sign a similar warrant for a search of the house. Lark snorted. In the old days they would have just gone in and tossed the whole damn place.

After hours of searching the area, all they had was one dead girl, three threads, and a possible bloodstain on the base of a cheap pedestal. It would take him another half-hour to go to headquarters and place the threads with the property clerk to ensure that the chain of evidence was sanctified.

It was ten-forty when Lark stopped the pickup in front of his house trailer, which was parked behind the Milligan Machine Company. It was choretime. He left the truck and walked slowly around the machine shop and its several outbuildings. Occasionally he tried a door to make sure it was securely locked. It was part of his arrangement with Milligan. He checked the buildings at night, and in return was allowed to park his trailer and hook into the shop's plumbing and electrical systems. Both parties benefited and it saved Lark money. Lark didn't like to spend money. The final chore was to empty the melted ice from the beer freezer and then he could go inside the trailer.

The trailer's interior was spotless and sparsely furnished in a militarylike simplicity. He had flipped open the small refrigerator to reach for a can of beer when he saw the calendar over the sink.

“Goddamn!” he said aloud. It was Monday. The rule was inviolate: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday were exercise nights. Lark hated exercise. He had decided many years earlier that you were born with a heart that was genetically engineered for a certain number of beats. You could accelerate your allotted time by excessive exercise such as long jogs, or you could also diminish your survival by reverting completely to sloth. He had chosen a midpoint, a minimum amount of exercise to keep the body in trim, expunge the beer poison, and maintain muscle tone in the absolute shortest possible time. After several years of experimentation he had decided that twenty-two minutes of violent exercise, repeated three times a week, would maintain his body.

He groaned. It had to be done or the system broke down. He rolled out the heavy dumbbells from under the counter, stripped off his pants and shirt, and began.

Sets of deep knee bends, pull-ups, sit-ups, and curls were the fulcrum of his program, and he forced himself to breathe deeply with each exercise.

He watched the wall clock as its hands moved with agonizing slowness. When twenty-two minutes to the second had elapsed, he stopped, kicked the dumbbells under the counter, stripped off his shorts, and stepped into the shower. He was exhausted.

The shower helped, and he was toweling off when he heard a car pull into the drive next to the pickup. He pulled on a pair of pajama bottoms and went to the door.