Murder in Little Egypt (24 page)

There was no flesh on the face, just a skull in the grass, with perfect young man’s teeth exposed and gleaming. Only the left eyeball still lay in its socket, and the brown, thick, swept-back hair was untouched.

Without a liver with which to test the body’s temperature, the coroner would be unable to determine the time of death accurately; the flesh remaining inside the boots and jeans would tell something. Nolen estimated that it had lain there no more than twenty-four hours, maybe less, it looked so fresh. The boy had been killed on Good Friday.

Sheriff Stafford found a black leather wallet in the grass near the body: The identification was that of Mark Dale Cavaness.

Detective Nolen told Marian and Kevin that they could leave. Kevin asked Nolen to please try to get hold of his dad, who was probably over at his Hickory Handle farm near Herod.

“We’ll send someone,” Nolen said. “Can you take care of your mother and your brother?”

Kevin said he could. He helped Marian to the car and headed for Grandpa’s house. The Harrisburg Ambulance Service passed them on the highway.

Coroner Lambert placed Mark’s remains in the ambulance to be driven to an Eldorado funeral home. Detective Nolen, poring over the body site, found four buckshots on the ground where the rib cage had rested. He examined a plaid shirt deputies had picked up near the truck. Between the left breast pocket and the snap buttons was a hole, surrounded by dried blood, that measured about two and a half by four inches. A pack of Vantage cigarettes and a book of matches remained untouched in the pocket. Mark Cavaness had been shot through the heart. With a shotgun, such a relatively small and neat hole could only have been made by a very close shot. Blood on the driver’s seat, floorboard, inside door panel, and outside, just behind the door opening, indicated that he had been shot at point-blank range either while he was sitting behind the wheel (turned toward the passenger side), getting in or out of the truck, or standing beside it.

Nolen found more buckshot on the floorboard. According to the sheriff, the gun had rested exactly as Kevin remembered it, except that it had also been positioned across an ax handle, as if to raise the shooting angle: the coat hanger hooked into the trigger, the vest on the hanger caught in the passenger-side door. The safety had been off; there was one round left in the chamber and one in the magazine.

Whether the end of the case had been blown off or worn out, it was hard to say at this point. The stock end of the case did show wear, and some of the case beneath the barrel had worn away. But if the gun had been fired inside the case, why was there no spent cartridge inside the case?

Instead, Nolen found one spent .12-gauge cartridge on the driver’s side floorboard. If the gun had been fired inside the case, either from the action of the coat hanger or by someone pulling the trigger, that cartridge could not have ended up on the floorboard, Nolen reasoned that someone had fired the gun with the case off from inside the truck, killing Mark, and had then replaced the gun in the case and rigged it to make the death look like an accident or a booby-trap.

Nolen kept his conclusions to himself, but he felt certain that this had been a murder covered up in haste. The killer had constructed a phony scene and had fled, leaving Mark to be ravaged.

Where exactly Mark had been sitting or standing when killed—that was impossible to say since the animals might have dragged the body. The buckshot found underneath the body had probably fallen through the rib cage to the ground as the outer flesh and inner organs were devoured. There might have been more buckshot in the body, eaten by the animals.

It was nearly four by the time Dr. Cavaness drove up. Detective Nolen remembered the doctor well from the night of the McLaskey accident, which as Nolen recalled offhand had occurred at about the same time of year five or six years ago. Nolen was not about to forget the scene, how drunk Dr. Cavaness had been, how uncooperative and unremorseful. Nor had Nolen forgotten how the doctor had gotten off with a small fine and probation. Certain officials in Egypt, as Nolen was fond of saying, had balls the size of mustard seeds. That was why Nolen was glad that he worked for the Illinois D.C.I. and could handle cases on his own. He could be sure that his end of a job would be done right, whatever happened in the courts afterward.

But today Dr. Cavaness was not drunk and appeared to be as distraught as any father who had just found out that his son was dead. He offered to help in any way that he could and asked what had happened.

Nolen gave a minimal description of the scene, offering no hypotheses or conclusions.

“It could have been an accident?” the doctor asked.

“It could have been, yes, that’s certainly a possibility. When was the last time you saw Mark?”

Dale said that he had last seen and talked to Mark on Monday, April 4, at Mark’s grandfather’s house. He had not seen him since then, but that was not unusual. He had talked to Mark about assisting him in getting a job in the coal mines. Mark had been working for him on the farm.

“You give him a wage? How much do you pay him?”

“Two dollars an hour,” Dale said.

“So you weren’t worried about him, not seeing him?”

“Well, yes, I was worried Thursday and Friday, because his mother and brothers, they were coming down for the holiday, and we couldn’t locate him. But you see, he doesn’t have a driver’s license and he depends on somebody to haul him around. So he can get stuck someplace.”

Nolen showed Dale the shotgun. Dale identified it as belonging to the Cavaness family. Nolen wanted to know where the gun was usually kept. At his own trailer, Dale said, southwest of the Shea place, down by the lake. Mark had been living in this trailer, here, and he had the use of the gun when he wanted it.

Dale Cavaness, 1943

Dale (right), Marian, and a friend, New York, 1951

Marian and Dale, 1964

Mark, Dale, Marian, and Kevin, 1956

Mark (left) and Kevin (standing);

Sean (left) and Patrick (seated), 1969

Kevin, Mark, Marian, Dale, Sean, 1965, in the family room

Mark, Sean, Kevin, 1964