Hunting Season (23 page)

Bruising on the inner thighs, buttocks and chest were clean and surrounded by chafing. Two darker bruised areas indicated metal buckles, the kind with clasps and a sharp tongue, had been used to secure the straps. The medical examiner's opinion was that the deceased had not been beaten but had been hung in a harness of some kind. Due to the man's obesity, his organs had been compressed while hanging until he was suffocated by his own fat. There were no defensive injuries on the hands or arms and no sign that Doyce had fought his attacker. Chafing indicated that, once in the harness and hung, he had struggled long and pitifully until strength, air and, finally, life had abandoned him. Time of death between 11 p.m. and 2 A.M.

Anna spread the report out on her desk. For reasons unknown poor ol' Doyce had allowed someone to buckle him into a harness, probably of leather or canvas webbing. He had allowed this person to string him up.

Anna let that grisly picture dangle in her mind for a while, wondering what sort of game could have been being played. If sexual, it had not reached its natural climax unless the other party got his satisfaction merely from watching, which certainly wasn't out of the realm of possibility.

After Doyce drowned in his own blubber, he'd been taken down, the harness removed, and carted to Mt. Locust to be dumped on Grandma Polly's bed. From the fibers found in the scrapes on Doyce's inner thighs, it was a good bet the harness had been worn over his clothes. When he'd been dangling to death he'd rubbed the fabric into his flesh. Pants and underpants had been on at the time of death. The sexual aspect of the crime was staged. Anna was unsurprised.

Mt. Locust was a very public place, one guaranteed to garner local media attention. Yet, at night, it was as dark, deserted and private as one could want for acting out nefarious activities. Ideal for setting a stage, the curtain to rise promptly at 9 a.m. just as the sign in the visitors center window said. An elaborate ruse to throw investigators off track?

To merely louse up the investigation, the easiest thing to do would be to hide the body, tie it to a sack of bricks and dump it in one of the bayous. By the time it was found—if it was found—alligators, snapping turtles, fish and bacteria would have effectively devoured any clues. Anybody who watched television would know that much.

Whoever had moved the body had not been attempting to dispose of it but to advertise it.

Why, Anna couldn't guess. The Bible text had been circled. Was it a warning? Retribution?

The body had been put at the old inn for a reason. Dead wasn't enough. A message was being sent or a finger being pointed or something else Anna wasn't thinking of.

Trussed and buckled in a harness. If Doyce had not been willing, he might have been unconscious. Anna mulled that over for a bit and discarded it. Humans were pretty tough animals. To render one unconscious usually left signs. Even if chloroform was used there'd be some faint burning in the nasal passages, traces of the substance in the blood.

The other option was that Doyce had put himself in the harness for reasons of his own. He'd strung himself up, then couldn't get down and suffocated while trying. Sort of a new twist on the auto-erotica deaths that occasionally occurred when somebody tried to heighten the masturbatory experience by partially hanging himself during the event, lost consciousness and was found not only dead but looking extremely undignified.

If Doyce had hoisted himself on his own idiosyncratic petard, who had found him, stripped him and moved him? "Why" was the key. Anna didn't need to know what message the dead messenger was carrying, only to whom it was sent. If she could figure that out, she could work backward to the sender.

Anna stopped speculating and returned to the report, still warm from the fax machine and curling on the desktop like autumn leaves. Wishing she'd had the fiscal wherewithal to buy a better fax, one that used real paper, she found her place in the blurred text.

No defensive injuries: cuts, contusions or bruising on the hands or forearms that would indicate an attempt had been made to ward off blows. No bruising on upper arms or wrists indicating the victim had been held or bound.

Anna had been reading quickly, the information pretty much all of a piece with things she'd observed on scene. She stopped skimming and reread the second-to-last paragraph. The palms and fingers of the victim's hands had been contused. The nails, bitten to the quick, had traces of bark beneath what was left.

Tree bark. Contusions on palms and finger pads. Shortly before death, if not during the actual event, poor, fat ol' Doyce had been climbing trees.

Rectal tissues were healthy, no indication of prolonged homosexual activity. Anna thought about that for a moment. Doyce was evidently not gay and had not regularly or recently been involved in any rough-and-tumble sex games. Men in late middle age, whether closet homosexuals or closet masochists, were unlikely to suddenly find the nerve to act out their fantasies. That fit with her instincts but not with the way Doyce Barnette had died or the way the body was found.

She shoved the report to the side of the desk, not rejecting it as worthless, but shelving information that might become important at a later date.

A short stack of messages and reports had been dumped at her work station during her two days off. Needing to reconnect with the daily life of her job, she began going through them.

Clintus Jones called twice. The slip from Monday said he'd called; no message. Tuesday's told her Martin Crowley, the last of the three surviving poker players, had returned. Clintus would wait for her before questioning the man.

The rest of the messages were bits and pieces from Barth's ongoing research regarding the slave cemetery. Barth was continuing to talk with local black families whose last names matched those of the few known inhabitants of the old cemetery. He'd included several synopses for Anna's edification. A Mrs. Jackson, eighty-seven, of Fayette, Mississippi, believed her grandmother to have been a
slave at Mt. Locust. No records existed to verify the old woman's memory. She claimed her son, a machinist at the Packard plant in Clinton, had tracked down two old bills of sale, one of a man he believed to be his great-grandfather, to a plantation south of Natchez, the other from a cabinet maker who'd built coffins of cheap pine to house the mortal remains of human chattel for local slave owners. Barth had added a note that he'd be following up with the Jackson boy.

The second synopsis was of Barth's talk with the mother of Paul's deputy, Lonnie Restin. Anna read that with more interest simply because she knew and liked Lonnie. Family lore had it that they'd descended from a freedman who'd once been owned by the Mt. Locust plantation. According to the stories, he'd been freed prior to the Civil War for saving the plantation owner's son from drowning in the Big Black River. A lovely story and possibly true, but Anna was cynical. Not that a black man could and would save a drowning child, but because orphans—and the African-Americans were orphans in the very real sense that their ancestors, their history, had been lost to the evil of slavery—often made up romantic stories about their origins. A group of people, made up of disparate tribes and conflicting customs, had been put in the uncomfortable position of reinventing a culture that would not only unite them but provide a historical matrix allowing a sense of belonging—to a place in history, to a place in the world.

Barth was looking for a needle of fact in a haystack of memory and illusion. Wishing him luck, Anna put aside the report and dialed the Natchez Sheriff's Department.

Crowley worked graveyard shift, 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. In hopes of greater cooperation, or at least greater coherence, they let the man sleep till two o'clock.

The Crowley residence was on a back road that ran roughly parallel to the Trace between the Parkway and the Mississippi River, and then veered to the west and the town of Vicksburg.

Anna met Clintus in his office. Together they headed north, in the sheriff's car. Rain still fell in cold unpredictable gusts, the wind playful in a malicious kind of way, buffeting the unwary from different directions, coating windshields with leaves and lying in wait near bridges to send cars skittering with sudden unexpected blasts.

The AM radio station Clintus listened to switched back and forth between Christian music and an announcer with a pronounced drawl gleefully predicting dropping temperatures with sleet by evening. Anna preferred the dire predictions to born-again messages set to rhythms designed for sex, drugs and rock and roll. on either side of the two-lane asphalt road, land melted away in soggy fields of stubble rising and falling as gently as the chest of a breathing child, the "hills" of Mississippi. Ditches ran full and creeks were beginning to back up at the culverts under the road. Leaves blew and fell, stuck and slid with the rain till there was little difference between earth and sky.

Given the swirling of this post-primordial soup, it took them three passes to locate the Crowley place. A black stroke of willow leaf had stuck to the mailbox, neatly transforming 603 to 1603.

Set on several acres of land, the house was a small suburban-style tract house and looked to have been lifted out of a development. An attempt had been made to force a suburban lawn to frame it, but city grass was no match for rural weeds and its edges disappeared raggedly into the flooded fields.

Martin Crowley came to the door before Clintus knocked. He was clad in plaid pajama bottoms and a University of Southern Mississippi T-shirt emblazoned with USM's mascot, a dull-witted eagle.

Crowley was small and compact, with hair as blond as a child's. Anna put him in his late thirties. Though his face was prematurely aged, he was fit with the tidy matched musculature that told of hours spent working out with weights.

"Have trouble finding the place? I saw you drive by a couple times," he said. Anna glanced at the one window that looked out over the road. The blinds were down and closed. He'd been watching, waiting for them, worried enough to spend ten minutes peeking out from behind the blind slats. Crowley didn't appear nervous or concerned by their visit, but he didn't stand aside or invite them in, apparently intending to have the interview on the truncated porch.

"Mind if we come in?" Clintus asked politely. "No sense in standing in the door heating the whole outside."

Crowley couldn't think of a reason to refuse, but Anna could tell he was trying.

"I guess you better," he said finally and stepped back.

The interior of the Crowley home was reminiscent of a packrat's lair. The small living room was crammed with furniture that looked as if generations of kids and dogs had jumped up and down on it. Three of the four corners were dominated by cheap glossy knickknack cabinets filled with Avon's collectibles in perfume bottles and glass figurines of empty-faced women in flowing pastel gowns. One wall was decorated with dead fish mounted on wooden plaques. The opposite wall sported collector plates, united by a
Gone With the Wind
theme; a his and hers display of bad taste and matrimonial equity.

Martin dropped into a well-used Barcalounger and picked up a coffee cup from the stand at his elbow. The television, turned to
Divorce Court
or some equally irritating show, grated on.

Uninvited, Anna sat down, or perched rather, on the edge of a sofa whose blue-and-white striped, low-rent elegance failed to hide the depredations of animals and foodstuffs.

Clintus, mindful of his sartorial perfection, looked around helplessly and Anna stifled a laugh. Stoically sacrificing the purity of his trouser seat to the greater cause of justice, he finally sat on a glider. on the television, the room's only light source, an overweight white woman with improbably red hair whined on about a two-thousand-dollar car loan her ex had left her with.

"This about Doyce Barnette?" Crowley asked.

Clintus began, "As you probably know, Mr. Barnette was found dead at—"

"I read the papers," Martin snapped as if Clintus had accused him of illiteracy.

The vehemence of Martin's declaration created a momentary silence. Clintus recovered first. "Yes. Well then you know about as much as we do. You played poker with Doyce the night he was killed, that right?"

"Right."

"How did he seem?" Anna asked innocently. "Was he different than usual? You know, distracted or anything?"

"He..." Crowley's eyes narrowed momentarily. He ran a work-scarred hand through his hair, leaving blond spikes in its path. "He never showed up," he said. "I meant I was supposed to play poker, but Doyce never showed. He never showed up." Crowley shut his mouth in a hard line exhibiting no more lips than a snake. The casual coldness of a man forced to entertain the Law in his pajamas had been replaced by the hostility of a man under attack.

Anna and Clintus went through their questions, coming at Martin Crowley from every angle they could think of. His answers were short and pat. He'd been coached; he exhibited none of the vague memories of a man trying to recall an evening that had been unmemorable at the time. Common mythology would have it that the truth was easy to remember and lies tended to morph with the retelling. The opposite was true. A group of honest men, questioned about a social evening that was merely one of many like evenings, would argue endlessly about who showed up in what order, whether they ate ham or pastrami, who won the pot. Memories were not stored in a linear fashion, ordered by some cerebral Dewey decimal system. They were clumped in a vast mental junk drawer and had to be pawed through and sorted out.