Chapter 15

It took Cecelia and me the rest of the afternoon to circle the scene and come back to the path, this time beyond the point where we'd turned into the woods to find the body. In addition to the lighter I'd found what appeared to be a scuffed trail heading west toward the road. If the lighter had fallen out of the victim's pocket, then he hadn't come in along the possible trail, for the two were about 90 degrees apart on an imaginary circle. I wanted to follow the trail, but by the time we got back to the path even the long summer sunlight was fading, and I knew I'd have to wait.

By the time we returned to the clearing it was a small beehive. Two or three uniformed officers were standing around, and one was stringing crime scene tape through the woods 10 feet or so beyond the edge of the clearing. Allen Mills was standing on the other side of the clearing, his head bent – apparently he was looking at something on the ground. He had his hands in his pockets, as all good investigators do when at a scene – otherwise the temptation to touch things is too great, and it's too easy to drop things and foul up the evidence. The medical examiner – it had to be him – was kneeling by the body, which was now on its back. The odor was stronger than ever, and I was glad there was still Vicks under my nose. Cecelia's breathing was harsh beside me, and when I glanced at her she was pale again.

I stood there and called out, "Any notion of what killed him?"

The examiner looked around at me. "You the chief?" Probably it was my eccentric civilian clothes that did it – at the distance it would take mighty good eyes to read my badge, which was hanging on my belt. Probably someone had also told him what I looked like. Or it might have been my hat device.

"Yeah."

"Well, all I know right now is something smashed in his forehead. Probably instantaneous death. Whether it was a sharp or blunt instrument I can't tell – an ax can crush as well as cut, you know, and this guy's been here long enough that decomposition has obscured things."

I looked around the clearing. "Offhand," I said, "I don't see anything here he could have accidentally bashed himself with."

"Even falling straight forward, he couldn't have done that kind of damage by landing on something – and he didn't land on something."

"Homicide, then?"

The examiner nodded. "Has to be. I won't know details till I get results back, of course, but grossly I'd say someone beat his brains in, and left him here."

"Any blood under his head?" I asked. Cecelia gagged, and then turned and ran. She's a tough woman, but between the smell and the topic it had gotten to her. Only the smell bothered me – maybe it was working cattle for a year when I was young, pulling calves and finding dead cows and whatnot, but the mere sight or thought of a body never has bothered me. Without the Vicks, though, the stench would have lost me my lunch long ago.

The examiner was shaking his head as he did as close an examination of the torso as he could under the circumstances. "No blood at all that I can see. We'll pick up the litter, of course, and scrape the dirt underneath, but I don't think he died here."

"Is there any indication that this guy smoked?" I'd kept on calling the victim "he," and the examiner wasn't contradicting me, so I knew we indeed had a male body.

"I haven't found anything – certainly there aren't any cigarettes in his pockets," he said, tapping the shirt pockets as he spoke. It is possible to carry a pack elsewhere, but most smokers use the most convenient spot.

"Then probably I picked up someone else's lighter," I said, and considerred the scuffed trail I'd found. Suddenly it was looking more important. Of course it's a capital mistake to theorize in advance of the facts, as someone once said, but for now I'd figure that probably the murderer had dragged the body in that way. "I'll do some scouting tomorrow on a route that looks promising. There may be some samples for you from it."

"Where the doer dragged him in?"

I've never liked the term doer, but some law enforcement agencies use it for the person who "does" a crime. Sometimes the law uses the verb "to do" in odd ways – for instance, the grand jury instructions I'd learned while serving on one a few years back had spoken of people "doing an act." But I let that slide – police work has its jargon just like baking or flying jets. "Yeah, at least that's what I'm thinking right now."

Allen Mills turned around. "I think I've got one end of your trail over here."

"Is it safe to walk over?"

"Go around the edge," he said. "I haven't yet covered anything but the route to the body."

I walked around the edge of the clearing, and stopped beside Mills. I saw immediately what he was looking at. "Yeah, that's the same sort of thing I found out there." I turned to look over the clearing. Now that I was looking for it, something didn't look quite right about the litter between where I was, and the spot where the body was lying. I got down into a squat, and then onto my knees, and put my head right down on the ground, holding my hat in my hand. For this the light was perfect – low and slanting – and in the desert it would have picked up tracks like a spotlight.

Here all I could say was that there appeared to be an area where the leaves weren't uniform, a track leading from the edge of the clearing to the body. It was as though someone had dragged the body over to the log and chucked it over, and then brushed out the drag marks, leaving the leaves and twigs and whatnot subtly different from the undisturbed material on either side of the trail. I got back to my feet. "Y'all gonna check out the log?"

"Yes, as soon as they take the body away."

"Thought so," I said. "Pretty obvious."

Mills grinned. "Yes, sir, it is. I'm glad you're not trying to run my investigation."

"I'm the chief, not the expert. I'm just thinking out loud here."