Blackbird. Tom Wright
new applicants, and she and I had a history.
Mouncey squinted as she took another look at the face. ‘Believe you right, Lou,’ she said. ‘Look like some hard miles on her since then.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Especially the last few.’
‘Be damned,’ Wayne said, squinting up at the empty eyes.
Lying in the weeds not far from the base of the tree I saw a pair of expensive-looking alligator shoes which, by reason of living mostly with women all my life, I knew were the kind called pumps. Bloody earlobes and grooves around three of the curled fingers meant the victim must have been wearing jewellery, which the killer had apparently taken while she was still alive. The hands themselves were fairly slender and long-fingered with what looked like a clear lacquer covering the well-manicured nails.
Something about this thought caught at me. I stepped in for a closer look at the hands, seeing no significant injuries anywhere other than the wrists. I thought about the hundreds – maybe thousands – of crucifixes and images of Jesus on the cross that I’d seen in my life, filing the question away for later.
‘Now look here,’ Wayne said, gloving up again. He reached up and placed one thumb against the corpse’s forehead to push the head upward and back, and with the other prised open the jaw to reveal a mass of bloody flesh and clotted, curly hair.
I shone my pocket flashlight into the cavity. ‘What is this?’ I said. ‘Doesn’t look like any tongue I ever saw.’
‘It ain’t, Lou,’ he said. ‘Matter of fact, I don’t think her tongue’s even in there.’
I turned to look at him.
‘Then where it at?’ Mouncey asked.
‘Question of the hour,’ Wayne said. ‘First thing we did was grid the area out about fifty yards around the site and all the way down to the road and the tracks over there, but no luck so far. We’ll keep opening up the circle if we don’t find it.’
‘So,’ I said. ‘What’s this in her mouth?’
Wayne cleared his throat. A quick glance at Mouncey. ‘Believe that’d be her snatch, Lou,’ he said.
‘Law,’ said Mouncey, bending down for a look at the bloodied groin. ‘Wait by the river long enough, e’thing in the world gone float by.’ She straightened up and looked at me. ‘How you figure it, Lou? We lookin’ for Romans or what?’
Wayne gave her a strange look, then turned back to me, saying, ‘There was some camouflage netting wrapped around her when we got here. That’s it in the evidence bag over there.’
Keeping to the grass tufts as best I could, I excuse-me’d my way around the tree through the cops and EMTs, the pine needles, dead leaves and bracken looking mostly undisturbed behind the tree, at least out to a distance of a yard or two.
Joining Wayne and M again, I looked closely at the wrists and the spikes that had been driven through them. The heads of the big nails showed an impressed waffle pattern.
I said, ‘What leaves a mark like this?’
‘Framing hammer,’ Wayne said. ‘Most likely a California.’
I glanced at him.
‘Daddy was a carpenter,’ he said.
Working at the horse farm as a kid, I thought I’d swung every kind of hammer there was. I knew about framing hammers, but the idea of individual state models was new to me.
I said, ‘What makes it a California?’
‘Longer handle, straighter claws. Wider face with checkering, like you see there.’
‘And she was alive when she was hung up here,’ I said, leaning in and shining my light on the sleepy-looking eyes, seeing no sign of petechial haemorrhaging. The visible skin of her face, hands, belly and upper thighs was pale as boiled pork, but the lower legs and especially the feet had darkened to a plum colour. It looked to me as if she had died with enough blood left to keep her alive at least a while longer. ‘How cold did it get last night?’
‘Right around freezing, per the Weather Service guy. That’d be airport temps, which I’d guesstimate might run a degree or two higher in a spot like this, with all these conifers around.’
I said, ‘Time of death?’
‘Full livor with coag,’ he said. ‘Max rigor by the time we got here. Say at least four hours ago, probably not over twelve. Best I can do for now.’
Meaning she was probably still alive when the weather front came through. I tried to imagine dying like this, in the cold rain with blue-white lightning strobing the sky and thunder shaking the earth.
‘So, what the hell was this about?’ I said.
Wayne cleared his throat again. ‘Been hoping you’d tell me,’ he said. ‘All I know is, something’s not right here, Lou.’
‘That true,’ observed Mouncey. ‘Lady got dead all over her.’
‘That’s not what I mean,’ Wayne said.
‘Then what do you mean?’
‘I mean this just ain’t natural.’
Mouncey snorted again, moving up for a closer view of the face, narrowing her eyes. ‘Maybe them Romans figure she a Saviour or something.’
Dropping the flashlight back into my pocket, I looked at Wayne.
‘Uh, well, okay,’ he said. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but the whole show took a hell of a lot of figurin’ aforethought, and nobody does something like this for a pair of earrings.’ He removed his bifocals and shook off the beads of rain. ‘Which’d knock out robbery and random.’ Back on with the glasses. ‘Leavin’ us with personal and premeditated. No immediately lethal wounds that meet the eye. Anybody’s guess what the actual COD’s gonna turn out to be.’
‘How many doers are we thinking?’ I said.
‘Well, the beam’s six feet long,’ Wayne said. ‘It and the woman together are gonna weigh a little south of two hundred pounds. She was bound to be thrashing to beat hell on top of that – no one guy’s gonna manage it. Even two’d be a stretch.’
Mouncey folded a stick of Doublemint into her mouth.
‘And while we’re amazin’ ourselves,’ said Wayne, ‘there’s this.’ He produced a little zip-lock evidence sleeve containing what looked at first like an irregularly shaped silver button a half-inch or so in diameter but actually turned out to be a crudely struck, heavily tarnished coin with some kind of profile on one side and a standing figure on the other. Taking it from Wayne’s hand, I felt an odd heat through the clear plastic.
‘How’d it get so warm?’ I asked, thinking Wayne was right; there was an eerie wrongness here, one that somehow wouldn’t let itself be pinned down.
Wayne frowned. ‘Didn’t feel warm to me.’
Mouncey touched the coin with her fingertips. ‘Feel like pocket temperature, Lou.’
I shook my head. Maybe I had a fever or something. Already knowing the answer, I said, ‘What kind of coin does this look like to you, Wayne?’
‘Had to guess, I’d say Roman.’
One of Mouncey’s eyebrows went up.
Wayne shrugged, looking a little embarrassed, the way he always did when confronted by something beyond his rational understanding.
‘“The footprints of a gigantic hound”,’ I said.
‘Huh?’ said Wayne. Mouncey stared at me.
‘My grandmother said that sometimes. It’s from Sherlock Holmes – means something strange that you can’t explain.’ I held the coin up to the light. ‘Doesn’t look like this