Deep South (10 page)

The wooded area was small enough she felt secure that neither of them could become lost. "I'll radio Sheriff Davidson in fifteen or twenty minutes and let him know where we are. If he thinks it's worthwhile, he can join us," she finished. "There's a problem with that," Thigpen said.

He'd stayed in his car. The left seat was a good two inches lower than the right where his faithful attendance had broken down the springs.

"That being?" Anna hurried him along.

"I couldn't find any batteries that were charged up. I got your radio, but it's deader than a doornail."

"That's okay," Anna said, needing to be in the woods. "I'll take yours.

Frank-the maintenance guy-is around here somewhere. Ask him to lend you his for the duration." Short of flat-out insubordination, Thigpen had little choice. With ill grace, he handed over his radio. Anna thought of taking his carrying case as well, but watching him take off his belt to unthread it was too gruesome to contemplate.

She collected Taco, not because he was a trained search-and-rescue animal but because he dearly loved treats. Since he'd considered the bloody scarf the most fabulous of finds, he just might remember and return to the source of the bounty. It was a long shot, but since the dog's services could be bad for a pat on the bead, there was nothing to lose.

The day bad warmed rapidly and, down in the trees, there was not a hope of a breeze. Leaves were as still as if painted on. Moisture breathed from the ground, from the dense greenery. Moving at an easy jog, Anna was drenched in sweat before she'd traversed the manicured trail between the parking lot and the church.

By the time she returned to her makeshift cairn at the top of the ragged embankment, the legs of her trousers were sticking to her thighs at every step. After one last meal at her expense, flying ins ccts the size of pinheads were drowning in the sweat at her temples. She was careful not to think of the high desert, the open spaces and crisp dry winds.

Taco was leashed. Anna loosed him to let him make his own way down the treacherous bank, then followed, clinging to roots and keeping her fanny close to the dirt so any fall would be short-lived.

Uncomfortable in the role of a female impersonator, the dog didn't run off Lassie-like to help in the search but seemed content to stay at Anna's heels. For a quarter of an hour, she picked her way through forest debris, down sudden gullies lined with soil that collapsed when she stepped on it. The whole state seemed to be rotting away, crumbling into whatever hell lay below the surface of the land.

The cycle of life was immediate in Mississippi. In the high deserts, dust-to-dust and ashes-to-asbes was the way of things. The fallenplants, animals, people-became seared, desiccated, purified, reduced to fine and molecules that were swept away, fed to the hills. With the rain's clear magic they became spring's new growth.

Not so here. There was no phoenix-from-the-ashes mystery. Here the downed became fodder for new life before the body had grown cold.

Dead trees were rife with growth springing from the carcass before their own leaves had fallen. Older deadwood lay beneath a carpet of burgeoning life so thick the logs were merely a mound beneath. And everything was green; the living and the dead carpeted with moss.

Last year's leaves were spiked through with this year's grasses growing toward vines that dropped from overhead. In turn, the vines were misted with Spanish moss.

The bones of the earth did not show through: no rocky ridges, no escarpments. And the land did not lie sensibly, mountains to foothills to plains with water cutting always downhill. The forested ground behind Rocky looked as if it had been crumpled by a giant hand and thrown down.

Ravines, going nowhere, intersected then dead-ended. Ragged hillocks furred with growth pushed up without rhyme or reason.

Water did not carve the land in gravity's rational manner as it did in the West, but sculpted at random as the winds of southern Utah sculpted the mountains.

Finally Taco began to bark and darted away from the narrow and fading deer trail they'd been following. Knowing be might be pursuing nothing more interesting than a panicked squirrel, Anna went after him. She found him in a vine-tangled clearing.

He'd located the source of his treat.

"Taco!" she yelled. "Get away from it." Cowed by her tone, he backed off. "Holy shit," Anna breathed and, shrugging out of her pack, she dug out the radio.

"Five-seven-nine, five-eight-zero," she said into the mike.

Thigpen answered immediately and for that she was grateful. "Where are you?" she demanded. The radio clicked as if he fingered his mike button before answering. "Down by the creek," came the reply Behind his words Anna could hear "The Girl from lpanema" playing. The son of a bitch hadn't even left his car. He was still squatting in the parking lot outside the ranger station. "Stand by," she said. Having changing frequencies, she put in a call to Sheriff Paul Davidson. "Davidson," came back quickly followed by, "My twenty is about a mile north of Rocky Springs." An efficient man. What his location was would have been her next question. "I think I've found your missing girl," Anna said.

She told him to meet Thigpen at Rocky and gave him directions from the graveyard. There was probably a quicker way to get to where she was, but not knowing the lay of the land, she wasn't going to risk experimentation.

After tying Taco well away from the scene, ignoring his injured innocence at having been restrained through no fault of his own, she made three more calls: one to Randv Thigpen to bring an evidence collection kit, one to headquarters in what rangers liked to know when dead bodies appeared in their parks-and the last to Steve Stilwell, the district ranger nearest her as the crow flies. She was going to need all the help she could get. This pathetic corpse had the earmarks of a political bomb. When it went off, she didn't want to be alone, the sacrificial maiden. The image was too apt, and she felt the weight of thirty years of the women's movement settle on her shoulders.

Sitting with her back to a tree trunk, Anna waited. But for the popliteal artery behind an exposed knee and the girl's wrist, Anna'd touched nothing. There'd been no pulse, the flesh cool with the unreal feel of death. Rigor had gone off. The child had been dead more than twelve hours.

Panic rummaged around Anna's insides. A stranger in a strange land, new to a job where she was not welcome. Reality-control-was trying to slip away. It alarmed her how anxious she was for Sheriff Davidson to show up and take command. Only that wouldn't do. Not now.

Now she was a district ranger; she was in charge. How she handled this would set the tone for her entire stay on the Natchez Trace.

Lonely lies the head that wears the crown, the words came unbidden to mind. The quote was wrong, she knew that, and she had no idea what it was from. Zach would have known. Loneliness swept over her in a wave that made her weak. Someone to share with. God. It had been a long time.

Zach was an actor

"Must have been Shakespeare," she said aloud to dispel the awfulness. Taco was unmoved.

Concurrent jurisdiction, she remembered. Law enforcement on the Natchez Trace was shared with the local constabulary. Some comfort in that.

"The timing sucks," she said.

To stay in her own skin, she began to do her job. Without moving, she took stock of what she could see. One thing at a time. She could handle that.

Anna'd seen dead bodies before. A baker's dozen or so who'd been taken out by automobiles, falls, fires and, once, a flash flood.

She'd even seen corpses dispatched by human violence-not a lot, not like a "real" cop in a city. For the most part, parks were peaceful places, marauding raccoons and bad sunburns the staple of the crime-fighting units. Bodies didn't show up on every shift. But she'd crossed paths with a handful. Nothing like this, though. This made her sick and angry and scared. She wondered, without looking forward to it, what they'd find when the noose was untied and the sheet removed. There was no telling what the girl had died of but it was clear there'd been bead injury The cloth covering her face was drenched in blood, black now, like the flies that feasted on it. "Sort it out," she told herself.

"Sort it out." She began her notes, unaware that her left hand was clamped firmly in the familiar warmth of the dog's fur.

The body was in a wide space between the trees, not properly a clearing, but breathing space. Fallen logs interlocked with the living forest on two sides, forming a tiny natural amphitheater.

The ground was green with vines and a low-growing plant thick with small, white, star-shaped blossoms. A delicate, sweet fragrance rose from somewhere, slightly masking the cloying smell of dead and fly-blown meat. "Okay," she said to Taco just because talking to someone, even a dog, made her feel less like a neutron lost in the far reaches of space.

"What's here? Two legs, encased in nylon-pantyhose-obviously belonging to a young girl. From what I can see, the hose is undamaged. Sandals." The shoes were so like those worn by Heather Barnes, Anna's fragmented mind flashed on innumerable phone calls she and Sylvia bad exchanged in high school. What are you going to wear? Heaven forbid one should be so unique as to cause untoward comment. The teenage struggle to fit in yet be special at the same time. Maybe Heather and Daniel] e-Dann 1-had had like conversations. Times changed. People didn't.

Legs were exposed to the thigh. A border of black showed below the sheet. Probably Danielle-if this was Danielle-wore a micro mini dress like the one Heather had on when she drank herself insensible. Above the blackness was the creepiest part, if the murder of a child could be broken down into degrees of creepiness: a white sheet, with holes cut out where the eyes might be, had been draped over the corpse's head. The eyeholes, askew, showed only a nose and the flesh of one cheek. The sheet fell to Just below the girl's crotch and the hem of her numdress.

Minidress, Anna thought, relevant of nothing. Did kids call them that anymore? "Focus, Taco," she admonished the unoffending hound. "Okay. A noose tied around the neck on the outside of the sheet. Heavy yellow line, nylon or plastic, like the kind used to moor boats." It was as if the killer had intended to bang the girl but had been interrupted in the process. Who had added the sheet? In the South-in all of Americaa sheet with eye holes was the symbol of the Ku Klux Klan. Had the girl been wearing it and thus was killed? Or had the killer put it on to make a point? The frail-looking legs, not broken but sprawled in the ungraceful attitude of death, belonged to a white girl, a Caucasian.

Did the Klan bang its own? Was there still an active Klan in Mississippi?

Anna wished someone would come. Sheriff Paul Davidson, even the wretched Thigpen, would be a relief. Davidson would know she'd found a body. Once he arrived, the machinery of investigation would follow: deputies, coroners, photographers. At least she assumed that's how it would go.

She'd never worked with Mississippi law enforcement. Sheriffs were elected, not necessarily brought up through the ranks. Good, bad or indifferent, though, people would show up. Probably great heavy-footed sods. She'd called Thigpen herself. District Ranger Stilwell was on his way, and Chief Ranger Brown. Soon the place would be a zoo.

With a sense of duty and with time running out, Anna shook off her self-pity and stood, careful to keep her feet in one place lest she prove to be a heavy-footed sod herself.

Mississippi was good at covering her sins-and her scars. The weave of plant and insect life didn't provide a surface where the casual detective would easily find a clue, be it a button or a burned-out match. But given the crude violence of the girl's attack, perhaps Anna was not dealing with a murderer of great subtlety and stealth.

Focusing eyes and mind, she studied the miniature glade. It was slightly sunken, as if a giant had pressed his thumb into the earth. The sheet-covered girl lay in the middle of the depression.

Her legs sprawled to the east and her head-Anna dearly hoped there was a head inside the noose-tied sheet-to the west. Weeds and vines gave nothing up. To the eastern edge of the sunken area, maybe a yard from the patent leather shod feet, was a thigb-high fallen log, covered with plate-sized mushrooms that jutted out from the sides.

A swath cut through them where someone had scraped a boot or dragged something over the log.

Staying to the edge of the scene and studying each step before she took it, Anna worked her way around to the far side of the rotting timber.

Bark on the log's top, soft from decay, had been crushed.

Either the child had been found here or chased here and murdered, or she'd been carried here and dumped after she was dead. The sheet she was wearing, the noose tight around her neck, suggested an aborted hanging.

Without more information, it was impossible to tell if the girl had dressed herself as KKK-or Casper the Friendly Ghost-and been killed for it, or if her killer had put the drape on her, attempted to hang her, when she ran and was clubbed down. "Don't speculate," Anna told herself, aware of the danger of falling in love with a theory to the exclusion of the facts.

Standing with her back to the dead girl, she looked in the direction that she and her killer must have come from. The murdered girl wore square-heeded sandals, as easy to follow as Heather's. Despite the creeping river of life that covered the ground, if she'd come this way on her own two legs, Anna would soon know it.