Deep South (12 page)

"He's not coming to the scene?" Anna was appalled. "Dwight's getting on in years," Davidson explained. "He's seventy-eight, ma'am, had a birthday day before yesterday," the deputy put in.

"He doesn't get around like he used to," Davidson added. "And he keeps getting elected?" Anna asked. "Without the money he makes as a coroner, he'd be pretty bad off," Davidson said, as if that explained everything.

Anna had a lot to learn about social welfare in Mississippi. The deputv went into conference with the sheriff, and the natty ranger stepped up to Anna. He was compact and wiry, and his dark hair, shot with gray, fell over his forehead. A neatly trimmed, thoroughly grizzled beard covered his jaw. There was about him a puckish mischief that Anna suspected had allowed him to get away with murder most of his life. With a child's corpse at her feet, the hackneyed phrase jarred, and she said with more asperity than she'd intended, "Who are you?"

"Gunga Din at your service," he said, and clicked his heels together and bowed at the waist.

For a moment Anna was flummoxed and annoyed by the sensation, then she remembered. "The water boy. Steven Stilwell. Thank you. If the Rocky Springs water tastes as bad as it smells, I'm in your debt."

"Good. I like being owed." Because one couldn't look or keep one's thoughts elsewhere else for any length of time, they turned toward the body. "Not much of a welcome to Mississippi," Stilwell said. "Not much," Anna admitted.

"John Brown's on his way. It's about a three-hour drive from Tupelo. I can do it in two and a half." Anna nodded. One of the perks-or pitfalls-of being in law enforcement. It was easy to become a chronic speeder. Stilwell was in the next level of addiction: not only doing it but boasting of it. The only unacceptable level of the malady was boasting about it in the presence of civilians who were ticketed, and rightly so, when caught indulging. "We can't just leave the body lying here being eaten by insects while the chief ranger drives down from Timbuktu," Anna said. "Tupelo.y, To Anna they were one in the same but she forbore comment. She wondered whether to talk with the sheriff about the next step, defer to Stilwell, radio the chief ranger and ask him what to do or lust wade in and take charge. Much as she loathed it, given Thigpen and Dinkin's response to her arrival, the gender question was very much in the air.

Davidson seemed okay and Stilwell had done nothing to set her radar off, but the situation bad her second-guessing herself. She didn't like it.

Please yourself she beard her mother's voice. Then at least one person will be happy with your decision. "What's the usual protocol, Paul?" she asked. "Tag her and bag her," Randy Thigpen said. Anna'd forgotten he was there. She chose to forget again.

"We'll get her covered up," Paul Davidson replied. "Get her out to the parking lot so Dwight can give his stamp of approval."

"How do you want to transport?" Anna asked. "Ambulance? Are the autopsies done in Jackson or where?"

"Steven Hayne at Mississippi Mortuary in Rankin," Davidson said and added, "Have 'em send an ambulance, I guess. All Dwight's got is an old pickup he uses to haul wood. We've used it in a pinch, but it doesn't seem right today." Anna called dispatch for an ambulance, then radioed Chief Ranger Brown. He'd been instrumental in hiring her, but the call was more than just courtesy or toadying. Brown had talked to her half a dozen times during the interminable process of hiring and struck her as a fairminded man who knew his Job. From the scuttlebutt she'd picked up during phone chats with the secretary in personnel, he'd come up through the ranks from a GS-4 seasonal law enforcement ranger in Death Valley to the exalted position of chief, and not via the fast track with the Office of Personnel Management pulling the puppet strings.

John Brown was at mile marker 105 in Stilwell's district north of Jackson. Davidson suggested he meet up with them at the mortuary, but Brown wanted to see the crime scene. Anna put her radio away.

Sheriff Davidson, hat in hand, was standing over the sad little heap of rotting flesh that had so recently been a pretty girl going to her high school prom. Anna'd never seen a cop doing it before, but she could have sworn the sheriff was praying. For some reason it bothered her. To cover it, she said: "In the words of Ranger Thigpen, it's time to bag and tag." Unruffled by her harshness, he finished whatever silent communion he was in the midst of, then restored his hat.

As Anna watched to see that nothing of importance was dislodged, the body was lifted into a black plastic body bag the deputy had brought.

The rope, an ugly companion in death, was coiled into the bag with the child's remains. Everyone, Anna was sure, even Thigpen, was relieved when the zipper closed over her face.

Together the sheriff and his deputy lifted their burden. Davidson took it in his arms, cradling the body as carefully as if it were still able to feel human kindness. With Thigpen leading the way, the three of them left to meet the ambulance and the aging coroner at Rocky Springs.

"What's he, to do?" The question came from Steve Stilwell. Anna had forgotten about him. He leaned against a tree, hands in his pockets, a grass stem between his teeth. The sheaf of salt-and-pepper hair spilled over his forehead as if he'd recently been tumbled out of bed. He'd taken a tin camping cup from somewhere and filled it with water for Taco. Now the fickle beast lay with his great dripping jaws draped possessively over Stilwell's instep. "Ob, God," Anna said, suddenly weary. "My answer of choice would be a drink but I guess we go over the back trail, or what's left of it. See if we can turn up anything."

"I've got a bottle of single malt whiskey in my car," Stilwell said unexpectedly. "Strictly for medicinal purposes, naturally. I'll buy you a drink when we're through."

"You're on." Though she didn't care much for whiskey, she was beginning to warm up to the Ridgeland district ranger. "Trail" was a misnomer. The track back toward the campground that the others-and presumably the girl and her killer-had taken was just a way through woods as rugged and choked with decaying plant matter as the way Anna bad traversed on her search for the body.

Rotten soil laid its booby traps. Stilwell called it "rotten" and that's how it appeared. The actual biological or geological phenomenon was unknown to Anna. Large patches of the ground could and did give way when weight was put on them. The sensation was like postholding: having one's foot break through the frozen crust on top of a snowfield. Except with rotten soil, it was never clear just how far the fall was going to be.

"Hell of a country for equestrians," Anna said as she extricated herself from such a place, scraping her shoe full of dirt in the process. "They ride though. Horsey types can't help themselves.

There's an active group out of Vicksburg rides around here quite a bit," Stilwell told her.

To corroborate his point, they uncovered a bit of evidence in the form of dried road apples. They also found two of Thigpen's Marlboro Lights butts but very little else. Perhaps grasses were crushed, twigs snapped, leaves stomped into the ground-signs that would speak of recent passage-but only in books and in the eyes of the few existing trackers with a genius for it could the difference between today's pedestrians and those of the night before be told.

The lack of the unique mark the girl's rhinestone sandals would have left behind provided one scrap of information. Unless she'd come from another direction, she'd not walked but been carried to the place where she was found. Anna's best guess was that she was dead or unconscious during the trip. Otherwise there would surely have been some marks of a struggle on the body.

After thirty minutes of this largely fruitless search, Anna and Steve came to a trench. The sides were steep and twenty or thirty feet high, the bottom flat. It was six or seven yards bank to bank at the narrowest point and as much as twenty where the sides had been eroded back over the years. A foot path wandered down the center. "This is it?" Anna asked.

"You've got about seven miles of it all told," Stilwell said. "In bits and pieces. But this is a section of the Old Trace. Hard to believe it was cut so deep with anything less than a bulldozer, isn't it?" Considering the havoc the passing of Thigpen, the sheriff and the deputy had caused, Anna believed it. Where they'd first climbed, then, burdened with the corpse, descended, the bank was deeply scored and broken at the lip. Looking up and down this short stretch of history, Anna saw more evidence of horseback riders, great gouts of soil where destructive hooves had been forced up the inclines. She started a new list in her head: Things That Would Be Different from Now On.

Along the bottom of the banks more damage had been done, fresh digging.

"Armadillos," Stilwell informed her when she asked about it. "They have noses like army spoons. One of 'em can root up half an acre if the grub hunting is good."

"Ali," she said. The park being their home, the armadillos could stay. The horse riders would have to be rerouted onto less sensitive terrain.

Anna added to the damage by scrambling down the bank on fanny, heels and hands. She and Steve searched the floor of the Old Trace for forty yards in each direction. None of the skidding slides down the bank appeared to have been made recently. The edges of the tracks were rounded, dried and crumbling. Either the murderer entered precisely where Thigpen bad obliterated all possibility of finding tracks or he had not entered the woods from the sunken Trace. Anna figured it was the former. If 'the murder had occurred at or near the campground, or even on the new, paved Natchez Trace where it ran by Rocky, this would have been the most direct route to where the girl was found. At night, in the woods, carrying a hundred pounds of dead weight, one would tend not to take the scenic route.

The ruination of the back trail was a severe 'loss. Anna thought about that for a while.

Randy Thigpen had destroyed evidence, tried to contaminate the crime scene with ashes and butts, and attempted to lead Sheriff Davidson astray by misinterpreting the observations Anna was making. "What do you know about Randy Thigpen?" she asked abruptly as they walked back to Rocky, still looking but no longer with any expectation of finding.

"Well..." Steve thought for a moment, then smiled, his small teeth glittering in his beard. "I know I'm really, really glad he's yours and not mine."

"How so?"

"In the four months I was acting district ranger down here-in addition, I might add, to my heavy load of responsibilities in Ridgeland-" Anna smiled to show she was a fun kind of gal. "-Randy went on disability for a soft tissue injury to the neck that can't be medically proved or disproved. Interfered with his ability to draw his weapon was the deal.

Then sued on grounds of age discrimination to get back on patrol when it turned out John wasn't going to give him an indefinite vacation but merely a change of duties where the gun arm was not a factor. What else?

Good with machinery.

Lots of local contacts. Good at dealing with lessees. Fries catfish in some kind of batter that Chez Paul would die for. Married to a nice little woman from Crystal Springs who he's been philandering on with a gal in Bovina for years." Any connection with the Poseys?" Walking just ahead of Anna through an infestation of kudzu that smelled disconcertingly like grape Nehi, Stilwell said: "He'd've had contact with the Poseys when renewing their lease, I guess. Other than that I can't say. Why? Hoping to pin a bit of homicide on him?" Anna laughed.

"It crossed my mind." She wasn't precisely compiling a list of suspects, but Thigpen was an irresistible target. Like a needle to True North, her suspicions turned to sexists and sloths.

Wishful thinking. Most sexists and sloths lacked the intellectual acuity or energy to commit crimes of much intricacy.

Lost in thought, Anna hadn't realized she was no longer walking till Stilwell's voice cut through the fog. "You don't want to stop here," he warned.

The possibility of danger brought her back into the three dimensional world. "Why not?" Automatically her eyes and cars probed for predators.

Nothing but deep, fragrant, leafy vines in every direction, so thick she couldn't see the path at her feet and so aggressive they'd climbed a dozen trees, smothered them till dead and now cloaked the lifeless limbs with a parody of the original foliage. So dense six hundred fifty water moccasins could be lounging on their snaky little bellies within inches of her toes and she'd never know it till she waded into the middle of them.

"Why not?" she repeated with more urgency. "You stand still too long in this stuff and it'll grow right up your leg. Who knows which of those green shapes were once trees and which were slow hikers. Kudzu grows up to eighteen inches a day in the summer." Stilwell combed his hair back off his face with his fingers.

The movement was provocative but totally ingrained, as if twenty-five years ago he'd taken to doing it because it was sexy and somewhere along the line it had become habit.

Anna laughed and began moving. The idea of snakes didn't stray too far from mind. Most snakes, deadly or not, were beautiful animals.

Not so the cottonmouth. Not to Anna's way of thinking. They were fat, like garden slugs, the color of mud and so nearsighted it made them mean.

Taco, piously leashed in honor of the chief ranger's impending arrival, minced along at her heels as if the same thing was on his mind.

Stepping where Stilwell stepped, Anna was haunted by the South.

Things were out of whack. The land refused to show you its skeleton.