In the Night Season (17 page)

“Aw, Christ,” Ross said.

Frank Bell walked to the window, put his hands high on the frame, and stared out.

“Christ,” Ross said again. “I hope not.”

Shaw folded the paper and put it in his shirt pocket.

“Looks like they broke in,” Ross said. “Bishop’s tied up.”

There hadn’t been a homicide in this county of Virginia for almost five years, and that had been the result of a fistfight in the old Beverly Tavern, something arising out of the passions of the moment.

“Who’s at the scene?” Shaw asked.

“A state trooper called it in. I don’t know any more than that. I’ve already called the officer of the court for you.”

“Hell,” Frank Bell said. “What in God’s name is happening?”

“I think I’m going to try to file it as a violation of Bishop’s civil rights.”

“You want the FBI?” Shaw said.

“I think so, yeah.”

“Okay.” He turned to Frank Bell. “Let’s go.”

Most of the land beyond the south fork of Steel Run Creek had been farm country for generations—wide green fields with soft slopes
leading into the foothills of the Blue Ridge. Family farms, mostly, some of them going back to the eighteenth century. The sale of the land north of the creek to developers had begun when the pressures of the expanding city began—and there were many people, like Philip Shaw and his wife, who were neither farmers nor commuters to the city. In the years since Vietnam, the county’s most important—its only—industry was house building and construction.

Riding along in the patrol car with Bell, Shaw looked at the hills, brown with widely separated patches of dirty snow on them and bordered by stands of naked trees; there was a dry-brush look to the trees, through which houses were visible now and then. All this country was up for sale. The farmers were leaving the land. But there were no takers. Near Steel Run Creek, they saw several half-finished houses and a few finished ones, empty, no one working on them. They belonged to the banks now. Kids used them for games and for hiding from their parents. There had been incidents: in the summer a girl had been cornered in one of the houses and harassed by two boys from the high school, one of whom was a state all-star in football and the stepson of a prominent doctor. No sexual assault had occurred, but her clothes were torn, and she pressed charges, then—perhaps not inexplicably, though she offered no reasons for doing so—dropped them. Last month, several boys had ignited a fire in the basement of the same unoccupied house; they had put the fire out, or so they thought, but smoldering ashes had set the thing going again, and in the subsequent blaze the house and several old trees surrounding it burned.

“I’ve only had two homicides in the sixteen years I’ve been here,” Shaw said. “Both were pretty straightforward. Involuntary manslaughter, one of them. And voluntary the other. Both of them the results of altercations. And the guys responsible stood around and waited to be arrested. Never had a cold-blooded one yet.”

“Neither me,” said Bell, who had grown up in Louisiana, had Cajun relatives on his mother’s side, and still occasionally slipped into the patois. “That’s why I didn’t want city work.”

“I guess it was only a matter of time.”

“Law of averages,” said Bell. “Been a pretty strange couple days. Those cattle yesterday and now this. Pretty screwy.”

The Steel Run Creek housing development took up much of what had once been Shaw’s grandfather’s farm. The grandfather had sold it before Shaw was born. Now the son of an army general had sold much of it to Argosy Development Corporation. By arrangement with the general’s son, Shaw used to hunt here, in these woods and hills; up into the deep greenery around Darkness Lake. And when he had lived in one of the houses of the development—the one on the corner as they turned, in fact—he had spent a lot of time walking back in among the trees. Now they took the road up, winding to the steepest part of the hill and on past the open field on one side and the heavy woods on the other. The road climbed again, and they were well past the houses, out of the shadows of the trees, surrounded by the wide field of one end of the Bishop Farm. There was a house in the middle of this field, three acres carved out of the property—a white clapboard house, the old place once lived in and owned by Shaw’s grandfather.

“Id’n that—” Frank Bell began.

“Yep,” Shaw said.

“They fixed it up real nice—looks like.”

“That’s that contractor who died last year in that bus crash on twenty-nine.”

“I remember.” Bell looked at the house as they went by.

“Young guy, too. With a wife and kid.”

“Lord.”

The Bishop farmhouse was only another field away, partially obscured by the rising ground between the two tracts of land and bordered by tall, skinny pines. They pulled into the driveway behind the two state cars and the truck with Bishop’s name on the door.

“Did you know this guy was pretty well-thought-of around here?” Bell said as they got out of the car.

“Never heard his name until he came to see me about the obscene flyers somebody put in his mailbox.”

A state trooper emerged from the front door and stepped to the edge of the porch to meet them. He was ghost-pale. “I seen accidents,” he said. “Bad ones. And a beating or two, you know?” He shook his head.

He had put the call in for help, and two other officers were securing the scene. The county medical examiner was on his way. Frank Bell, putting in the call, had been told that the examiner had already been notified.

“You touch anything?” Shaw asked the trooper, who kept shaking his head.

“Looks like the son of a bitch wanted to play some kind of game with him. The bulb’s broken out of the hall light upstairs, and all of them are out of the lamps up there—in every room. The record player’s on. I left it all exactly the way I found it.”

Shaw went on into the house, the living room. He saw through to the kitchen, the broken pane in the back door.

“What’s your name?” Shaw asked the trooper at his side.

“Bryan.”

“No, your last name.”

“That’s it, sir. Bo Bryan.”

Shaw followed him up the stairs, noting that there were bloodstains on the floor, that the phone was there, as if thrown, and there were broken pieces of lightbulb strewn down the hallway. The music was still playing. Shaw put latex gloves on, then lifted the record arm and set it down. On the table was a piece of paper, one of the Virginia Front’s hate messages. He pointed at it. “See this, Frank?”

Bell said. “Yeah.”

The room seemed almost supernaturally quiet now. The others were waiting for him to begin. He stepped carefully over to the body, scrunched down, and looked at the face. Something heavy dropped down into him, and for an instant he couldn’t get his bearings, almost toppled over. The cord running from the head to the ankles was thin, the kind that people used to string clotheslines. It looked as though a sharp blade had simply been drawn across the throat. One motion. An execution. “Do we have the weapon?”

“Not so far, no.”

“Look like anything’s missing?”

“House seems fairly undisturbed—except for the kitchen door and the lightbulb in the hall, and like I said all the lamps have the
bulbs out of them. There’s a half-glass of beer on the end table in the living room.”

Shaw took a breath and tried not to shiver. He felt the others watching him, and for a bad few seconds his mind went blank. The quiet was like a substance pressing against his face. Leaning in, he traced without touching it the line of the cut. “Looks like a knife blade. Serrated. The flesh is torn.” He took a breath and gingerly put his gloved hands under the body, at the chest. “Fairly advanced lividity.” He moved the fingers of the hand.

“Twelve hours?” Bell said.

“Maybe more. Hell, maybe less.”

Bell sighed. “Lord, lord.”

Shaw pushed one eyelid farther back, exposing the blackening sclera, then closed it slightly.

“Jesus Christ,” the trooper said, putting a hand on the frame of the door.

“As you know, we don’t want to touch anything,” Shaw said, without turning to look at him.

“God, I’m sorry.”

He moved back a little and observed the pattern of bloodstains. “Arterial spray on the floor and the wall,” he said. He was gaining control of himself now, burying his horror in the intricacies of procedure. Beyond the body, near the love seat, he saw streaks in the blood, and there were odd tracks of it along the baseboard. “Look here,” he said to Bell, pointing at one of the brownish-black smears on the baseboard.

“What do you make of it?”

“Looks like part of a footprint. Tread from a tennis shoe, maybe?” With his hand held in the air, he traced a line from this mark to an imprint in the blood. “And this looks like it could be the fold of a shirt.”

“Somebody—”

“There’s another mark over here.” He pointed to the left of the first mark—perhaps two feet away. Then he stood and went out in the hall and bent down to look at those splotches. “It’s the same. I’d bet on it.” He went back into the room, Bell and Bryan following.

“He hid here?” Bell said.

“Why?” Shaw wanted to know. “I mean it’s blood—so the killing’s done. Somebody come in on him, maybe?”

The others were silent.

“Well, I guess we’ll find out, soon enough.” He pointed to a place next to the body. “Cat print?”

Bell leaned down to look at it. “Cat or maybe a little dog.”

“There’s a bunch of cats around the place,” Bryan said. “I saw them when I pulled in.”

“They keep the rodents at bay,” said Shaw.

“Speechless witnesses,” Bryan said.

Shaw glanced at him, then walked to the bureau. An ashtray with cigarettes in it was there, along with a butane lighter. “Could be they did some talking or waiting before things got drastic. Or this could be the victim’s. They walked in on him while he was listening to music, smoking a cigarette.”

Bell was writing everything down in his pad.

“No, hell. Two brands of cigarettes in the ashtray.”

“Maybe there was two of them,” said Bell.

“I don’t understand the situation downstairs,” Bryan said. “The drawers being open like that and the broken window in the kitchen door.” He pointed at the stain on the baseboard. “Blood tracks just like those, down in the kitchen and the hallway and on the stairs, too.”

“Any full prints?”

“Smears. It looks like a—well, like a kid’s shoe.”

“Show me.”

Bryan led him out into the hall, to the stairs. There was one smear that looked to be the whole left part of a shoe print.

“That’s a small shoe. What—an eight, say?” Shaw put his own shoe next to it, an inch away. “I wear a ten.”

“I’d say that’s at least three sizes smaller,” Bell said.

“Who discovered the body?”

“Come with me.” Bryan started down the stairs.

“Wait a minute,” Shaw said. He walked over to the telephone answering machine on the hall table and pressed the playback but
ton. A soft baritone voice came: “I’m not here. Please leave a message. Good-bye.” There was a hang-up and then another. And then a female voice, faintly distressed or irritated, tinged with exasperation and weariness. “Ed? Oh, where is everyone? Is Jason with you? I can’t get home before six-thirty or seven.” The line clicked; the little tape ran back to the beginning.

He opened the machine, took the tape out, and put it in a small plastic bag he had drawn from his pocket. He set this down next to the phone. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Bryan led him down the stairs and through an arched doorway, past the outside door, on into the little den where the TV was. A woman sat on the sofa there, her hands resting on her thighs, her face a perfect expressionless mask—lovely features, lovely blond hair, a bluish cast to the skin, eyes dark blue as a clear winter sky. Shaw discerned that she was scarcely holding on.

“Hello,” she said. He heard a jittery energy in the voice. She was fixed, with her panic, looking from one to the other of the men and seeing only what she had stumbled onto less than an hour ago. For her, life would now be colored by this—her perceptions would continually give off the sense of the proximity of harm, and it would go on that way for months or years, and even if time dulled the edges of it, she would never really find the self she had been before. He felt a kinship with her, and he thought of all those who had suffered the world’s unrecoverable shocks, including the ones who had walked into the scenes of violence and mayhem, as a group of initiated people, a growing army of the psychologically scarred. Perhaps the country’s fascination with violence was explicable in terms other than its famous appetite for it—perhaps people so wounded and marked by it wanted to see it cosmeticized on their TV screens as a way of exorcising the ghost. His own daughter stood in his mind for an instant, that scared and scarred girl, going through the years of her father’s grief and now the separation of her parents—having already spent unhappily long periods of her babyhood in the company of aunts and uncles, or family friends, while one or the other or both of her parents foundered in an alcoholic haze—overly worried about herself and how she appeared to them, how she seemed
in their eyes, inwardly convinced that she had done something to cause all the trouble and believing that the world was breaking down. His heart hurt. For a second it was as if this woman were that girl in some future circumstance.

He sat down near her, almost reached over and touched her arm. Then he looked at Bell and the trooper. “Could we get some coffee or milk or something—some tea maybe?”

“There’s stuff moved around in the kitchen,” Bryan said. “Drawers open.”

“Yeah,” Bell said to him. “We weren’t talking about touching anything in the kitchen. There’s a Seven-Eleven nearby, isn’t there?”

“A Country Store,” Bryan said.

Shaw turned to the woman. “Would you like something?”

“No, thank you.”

“A Danish, or a glass of milk?”

“A glass of milk,” she said. “Thank you.”

Shaw signaled to Bryan.

“I’ll go with him,” Frank said.

Shaw nodded. When he turned to the woman again, he saw that she had begun to shake. Someone had put an afghan over her shoulders, and she pulled it around herself.