Strawman's Hammock (10 page)

“Well,” he said, studying Barrett. “I guess we better call the sheriff.”

*   *   *

It took an hour and a half to get Sheriff Sessions to the scene. The Jeep's radio had not proved reliable, forcing Jarold to borrow Barrett's cell phone. “It's all right.” Barrett handed the phone over graciously. “Happens to us all the time.” The sheriff would have to be shown the way in, of course, which meant that the warden had to meet Lou Sessions at some mutually known location and then guide him into Strawman's Hammock.

“How 'bout Linton Loyd's deer camp?” Jarold spoke into the phone and Barrett quickly sliced his hand across his throat.

“Belay that suggestion,” Jarold recanted. “I can do better than the Loyd camp. Tell you what. Just go to the boat ramp at Roy's.… Roy's, that's right. I'll meet you there.… What's that?”

Barrett saw Jarold nod to the sheriff's rejoinder.

“Yes, sir.… Right, Sheriff.… No, he's here, you wanta talk to him?”

Jarold extended the phone. “Sheriff like to speak with you, Bear.”

Barrett took the cell phone. “Agent Raines.”

“Goddammit, what are you doin' investigatin' homicides in my county?”

“I wasn't, Lou. I was checking out the migrants' camps. This thing here came because of the warden's sharp eyes, and I think we oughta be glad he's got 'em. Otherwise I don't know how long it'd have been 'til—”

“Kiss my ass, Bear. People don't die in my county without me knowin' about it.”

“Didn't imply that they could, Sheriff. But what would you have us do? Walk away?”

“Goddamn right! Walk away is
exactly
what you should of done.”

“There could have been a victim still alive in there, Sheriff!” Barrett stared into the receiver of his phone. “There could have been a perpetrator, for God's sake.”

“There could have been lots of things. You should have called.”

“I did call, Sheriff. I proceeded under exigent circumstances—”

“Exigent, my ass!”

Barrett took a deep breath. “You're gonna need some forensics out here.”

“I don't need you to tell me what I need.”

“Do you even care what you've
got,
Lou? Because I can tell you, you've got what appears to be an elaborately staged homicide. You've got a dead dog that I'm betting belongs to Rolly Slade. You've got blood and guts all over the shack, I'm guessing at least a week old. Now I can get you an FDLE mobile out here with a team to grid this whole thing off and sift the goddamn sand. Why the hell wouldn't that assistance be interesting to you, Sheriff?”

“If I need assistance, I'll ask for it.”

“At least let me call it in. Have 'em put a unit and team on standby.”

“You don't do a
goddamn
thing 'til I get out there, you got it, Agent? You sit on your goddamn hands.”

“I will so note in my report,” Barrett grated.

“Fuck you, Raines.”

“Also noted. And by the way, Lou, I
will
write a complete and detailed report. And if you want to find fault with anything that I or the warden have done here, you can take it up with somebody who gives a shit.”

Barrett killed the call and snapped the phone's thin receiver shut.

“The hell was that?” Jarold asked.

“Man worried about his job,” Barrett said. “You go ahead. I'll do what I can to secure the scene.”

“Awright. One thing.”

“Yes.” Barrett waited.

“Why'd you wave me off Linton's camp?”

“Avoiding problems,” Barrett replied. “After all, we've found tracks that put Linton's son at least near the scene and in the approximate time frame of the killing. So what would you do if you ran into Gary at his daddy's camp? He'd want to know, Linton certainly would demand to know, what you're doing meeting Lou out there. And there's the other thing—between Lou and Linton.”

“They hate each other.” Jarold nodded. “I knew that. I just jumped the gun.”

“Don't kick yourself in the ass over it,” Barrett assured him. “You've done good out here, Jarold. Damn good. If it weren't for you this homicide might never have been discovered—a fact I will note in my report.”

The warden offered his embarrassed chuckle to that compliment.

“Jarold, there's one other thing. It's the wrong time to bring this up, but there's no good time. Something between you and me I want to apologize for. It happened a long time ago, when we were kids.”

“On the bus.” Jarold nodded.

Jesus.
Barrett's heart fluttered.
He hasn't forgotten.

“Well, I don't know why I joined in with those boys to call you names and generally behave like a jackass, but I am ashamed of it. I was wrong and I want to apologize.”

Jarold stared at the ground a moment.

“Long damn time to wait,” he said.

Barrett swallowed. “Yes, it is.”

Jarold took his eyes off the ground. “Past is past.”

“It isn't always,” Barrett said. “I know.”

Jarold scuffed his boot across the Jeep's tire.

“I better go after the sheriff. We don't wanna be stuck in this place after dark.”

It wasn't the best of exchanges, but it would have to do.

“Right, then. And thanks for the help, Jarold.”

“Welcome,” the warden replied and swung into his Jeep. Barrett waited for the Willys to clear the pond before he returned to his cell phone. Lou certainly couldn't keep him from reporting a homicide to his Live Oak office And if one of Bear's peers at the field office just happened to assume that a mobile unit would be needed, or maybe even call to Tallahassee to get a team ready, why—

There was nothing Lou could do about that.

“FDLE.” Bonny's voice answered thin and far away.

“Hey, Bonny. Bear here. Has Cricket left yet?”

“No, he's right here. Flirtin' with me.”

“Would you put him on, please, ma'am?”

Five

The side-paneled van of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement's mobile unit was familiar to Barrett Raines. A team of FDLE investigators methodically gridded off the murder of the now-confirmed female who would be the Jane Doe of the investigation. Sheriff Sessions arrived at the scene in near total darkness to make his professional evaluation by flashlight which, of course, meant that the sheriff only delayed the team's arrival. Barrett could have had the investigators there that night, working under the halogens, saving precious time.

Even though the corpse's disintegration told investigators that the homicide was not recent, there still ought to have been every effort made to gather forensics on blood, tissue, and fluids as quickly as possible. The accuracy of many tests related to levels of adrenaline and serotonin that might be accurate within a day or two of death degraded precipitously thereafter. Some toxins that might be detected within five days or a week would fail to register beyond that time.

Forensic pathology was a time-sensitive art.
Every
man or woman in criminal investigation was drilled to gather fluids, tissue, and visual information as quickly as possible. The sheriff's sensitivity for turf had delayed the gathering of crucial information a full twenty-four precious hours. What chafed Barrett, Cricket, and the other members of the team even more was that Lou seemed completely unconcerned about the effects of that delay.

You did what you could. The area was secured, first, and gridded off into squares. Every scrap collected in a given square received a coordinate in the grid, a description, and an identifying number. The finding officer signed a receipt for each bagged item of evidence. Chain of custody went straight from the discovering team member to Sheriff Sessions. The work was as painstaking as archeology, and the stakes were a lot higher.

A killer was loose. More than likely a sociopath. Certainly this was no ordinary crime of passion. Barrett and his team did not yet know (might never know, thanks to the sheriff) whether the woman was raped or had had sexual intercourse with her killer. That fact would greatly impact the profile made of Jane Doe's assailant.

The body, what was left of it, would be violated again, this time for forensic detail. Every hair on her body held a story. Every scrap of skin told a tale. A single fingernail or a sample of blood could point to her killer. Or cement a conviction. Barrett was certain that her killer was a he. And he would bet that this was not the perpetrator's first homicide. The dog was what bothered him the most. It
was
Rolly Slade's. That fact was verified by Rolly himself only that morning. Barrett was almost sure that whoever recruited the dog was a local resident. It was hard to imagine a serial killer drifting through the area who could capture or cajole the animal into captivity, then select a victim and construct the kind of horror show that was being uncovered grid by grid in this suffocating hammock. Whoever did this knew the dog, knew the land. Barrett would be surprised if he did not know the victim as well.

Barrett turned to Cricket.

“Where's Holloway?”

Midge Holloway was the chief forensics investigator from Jacksonville. Midge had gone much more than the extra mile, leaving that East Coast city to drive all the way to the West Coast for this homicide. The chief did not usually come to the scene. Their work was done in the Jacksonville morgue. Midge's responsibilities and authority were more fluid. When Barrett explained the elaborately staged scene, Midge had decided that she needed to have a clearer vision of the evidence than what could be gleaned from a grid map and plastic bags.

“I'll be there at first light,” she had told Barrett.

“She's inside the shack,” Cricket told Bear.

Midge was a short, slightly built woman. A premature onset of osteoporosis forced her to peer up at you from a nascent hunchback with eyes large and liquid as a lemur's.

Those eyes, Barrett thought. They don't miss much.

“Midge. You got any impressions?”

“Most interesting thing I've seen in a long time.”

“Interesting” was not the word Barrett would have chosen. But he understood that Midge's vocabulary was shaped by the imperative need to remain objective. An emotional identification with the victim could be useful at some point in the process. But not here. Not now.

“We have a female. The pelvis, what I can find of it, shows no sign of childbirth. I'd be surprised if she was much older than twenty.”

“Okay.” Barrett was already scribbling in his spiral pad.

“I won't know for sure 'til I get to the lab, but I'm pretty sure she was not dehydrated at the time of death. Not badly, anyway.”

“How you figure?”

“Body's been torn apart, which complicates things. And then there are the flies and maggots, not to mention the bacterial assault. But looking at what's left of her arms and hands, I don't see the kind of dessication you'd expect in someone who, for instance, died of thirst.”

“How did she die?”

“At this point it could be anything from a shot of pentothal to the obvious.”

“The dog.”

“Right. That'll have to wait for the lab. If the dog killed the victim, she most likely bled to death or died of shock, but at this point that's conjecture.”

“I understand.” Barrett nodded. “Though that water bucket and pipe make me think that both the dog and the woman had some kind of access to drinking water.”

“She wouldn't be sipping on her own,” Midge stated wryly.

“No, my guess is she was kept. For how long and what purpose, I don't know.”

The problem with looking for a motive early in any investigation was that it led to rabbit trails or, worse, a distortion of the actual facts on the ground. Something no more complicated than revenge might have led to this criminal act. Victims both male and female had been tortured to death in retaliation for any number of reasons. But there were some general patterns in cases like these that were hard to ignore.

“You figure the killer was male?” Bear asked.

“Oh, yeah. Male. Late twenties to mid forties. You know the profile. And there is one piece of religious paraphernailia that I find interesting.”

Out of a blue plastic tub, Midge pulled a plastic bag with a cheap crucifix inside.

“Victim was stripped naked, except for this. Now who might allow a crucifix to remain on the naked body of a victim he meant to torment and kill?”

“You're thinking Catholic?”

“Possibility. Could also be a killer with a religious bent or background. Lot of your Latin workers fit that bill.”

“Lots of Baptists, too,” Barrett countered.

Midge shrugged. “Nevertheless, this crucifix taken with the fact that the victim is Latin American suggests to me that we can't exclude Latin American males from the set of her possible killers.”

“Would not fit the general profile,” Barrett responded.

Barrett knew, and Midge knew very well, that this sort of crime tended overwhelmingly to be the work of male Caucasians, usually men without strong ties to family or friends, who were somewhere in age from their late twenties to forties. That profile, developed in the need to find serial killers, also conformed remarkably well to most elaborately staged homcides, especially those involving women.

“What would motivate a Latino male to go to this trouble?” Barrett asked.

Midge shrugged. “What made the guy from Texas whack victims along the railroad?”

“Those were targets of opportunity,” Bear pointed out.

“Who's to say our victim wasn't?” Midge countered. “Or going the other way, you can look at scenarios for revenge, betrayal. Anything to do with drugs. Folks in the coke business torture people to death routinely. Just on the
suspicion
of a doublecross. You think every druggie in this district is Caucasian?”