by Joel B Reed
As we crossed the road, it occurred to me that anyone seeing us would probably think we were chasing Robert. Nor did I think this concept was lost on him. This was what he intended, and it struck me we were dealing with a very sophisticated ten-year-old. I must have chuckled because Dee answered me in the same quiet voice. “You spot it, you got it!”
“You got what?” Robert asked. His ears were much sharper than mine. I hope he didn’t blast them away with loud music like so many of my generation did in the sixties.
“You got whatever you see,” Dee answered him. He smiled.
Robert looked from one of us to the other, then shrugged. Without a word he turned and walked down a game path I could barely make out. We were walking through heavy brush at the edge of what must have been a steep drop-off, because all I could see to our left was brush and the top of tall pines. We were moving too fast to step carefully, and I hoped the copperheads and rattlesnakes were already tucked in for winter.
Robert stopped so quickly I almost bumped into him. Looking over his shoulder I saw what I thought was the back of the store. There was a door there and two windows, but the windows were tightly boarded up with unpainted plywood. To our left there was another privy, about twenty feet from the back corner of the store, and I could see what looked like the back corner of the blacksmith shop.
After a moment, Robert darted out of the brush and crossed behind the blacksmith shop. He disappeared into the space between the smithy and a third building that was boarded up. I looked around and then followed.
When we got to the spot where Robert disappeared, we found him standing about six feet into a space almost wide enough to be a walkway between the buildings. Except for weeds and a few rusty cans, there was nothing between the buildings. Beyond where Robert stood, the high weeds looked like they had not been disturbed for years. Some were from last year, slightly weathered, but still standing in the protected space. Others were lighter yellow, this year’s crop, but only a few held any trace of green. Moisture from the soft day gathered on their leaves, dead and dying, turning some of them black and some deep gold.
“Right there,” Robert told us, pointing between his feet. The weeds had been trampled there, but not much. The disarray could have come from him retrieving the spent shell.
“All right,” I said. “I need you to stand over here behind us while we look around.”
“What about my five dollars?” he responded. I heard Dee chuckle.
“Sorry,” I said holding out three ones. I may have forgotten to pay him, but not the details of our deal. “This makes five.”
Robert slipped behind us but made no move to leave. He watched as Dee and I carefully searched the space. “I already looked there,” he told us.
“I know, but I have to be thorough,” I answered. “How did you spot it with all these weeds?”
“Lucky, I guess,” Robert said. I looked at Dee. He nodded. The kid wasn’t telling us the truth but I decided not to push it right then.
“May be we’ll get lucky, too,” I told him. He answered with a snort, letting us know he wouldn’t lay odds on it. I grinned at him, then noticed the privy behind him. It was very old, so old it looked like a good gust of wind could flatten it. I made a mental note to check it out when we were finished searching the space between the buildings.
“Yes!” Dee said. I glanced over at him just in time to see him frown.
“What do you have?”
“Looks like another casing, but this one’s tarnished.”
I moved to where he stood and looked over his shoulder. The shell was lying at an odd angle against the smithy. Weeds held its base up, but the light was too poor to see the marking stamped in the base. What I could see was that the primer was dented, telling me the shell was either empty or a misfire. “Let me get a picture,” I said, reaching into the small rucksack I was carrying. Nellie calls this my purse. I use it to carry the things I may need on a crime scene, like paper and a pencil, water, extra film, vinyl gloves, and a small tool kit. I even carry a couple of high energy bars for those times I cannot take to eat.
I hung the camera around my neck and took out a plastic bag. Using a pair of tongs, I carefully picked up the shell. It seemed heavier than I would expect, and I was not surprised to find the bullet still seated in the neck of the casing. Holding it up to the gathering light, I saw that it was a .223, the same caliber as the shell I got from Robert.
“Looks like military issue,” Dee said. “Could have cost someone his life.”
I nodded. Misfires are the last thing a soldier needs facing hostile strangers trying to kill him. Then I noticed something else. “Maybe not. Look at the pin mark.”
Dee leaned over my shoulder for a closer look. “I see what you mean. Looks like the pin barely touched the cap.”
“What pin?” said Robert.
I had forgotten he was there. Normally, I wouldn’t respond to questions like this. Cops keep what they find to themselves until the crime is solved, but Robert already knew about the shell, and I couldn’t see any reason not to answer. Good will now might turn out to be bread cast on the waters later. “Can you keep a secret?” I asked.
Robert looked at me for a few seconds and nodded. I held the shell up so he could see the base. “See the dent in the center, there? The little round thing is the cap. When the firing pin hits it hard enough, fire shoots through a tiny hole under the cap. That makes the power explode and sends the bullet—the slug up front—down the barrel.”
Robert nodded gravely and I continued. “See how shallow the dent is? That means the firing pin barely touched it, not hard enough to strike fire. So the bullet never left the gun.”
Just then a voice sounded from the direction of the store, calling for Robert. “That’s my mom,” he said, and disappeared around the corner of the building.
Dee looked at me. “So what do you think? Dirty weapon?” One of the problems with the early Vietnam era M-16 was that it had to be cleaned often. Without constant care, the weapon would jam or misfire.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. Could be. Or it could be brand new and someone missed some Cosmoline.”
“Cosmoline?”
“Yeah, it’s the greasy stuff the military used fifty years ago to coat weapons for long term storage. I’m not sure what they use now.”
Dee raised an eyebrow. “We’re not far from Red River,” he said. Red River Army Depot was only a hundred miles away, just west of Texarkana. It employed several hundred civilians, any number of whom could have easily filched a military rifle from one of the older bunkers.
I shrugged. “I don’t know if it matters. The shell Robert found was a commercial civilian casing, so this may not involve the same weapon. We can check the firing pin marks to see. At least, as much of the marks as we have. The one in the fired shell was deeper.” I dropped the unspent shell into a plastic bag and marked it with the date and place we found it.
I looked around. There was no way of checking out the rest of the space between the buildings without disturbing the weeds. “Let’s hold off on this for a bit,” I said. “Let the crime scene team deal with it if we bring them back in.”
We walked back to the area behind the buildings. “You want to stretch tape?” Dee asked. He meant yellow crime scene tape warning people to stay out.
“No,” I said. “That’ll only draw attention. Let’s hold off for a while. We don’t have anyone to enforce it.”
“One phone call will take care of that,” Dee reminded me, but I shook my head. I was looking at the outhouse directly behind the space between the buildings. It was old and looked as if it hadn’t been used for years, but I noticed something and walked over to it. The door, now sagged so far it touched the ground at its outside corner, had been moved recently. Even though it had rained, I could see a faint scratch arced in the grass where it had been opened wide. The scratch looked fairly recent.
I walked to the privy and pointed to the scratch. Then I opened the do
or and stuck my head in. The tin roof was still intact and had done its job protecting the inside. A faded red seat was nailed to the cross boards, but the lid was up, showing a dark hole below. I backed out and carefully held the door open. “Take a look,” I said to Dee. “Tell me what you see.”
He stuck his head into the privy for a moment. “Doesn’t look like the place has been used in a while.” He grinned. “No paper…not even a Sears catalogue.”
“What do you smell?” I asked.
He gave me a funny look. “I smell shit and piss. What else would I smell?”
“Nothing,” I told him. “Did you see that old sack of lime by the door?”
“Yeah,” he said. “So what?”
I sighed. One of Dee’s shortcomings is that he was raised in town and grew up with all the comforts of civilization, including indoor plumbing. He had never had to lime the pit of an outhouse. “What you smell is fresh shit. Not from today, but from not too many days ago, either. The lime has killed the smell of the older stuff.”
Dee was on it like a cat on a bug. “So our shooter could have used it?” he said. Then he saw the possibilities. “Well so could have a lot of people. The town was full of people that day. There aren’t that many outhouses.”
I pointed to the scratch marks. “Yes, but most of the people were gathered over by the church and the community center. They would have used the ones over there or maybe the one at the parsonage. I think it’s unlikely that anyone came all the way over here to take a dump. The marks the door made in the ground would be much deeper if they had. It’s only been opened once or twice.”
Dee stuck his head back in the outhouse and shined his flashlight around the floor and the walls. “Well, I don’t see anything obvious. Let’s let the crime scene guys deal with this, too. Maybe we’ll get lucky and they will find a print or a hair or something.”
“Suits me,” I said. “Why don’t we check out these buildings while we’re here?”
There was no easy access into the third building. The rear door was boarded over and nailed tight to the frame. The rust on the nail heads was dark brown, telling me they had been there for years. There were windows with broken glass for panes in the open side, but the weeds were grown high and completely undisturbed. The side next to the smithy was a solid wall without a door or any windows at all.
The door of the smithy seemed to be fastened shut, too, until Dee gave the handle a hard pull. Then it opened suddenly, almost throwing him off balance. Nor was there any protest from rusty hinges, and, when I looked, I saw dark stains on the old rust. Someone had oiled them recently. I pointed this out to Dee. “More stuff for Crime Scene.”
What surprised me when we entered the smithy was how much light filtered through the planks that covered the windows from outside. There was very little left in the building, only an old wooden bucket that would fetch a premium at a flea market in Little Rock and a rusted out iron washtub that held what looked like hemp feed sacks. There were two empty rooms at the back of the shop, both heavy with dust left undisturbed for years, but the dust covering the floor of the wide hallway between them was trampled down. I couldn’t make out distinct tracks, so I moved carefully down the hall toward the open room at the front.
The wooden floor we were walking on stopped at the end of the hallway, giving way to packed dirt. A third of the width of the the shop front was taken up by a massive door that slid to one side on a heavy railing. On the other side, the one farthest from the store, there was a narrow door flanked by a wide window, and directly above the sliding door was another window—a large one. Both had been boarded up from the outside. However, most of the glass in the windows was intact and light trickled in through spaces between the boards, filtered by heavy dust stains on the glass that created a sepia glow.
The sun was above the tree line now, burning off the low clouds, and its light struck the building full force. The effect in the still air of the shop was like a dozen spotlights throwing long beams of light across the interior and and highlighting dust motes in the air. I paused to take a couple of pictures with my flash switched off. At that point, I was not after evidence, just struck by the wonderful play of light and shadow and I hoped one of those shots turned out. If nothing else, it would make a marvelous addition to my collection of prints. While this might seem unprofessional, it was not. Over the years a number of these “unrelated” photos from crime scenes have pointed to lines of inquiry that turned into gold mines of information. So I have learned to trust these moments of imagination.
I was about to move on into the large room when Dee reached out to stop me. “Look there,” he said, pointing. When I looked, I understood why he stopped me. On the right side of the sliding door, about a foot above the dirt floor, the sunlight streamed in a narrow opening about two inches by four. Casual inspection might have passed it over for a knothole, which is exactly what it was at one time. Yet in the direct sunlight, I could see the wood on all sides of the opening was much lighter than the surface inside, as if someone had carefully cut it away. From what I could see, whoever did this was careful to bevel the cuts so they could not be seen from the outside.
I brought my camera up and switched on the flash. I turned the lens out to full zoom and looked to make sure I had what I wanted. It could n’t have been better. I could see the cut marks around the hole clearly.
I pressed the shutter, then zoomed out for a wider angle. This time when I snapped the shutter, the flash revealed something I hadn’t seen before. I zoomed in to be certain. Sure enough, I could see the outline of a long, rough rectangle made by a couple of feed sacks laid out behind the hole. The color of the fabric was about the same as the dirt, but from what I could see, there was no dust on the sacks at all. I pointed this out to Dee. He nodded. “It looks like someone was up to some serious sniping,” he said. “I wonder if that’s his.”
I looked where he was pointing. Hidden in the shadows of the corner were the outlines of a soft drink can. I couldn’t read the brand name, but the red and white striping were distinctive. I found myself getting excited. “We better call Crime Scene in, STAT,” I told him.
Dee pulled out a cell phone. “Looks like a dead area here,” he said, looking at his signal bars. “I’ll have to use the radio in the car.”
“I don’t suppose there’s a pay phone anywhere around here. Anyone with a scanner will know something’s up.”
“They’ll know, anyway, as soon as the van gets here.” While the crime scene van was a discrete silver, the bold lettering on the side doors and the back made it very clear what it was there to do.
“I was thinking about the press,” I told him. “The last thing we need is a cable news van pulling in and messing things up. Where are they, by the way? I was surprised not to see any of them in Nashville.”
He shrugged. “They’re as lazy as anyone else. With the governor’s office feeding them information, it’s easier to stay in Little Rock.”
“Why don’t you check the store?” I said. “Or maybe, the parsonage. Surely there must be someone around here with a phone.”
Dee gave me a look I remembered from when I was his boss. It told me I was being very unreasonable, at least in his eyes. The difference now was that I was no longer his boss and I could see him searching for a polite way to suggest this. “Never mind,” I said. “I’m probably being too paranoid. I’ll watch the place while you make the call.”
Dee looked relieved. “I’ll be discreet,” he promised. “I’ll ask for Casey by name.” Kermit Charles Jones is the physician who heads up our state forensic team. Years ago he began signing his name using only his initials, and K.C., or Casey, quickly became his sobriquet among the other members of the CID. Yet, to the press, he was still Dr. Kermit Jones and we kept it that way in public situations, not only for him, but for the rest of us. It seemed to work. It gave us a degree of anonymity over the air.
I walked around to the front of the smithy while Dee was gone. Sure enough, I coul
d see faint smudges on the weathered wood outside, but no sign of new cutting. We were dealing with a very careful killer, and it crossed my mind again that we might be dealing with a professional.
There was nothing else to see at the moment, so I walked around to the back to secure the building. When I did, I saw Robert coming out of the back of the store with a soda in his hand. He saw me and walked over. I closed the back door to the blacksmith shop and leaned against it. “Didn’t know that door worked,” he told me. “Whatcha find?”
“I’m not sure, Robert,” I told him. I took a bottle of water out of my sack and took a sip. “It may be something or it may not. You ever see anyone hanging around back here?”
He gave me an appraising look. I pulled out the torn five and handed to him. “Why don’t you see if they will take this at the store? Bring me a couple of diet cokes and a couple of bags of peanuts, and you can keep the change.”
“This ain’t no good,” he protested, lapsing into his rural Arkansas accent. “I done tole you that already!”
“You’re wrong, but never mind, then,” I answered, reaching for the torn halves.
“We out of everything but Pepsi,” he told me. “We do have diet that.”
“Sure,” I said. I’ve always thought diet Pepsi tastes like watered bleach smells, but it was caffeine I was after…and information.
Robert was back inside a minute. I saw his mother looking out the door to see who he was coming to see, and I waved. She stared at me for a long moment, then disappeared into the store without waving. After a moment, a tall, husky man came out of the store and walked in our direction. Determination was written all over his face and punctuated by his stride.
I decided to beat him to the punch. I handed him a card and introduced myself before he had a chance to speak. “I bet you’re Robert’s dad.”
He acknowledged this with a curt nod, glancing at my card. “What you want with Robert?” he said in a tone that was just inside being civil. Thirty years ago such a tone with a white officer would have earned him thirty days and some hard knocks as a guest of the county.