by Jean Rabe
Oren did not correct him with chief deputy sheriff, though he noted Annie’s raised eyebrow.
“—the ends of these ribs are rounded, and they’d be smooth to the touch. As a man ages the ribs display pitting, and the edges here and here—they’d be sharper. I want an MRI done. X-rays are good, but not sufficient. An MRI will give us the calcium density, and that’s useful in a final determination of age. I suspect they’ll reveal that your boy was eight or nine years old. The ribs tell me that, not the ten I first mentioned as a possibility. I’m very good at this. Eight or nine. Probably nine. I’ll want to pull DNA, too, though it might not help because—” He looked to Annie. “You mentioned these remains might be forty to sixty years old.”
“They found some coins.”
“Sixty,” Oren said. “I’m leaning toward sixty.”
“That old, might be hard to trace to relatives. But you never know. MRI, DNA. Might not need to bother with facial recognition if there are dental records to compare with missing children reports. We’ll see.” Abernathy shifted his weight. “No evidence of carnivore scavenging on these bones, no rat bite marks. But the lack of some bones might indicate animals removed pieces. They’ve been subjected to repeated freezing and thawing cycles, and those reduced some of your finger and toe bones to fragments. Some evidence here and here of plant abrasion—roots growing across the body, probably into the flesh before it dissolved. Can’t tell if these bones were moved. You didn’t call me to the scene. You packed them up and brought them here.” He paused and frowned. “Then you called me. You should have called me to the scene.”
Abernathy stood a little taller and Oren figured the forensic anthropologist was thoroughly “full of himself.” Nevertheless, Oren was impressed.
“Eight or nine, eh?” Oren said.
“Probably nine.” Abernathy made the clicking sound again. “I’m always right to within a year to a year and a half. Always. But like I said, I want the MRI before I write a report. I see some evidence of nutritional deficiencies, but a further analysis will confirm that.” He made a circle of the table, picked up the skull, turned it over in his hands and replaced it. Picked up a few vertebrae to study, and then put them back down. “This arm bone is thicker than the other. See? That was the boy’s dominant side. So he was right handed. The right femur would be thicker than the left, dominant side. But we don’t have a right femur. The radius of this arm bone, and the skull—it has a more distinct ridge here—say ‘boy.’ The pelvis is not, in my opinion, strong enough evidence given the young age. Still, it all suggests ‘boy.’ Caucasian. Right handed. Nine, eight on the outside. I think—”
“Excuse me, Dr. Abernathy,” Oren cut in. “Okay, you know skeletons. Can you tell from the bones how he died?”
Ire flashed across Abernathy’s figure, clearly not pleased with the interruption.
“I could give you an educated guess right now, but I won’t. I want the MRI, and I want to take a closer look. Come back later this afternoon. After I’ve had a few hours with all of this. Can you do that? Some test results take days, weeks. But I’m pretty confident on this one already. After lunch. I’ll give you a cause after lunch. But the official ruling has to come from your coroner here. Dr.—”
“Dr. Annie Neufeld,” Annie supplied.
“And that won’t come until all the test results are back,” he finished.
Oren figured he could talk his granddaughter into a long lunch.
“Yeah, I can do that,” Oren said. “I can come back after lunch.”
Abernathy waggled his gloved fingers in a dismissive gesture.
Oren sincerely hoped his granddaughter had not been in one of Abernathy’s classes.
7
Seven
It was a big red Case tractor, double wheels on the back, hitch, with a raised disc harrow attachment used for cultivating the ground prior to planting—all of it caked with dried mud and in need of washing. Piper was stuck behind it on 66, on her way to Hatfield, an unincorporated dinkburg where Mark the Shark lived.
Piper figured this ten-mile endeavor would take her an hour away from her cold case—fourteen minutes to Mark’s, fourteen minutes back, and a half hour at the bank or looking through his records to show him the bookkeeping error and ease his conspiracy fears.
But the tractor was fouling her time-frame.
It belched fumes; her windows rolled down, the stink wafted inside and made her eyes water. It was noisy, overwhelming the oldies station she’d had on and just now clicked off. It was slow, riding in the center of the road, impossible for her to pass on either side without risking the ditch. And it wasn’t traveling straight, sometimes in the proper lane, sometimes veering into the left lane. Usually it held to roughly the middle.
She honked.
The driver raised his left hand and flipped his middle finger.
“Really?” Piper stuck her head out the window and hollered, “Pick a lane!” Then thinking he might not be able to hear over the racket the tractor was making, she used the PA in her car. “Pull over. Spencer County Sheriff. Pull over.”
The tractor had no rearview mirrors that she could see, and the driver hadn’t turned around to notice who was honking at him.
She honked again, this time laying on the horn. Piper really didn’t want to further delay her visit to Mark Thresher’s and subsequent return to the alluring skeleton case by citing the farmer for a simple traffic violation, but— She honked a third time, the driver took both hands off the wheel and gave her the dancing double middle fingers. The tractor, which according to the speedometer in Piper’s Ford was going about twenty miles an hour, shimmied to the right. As she started to pass, and reached to turn on her flashing lights, it sped up, drifted back to the left, and nearly clipped her front fender. She pumped the brakes and eased behind it, matching its speed—twenty-five miles an hour now. A boxy station wagon pulled behind her, and another car was coming farther back. Fortunate no one was in the opposite lane at the moment.
The tractor wobbled farther right, then left, shuddered, and went faster still. Thirty miles an hour.
“What the hell?”
Then the driver tossed an empty whiskey bottle off to the side of the road.
“That’s it.”
She turned on the siren and called the dispatcher to report her impending traffic stop. No license plate on the tractor, so no identification to note. Fleeing to avoid arrest, failure to yield, she mentally started writing the charges. She couldn’t yet add DUI—that would have to be proven.
It looked like the driver—she guessed him to be young to middle-aged, as he had a flowing mane of ink-black hair—was finally going to acquiesce. He slowed to twenty, then ten, and pulled to the right, one of the big back tires drifting to the berm. A car and a motorcycle appeared in the opposite lane and zipped past. Piper continued to follow the tractor, the station wagon still behind her. Then she cursed when he sped up again. How fast could a farm tractor go? It jinked left, the sudden motion causing the tractor’s back right set of tires to come off the road. They dropped back down with a clatter and the disc harrow made an ominous clunking sound, came loose, and cut into the blacktop, leaving grooves like open wounds.
“This is just absolutely wonderful.” Piper’s lip curled as she tried to maneuver her Ford Explorer around it again. “Pull the hell over!” She pressed on the gas, was nearly even with it and could read the MX 240 model on the side, then it trundled left again and she slammed on the brakes to avoid being run off the road. “Sonofabitch!”
Wisely, the two cars behind her drifted back.
The tractor surged forward, weaving and now straddling the center line. She matched its speed. Forty miles an hour.
“Really? Tractors go that fast?” She almost called for backup. Should call, she told herself. But Piper was proud and stubborn. How would it look if a decorated Army veteran couldn’t stop a drunk on a farm tractor? Her deputies would not respect a sheriff who could not manage a traffic stop. She
used the PA again. “Pull over! Pull over now!”
A beer can sailed away into the ditch. The hand that threw it raised the middle finger again.
“I left the 101st for this,” she hissed. Piper was a skilled driver, able to operate armored personnel carriers, combat support vehicles, light armored vehicles, and an assortment of heavy trucks. This Ford was easy, and she could use it—if she absolutely had to—to force the tractor off the road. But there wasn’t much shoulder, and she worried the tractor would flip into the ditch and seriously injure, or possibly kill, the drunken driver. She slammed her hand against the steering wheel and looked at the speedometer. The tractor had slowed back to thirty. Then twenty.
“Now ten,” she encouraged. “Ten.”
A few moments later it did, but it hung to the middle. Piper laid on the horn again; that coupled with the siren causing a clamor she was certain this rural stretch of road wasn’t used to. The tractor ambled to the right, just as a bright green SUV came down the opposite lane.
“Five,” Piper said. “That’s it. Stop. Please stop you double dumbass drunken idiot.”
She spotted him working some kind of gear. The tractor stopped, and she braked the Ford and put it in park.
“Oh, thank God.” She let out a breath, which turned into a shriek when he stomped on the gas pedal and ran the tractor and its disc harrow into reverse. It slammed into her Ford with enough power to jar her and cause the airbag to inflate. The pillowy mass pushed Piper back; it felt like she’d been punched in the face with a boxing glove. The bag started to auto-deflate in a handful of seconds.
When she cleared the empty bag away from the windshield, she saw the tractor was churning away, weaving across both lanes and listing so that the back left tire came up, and then slammed down, the disc harrow digging another gouge into the blacktop.
She was nearly at the outskirts to Hatfield when the tractor slowed again and shuddered to the right, made a coughing noise that told Piper it had run out of gas.
“A little more. Get over. Get the hell over,” she said. There was no way the farmer could have heard her, but he pulled farther right nevertheless, the outside rear tire at the very edge of the ditch. Piper held her breath as the tractor stopped. She flipped off the siren, left the lights on, and jumped out. The two cars that had been trailing her slowly passed, drivers’ heads craned in lookie loo fashion.
“Keys!” she shouted up to him. “Throw me the keys!” That was the first thing to take care of, making sure he didn’t start the damn thing up again and run it on fumes. Another car approached from the opposite direction. It stopped several yards back as if the driver was unsure she could proceed. Piper motioned her forward, and she complied—slowly and with her window down so she could catch all the details. “Keys! Now!”
The farmer tossed a glittering mass of silver and hit Piper in the chest. She grabbed them with both hands, not willing to take her eyes off the drunk. There were at least a dozen keys on the ring. It didn’t matter which went to the tractor, not at the moment anyway. The fob was a three-inch long plastic ear of corn that said DEKALB on it in green block letters, Schmidt scrawled in faded marker on the other.
“Are you Mr. Schmidt?” Piper called up to him.
He nodded, swaying on his perch.
“I need you to climb down, Mr. Schmidt. Do you need help?” She stuffed the mass of keys in her front pocket and reached out to him.
“Nope. No help.” He shakily stood and climbed down, knocking an open beer can off. It splashed Piper on its way to the blacktop. “Oops. Not shorry.” His laughter turned into a hiccup, and he gave her the dancing fingers again. “Gonna arresht me? I don’t need a license to drive a tractor on—”
“Yeah, I’m gonna arresht you.” She took one wrist and then the other. He struggled, but as drunk as he was and as pissed off as she was, he was no match. Piper half-carried him and nudged him toward her Ford, noting the heavy grille and bumper damage the disc harrow had caused.
“Oopsh,” he said again, as he noted the damage too. “I’d say shorry, but that wash on purpose, me ramming into you. Not shorry. I done good.”
“Glad you admitted that,” she said. “You have the right to remain silent.”
“Oh, now you’re shounding like my wife, and she’s—”
“Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.” Piper didn’t need to read him his rights here, not until she requested him to take a breathalyzer test or started asking him questions. But she intended to do both of those. Maybe more than once. And she’d have the rights read to him again at the department. “You have the right to an attorney.”
“Can’t afford one,” he hiccupped. “I gots to shave my money for a camper I wanna buy. I can’t shpend it on no damn lawyer.”
“If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you.”
“That’sh nish.” He belched and a noxious mix of booze and cigarette smoke assailed her.
“Do you understand the rights I have just stated to you?”
“I undershtand just ducky, little chickie.”
“Not giving you a field sobriety test,” she said. “You’re falling down drunk and the road’s uneven. Not safe.” She wrangled him into the back seat, retrieved her breathalyzer, and leaned over him. Piper knew that this test on the side of the road would only be useful for probable cause. To get anything admitted during a trial, she’d need a more formal test, which they could do at the station. There would have to be a twenty-minute stretch where he was observed not drinking before that test was administered. It would provide more accurate—and admissible—results.
“Shit,” he said, looking through the screen that divided the front and back seats and kicking at the floorboard. “Shit. Shit. And back again. Shit.”
Piper heard what upset him. A groan and clatter of metal heralded the tractor and its disc harrow tumbling into the ditch. All the rain must have softened the edge of the bank just enough, and the tractor’s weight did the rest. She withdrew from the Ford and saw the gaping section of embankment where the big tire had rested. A road warning sign would have to be posted ASAP. At least she didn’t have to worry about getting the tractor gassed up and moved off the road. Just towed—and that would be on Mr. Schmidt.
“Do you have some identification on you?”
He looked dully at her.
“A driver’s license?”
“Don’t need a goddamned driver’s licenshe to take a tractor out on the road. I don’t have a driver’s licenshe. That gotten taken the lasht time I was picked up. Why the hell do you think I was out on the tractor? Don’t need no goddamned driver’s licenshe to take a tractor out on the goddamned road.” He said that much louder, as if she might not have heard him the first time. “Don’t gotsh no goddamned wallet on me with ID. Don’t gotsh no—”
“Got a first name?”
“Shandy.”
“Sandy?”
“Yeah, Shandy.”
“I’m going to give you a breathalyzer test. All right with you, Mr. Schmidt?”
“Fine and ducky, little chickie. I know how to do it. I’m good at it.”
“Breathe into this, Mr. Schmidt.” Piper held the device to his face. This close to him, she could see that his cheeks were pockmarked, like he’d had serious acne in his younger years. His eyes were a watery blue, puffy, his hair shoulder-length, and his face clean-shaven. He was wearing jeans and a short-sleeved sport shirt, both looking relatively new. He had a pair of bedroom slippers on his feet. She placed him at about thirty-five to forty.
“What ish it? Whatsh my reading?” He looked almost excited.
“Point two-eight-nine,” she said.
“I’m shnot drunk enough. I’ve got pasht three before.”
“Wow,” Piper said. Mr. Schmidt was an alcoholic. She guessed he weighed about one-eighty, meaning he’d consumed the equivalent of at least ten drinks in the past hour or so. She was surprised he was awake. Only an alcoholic would be
this coherent and conscious with a .289.
She got in and radioed the department.
“I’m charging him with DUI,” Piper said.
Schmidt made a growling, gacking sound then spewed vomit all over his shirt and the back seat. “Oops,” he said. “Not shorry.”
“This early?” Drew came back. “You got a DUI this early in the day? It’s not even eleven.”
“And damage to public property.” Piper’s Ford. She wrinkled her nose at the stench coming through the partition. “And damage to state property.” The roadway. “And assault with a deadly weapon.” The tractor, as she was in the car—and Schmidt’s act of ramming her was admittedly intentional. She suspected some of the charges would be reduced, AA part of the deal. And maybe some more would be added. It would tie Sandy Schmidt up in knots with worry and hopefully give him enough attorney fees to make him more cautious in the future. He’d get stuck with insurance claims, too. For her Ford and for the team that would be called to handle re-righting the tractor. “And littering.”
Indiana Code Title 35. Piper had memorized it among many other passages when she took the test at the sheriff’s academy. Criminal Law and Procedure Indiana Code Section 35-45-3-2. A person, in this case Sandy Schmidt, who recklessly and knowingly left refuse on another person’s property—the tossed beer cans and whiskey bottle—commits littering, a Class B infraction.
“And littering,” she repeated. She told Drew to contact the roads department and get signs and flashers out.
“Mary’s fault,” the drunk moaned as Piper turned the battered Ford around and headed back to Rockport. “My shweet wife. She made a big to-do ‘bout that new camper I wanna buy. She drove me to drink.”