Cat's Eyewitness

by Rita Mae Brown

  Susan, reaching her, saw the same spectacle. “No.”

  “Mine!” Tucker raced with Brother Thomas’s arm, which she’d found behind a large boulder.

  “You didn’t find it, I did.” Owen raced after her, both dogs enjoying the game, oblivious to how awful this appeared to the humans. The cats didn’t much like it, either.

  “One arm. Where’s the rest of him?” Pewter asked.

  “Mmm.” Mrs. Murphy sat, watching the dogs carry on, one at each end of the arm now. Tucker had the hand; Owen, growling, pulled on the bone sticking out from the other end where the forearm once connected to the elbow.

  “Coyote?” Pewter noticed that what remained of the flesh was gray.

  “Or dogs. Wild or domestic. Chances are they’ve torn poor old Brother Thomas all to hell. Buzzards got at him, too. We’ll be picking up pieces until the cows come home.”

  “Be funny if someone’s beloved golden retriever brought home a foot, wouldn’t it? That’s one human who would pass out.” Pewter couldn’t resist thinking of the shocked person.

  “Best foot forward.” Mrs. Murphy trotted past the dogs, who continued to tug at the arm. “Come on, Pewter. Let’s keep moving. We’ll find more of him.”

  As Harry reached the dogs she sharply said, “Leave it!”

  Obediently, Tucker dropped her end. “Spoilsport.”

  Hearing Susan shout at him, Owen also dropped the arm. “I was only playing.”

  “Don’t touch it, Susan. No prints.” Harry was glad the morning had proved so cold. The arm, thawed and frozen a few times during the last days, would become more pungent once the temperature climbed.

  “I won’t. I suppose it’s my great-uncle’s arm, but I can’t say for sure.” She wasn’t as disgusted by the sight as she thought she would be. At least not yet.

  “Over here,” Mrs. Murphy yowled as she pushed down into a large boulder crevice where Brother Thomas’s head and most of his torso had been stuffed. Coyotes or dogs had pulled off the limbs, but whoever wedged the old man in the crevice jammed him in there, placing large stones on the torso.

  Harry reached the body first. “Goddammit!” she exploded.

  Birds had plucked out Brother Thomas’s eyes. They’d also been pulling at his hair, for birds like long hair—human, horsehair, the hair from the end of a cow’s tail—to weave into their nests.

  Susan stopped. She could take seeing her great-uncle’s arm, but this was pretty bad. “Oh, Harry.”

  “Don’t look. It’s him, all right.”

  “We found him.” Pewter puffed out her gray chest, although she was disgusted at the sight.

  “Why not leave him in his pine box?” Tucker joined the cats.

  “Because someone was smart enough not to take the chance he’d be exhumed. Obviously, Tucker, there’s something to find in the body,” Mrs. Murphy replied.

  Owen, leaving the treasure, walked over to the cats. “So tasty.”

  “Whoever is behind this knows something about bodies. If the corpse is exposed, maybe the method of murder will evaporate. I don’t know. The coroner has his work cut out for him, but there has to be a reason why Brother Thomas wasn’t left in his box. Think about it.” Mrs. Murphy ignored the “so tasty” remark.

  “I am. I don’t like any of this, and I really don’t like that Harry’s smack in the middle of it.” Pewter wanted to go home now.

  “She’s not patient. She acts on impulse,” Tucker observed, wanting to tug at Brother Thomas’s remains. “She thinks about these things. She gets part of the answer, but she rushes in, you know?”

  “They’re both in it.” Owen’s big brown eyes looked at Susan, who was white as a sheet.

  “You going to puke?” Harry also noticed Susan’s pallor.

  “No,” Susan snapped. “It’s horrible. For God’s sake, Harry, how can you be so cold-blooded?”

  Harry backed away from the body, going to her friend and putting her arm around Susan’s shoulders. “The soul is with his Maker. This isn’t really your great-uncle. It’s like an old corn husk, Susan. We attach importance to it, but Thomas is gone.”

  A light lingering scent lured Tucker and Owen to the back of the large boulders. They sniffed around where coyotes had marked.

  “They’ll be back.” Owen hated coyotes.

  “Yes, but we’ll be out of here and so will what’s left of the human.” Tucker, like Mrs. Murphy, was trying to think things through. “And when whoever is behind this learns that we’ve found the body, it will be dangerous.” The strong, small dog sat down. “I’m trying to put the pieces together, no pun intended.”

  Owen chuckled. “Some of these pieces aren’t going to be found. They’re in coyote and buzzard bellies.”

  “Can’t talk to the coyotes, even if we found the ones that did this.” Tucker watched as Harry punched numbers on her cell phone.

  “If all four of us were together we might could.” Mrs. Murphy used the old Southern expression.

  “Only way I’m talking to a coyote is if I’m high up in a tree.” Pewter spit out the word “coyote.”

  “You’ve got a point there, Pewter. They’d kill us the minute we turned our backs.” Mrs. Murphy hated the marauders as much as her gray feline companion did.

  “Can’t get a signal. Susan, I’ll try from the top of the ridge. Come on with me. We aren’t going to forget this site.”

  Once on the ridge, Harry reached Cynthia Cooper, who told Harry to mark a trail but to get out of there.

  “Why?”

  “Because neither you nor Susan is armed. Because you’re probably safe, but what if whoever dumped Brother Thomas were to come back? It’s a long shot, but I want you and Susan out of there. You’ve got your pocketknife on you, don’t you?”

  “Always do,” Harry answered.

  “Make slash marks where you can, bend twigs. We’ll meet you at the parking lot. I mean it, Harry.”

  “All right, Coop. All right.”

  Back at the parking lot, the humans and animals waited.

  “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.” Susan burst into tears as she quoted First Thessalonians, Chapter 5, Verse 21.

  “What makes you think of that? It’s usually Miranda who quotes the Bible.”

  “When I spoke to Thomas about my fears—you know, about Ned—that’s what he said to me. I don’t even know why I blabbed it. Not his business.”

  “He was wise and loving. You probably made him feel good by confiding in him.”

  Later, when Harry called Miranda, Miranda did, in fact, quote scripture. “Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil and canst not look on iniquity.”

  Gave Harry a shiver to hear the quote from Habakkuk, Chapter 1, Verse 13.

  Gave Cooper and Rick a shiver when the law called back on the sample Coop had dropped off from the statue. Type O human blood.

  29

  Meticulously laid out on the stainless-steel table, with channels along the sides to capture any fluids should they escape the corpse, were the pieces of Brother Thomas.

  Sheriff Shaw and Deputy Cooper watched Tom Yancy and his assistant, Marshall Wells, inspect the remains. Tom used long tweezers to pluck out a fiber or a bone splinter.

  “What we’re seeing, Rick, is consistent with animals ripping over a body.” He pointed with the tweezers to part of the femur still attached to the hip socket. “The bone is cracked open, chewed. You can clearly see the teeth marks here.”

  “Dogs, coyotes, most all carnivores love bone marrow,” Marshall said.

  “What about vultures?” Rick viewed sights like Brother Thomas as a matter of course.

  Didn’t mean he liked it, though.

  “Yes. They’ve been at him.”

  Coop remarked, “Tom, any idea if he suffered trauma before death?”

  “Well, his skull is intact. Upper jaw still attached. Lower one gone. No broken bones around the shoulder. Too late to tell about the arms, of course. There’s just enough left of his liv
er and a scrap of kidney here that I can get a sample. If he was poisoned there might be a trace, depending on the poison.”

  Rick cracked his knuckles. “Sorry. Bad habit.”

  “Not as bad as smoking.” Tom reached into the body cavity to lift up a tiny piece of kidney, which Marshall snipped.

  “No signs of stabbing?” Coop couldn’t imagine why his body had been dragged into the ravine and stuffed between and under large rocks.

  “No.”

  “If he’d been hit up with a hypodermic needle, something to put him down, too late for the mark?” Rick wondered.

  Tom touched some fragments of one arm; the other hadn’t been found. “Not much chance. If the body had been intact, possibly, Rick, because the cold helped us. Yes, we’ve had a few warm days, enough for him to blow up and give off scent, which brought in nature’s garbage collectors, but the cold returned with a vengeance. I don’t have much arm here. Most of the flesh has been chewed off. Marshall and I examined the torso, used magnifiers; no obvious puncture except for fang marks. Some of those needles barely leave a trace.”

  “Hmm, let’s say something appears in the kidney tissues or the liver. What would be your first choice?” Rick asked.

  “You mean to kill him?” Yancy put down the long tweezers on a stainless-steel tray. “First of all, Rick, he may not have been killed where he was found. That’s one possibility. He could have been, say, poisoned at another location, taken to the statue, placed in a kneeling position. His body would be losing warmth and it was colder than a witch’s tit; he’d freeze up in less than three hours. Not much body fat on him. I’d estimate about nine percent, given his age and what I know of his people. The Bland Wades get painfully thin starting in their sixties. He was quite thin. Of course, he could have been praying, hard as it is for me to believe, on that bitter night. He could have just let himself go. People can will themselves to die.”

  “No. I don’t think he willed it.” Rick shook his head.

  “All right, then. Let’s say he did go to pray.” Tom Yancy shrugged. “He’s lost in communion with the Lord, and someone comes up behind him. He’s down on his knees. Now, if his neck were broken this would be an easy call. It’s not. So either someone reached around and knocked him out with, say, chloroform, or they shot him with the same stuff the vet uses to put down old Rover when his time has come. There’s always morphine and heroin, too. Or, my last thought here, he was smothered.” Tom moved up toward the head and neck. “There would be bruising on the neck, even now. There isn’t. But if he were smothered, at this point I wouldn’t know, because the eyeballs are gone.” He paused, then continued, “If someone is choked to death or smothered in a less violent way, the eyeballs are bloodshot, red.” He pressed his lips together. “I don’t have much to go on, but we’ve got pieces of a body. That’s a start, and we will invite poor old Brother Thomas to tell us as much as possible.”

  “Any idea how long it will be before we hear from Richmond?” Rick hoped the state lab, one of the nation’s best, would be quick.

  Tom shook his head. “Rick, it’s less than two weeks before Christmas. People are killing themselves in greater numbers than usual or they’re flaming out on the highway. There’s always some damned fool who drinks himself to death and the family won’t believe what the county coroner tells them, so off goes John Whiskey Doe to the state’s pathology lab. Christmas is a nightmare. I’ll do what I can to push them along.”

  “You knew Brother Thomas; what did you think of him?” Coop asked.

  Tom folded his arms over his lab coat. “I’d see the old fellow occasionally at the hardware store, sometimes at the huge nursery over there in Waynesboro, the one where Jimmy Binns used to do such good work. Now, that man could design anything.”

  Yancy mentioned a retired gentleman who had a gift for landscaping.

  “Ever see him, mmm, at the bank?” Rick picked up on Coop’s direction of thought.

  “No. Can the brothers have personal money?” Tom wondered.

  Marshall, a Catholic, said, “Depends on the order. For the Greyfriars, if the money is family money it can be in a trust. The order can’t touch it, but the brother can still have use of it. Trusts and wills can be both creative and binding.” He added, “Had to study the monastic orders in parochial school. Always liked the Cistercians.”

  “Coop, check with Susan about this, will you?” Rick turned to his favorite officer.

  “Okay.”

  Rick returned to Tom. “I’d see him at Jeffrey Howe’s nursery, Mostly Maples. You couldn’t help but notice him in his gray robe with the white hood. Unfailingly pleasant.”

  “I never heard him even say ‘darn.’ ” Tom gazed down on the pieces of what had been a good man. “Rick, why anyone would harm him, I don’t know. That’s your job. Mine is to find out what I can from what’s left.”

  “While I’m here,” Rick glanced at the large wall clock, “anything else come back on Nordy Elliott?”

  “Alcohol in the bloodstream. Not above the legal limit. A healthy male. Death was straightforward.”

  “And painful.” Coop grimaced.

  “Extremely, but it was swift. One blinding pain, and I mean blinding, and it was over.” Tom Yancy sighed. “Nordy wasn’t on earth nearly as long as Brother Thomas, but he certainly piled up the enemies. And here’s Brother Thomas, who, as far as we know, didn’t have any.”

  “He had one,” Rick said.

  “A lethal one,” Coop added.

  30

  Lips white, face purple with rage, Brother Handle strained for self-control. “He walked out of the coffin!”

  “Your angina, Brother, remember your angina,” Brother Andrew softly spoke as Brothers Prescott and Mark trembled on either side of him.

  “Damn my angina. You put him in his coffin and you nailed shut the lid.”

  “I nailed shut the lid,” Brother Mark squeaked.

  “Well, you did a damned poor job of it.” Brother Handle ran his right hand over his head, feeling his tonsure.

  “Brother, this is painful and difficult for all of us, but we will get to the bottom of it.” Brother Prescott, as second in command, knew how to handle the boss, but he’d never seen the boss this distressed.

  Brother Handle paced in front of the three standing men. As he did, the knotted rope at his waist swayed with each step. “In all my years, all my years, not just as a brother, I have never encountered anything so disgusting, so bizarre, so vile, so disgusting.” He stopped, since he was repeating himself.

  Brother Handle veered close to out of control, but he still weighed his words.

  “It’s beyond imagining.” Brother Prescott’s voice sounded more soothing than usual.

  “Things happen for a reason. This is the will of God,” Brother Mark stupidly whined.

  “This has nothing to do with the will of God, you impertinent young pup. This is an effort on someone’s part to destroy our order!” He stopped in front of the slight young man, almost nose to nose. “Destroy our order! First we have a statue bleeding from the eyes. Every half-wit, every fool disappointed in love, every person suffering from illness has dragged themselves up this mountain to pray before the statue. Nordy Elliott, that insufferable reporter, hung around like a blowfly. He’s dead and now this!”

  “The tears of Our Lady are a sign.” Brother Mark’s lower lip quivered.

  “Oh, they’re a sign, all right,” Brother Handle glowered. “A sign that your mental wattage is about fifteen. Fifteen-watt Mark.” He smacked his hands together. “Weeping icons and statues have been part of Catholic lore for centuries, whether they’re found in Carpathia or California!”

  The loud clap made Brother Mark jump back and Brother Andrew wince.

  “It is possible those tears are—”

  Before Brother Prescott could finish, Brother Handle said, “Manufactured? That is what you were going to say, isn’t it?”

  “No,” Brother Prescott responded with some heat, which
surprised the others. “No, I wasn’t going to say that. They truly might be a sign.”

  “Oh, bullshit! You’re as weak-minded as this idiot.” Brother Handle turned, striding toward the large open fireplace in his office, the main source of heat. A small radiator rested under the window, but Brother Handle kept expenses down by utilizing the fireplace. “In Brisbane, Australia, a small statue has been weeping blood and rose-scented oil. In 1992, a six-inch statue of porcelain wept type O blood in Santiago, Chile. All hoaxes, whether proven or not.” He pointed his forefinger at Brother Mark. “A true believer does not need physical manifestation of God. And that’s the end of it.”

  Brother Andrew, in his former life, dealt with extreme emotions regularly. One can’t be a physician without seeing the best and worst of people. He didn’t like seeing Brother Mark browbeaten by the Prior. He didn’t fear Brother Handle. “I, too, doubt the miraculous aspect of the tears, Brother Handle. I’m sure if we tore apart the statue we’d find some simple explanation.”

  “You can’t do that!” Brother Mark cried, tears surging down his face. “She weeps out of sympathy for our sins and suffering. She weeps to bring us back to faith. People need signs.”

  Brother Andrew turned to him. “She’ll never run out of things to weep about, the world being what it is.” He turned back to Brother Handle. “This event has brought a most welcome boost to our treasury. Brother Frank has been almost jolly of late—for him.” Brother Handle turned, his back to the fire, to fully face the doctor as Andrew continued. “It’s not just the offerings that visitors have given us; the sales in the shops have skyrocketed. People mail in donations. If anything, we should perhaps be more organized as to how we present this economic—if not truly spiritual—miracle. Tearing apart the statue, even if we could do so without destroying it, serves no useful purpose. Let sleeping dogs lie.”

  A long silence followed, then the head of the order spoke, voice lower, less emotional. “I take your point. However, if it hasn’t occurred to you, it certainly has occurred to me that if these tears are exposed as a fake, a ploy to bring more money into the order, heads will roll. Even though I knew nothing, should this prove a hoax I will be held accountable. The order will be discredited. The buck stops here. I have to take responsibility.” He paused again, then spoke, an edge to his voice rarely heard by the others. “I’ve called you here hoping for an explanation of the desecration of Brother Thomas. I lost my temper. I’m sorry. If any of you removed that body, tell me now. I will forgive you if you tell me the truth.” He looked searchingly from face to face. No one responded. “Then I have to conclude that either one or all three of you are lying to me, or that someone in our order has something very big to hide. Big enough to toss away a corpse, big enough to kill.”