As Barrett approached the lab’s utilitarian door he noticed a young woman in running shoes and jeans leaning into a common hedge that Barrett recognized from his nursery days to be photinia, family Rosaceae. Rosaceae—the scarlet fruit? The shrub appeared to be infested with aphids. Late in the year for aphids. Then Bear saw the parasites being gently removed from the hedge’s shining green leaves and realized that the infestation was exogenous and purposeful.
He went inside. The jukes in the weather had fooled the A/C, which was still pumping cold air, even though it was barely fifty degrees outside. There was nothing so formal as a receptionist’s desk, though an open office was occupied. A university employee reigned, her sweater draped across the back of her chair. Barrett waited patiently to announce his arrival. A message was relayed and Midge Holloway emerged shortly from a narrow hallway, waving him on over with even more kilowatts of energy than was her usual.
“It’s fantastic, what he’s done!” She shoved Barrett down a sheetrocked hall. “You won’t believe it! Fantastic!”
The lab was divided into something like large bays. Faculty and graduate students were engaged in a bewildering variety of tasks. With a murmured apology, the gardener from outside edged past Barrett bearing a tin of aphids.
“Barrett. I’d like you to meet Dr. Nguyen Tran.”
Barrett turned at Midge’s voice to find an Asian face staring straight into his own. For a moment Bear had the uncomfortable feeling that he was being inspected. The anthropologist was taller than Bear expected. A fine mesh of French and Asian features. Delicate, but not feminine. Straight black hair receded from the forehead. Deep, hazel eyes.
“Nguyen, this is Special Agent Barrett Raines.”
“Doctor.” Barrett extended his hand. “I can’t tell you how much we appreciate your help.”
Barrett kept his eyes steadily in the center of the small, delicate skull before him. He tried to ignore the fact that Dr. Tran had no ears.
That impression did not give an accurate description, of course. The doctor could hear. There were orifices, certainly, allowing waves of air to beat onto the tympani within. But the visible ears had been savagely removed. From where the lobes should have been, and extending to the temples above, only a ragged vestige of tissue remained, like the rims of dead volcanoes.
Dr. Tran cleared his throat.
“A schoolboy’s revenge, I am afraid. Enacted, unfortunately, by a gang of men. In prison.”
“I have some scars of my own, Doctor.”
“Nothing so visible, I trust.”
Midge was embarassed. “This is my fault. It didn’t occur to me to tell him.”
“Of course not.” The doctor laid a firm hand on her shoulder in obvious affection. And then to Barrett, “She sees through the eyes of love.”
Barrett smiled. This man knew what to keep and what to chuck.
“Come see my work.” The academy-trained crime fighter swiveled abruptly for a set of double doors. Barrett followed Tran and Midge to find an open, high-ceilinged studio littered with mannequins and plaster casts. A set of cubicles roughly divided an otherwise open interior. Barrett saw body parts floating in formaldehyde or lying exposed all over the damn place. The hands, Barrett knew, had been sent so that their owners could be identified. Frequently it was cheaper for a sheriff seeking a John Doe’s identification to amputate a hand for delivery to the FDLE rather than bear the expense of shipping an entire corpse. Tallahassee normally received those gifts by Federal Express. A similar procedure, Barrett assumed, was followed here.
He saw a hand hirsute as a chimp’s lying casually on a silver tray, a wedding ring still in place. A phallus occupied its own tray nearby.
“Sometimes we get a print,” Tran quipped. “Sometimes not.”
Barrett found himself chuckling.
Moving on they passed beneath a skeleton and anatomical chart that looked over dozens of prosthetics, hands and feet fashioned from combinations of Kevlar and titanium and even more exotic materials.
“We are experimenting with neural impulse from the brain.” Tran led them weaving through the artificial landscape. “Very promising work.”
Then they entered the anthropologists’ studio. Ancient hominids and other animals gazed from stools or tables. Everything was coated in a white dust of plaster. Dr. Tran led Barrett and Midge past a dozen partial reconstructions before he stopped to drape a delicate hand over a mannequin’s shoulder.
“Jane Doe.”
Dr. Tran stood aside to allow Barrett’s inspection.
Barrett could not believe what he was seeing. This was no static display. There was expression here. A sense of life. There was tension in the muscles of her face. Her mouth was opened slightly, head turned, as if she were responding to a summons or sound. An opened door?
“I have a wig.” Dr. Tran rummaged through an ordinary cardboard box. “We are confident she was Latin American. Probably from Mexico. See for yoorsef.”
She had been beautiful. A high brow and wide-set eyes. High cheekbones. A nice mix of Spanish and Indian in that sad face. And straight black hair.
“It’s … it’s unbelievable,” was all Bear could say.
Tran allowed a smile. “We’ve had an artist from the lab draw a composite from this cast,” he said.
Midge beamed with pride. “Over here.”
Barrett turned to find what might have been a portrait in pen and ink. A finely detailed, fully living being looked out at him now, reconstructed from flesh and bones mangled in a terrible death.
“Somebody has got to know a face like this,” Midge declared.
“Several somebodies,” Barrett affirmed grimly. “Now maybe we can get a shot at finding out who.”
* * *
Hezikiah Jackson looked sternly at the supplicant at her door. “I tole you it’d take some time. Not gonna get well overnight.”
She shivered in the wind like a tuning fork. A thin blue line drawn in the sky from horizon to horizon was all that kept a Canadian front from freezing Strawman’s Hammock. Hezikiah could feel it coming on, a blue norther. There would be a bitter drop in temperature. A hard frost. Ice in the barrel. She glanced to her gourds and pumpkins. Better make ’em into pies. Hezikiah always knew what climate was coming. She felt it in her knees, her back. It made her irritable.
“You been usin’ that salve I give you?” She wrapped a blanket tighter against her emaciated frame.
“I have another sickness.” The barrel-chested Latino known as El Toro kept his hands folded over his cap.
“You a busy boy.”
“Not that. Of the soul. A sickness of spirit.”
“That girl, though, ain’t it? Something to do with you’ whore.”
“She iss not my whore.”
Hezikiah cackled. The Bull reached inside his shirt. A crucifix was strung by a silver strand of chain about his thick neck, a cheap thing inlaid with lapis lazuli, warped with heat and humidity.
“She needs a shrine.” He kissed the cross. “So that her soul may rest in peace.”
“Or mebbe yours?” Hezikiah asked shrewdly. A bony hand snaked out to snatch the crux ordinaria. She thrust it like a nail into her bony chest. Breathed deeply.
“Oh, yes! Lordy, lordy. She was a purty thang.”
A groan acknowledged that vision, and fear. What manner of witch could see the dead?
Hezikiah opened her eyes.
“She was purty. She was full o’ life. Why cain’t she rest easy? Can you tell me why?”
He trembled as he shook his head. “No! I cannot say it!”
Hezikiah chewed over the first of the pecan shells that daily stained her teeth.
“You wanta repent? You wanta ’pease her spirit?”
“Sí!” He bobbed his head. “And make her a shrine.”
A bitter wind whistled through the cypress shack. A pair of shingles chattered on the roof. Hezikiah hesitated a long moment, which was in its own way disturbing. Her instincts had never been
wrong before. She had always known what to do. A pair of bleach bottles clanged in the wind like windchimes. Just a pair of bottles broken at the neck and strung with a twist of clothes hanger. Their bell was jarring, dissonant.
“We used to make syrup, days like this,” the ancient woman declared absently. “Usta boil it in a open pot and pour it in whiskey bottles.”
El Toro waited for her prophecy or vision to pass. Hezikiah noticed him, finally.
“Whutchu doin’ on my steps?”
He nodded to the crucifix still in her bony hand.
“Oh, yes. Oh, yes.” Her fist closed like a talon. “You need to repent. Is that it? Repent?”
“Sí.” His head bobbed like an apple in a barrel. “Repent. Confess! Give her peace.”
The witch cocked her head to one side to regard him. Bloodshot eyes.
“Take down yer britches,” she said finally. “I give you somethin’ to repent about.”
* * *
Sheriff Lou Sessions was abiding by the letter of Judge Blackmond’s ruling, if not its spirit. Barrett Raines, Cricket Bonet, and Midge Holloway were required by the sheriff to brief him twice weekly on their progress. Sessions had the three agents seated like satraps in his bunkered office, shivering in the insufficient warmth generated by a radiant heater thick with dust. Barrett had just presented the sketch of Jane Doe to the county’s top dog. The sheriff seemed singularly indifferent to that effort.
“And where’d you get this?”
“Dr. Nguyen Tran.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Pound Lab, Sheriff. University of—”
“I know where the Pound Lab is.”
Cricket Bonet pointed a freckled hand at the composite. “Midge busted her ass to get us that sketch, Sheriff. Otherwise—it could have been weeks before our turn came.”
“Am I supposed to be grateful?”
“Courteous would suffice,” Midge replied cooly.
“My argument ain’t with you, Midge.”
“Well, it sure as hell isn’t with me.” Barrett stood from his folding chair. “Lou, did it ever occur to you that I might actually want to see you get credit for busting this case?”
“You do, huh?”
“It is FDLE policy always to give the sheriff credit, Lou,” Cricket pointed out. “That’s how we stay so popular. Not to mention invisible to civilians.”
Lou allowed a grudging smile in reply.
“Fair enough.” He dropped the sketch into an outbasket. “I’ll have ’em make copies.”
“You’re welcome.” Midge’s sarcasm gained no rejoinder. “And have you had a chance to go over the autopsy?”
“The dog’s what killed her.” Sessions shrugged. “Why else would he have been watered? Why else would she have been left for him?”
“She could have been killed any number of ways before the dog,” Midge disagreed coldly. “But as it happens, the report confirms your first impression. The dog was responsible. He didn’t go for her neck, at first. She was hung too high. So the animal fed first on her torso. The softer tissues. Shock and trauma followed. Essentially she bled to death.”
“Sounds about right.” Sessions nodded. “But ’til you get me a complete analysis of the DNA there’s not much more here for me to use.”
“No?” Barrett tried to keep all vexation from his voice. “The woman had repeated cases of veneral disease. A recent episode of gonorrhea. Her vagina was lacerated, consistent with a repeated rape or abuse with an instrument. There was a residue in her vagina which turns out to be a plaster of local herbs and soil, administered apparently as a kind of home remedy.”
“That helps me?”
“Well, it is the year 2001, Sheriff. How many people still treat the clap with dog fennel, chinaberry root, and straw?”
“Not Gary Loyd. That’s for damn sure.”
“The woman also was HIV positive.” Midge finished her summary gruffly. “I suppose were I a detective I might imagine someone wanting to wreak vengeance on a woman who gave him AIDS.”
“If Gary Loyd’s HIV positive, we’ll have his ass,” Lou agreed.
“Sheriff.” Barrett leaned forward. “I want to nail Gary down on this thing, I really do. For one thing, even if he wasn’t at this particular scene, he clearly knew about the location. He may well know some of the other people who on some kind of periodic basis appear to have visited the scene. But I think it’s very dangerous to try and hang this case on any single smoking gun.”
“That’s a nice cover-your-ass.” Lou’s chair squeaked in his dungeon office.
“Not at all,” Barrett responded quickly. “But take this business about venereal disease—that’d be enough motive for lots of men to kill, not just Gary.”
“And then there’s the crucifix,” Midge chimed in.
Lou waved her off. “You already bent my ear on that one. If a Mexican did it, I’ll be happy to run his ass in. But I don’t know any Mexicans driving vehicles of any kind into Strawman’s Hammock. Let alone a Humvee.”
“Well, you’ve lost the Humvee and everything in it. So now you’re down to betting that something off the victim’s remains will tie her to Gary Loyd.”
“Hair, fiber, semen. The girl did have semen, ’cording to your boy’s report, Midge.”
“Semen, yes. And from more than one man.”
“So. She was gang-banged. Or pulling a chain. Doesn’t mean Gary wasn’t there to rape and kill her.”
“All her possible partners had that opportunity,” Cricket objected. “And supposing the sex was consensual?”
“Consensual?”
“All Midge can say is that there was intercourse with multiple partners. She can’t say for sure whether the victim was raped. The signs consistent with rape are also consistent with vigorous sex. Or S&M.”
“Oh, Jesus.” Lou threw up his hands.
But Midge persisted. “It is a possiblity. Harder to make, I grant you, because of the condition of the body, but these photos…”
She fished a pair from the thick file on Lou’s desk.
“… come from the extremities still handcuffed to the wall of the shack. See these bruises here? On her wrists? Those are handcuffs. But there are older wounds inflicted with much softer ligatures beneath and on her arms that I suspect are related to some kind of bondage scenario. That’s just my guess. But definitely the woman had been tied up before.”
“So maybe this time things just got way out of hand?” Lou scoffed. “Is that what you want me to believe?”
“No, Lou.” Barrett tried again. “Midge is just trying to say how this thing might have started—how the victim might have met her killer. Or pissed him off. Or given him AIDS—who knows! But it does tell us this woman didn’t mind walking on the wild side, and it implies that a number of probably local men can identify her if we just get the damn picture out!”
The chair groaned under the sheriff’s weight.
“There’s one other detail in this-here report. Something I’m not sure that any of y’all FDLE sleuths happened to notice.”
Barrett took a deep breath before replying, “If you can help us, Lou, I’m sure we’d both appreciate it.”
“There’s the straw.”
“The straw?” Barrett frowned. “You mean the straw in her vagina?”
“Nope. In her hair. And those welts you mentioned, Midge? Those long, regular ones along her arms? I’ve seen that kind of sign before. Comes from working in straw.”
“But there’s straw all over the Hammock,” Bear responded.
“There’s straw, yes. But what kind?” Lou rocked in his easy chair. “See, that’s yellowheart pine on the crime scene. Loblolly. Original growth. That’s what was mixed up in whatever godawful mess they found inside the victim. But the straw they found in her hair? Came off slash pine trees. Hybrid pines. Am I right, Midge?”
Midge was astonished. “I don’t know.”
“No?” Lou rose from his desk. “But I do. Y’see, there’
s other folks in that Pound Lab besides gorilla hunters. And those folks, they gave me some real information. Something I can use.”
“Be nice if you shared the information with us,” Barrett remarked.
“Why we’re havin’ these little get-togethers,” Sessions smiled. “You look and you’ll see that the straw in that girl’s crotch came from the Hammock. But the straw in her hair didn’t. Now, I’m just a country-boy sheriff, but I’m thinking to myself, what besides screwin’ puts pine needles in a woman’s hair? And what kind of work scratches yer arms? And then I ask myself, where can you find Mexicans working?”
Sheriff Sessions retrieved the sketch with one hand, handed it to Barrett. “’Bout five crews working at present. Gary Loyd’s got a gang raking ’bout five miles out towards Oldtown. Back in the woods deep. ’Course I cain’t go near the place.”
“Spare a deputy?”
Lou smiled. “Nope.”
“It would be better if we could work together on this thing, Sheriff.”
“What I thought, too. But the judge, why—he sees it different.”
“That’s a pitiful fucking excuse.” The roots of Cricket’s hair now sprouted in a scarlet scalp.
“What’d you say to me, Agent?”
Lou was coming to his feet. This is what the bastard wants, Barrett realized. He wants to make us fuck up.
“Agent Bonet made an excellent point,” Barrett intervened smoothly. “But it’s no problem, Sheriff. I believe I know a man can get us where we need to go.”
Nine
Jarold Pearson knew exactly where Gary’s latest crew baled straw.
“Land used to be owned by a dairyman.” The game warden picked up Barrett and Cricket at Shirley’s Homestyle Cafe and loaded them into his Chevy off-roader. “St. Regis tried to buy it years ago. There was some kinda’ bankruptcy. Gary got it on auction. Put it in pines. First stand to bale in the county.”
“So it was Gary’s idea to get in the straw business? Not Linton’s?”
Jarold nodded, his eyes steady and alert in their narrowed cranium.
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