Strawman's Hammock

by Darryl Wimberley

  “Two of these you need to see.” The Sheriff pulled up a chair for Barrett’s benefit.

  The first was of Isabel Hernandez. The girl was not hard to identify, even with her cyber-smudged face. The details of her dress and shoes, taken with details of the stall and Kohler commodes standard in the school, made identification easy.

  “Plus the bows in her hair.” The Sheriff winced.

  “We knew he had Isabel,” Barrett remarked. “That shouldn’t be a surprise.”

  “No. But this is.”

  Sessions nodded to a deputy who clicked on another file. A thumbnail came up. Another double-click.

  It seemed the same as the other bondage scenarios. A woman, face averted, was handcuffed in a stony dungeon to massive beams of wood. Gargoyles leered salaciously from perches on the wall as if entertained by the agony below.

  “Wait a minute.” Barrett leaned forward.

  The source of the woman’s apparent terror was withheld in this frame, an indistinct smudge at the bottom of the screen. It could have been a man’s head, or a woman’s.

  “It’s a dog,” Barrett rasped, and then leaned in closer to inspect the grainy screen. “No. Maybe another woman. I can’t tell. But I can see a crucifix. On her neck—you see, Sheriff?”

  “I think so, yeah. Jesus, Lord.”

  Barrett nodded. “Yeah. That’s Juanita Quiroga.”

  * * *

  It was obvious to Barrett that Sheriff Sessions was dumbstruck with doubt. “I was sure we had the killer,” he said over and over. “But now look at this!” Sheriff Sessions was completely ignorant of the technology used to produce the images on Jerry’s computer, but he knew enough to admit that the pixeled images in his possession could not have been created by an ignorant migrant worker. The computer-generated scenarios downloaded to Jerry Slade’s computer were not the work of the Bull. But Sessions had no idea how to follow this cyberspace trail to its source.

  “‘BruteMaster.’” He turned to Barrett. “What kind of goddamn name is that?”

  “It’s a place to start,” Barrett replied. “When you put something on the Web, you leave crumbs. Cookie crumbs, they’re called. They have to lead somewhere. It may take some time, but we’ve got people who do this for a living. Let us help.”

  Sessions’s leather holster squeaked. “Take anything you want. Bring anything. But goddamn, bring it quick.”

  Barrett pored over the scene generated by Jerry Slade’s computer. It was impossible to say whether the images here were staged and consensual, or represented Juanita’s actual torture. Similarly, it was impossible to say whether the original location had been a motel, a bedroom, or the scene of the girl’s murder. What was obvious was that the original location was effectively camouflaged. The medieval wooden beams from which Jaunita hung on-screen, for instance, were obviously pasted in. The castle walls and stonework—all stock imagery.

  The victim’s body was not altered, so far as Barrett could discern; only the face was pixeled to obscurity, as if to say a whore was no person at all. And what was that unfocused image intruding from the bottom of the frame? Was it a dog? A shadow? The FDLE’s cyber sleuths would have to crack that one.

  But there was one remaining, ordinary detail that Barrett almost missed. It sat on the floor to one side of the frame, a vessel of some land. A pail, maybe? Bowl?

  “See that?” Barrett pointed. “The hell would you put a bowl in a bondage scenario?”

  “Water?” Sesssions offered.

  Barrett leaned in close to the screen. There was something familiar to him about this bowl or pail or whatever it was. A substantial volume, flat, cylindrical sides. Composed of metal, certainly, not porcelain or clay.

  “It’s not for water.” He squinched. “It’s a cooking pot, an old, cast-iron…”

  And then Barrett felt his heart pounding in his ears.

  “Sheriff.” He rebounded from the screen. “I need your help.”

  “You need?”

  “I … interviewed a woman,” Barrett continued. “Didn’t get much. I was going to drop it. But she lives in Strawman’s Hammock, she knew both the victim and her uncle, and I’m not sure now that she told me everything she knows.”

  “Hell.” Sessions reached for his hat. “It’s better than nothing. And who is this mystery woman?”

  “Some people call her a witch,” Barrett answered. “I’ve about decided they’re right.”

  Thirteen

  Hezikiah Jackson turned a deerhide rocker to face the failing shade of her mimosa trees. Summers she loved to sit on the porch, admiring the evening fireflies that glowed beneath those twin parasols. But it was much too late in the year for those gentle creatures. The old woman pulled a shawl closer about her bony shoulders and reached to take the frosted glass of water pulled fresh from the pump in her sandy yard. Her potion pot sat handy, its blackened belly filled from the afternoon’s labor with dog fennel and hemlock.

  She was working on a potion now. A pod of pickled beets stained her lap like urine. A butcher knife was cradled in the thin fabric that sagged between the sticks of her legs.

  Creak, creak. Creak, creak.

  The rocker found its rhythm on the porch’s widely spaced planks. Creak, creak. But then something artificial intruded on the evening breeze. An engine of some kind. Car. Truck. Hezikiah did not alter the cadence of her labor.

  The porch steps squeaked with his weight.

  “E’nin.”

  She took hold of the knife.

  “I figgered you might be back.”

  * * *

  Barrett was barely able in the failing light to direct the sheriff onto the faded path that twisted to reach Hezikiah Jackson’s sharecropper shack. At one point he was sure he’d lost that meager road. But then he saw above a setting sun the preternatural blossom of her mimosas.

  “There you go,” the sheriff declared, pulling his Crown Vic into the clearing of her sterile yard.

  “Hezikiah?” Sessions bellowed.

  No answer. Only the rocking chair, propelled by a stiff breeze. Creak, creak. Creak, creak.

  “There’s the pot,” Barrett said. “Same one, gotta be.”

  “Hezikiah?”

  No answer. Sessions unlimbered his .357. “If it ain’t one thing, it’s another.”

  Barrett followed the sheriff inside. The floor tilted at an angle, like a crazy house. The lawmen worked their way as drunken sailors down its shotgun hall. The rooms on either side were empty. Finally they came to the rear of the shack and the kitchen.

  “Shit Miss Agnes,” Sessions’s Tony Limas slipped.

  Barrett caught him by the arm. “Careful.”

  The floor was slick with fluid and strewn with a variety of parts—frogs’ innards, snakeskins, chicken heads. The shelves that formerly held the curandero’s potions were knocked off their bottled columns. Shards of glass and pottery added hazards to the awful-smelling mess strewn onto the floor.

  But there was no witch to be seen. Only the remains of her spells, her alchemy. The back porch waited now, the only place left to check. A single flimsy door barred the way. “Cover me,” Sessions directed, and kicked that flimsy impediment from its rusted hinges.

  There she was, nailed like a deer through the heels and hung from the beam of her porch. A garrot of gingham twisted about Hezikiah’s straw-thin neck. She twisted obscenely in the half-shadows, naked, tongue lolling and purple from a toothless mouth.

  She was disemboweled from her crotch to her throat.

  “Jesus.” Sessions turned away.

  A butcher knife fresh with blood stood straight in the rough pine beside him.

  * * *

  The two lawmen worked out from the homicide in practiced patterns, being careful in the failing light to preserve the scene. They had worked out to the car when the sheriff nodded Barrett over.

  “Got some tire tracks.”

  Barrett walked over to a place about a piss away from the sheriff’s cruiser. A pair of widely space
d treads were well preserved in the hard-packed sand beside the leather-bellowed pump. Barrett knew instantly where he’d seen them before.

  “I’ll be goddamned after all,” he said.

  * * *

  The Loyd family’s riverside mansion glowed like a jack o’ lantern. Lights set into the surrounding water oaks bathed smoothly curved walls. Incandescents inside beamed through the mansion’s wide windows like a lighthouse to limn the approaching driveway.

  The wife’s Lexus stood in its familiar place on sand-packed brick alongside Linton’s SUV. And in between the mother’s vehicle and his father’s crowded Gary Loyd’s Humvee.

  Linton met them at the door.

  “Where’s Gary?” the sheriff asked.

  “I don’t know,” came the wooden reply.

  “This time I got a warrant, Linton,” Lou warned. “Independent discovery. I called the judge myself.”

  “Damn well better have,” the elder responded curtly.

  They checked the Humvee first. Linton claimed not to have a key for the toolbox wedged behind the front seat, but Barrett found a spare in the vehicle’s map box. He opened the steel-tempered container. There was a smoothly machined lump of metal inside. A camera, Barrett realized. Similar to the Slade boy’s.

  “Linton.”

  “What?”

  “Does Gary have a computer?”

  * * *

  They spotted Gary’s computer on a desk in a bedroom bare of any plaque, picture, or memento. Sheriff Sessions waved Barrett off.

  “No. Get your people in here. Let’s do this thing right.”

  Barrett became the virtual case officer on the scene, coordinating with two mobile units to keep a strict chain of custody for all evidence bagged from Gary’s carriage house residence and from Hezikiah’s shack. Barrett also personally swept the shack in Strawman’s Hammock for the second time, just to make sure nothing was missed.

  It was immediately apparent that things did not look good for Gary Loyd. For starters, dozens of files featuring Juanita Quiroga in various scenarios of pornography, bestiality, or bondage were discovered on Gary’s computer, including, for clinchers, the medieval scenario found on Jerry Slade’s machine.

  Investigators also reported that the PhotoLab software on Gary’s PC was exactly the sort of program used for sophisticated cut-and-paste procedures, though they were unable to retrieve files from his machine that contained images of the actual crime scene or Juanita’s real-life agony. The computer’s hard drive was clean of that evidence. But not the camera’s.

  The camera Barrett recovered from Gary’s Humvee was digital, a Nikon Coolpix-900. And it was from that camera that investigators finally recovered the original and untouched photographs of Juanita Quiroga’s ordeal.

  A sense of morbid curiosity competed with the professional obligation to view those photos, but Barrett resisted them both. He was more than willing to let the pros in Violent Crimes pore over that material. The only thing he wanted to determine was whether Hezikiah’s potion pot showed up at all in the digitized pictures from the actual crime scene in Strawman’s Hammock.

  “Did you see the pot?” Barrett double-checked with Midge Holloway.

  “Only in the medeival scenario,” Midge answered. “No place else. And definitely not at the actual scene.”

  “I guess I should be relieved,” Barrett grumbled. “I made the initial search, for crying out loud. I know I couldn’t miss a damned cast-iron pot.”

  “You didn’t, Bear. It wasn’t there. Gary imported that pot into his fantasies, just as he imported the castle and the gargoyles and the rest. Hezikiah was a participant. Maybe she provided stimulants. Maybe kinky sex. Hell, maybe Gary used her house at one time or another, I don’t know. But at some point, he simply decided to include something of hers as part of the scene.”

  That made sense, of course. It made perfect sense.

  “I guess you’re right,” Barrett relented. “It just bothers me that he’d leave a clue like that in a setting otherwise disguised.”

  “Part of him probably wants to get caught. Or at least get public recognition. It fits the profile.”

  Cricket agreed. “It was Gary Loyd all along.”

  Sheriff Sessions reveled in the bright-haired Canadian’s endorsement. Cricket and Bear had just completed their biweekly brief with the sheriff, a much more amicable affair than usual. It had become apparent that the sheriff’s humor was entirely determined by how the news of the day affected his relationship with the Loyds and his bid for reelection. In this regard, Sessions was a perfect politician, cozying up to the Loyds and ignoring Bear when El Toro was pegged as his niece’s killer, distancing himself from the Loyds and embracing Bear when Gary Loyd again looked good for murder.

  “For sure Gary killed Juanita.” Cricket gulped his coffee. “And then he got afraid that Hezikiah would talk. Or maybe she tried to blackmail him, who knows? So he killed her, too.”

  “Damn woman.” Sessions shook his head. “She musta had somethin’ on everybody.”

  A point too close to home for Barrett to blithely acknowledge. About that time a deputy stuck his head out of his underground office.

  “Call from Jacksonville. Miz Holloway.”

  Sessions put Midge on the phone’s duct-taped speaker.

  “Just some additional goodies,” Midge began. “First off, you can eliminate Jerry Slade as a suspect. The camera used to photograph Juanita was definitely not Jerry Slade’s, or any Sony Mavica. And get this—we traced credit-card payments for the freeplay site to a hidden account in Gary’s straw-baling company.”

  “What kind of change we talkin’?” Sessions drawled.

  “Almost a quarter of a million dollars,” Midge reported. “That’s in the one account we’ve been able to trace.”

  “Looks like we got our BruteMaster by the balls,” Sessions declared loudly, and Barrett had to admit that the evidence was mounting.

  Most damning was the fact that forensics on the ground stood right in line with evidence pulled from computers and cameras. The FDLE team that cast the tracks leading up to Hezikiah’s porch matched the pattern of those treads to the tires on Gary’s Humvee. Also recovered near the witch’s uneven stoop were partial prints from a size ten R.E.I. hiking boot that matched a pair found in the garbage behind the Loyd mansion.

  Barrett’s team found loose, straw-colored hair in Hezikiah’s kitchen. They found traces of semen, badly degraded, in her bedding. Samples from a hairbrush and razor in Gary’s bathroom were sent to Jacksonville for DNA comparison to samples taken from the murdered women of Strawman’s Hammock. The Humvee was transported to Jacksonville for extensive forensics.

  “And this time,” Sheriff Sessions promised, “ain’t nothing gonna be thrown out.”

  Barrett received congratulations for an effort that was well coordinated and professional. Within the week, Gary Quentin Loyd was charged with two counts of first-degree homicide. Fountain-Pen Reed champed at his platinum-plated bit as he waited for the DNA analyses that would unarguably tie the alleged BruteMaster to Juanita and Hezikiah. He needed one other thing to proceed, of course. He needed an arrest. He needed Gary Loyd.

  Only Gary was nowhere to be found.

  * * *

  An APB was put out for the younger Loyd on the night of Hezikiah’s murder, but with a week passed there had been no sight of Master Loyd. Sheriff Sessions was convinced that Linton was hiding his son from prosecution. For the narrow purpose of pursuing that possibility, Judge Blackmond granted a single interview, formally for purpose of discovery, to be conducted by Sheriff Sessions with Gary’s father. An attached caveat required the FDLE to assign an agent to accompany the sheriff to the Loyd compound. Lou asked Barrett if he’d like to take that ride.

  “Dollars to doughnuts Linton’s either hiding that boy hisself, or helping him hide,” Lou said as they rumbled over the cattle gap leading to Linton’s riverside home.

  “Just do us all a favor,” Barrett cautioned. “
Do not provoke. And do not get personal.”

  * * *

  A hail from the driveway got no response from inside the big house.

  “Let’s ease around back,” Lou suggested.

  They spotted Linton Loyd viewing the Suwannee River from the height of his balcony. The elder Loyd did not seem surprised to see the lawmen.

  “Come on up.”

  Barrett followed the sheriff into Linton’s marvelous home, up the long curved arm of stairs, onto the marble tiles of the overlook.

  “Do for you gentlemen?”

  “Where’s your boy, Linton?” The sheriff was not about to beat around the bush.

  “Don’t have any idea.” Linton ran a neat hand through perfectly coiffed hair.

  “Have a notion where he might hole up?”

  “Don’t know that he is holed up.”

  “Linton.” Barrett tried to keep his voice calm. “If Gary did kill these people, he’s either a sociopath or insane. If he’s insane, and you can help us prove it, he can avoid the death penalty.”

  “You don’t git the chair for foolin’ around with a whore,” Linton spat. “Now, I don’t doubt that Gary might have chased his dick around a little. Don’t mean he killed that little girl.”

  “How about Hezikiah? Don’t tell me he was out there looking for strange. Nobody’s that desperate.”

  Linton actually smiled.

  “You might be surprised.”

  At some point in the debate the mother floated onto the balcony. More frail and porcelain, it seemed to Barrett, than ever.

  “He took the boat,” she announced without prompt or preamble.

  Linton turned angrily. “Mother, be quiet!”

  “Took it a week ago,” she said. “Said he was gone to fish.”

  “Elizabeth, be still!”

  She turned to her husband.

  “You lord over him. You think you can lord over me?”

  Real hatred there. Genuine contempt.

  “Goddammit, Liz—”

  “Damn you, Linton. Wasn’t for me, you’d be broke! It’s my money made the business in the first place. Bailed you out when you were bust. My money!”