Deep South

by Nevada Barr

  ★ 6 ★

  A county sheriff had never looked so good, but Anna congratulated herself on handling it well. The only slip was she did step forward to shake the man’s hand just as if she’d not done the same thing when she met him several hours earlier.

  Thigpen arrived in the sheriff’s wake. He was wringing wet with sweat and huge with pompous proclamations about waiting for the arrival of the chief ranger, about his strong suspicion that the body would be found just precisely here. Other than to tell him not to smoke or in any other way risk contaminating the crime scene, Anna pretty much ignored him.

  Davidson stood on the edge of the depression that held the girl, letting Ranger Thigpen’s ongoing advice wash over him. Self-discipline or Southern manners kept him from demanding the silence the death of a child and the mind of a policeman required.

  Under his breath, he whistled a tune Anna’d heard once before, a long time ago, but couldn’t place. Comfortable in her skin again, she waited, letting him think. Finally he said, “You look around some?”

  The question was an open-ended invitation. Anna accepted it and began listing the observations she had made while waiting. Thigpen stepped forward and in a loud voice began countering her observations with those of his own.

  “The kid was hung. The rope must’ve broken. This is where she fell.”

  Rather than waste breath arguing the obvious, Anna made an executive decision she knew she’d pay for later but, hell, in for a penny ...

  “Randy,” she cut him off. “I need you to go back to the ranger station. Get a measuring tape, 35mm camera, pens, paper, envelopes.” She went on to list all the things in the evidence collection kit that he hadn’t bothered to bring. Its absence didn’t make her think worse of him. Murder in the parks, any crime that required intricate collection of trace evidence for that matter, was rare. Rangers were trained in it, but without cause to use those skills, most lost them. Anna had. She’d no more faith in herself to lift an important fingerprint or make casting of a boot print than she would to sing an aria. To do these things well required practice. What made her already low opinion of her erstwhile subordinate drop another notch was that he’d not had the respect—or the spine—to tell her he had no kit.

  When she finished, Randy pursed his lips, nodded and said, “Barth can get ’em.”

  “I’d like you to,” Anna said. “You’ve seen the situation firsthand. You might think of something I’ve forgotten. Also, I need you to be there when the district ranger from Ridgeland arrives. Show him where we are.”

  Thigpen spent a moment or two thinking. Anna guessed he was weighing how far he dared to openly flout her orders. Being in on something big in the parks gave a ranger status, bragging rights. Whether he wanted to work or not, Randy Thigpen didn’t want to miss out.

  A conclusion was reached, and he got in his parting shot. “Good point about Stilwell.” He named the district ranger to the north. “A good man to have on the job. He knows what he’s doing.”

  Anna let it pass. Many years had elapsed since her skin had been so thin a dart as meager as that could penetrate. Davidson was not so well-armored. He shot the big ranger a look that was equal parts anger and contempt. Anna allowed herself one small smile as she watched Randy struggle, knowing he couldn’t apologize to the sheriff without committing himself to open warfare with his new boss.

  He settled for telling Anna, “There is a better way than you had us come,” and forged off through the woods at an oblique angle to the path they’d followed from the graveyard. According to Anna’s brochure map, he was heading toward the fragment of sunken trace that ran just this side of Little Sand Creek.

  “Where were we?” Davidson asked as the sound of Thigpen’s progress faded. Anna finished her litany of suspected evils.

  The sheriff had a camera in an olive-drab sack he carried. After taking photographs of the scene from various angles, he asked Anna to go through her list once more and meticulously photographed each item she mentioned—the shoes and feet, the fungus, the roping, the hands—three shots each to bracket the light.

  That done, they stopped by mutual unspoken accord and stared at the sheeted body. “I guess it’s time to unwrap her,” Anna said at last.

  “I guess.” Neither moved to do it. “You do a lot of this?” he asked.

  “No. You?”

  “It seems like a lot to me but I guess it isn’t. This is my first kid, believe it or not. You know—that wasn’t a car accident or something.”

  “Mine too,” Anna said, made free by his confession. “It changes it. And I don’t even much like kids.” She was wishing she hadn’t added that last—it sounded so heartless given the circumstances—but Davidson laughed and she was, if not exonerated, then forgiven. “Let’s get to it,” she said.

  Having donned latex gloves from her first aid kit, she carefully removed the noose from around the sheet-draped neck and slid it over the head. As she worked, the sheriff took photographs: the knot, the creases the rope left in the fabric of the sheet.

  Anna’d forgotten how much a human head weighs. Slipping the noose free, she let the head fall a couple of inches and flinched when it thudded into the ground. Starting at the ragged hem, she folded the sheet up around the girl’s thighs so any loose trace evidence there might be would be contained rather than shaken loose and lost.

  The sheet was old, worn soft and thin. Guessing by the size, it came from a baby’s crib or a cot. Faint dark lines ran across one comer and again up near the noose, stains that looked as if they’d been there through a number of launderings. All this Anna noted aloud, speaking into the tape recorder in the breast pocket of her uniform shirt. She preferred written notes but her hands were otherwise occupied.

  The victim wore a little black dress, not quite so revealing as Heather’s but nearly so, with a spider-web design in rhinestones across the chest. The girl was slight but full-breasted. The flimsy gown had fallen off her shoulders, exposing a black satin strapless Wonderbra with its carefully engineered upthrust. Times had changed. When Anna was in high school, girls had to make do with gym socks shoved into the Playtex. Not to mention what the nuns would have done had any girl at Mercy High showed up in such an abbreviated confection. “I’m getting old,” Anna said to Davidson to make the image of this little girl, alive, excited, dressing up for her date, go away.

  In a way, she thought, it must be harder for a man to see such a thing. Not only were they trained—at least the good ones—to protect women, but such a display of girlish flesh must cause, if not mixed signals from the body, at least the uncomfortable knowledge that such a thing was possible. “Baby women,” Anna said, apropos of nothing.

  “I see them all the time,” he said. “Some friends of mine and I were down on the Gulf, and I saw this girl in a tiny bathing suit. I turned to my buddy and told him to take a look. The kid came closer. It was his daughter. I’ve known her since she was in diapers. I’d been telling my pal to leer at his own daughter. I’d been leering. I was half sick for a week.”

  Who was this guy, Anna wondered, telling her things like that. “Do you still leer?” she asked just to have something to say.

  “On special occasions, but only if the leer-ee is clearly over forty.”

  “Not twenty-one?”

  “Carding them prior to leering takes the fun out of it.” Neither of them could carry the conversation further with the dead between them. Holding her breath though the body had yet to get really ripe, Anna began peeling the sheet off the girl’s neck and face. Abrasions discolored the throat but there was no bruising, and no ligature marks. She’d not been hanged. Odds were the rope had been put around her neck after death.

  The sheet came away from the left side of the face easily, exposing a girl in her early-to-mid-teens who had been pretty. Now the bugs had found her and she showed a nightmare countenance. Blood matting the hair, the skin and the cotton fibers of the makeshift hood stuck the sheet to the right side of her face.

&nb
sp; “I don’t want to jerk this off,” Anna told Davidson. “I’m afraid I’ll screw up any trace evidence in the wound or the hair.”

  Davidson took some close-ups of the girl’s face while Anna finished her observations. Trace evidence would be sent to the Mississippi Crime Lab in Jackson.

  “Looks like a severe blow to the right side of the head.” That was it. A blunt and ugly truth. “Do you want to tell the parents or shall I?” Anna asked.

  “I’ll do it. If this is Danielle Posey—and we’ve got no reason to think otherwise at this point—I know her father to talk to. I worked a fender-bender on the Trace near 1-20 there out of Clinton. A drunk hit him, an old black man in a pickup truck. Mr. Posey was not happy. He wanted that old man drawn and quartered, legally speaking. There wasn’t much I could do. The old guy had no money, no insurance and taking away his driver’s license was a moot point, since he’d never bothered to get one. When I asked him why he said, ‘I never needed one till now.’ ”

  Anna laughed. Davidson finished the photos, and she was grateful to let the sheet drop back over the child’s face, hiding the fester of ants that marked where the eyes had been.

  “Can’t blame Posey a whole heck of a lot,” the sheriff went on as they picked their way back to the side of what they’d deemed the crime scene area. “He’s got an older boy that’s nothing but trouble and Danielle, a farm that can’t clear more than twenty or thirty grand a year, and a wife that’s in and out of mental hospitals all the time. That’d be enough to fray anybody’s nerves. Anyway, I’ll get him down to ID the body. Poor guy. What could be worse? Asked to come see if a dead girl’s your daughter and it is.”

  The deep and apparently genuine compassion in the sheriff’s voice touched Anna. With that touch, the human tragedy of the situation came home and she felt sadness as a physical weight across the back of her neck. Paul Davidson began whistling again. This time Anna remembered the song. She’d heard it on Cumberland Island: “Jesus Met the Woman.”

  “You’ll meet Posey,” Davidson said. “I believe he leases some of his land from the Trace. Cotton or soybeans.” There wasn’t much else to say, and they stood side by side, Taco at their feet, staring at the ruined child.

  The sound of voices approaching from the northeast, the direction of the sunken Trace, Little Sand Creek and Rocky Springs campground brought the two of them out of whatever hole their thoughts were taking them down.

  “Jesus Christ,” Anna growled. “It sounds like a herd of elephants. If there was anything on Miss Posey’s trail to find they’ll have smashed it all to hell.” The damage was done. It was too late to do anything but fume and Anna watched sourly as three men tramped out of the woods. Ranger Thigpen was in the lead, a cigarette in his hand that he only flicked away after making sure Anna had seen it. Behind him, trim and neat in NPS green and gray, was a ranger Anna’d not met. Trailing was a deputy in the crisp uniform of the Claiborne County Sheriff’s Department. The deputy was first to speak. He was young and fit, the short walk not even causing him to break a sweat. He was a couple of shades darker than Anna’s ranger, Barth Dinkin, and about forty pounds lighter. Showing his mama had raised him right, he took off his Stetson, nodded at Paul, then Anna.

  “Sheriff. Ma’am.” Amenities taken care of, he turned to his boss. “The coroner’s waiting at Rocky. Says he’ll take your word she’s dead.”

  “He’s not coming to the scene?” Anna was appalled.

  “Dwight’s getting on in years,” Davidson explained.

  “He’s seventy-eight, ma’am, had a birthday day before yesterday,” the deputy put in.

  “He doesn’t get around like he used to,” Davidson added.

  “And he keeps getting elected?” Anna asked.

  “Without the money he makes as a coroner, he’d be pretty bad off,” Davidson said, as if that explained everything.

  Anna had a lot to learn about social welfare in Mississippi.

  The deputy went into conference with the sheriff, and the natty ranger stepped up to Anna. He was compact and wiry, and his dark hair, shot with gray, fell over his forehead. A neatly trimmed, thoroughly grizzled beard covered his jaw. There was about him a puckish mischief that Anna suspected had allowed him to get away with murder most of his life. With a child’s corpse at her feet, the hackneyed phrase jarred, and she said with more asperity than she’d intended, “Who are you?”

  “Gunga Din at your service,” he said, and clicked his heels together and bowed at the waist.

  For a moment Anna was flummoxed and annoyed by the sensation, then she remembered. “The water boy. Steven Stilwell. Thank you. If the Rocky Springs water tastes as bad as it smells, I’m in your debt.”

  “Good. I like being owed.”

  Because one couldn’t look or keep one’s thoughts elsewhere for any length of time, they turned toward the body.

  “Not much of a welcome to Mississippi,” Stilwell said.

  “Not much,” Anna admitted.

  “John Brown’s on his way. It’s about a three-hour drive from Tupelo. I can do it in two and a half.”

  Anna nodded. One of the perks—or pitfalls—of being in law enforcement. It was easy to become a chronic speeder. Stilwell was in the next level of addiction: not only doing it but boasting of it. The only unacceptable level of the malady was boasting about it in the presence of civilians who were ticketed, and rightly so, when caught indulging.

  “We can’t just leave the body lying here being eaten by insects while the chief ranger drives down from Timbuktu,” Anna said.

  “Tupelo.”

  To Anna they were one in the same but she forbore comment. She wondered whether to talk with the sheriff about the next step, defer to Stilwell, radio the chief ranger and ask him what to do or just wade in and take charge. Much as she loathed it, given Thigpen and Dinkin’s response to her arrival, the gender question was very much in the air. Davidson seemed okay and Stilwell had done nothing to set her radar off, but the situation had her second-guessing herself. She didn’t like it.

  Please yourself. She heard her mother’s voice. Then at least one person will be happy with your decision.

  “What’s the usual protocol, Paul?” she asked.

  “Tag her and bag her,” Randy Thigpen said. Anna’d forgotten he was there. She chose to forget again.

  “We’ll get her covered up,” Paul Davidson replied. “Get her out to the parking lot so Dwight can give his stamp of approval.”

  “How do you want to transport?” Anna asked. “Ambulance? Are the autopsies done in Jackson or where?”

  “Steven Hayne at Mississippi Mortuary in Rankin,” Davidson said and added, “Have ’em send an ambulance, I guess. All Dwight’s got is an old pickup he uses to haul wood. We’ve used it in a pinch, but it doesn’t seem right today.”

  Anna called dispatch for an ambulance, then radioed Chief Ranger Brown. He’d been instrumental in hiring her, but the call was more than just courtesy or toadying. Brown had talked to her half a dozen times during the interminable process of hiring and struck her as a fair-minded man who knew his job. From the scuttlebutt she’d picked up during phone chats with the secretary in personnel, he’d come up through the ranks from a GS-4 seasonal law enforcement ranger in Death Valley to the exalted position of chief, and not via the fast track with the Office of Personnel Management pulling the puppet strings.

  John Brown was at mile marker 105 in Stilwell’s district north of Jackson. Davidson suggested he meet up with them at the mortuary, but Brown wanted to see the crime scene. Anna put her radio away.

  Sheriff Davidson, hat in hand, was standing over the sad little heap of rotting flesh that had so recently been a pretty girl going to her high school prom. Anna’d never seen a cop doing it before, but she could have sworn the sheriff was praying. For some reason it bothered her. To cover it, she said: “In the words of Ranger Thigpen, it’s time to bag and tag.”

  Unruffled by her harshness, he finished whatever silent communion he
was in the midst of, then restored his hat.

  As Anna watched to see that nothing of importance was dislodged, the body was lifted into a black plastic body bag the deputy had brought. The rope, an ugly companion in death, was coiled into the bag with the child’s remains. Everyone, Anna was sure, even Thigpen, was relieved when the zipper closed over her face.

  Together the sheriff and his deputy lifted their burden. Davidson took it in his arms, cradling the body as carefully as if it were still able to feel human kindness. With Thigpen leading the way, the three of them left to meet the ambulance and the aging coroner at Rocky Springs.

  “What’s left to do?”

  The question came from Steve Stilwell. Anna had forgotten about him. He leaned against a tree, hands in his pockets, a grass stem between his teeth. The sheaf of salt-and-pepper hair spilled over his forehead as if he’d recently been tumbled out of bed. He’d taken a tin camping cup from somewhere and filled it with water for Taco. Now the fickle beast lay with his great dripping jaws draped possessively over Stilwell’s instep.

  “Oh, God,” Anna said, suddenly weary. “My answer of choice would be a drink but I guess we go over the back trail, or what’s left of it. See if we can turn up anything.”

  “I’ve got a bottle of single malt whiskey in my car,” Stilwell said unexpectedly. “Strictly for medicinal purposes, naturally. I’ll buy you a drink when we’re through.”

  “You’re on.” Though she didn’t care much for whiskey, she was beginning to warm up to the Ridgeland district ranger.

  “Trail” was a misnomer. The track back toward the campground that the others—and presumably the girl and her killer—had taken was just a way through woods as rugged and choked with decaying plant matter as the way Anna had traversed on her search for the body.

  Rotten soil laid its booby traps. Stilwell called it “rotten” and that’s how it appeared. The actual biological or geological phenomenon was unknown to Anna. Large patches of the ground could and did give way when weight was put on them. The sensation was like postholding: having one’s foot break through the frozen crust on top of a snowfield. Except with rotten soil, it was never clear just how far the fall was going to be.