Red Circus: A Dark Collection

by John L. Campbell

  “Hey, Ham,” said the deputy, leaning on the doorframe and taking in the cool air. He was sweating, the collar and armpits of his uniform shirt stained dark. A wad of tobacco puffed out his lower lip.

  “Gary,” said the Sheriff. He nodded up towards the cluster of vehicles. “Tobias has the scene?”

  “Yessir,” the deputy nodded. “Got the tape up and being a real bitch about not letting anyone inside. Got her kit out, says nobody touches nothing until you get here.”

  “That’s why she’s the sergeant,” Hamilton said, then thought, and that’s why you’re out here sweating on the blacktop.

  Gary spit to one side, careful not to get any on the sheriff’s car. He had his own opinion about that. “Won’t let nobody talk to the witness, neither.”

  Hamilton frowned. “We’ve got a witness?” Before Gary could respond, he had dropped the cruiser into drive and gunned away, leaving his deputy waving at exhaust and a cloud of gnats which had lowered slowly onto the road. The sheriff maneuvered his car around the other vehicles and stopped at their center, shutting off his light bar. There were enough of those going as it was. On foot he wound through the deputy cruisers and around the firetruck, where four volunteer firemen half dressed in their turnout gear were gathered, talking quietly. They gave the sheriff a nod as he passed, but didn’t speak. Their expressions told him they’d seen the body, and that spoke for itself.

  As he reached the gravel shoulder, Deputy Jeff Hooper met him coming out of the thick woods, carrying a flashlight. “Evening, Ham.” He handed over the light. “Maggie’s already put up one set of lights, you’ll see ‘em in a bit, but you’ll need this to get there. Watch out for a big bitch of a fallen tree.” He gestured at a torn knee of his uniform trousers. Blood had started soaking the surrounding fabric.

  Sheriff Hamilton gave his deputy a gentle squeeze on the shoulder. Jeff was one of his hardest-working and most dependable men, destined to wear sergeant’s stripes if a slot opened up, and he had seen plenty of horror in his years with the department; car accidents, hunting accidents, child abuse, domestic arguments turned to homicide. But the murder of a child was something different, enough the shake the most jaded, and Hamilton could see it on the deputy’s face as he had with the firemen. “Get someone to take a look at that, Jeff. It gets infected and your leg goes bum, you’re no good to anyone. Won’t have you slackin’ off on Worker’s Comp, hear?”

  The deputy grinned and nodded as he limped towards the ambulance, and Hamilton headed into the woods, the powerful Maglite beam leading the way. About forty yards in he could see the white glow of Maggie Tobias’s crime scene lights, slashed with the black vertical stripes of intervening trees. In here the humidity wrapped itself close around him like a barber’s shaving cloth, the late July air heavy and hard to breathe. Twilight mosquitoes descended for a sweaty meal, and he brushed them from his bare arms, taking off his ballcap to wipe his brow. The woods crowded in on him, and while brambles tugged at his trousers, mud sucked at his boots and threatened to pull them off as he picked his way towards the lights.

  What a miserable place to die.

  It had rained for over two hours late this afternoon, and although it had done nothing to suppress the heat, it had succeeded in softening up the ground pretty well. He found the fallen tree Jeff Hooper had warned him about, and climbed over it carefully, but a snapped-off branch still dug a red line across one elbow, and a tangle of weeds and muck on the other side threatened to throw him onto his face. He managed to stay on his feet, planting a hand on a mossy tree trunk, and even held onto the flashlight. Ahead, the blue-white flash of a camera lit the woods for an instant. He continued, reminding himself to have Patricia check him for ticks when he got home.

  The scene was a tight little clearing – a loose term in these woods – with a giant, rotted stump at its center. Tough grass was matted as if by the passage of many feet, and the ground was littered with trash, mostly beer and liquor bottles, many of them half sunk in the earth with time. Yellow crime scene tape ringed the clearing, wound back and forth among the trees, and Sheriff Hamilton ducked under it as he entered. He saw the body at once.

  “Stop,” said a woman’s voice, the tone one of authority not to be argued with. Cecil Hamilton did as he was told and froze in mid-step. Maggie Tobias, five feet five and a hundred twenty pounds, stood to the left of the stump. She wore her uniform trousers bloused into black combat-style boots and a bright yellow shirt with SHERIFF’S DEPT. emblazoned on the back, sergeant’s stripes on each short sleeve. A 9mm in a paddle holster rode one hip, and her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. In one hand she held a large camera, and with the other she pointed at her boss.

  “Walk to the right, around that side of the stump,” her finger traced the route he was to take, “and come up behind me.” Her finger stopped, pointing at a spot next to her. Then she hoisted the camera, aimed, and lit the woods with another flash.

  Sheriff Hamilton followed her instructions, seeing several pieces of evidence already bagged and left in place where they had been found; a couple of Budweiser cans, a crumpled cigarette pack, a condom, several cigarette butts and a hardback Dr. Seuss book. A tripod with a pair of high intensity, battery powered lamps sat off to Maggie’s right, illuminating the area. The sheriff was careful not to step on anything important, and his eyes roamed the ground for something she might have missed. He didn’t see anything. Not that it would have helped. The late day rain would have already done a fine job erasing a considerable amount of evidence.

  He completed his route and ended up beside her while she crouched and took another picture. Up close he could see she had sweat right through the back of her shirt, and it hung on her like a damp skin. Mosquitoes fed on her neck, but she seemed not to notice. She took three steps to the right, crossing in front of her boss, and snapped another picture.

  Sheriff Hamilton looked at the body and shoved his hands in his pockets, shaking his head.

  “Black female,” Maggie began, not pausing in her work as she made a slow circle, taking pictures from every angle, “age approximately twelve years. Blunt force trauma to the head, the forehead.” She pointed at a rock sticking out of the flattened grass that looked as if someone had painted it red. Even the rain hadn’t washed it clean. “That’s your cause of death right there.” Several mosquitoes crawled over the rock’s surface. “The rock’s stuck in the ground, so best bet is either she tripped and fell and hit her head on it…” she pointed at the panties around the girl’s ankles. It would have been hard to run like that. “…or someone grabbed the back of her head and bashed it into the rock. There’s a depression in the ground near her upper body, could be a knee mark, can’t say.”

  “Sexual assault.” Hamilton didn’t say it like a question.

  “Doc Fulcrum’s gonna have to say for sure, but yeah, I’d say so from the bruising.” The girl’s red and white patterned dress was turned inside out up to the waist. “Looks like sodomy too. Can’t say what else, but we’re gonna have to have the doc check her mouth for…”

  Hamilton held up a hand. “Yeah, I know, Maggie. He will.”

  Maggie looked at him, and for a moment the professional mask she wore, the one which allowed her to do such a gruesome task, the one which every cop in America was familiar with, slipped just a little out of place. Revealed was a woman, a human being struggling with pain and disgust and rage. Then the mask returned and she was a sergeant again, working a scene without emotion.

  “I’d put time of death somewhere between ten a.m. and two, maybe three. Before the rain, that’s for sure.”

  “She put up a fight?” Hamilton was hoping she had, because then her fingernails might be a wealth of evidence.

  Tobias sighed. “Not what I’d expect, not from a first look. Who knows? But I could smell liquor when I got close to her face. Her eyes are wide open, so I’d say she was conscious when it happened. Can’t tell how aware she might have been, though.”

  “How many
?”

  She frowned as she thought. “More than one.”

  The sheriff contemplated several men doing this to a child, then quickly buried that one down deep. He had a mask of his own, and it was better than most. “What’s the witness say?”

  Tobias nearly dropped her camera. “We got a witness?”

  “You got a witness.”

  “Who?”

  The sheriff scowled and held up a hand. “Hold on. You’re holding a witness and won’t let anyone talk to them.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says Gary. He told me when I got here.”

  It was Maggie’s turn to shake her head. “Boss, that dumbass don’t have a brain in his head, and most days can’t tell rain from piss.” Maggie had a BA in criminal justice, and was half way to her Masters in business administration, but when she got fired up her Mississippi was revealed in all its glory.

  “So what’s he talking about?”

  “No witness, that’s for sure. He must mean Tyler Coffey, got him sittin’ in the back of my unit with the AC on, drinking a diet Coke. He’s the one found the body.” She held up a hand and corrected herself. “Well, his dog found it, I guess, and he found the dog.”

  The sheriff knew a witness was too much to hope for. Tyler Coffey was a local, seventy years old and retired from the mill, living in a shack down County Road 17 and spending his days drinking away his pension. When he wasn’t prowling the sides of the county’s roads for redeemable cans.

  “He gonna be of any use?”

  Maggie shook her head. “Doubt it. I was hoping maybe he saw a car or someone on foot, but he said he couldn’t remember seeing anyone. He’s mostly in the bag, anyway. I’ll get a formal statement from him later.”

  Hamilton looked at the little girl again, stretched out face-down on the damp ground, arms down at her sides. She hadn’t even braced before hitting the rock and sailing off to whatever came next. He hoped it was someplace peaceful. His Pentecostal mother claimed it was. That is, in the unlikely event you escaped the fiery torment of Hell.

  “You call the State Police yet?”

  Maggie crouched behind her camera. “Nope.”

  “Goddamn it, Maggie Lynn, you know the procedure!”

  She looked over her camera, her chin thrust out. “Yessir, I do, and the God almighty SBI boys are more than welcome to come in and mess up this scene right after I’ve processed it. This is my case, Ham, and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let whoever did this get off on a technicality because some state fool can’t tell a jackass north from south!”

  The sheriff glared back at his sergeant for a long moment, then sighed and shoved his hands back in his pockets. “Alright, do it your way, but I’m going to have to call.” Tobias started to object, but he silenced her with a stern look. “It’ll take ‘em two, three hours to get here, time enough for you to finish. I’ll square things with Johnny Lee.”

  Cecil Hamilton and Johnny Lee Reed had grown up in Jasper together, had played high school football together – where Johnny Lee had given him the nickname Ham, due to his beefy physique – and had both started taking police entry exams as soon as they were old enough. They had even dropped out of college the same year when Cecil had been accepted to the sheriff’s department and Johnny to the state police. Weddings, births, and law enforcement had kept their lives linked ever since, and Johnny Lee was now the commanding lieutenant at State Police Barracks D over in Hawley.

  The sheriff pointed a finger at his sergeant. “And don’t you give his boys no grief when they get here, Maggie Lynn Tobias. They start in on you, you just walk away. Soon as they get here you can turn over the scene and get on home to a shower.”

  “Not goin’ home, Ham. Gonna stay with the girl until Doc Fulcrum has a look at her. There’s things I gotta know.”

  He knew it was no use to argue. “Fine. Gonna put Don on this with you, give you a hand.”

  That sat well with her. Don Havermeyer was a young sheriff’s detective who usually worked narcotics cases – a busy job in this county – but he was shaping up to be a fine investigator. Some of the deputies, the old-timers mostly, disliked him for his youth and eagerness. Tobias knew what it meant to be disliked.

  Hamilton looked at the girl once more, wishing he could cover her up, knowing it wasn’t yet time for that. “That’s Harriett LaCroix, isn’t it?” He already knew the answer. He had recognized the dress, and the Dr. Seuss book was a giveaway. Harriett loved Dr. Seuss.

  Tobias stood from her crouch and nodded, also looking at the still body. “Yessir, gotta be.” Then she looked up at Sheriff Hamilton and the detached attitude which had helped get her through the evening was gone. Tears streaked both cheeks, and Hamilton realized he had never once seen Maggie Tobias cry in the eleven years he’d known her. “And what I wanna know, Ham, is what the hell is this little girl – this little retarded girl - doing out here in the woods, and her mama ain’t banging down our door wanting to know why her baby didn’t come home?” The fury behind her words was like a slap. “I’ll tell you why,” she continued, her voice shaking as she pointed at her boss. “Because her worthless whore of a mama is sleepin’ on her damn sofa cracked out of her mind, that’s why!”

  Hamilton was torn, wanting to put his arms on her shoulders and calm her, a paternal instinct to somehow shield her from something so heinous, yet knowing he could not, it was her job, chosen of her own will, and something she had to face on her own. Instead he did the best he could.

  “You do a good job here, Maggie, and we’ll get who did this. I’ll take care of her mama.”

  It was almost two in the morning by the time Cecil Hamilton pulled his cruiser up the long dirt driveway that led from the blacktop to his house, a big two story place on plenty of land, enough room for Patricia’s horses. The headlights picked out his wife’s silver Buick, David’s pick-up, and a muddy quad parked near the garage. In the dark to the right was the silhouette of his boat, covered in a tarp and sitting on its trailer. A soft glow came from the kitchen window. Patricia had left the stove light on for him.

  He shut off the engine and sat there for a while, listening to the big V8 tick as it cooled. He’d quit smoking five years earlier, but tonight he caught himself craving again. He popped a mint instead and eased slowly out of the front seat, groaning at the pulled muscle in his back as he straightened. His dark green trousers were bloody and he was wearing only his white t-shirt, the khaki uniform shirt a torn scrap in an ER trash can. A white bandage was wrapped around his left forearm, and the bite mark hurt like hell. Jeff Hooper had gotten off easy with just a black eye, but Gary had caught a solid kick to the groin, followed by a broken nose after a direct hit from a glass ashtray.

  Miracle Falls was the unlikely name of the trailer park where Topaz Martin lived, just about a mile outside Jasper along Younger Creek Road. It was a place the department knew well, home to a mostly transient population of paroled felons and folks for whom public assistance was a third and fourth generation family business. Even Cecil Hamilton, with a reputation for holding his ground against any and all comers, regardless of their prison muscles or badass attitudes, knew better than to go there alone, especially at night. He’d brought along Gary and Jeff, partly because he didn’t know who might be cribbing at Topaz’s trailer, and partly to keep watch on the cruisers so no one tried to steal the shotgun or radio while they were inside.

  Topaz Martin (originally Topaz LaCroix), was twenty-six, and had a criminal record that went back well into her childhood, everything from car theft and prostitution to felony assault and possession with intent. Her current occupation centered mostly on a shoplifting-for-refund operation she ran with the help of her two sisters, Cinnamon and Eternity LaCroix. That trio was the scourge of retailers across lower Mississippi, and all three had been banned from the Chestnut Farms Mall on the edge of the county. She had six kids of varying ages, all different daddies, all placed in different foster homes. Except for her oldest, twelve-year old Harriett. No
matter how many times Topaz was arrested and Harriett taken out of the home by CPS, the state always returned the girl to her mother. Topaz would serve her thirty or sixty days, get clean for a while in a mandatory program, and then a state worker would drop the girl off and watch as Topaz showered her special-needs child with affection and promises that this time things would be different.

  As Tobias had predicted, Topaz was high. She said she had sent Harriett out in the morning with some money to get her mama cigarettes, and “that damn stupid girl ain’t come back yet.” When she had been told of her daughter’s murder, she had paused, then wondered aloud if that meant the state was going to cut down on her assistance.

  The sheriff had never wanted to slap a woman so badly in his life, but instead, Jeff had nudged him and pointed at the coffee table. There in plain sight was the pipe, the baggies, the crack, and half a dozen credit cards which most certainly did not belong to Topaz Martin.

  “Hook her up,” the sheriff said, and that had set it off.

  Losing her daughter might not have shaken Topaz, but being deprived of her crack turned the scrawny woman into a demon. At the sounds of battle, Gary had come bursting in from outside in time to take the full force of her attack, which had spilled out into the muddy drive before they managed to subdue her. She was being held overnight for observation in the security unit at Fredericks Hospital, pending transfer to Hamilton’s lockup in the morning.

  Sheriff Hamilton leaned against the fender of his cruiser and looked up at the star-filled Mississippi night. It was clear, and the humidity had dropped mercifully, so he took a moment, intending to clear his head before going in to join his wife in bed. Instead, his thoughts kept turning back to the hospital.

  After he and his men had gotten stitched up and he had sent them home to their own families, Hamilton had gone down to the hospital basement, where Doc Fulcrum, the county medical examiner, had his offices and labs. The hallways had been dark, and he had found a nurse who told him Doctor Fulcrum was in Jackson at a conference, and wasn’t due back until midday tomorrow. Then he’d gone looking for Maggie Tobias, and found her sleeping on a vinyl sofa outside the morgue. He didn’t wake her, and instead hunted through several rooms until he’d found a blanket, and covered her up before leaving.