by A. E. Howe
“What’s your name?”
“Carlos Ruiz. Please, I got to call Mr. Joe.”
“You called 911?”
“I see a body. I call the police, then the woman on the phone says to wait and not call anyone else. I told her I had to call Mr. Joe, it was his father who was dead, but she said no. Go to the gate and wait for the deputy. So I did, but now you’re here. I got to call. It’s his father.” The man seemed to be in genuine shock.
“Better leave your car here. I can’t tell if we have tire tracks or not,” Toomey said somberly. “I walked on the left side of these ruts.”
I told Carlos to wait for us and we fell in line behind Toomey, heading out into the pasture.
I looked at the field. It was two hundred acres, bordered by old growth hardwoods. Looking ahead, I couldn’t see any vehicles or buildings. I knew that the Parrish family had owned the land for well over a hundred years. This case was going to be a bear to deal with no matter how you looked at it. The victim was a very important and well-liked member of the community, so all the stresses of a murder investigation would be multiplied a dozen times.
“It’s not too much farther,” Toomey said over his shoulder as he traipsed alongside the dual ruts that bordered the edge of the hay field. He set a steady pace. Middle-aged, he also served in the Army Reserve. Of average height and build, his eyes had a military squint that told anyone with two brain cells that this was not a person who played games and that, if you chose to play games with him, he was going to win.
As we got closer to the murder site, I saw an area where the open pasture cut into the woods. Off to the right I could see a large tractor parked at an odd angle and, in the distance, the railroad tracks that ran along the far edge of the pasture.
“It ain’t pretty,” Toomey warned. “I’m going to go back and wait for Shantel and Marcus,” he said, referring to our best crime scene techs.
As irritating as I found Darlene, I knew that she was highly competent and would follow in my footsteps as we tried to avoid tramping over any evidence that might exist on the soft soil surrounding the body.
I winced when I saw Hank Parrish lying on the ground about twenty feet from the tractor. He was on his back, an arrow sticking out of his left eye. I understood Toomey’s uncertainty about whether this was a murder or an accident. Every year we dealt with several hunting accidents. Usually they were just gunshot wounds, but occasionally it was something more exotic. Last year a young man got his foot tangled up in his deer stand and fell headfirst onto the ground from fifteen feet up, breaking his neck. On average, every other hunting season someone out in the woods ended up dead.
“Couldn’t have been hunting deer. Season’s been over for months,” Darlene said, peering around me and trying to get a closer look.
I looked in the direction that the arrow had probably traveled. “Still legal to hunt boar or small game.”
“You got to get close for those. They’d have been able to see him. Hell, he’s wearing a red shirt,” Darlene pointed out.
“You’ve got to get pretty close anytime you’re using a bow.”
“That’s true.”
“We’ll have to wait till they photograph and document the scene before we can get a closer look, but I’m inclined to agree with you that an accident seems pretty unlikely.”
I pulled out my phone and called Dad. He was in Tallahassee at a regional law enforcement meeting, but said that he would come by the crime scene when the meeting was over. He’d already heard about the death. I could hear the weariness in his tone.
“Let’s go find the family and let them know,” I told Darlene. “We won’t be able to keep a lid on it much longer.”
We went back up to the gate where Toomey was having a hard time keeping a handle on Carlos.
“He’s getting himself all worked up,” Toomey told me.
“We’re going to tell the family now.”
No sooner had the words left my mouth than a truck came down the road, moving fast, and pulled onto the side of the road behind the other vehicles. A large, stocky man I recognized as Joe Parrish, in his late forties and the eldest of the Parrish children, jumped down from the cab and strode over to us.
“What’s going on?” He saw Carlos. “Where’s my father?”
I stepped up to him. “I’m Deputy Larry Macklin with the sheriff’s office.”
He turned and focused his attention on me. “You’re the sheriff’s son.”
“That’s right. Mr. Parrish, I think you’d better prepare yourself.” I paused to give my words time to sink in.
His face took on a puzzled expression, as though the thought of bad news was alien to him. “Why? What’s happened?”
“I’m afraid that your father is dead.” I didn’t want to tell him that he’d been murdered yet. Who knew? Maybe he’d blurt out something like: Who shot my father with an arrow? and I could arrest him on the spot.
He fell back against the hood of Toomey’s patrol car. “He was fine this morning. Dad was just at the doctor’s a month ago.” Joe spoke slowly, his eyes focused on the ground. “I… What?” He tried to puzzle it through. “Was it an accident? Like I said, he was feeling fine.”
“For the moment, we can’t be sure what killed him,” I said, thinking: The arrow sticking through his skull is a big clue, though. My dark humor almost caused me to laugh out loud. My dad and I had the occasional odd tendency to laugh at funerals and other situations surrounding death. It was either a coping mechanism, or we were just weird. “I can tell you that it looks like it was quick. The coroner’s office will be here soon, and we will be working very hard to get some answers for you. We’re going to want to talk with your family and employees.”
“Sure,” Joe said, clearly stunned by the news. I knew what it was like to have a father who was bigger than life. Losing Hank Parrish would leave a huge void that would take a long time to fill.
“What do you suspect?” Joe asked suddenly. He was smart—I knew that from his reputation. I had also heard he was a cutthroat businessman. Not that I blamed him. It was hard to make a living as a farmer.
“I’d be a poor investigator if I suspected anything at this point. It’s very early days. What we have to do is gather as much information as we can. Anyone who has been on this property in the past twenty-four hours, or could have been on the property, needs to be questioned. I know that this will be a difficult time. Unfortunately, we’re going to have to make it even worse by conducting an investigation while you and your family are still grieving.”
He stared at me hard. “When do you want to talk to the family?”
I looked at Darlene, standing by me quietly and respectfully. I decided that it would be best if both of us did the questioning. “Give us a couple of hours.”
“I can get the employees together at any time,” Joe said with authority. The king was dead, long live the king.
“We’ll talk to them after we’ve talked with the family. What you can do now is make a list of all the employees that are here today, and make sure they don’t leave until we’ve spoken with them.”
He nodded, then Darlene and I headed back to the crime scene.
I wanted to walk around looking for evidence, but I needed to wait for the techs to do their thing. Shantel Williams and Marcus Brown were the best we had, and I knew they would try to find every spot of blood and stray piece of trash at the scene and flag and photograph it before bagging and logging it in. I had to keep reminding myself that patience and due diligence were my friends.
I could tell that Darlene was itching to get started too. I was willing to admit that on the few cases we’d worked together so far, I had been impressed with her obsessive need to figure everything out. This was both a blessing and a curse. Even on the tightest cases I’d put together, there were always unanswered questions. At some point during an investigation you just had to accept that you knew everything you were going to know and let it go on up the food chain to the prosecutor’s office.
/> “The arrow probably came from that direction.” Darlene pointed off into the dense woods where Parrish must have been looking when he was struck by the arrow.
“That’s a good bet.”
Darlene turned to Shantel, who was walking around putting flags in the ground near possible evidence. “Can we borrow the video camera?” Darlene asked her.
Shantel picked up the camera and walked over to Darlene. “Have you got him trained yet?” she asked as I felt my face flush.
“Getting there. The good news is, I think he is trainable,” Darlene told her.
I felt like they were in a secret club where the sole purpose was to get under my skin. Maybe this was a little taste of what women felt like when there were only men around. I looked to Marcus for support, but he was pretending not to hear.
“Be nice. I owe him,” Shantel said, looking over at me with a smile that made my irritation meter go back down to green. Through a bit of good luck, and with the help of two other deputies, I’d managed to find and rescue her missing niece the month before. Ever since, the tough-talking Shantel had been sickeningly grateful to me. I thought about telling her, for the hundredth time, that I’d been lucky and that she owed Pete and Deputy Julio Ortiz as much as me, but there wasn’t any point.
“Come on. I’ll film, you keep your eye out for any evidence,” Darlene told me.
As frustrating as it was to admit to myself, Darlene was smart to grab the camera. We could have used one of our cell phones, but the quality was better on the crime scene camera and the time was calibrated and would be in sync with all the other footage of the crime scene.
We hadn’t gone more than ten feet past the dense oak scrub and wax myrtle at the edge of the woods before the area opened up a bit and made it easier to walk. There was a clearing with half a dozen large live oak trees about fifty feet inside of the woods. Along the far edge of the clearing, I could see the railroad embankment a hundred and fifty feet away.
“Damn!” Darlene exclaimed when she stepped into the clearing. She had the camera focused on the ground ahead of us. There were a dozen freshly dug holes scattered randomly throughout the clearing. “What the hell happened here?”
I was too busy examining the holes to answer her. They varied in size from some that were big enough to bury a microwave to several that you could have dropped a refrigerator into. Near the holes were the remains of an old house, its ancient brick chimney still standing tall. The railroad tracks were just beyond the house.
“These were dug very recently,” Darlene said, as much to herself as to me. We walked carefully around the area.
“What do you think they were doing?”
“It might have nothing to do with the murder. Could be something the Parrishes were working on.” I didn’t want to start focusing on the holes as clues until we knew more.
“Look.” Darlene pointed with the camera toward large tire tracks in the dirt. The tracks went off down a dirt path, large enough for a car or tractor, but clearly seldom used.
“Let’s follow them,” I said. Darlene was already on the trail, which sloped down through some thick undergrowth.
“Son of a…” Darlene breathed. She stopped short and I almost bumped into her. I’m sure my mouth fell open. In another small clearing was the trailer and backhoe that had been stolen. The backhoe was leaning half off of the trailer.
“That’s Turner Road,” Darlene said, aiming the camera fifty feet on the other side of the trailer and backhoe.
“Looks like they tried to get it back on the trailer and missed the ramp,” I said.
“The way it’s resting there, I bet it’s stuck.”
I could see that the backhoe’s transfer case was jammed into the ramp.
“So someone stole the backhoe to come out here and dig holes. Why?” I asked.
“And is it connected to our murder?” Darlene threw in.
“Seems likely. I can accept some coincidences, but this would be a stretch.” Then a thought occurred to me. “Maybe they planned on burying the body.”
“I like that theory,” Darlene said. “Which would mean that it was premeditated.”
“They stole the backhoe last night and came out here to dig a hole in order to bury the body of a man they hadn’t killed yet. They killed Parrish this morning and then… What? They got spooked?”
“If that was the plan, then they’d have to know that Parrish was going to be out here, or have some way of getting him out here.”
“It’s a bit far fetched, but it explains the backhoe and the holes.”
“Wait. Then why dig a dozen holes?”
I looked at the backhoe sitting precariously tilted off the ramp. “A backhoe isn’t quite as easy to operate as a car. I’d say whoever stole this didn’t have much experience. Maybe some of the holes were for practice. Or maybe they wanted it to look like the whole area was dug up, so there wouldn’t be just one freshly turned, grave-like patch of ground.” Darlene shrugged, which summed up how happy I was with my own theory. “Call someone to come around on Turner Road with some crime scene tape,” I said.
Darlene took out her radio and got patched through to a deputy who was at the entrance to the pasture. After telling him what she needed, she added, “And don’t be stupid and pull onto the dirt road. We need to cast any tire tracks that are there.”
I heard, “Yeah, yeah, I’m not a moron,” come over the radio.
“Of course, the tires probably belong to the truck that was stolen,” I said, but we both knew that an investigation could be botched by making assumptions.
Ten minutes later we had the road taped off and we headed back to the spot where Parrish had been killed. Shantel and Marcus were carefully lifting tire casts from tracks on the ground near the body, even though Toomey figured they probably belonged to Mr. Ruiz. We told them that they had some additional tire tracks to cast in the woods.
“Don’t feel compelled to find us more work,” Shantel joked.
Two forensic techs who worked for our coroner, Dr. Darzi, had finished photographing the body and were in the process of bagging the hands and carefully examining clothes, mouth, nostrils and hair.
They used a vacuum to pick up any fibers, hairs and minerals on the outside of his clothes before turning him over onto a body bag. The procedure was made more awkward than usual because they had to keep from moving the crossbow bolt sticking out of his eye. As they turned the body, I had a chance to see that the bolt hadn’t gone all the way through the skull.
“Depending on the pull weight of the crossbow, I’d guess that the killer wasn’t too far from the victim,” Darlene said from behind me.
“I’ll get Darzi to check with his fellow forensic pathologists and come up with a chart that shows estimated distance, pull weight and penetration. He’ll love it.”
“After you’ve looked at a hundred automobile accidents, it might be easy to get excited about something exotic like a crossbow killing.”
“Have you worked with him before?” I asked. Darlene had been with the Calhoun Police Department most of her career, but it was a small force and the sheriff’s department wound up doing most of the serious crime investigations for both the city and county.
“Only on auto accidents. Though the Danfield accident did turn into vehicular homicide. I worked with him and the State Attorney on that case,” she said.
I didn’t remember the case, but I didn’t ask any questions. Once Darlene got going on a story, you couldn’t get a word in until she’d given you every detail.
I heard a vehicle approaching and turned to see Dad’s truck driving toward us, a “Re-Elect Sheriff Ted Macklin” sign displayed prominently on the driver’s door. He parked twenty yards away and got out of the truck, still in the full uniform he’d worn to the regional meeting. Normally, he wore what he called his “small town sheriff’s uniform”—jeans, a button-down shirt with his badge on it, cowboy boots and his stainless steel 1911 close at hand in a tooled leather holster. But toda
y he cut an imposing figure as he walked across the field, his badge and the brass stars on his lapel flashing in the sun.
“Sad,” he said when he got up beside me. He stepped closer to examine the head wound as Darzi’s team tried to figure out how to zip up the body bag around the bolt.
Finally one of them said, “Duct tape. And bring another body bag. We’ll cut it up and use that to wrap the head.”
Once they’d protected the head as much as they were able, they put the body in their van and drove off. I hadn’t bothered to ask them any questions because everything would be contingent on the results of the full autopsy. Lately Dr. Darzi had cracked down on his teams speculating about the time or cause of death while at the scene.
I filled Dad in on the backhoe and what we had found in the woods.
“We’re ready to go up to the house and talk to the family. While we’re gone I’ll have Toomey get a couple of other deputies to help Marcus and Shantel search the area for additional evidence.”
“You mind if I follow you all up there and pay my respects to the family?” Dad asked me, looking over at Darlene so as to include her in the request. Even though he was the boss, he always tried to defer to his investigative teams on an active case.
“I don’t think that can hurt,” I said.
“Might even help. They’ll feel like you’re showing them the respect they deserve. Being big fish,” Darlene said, and I had to agree. If they knew right from the start that the big guy was overseeing the investigation, they’d be less likely to start demanding to speak to our supervisor.
I called Joe Parrish and told him we were headed up to the house.
“I’ve got most of the family here,” he said over the muffled sound of crying in the background.
Chapter Three
As soon as we got in the car Darlene said, “Hank Junior. I’d like to know where he was.”
“You know him?” I asked.
“Is there a law enforcement officer within two hundred miles that doesn’t?” she asked and I saw her point. “I had a couple run-ins with him, mostly drunk and disorderly. But once he wrote a bad check at the bank. Forged it, actually. We had him dead to rights, but his dad changed his mind at the last minute and refused to press charges. Said he’d forgotten that he’d given Junior permission to sign his name. Of course, everyone at First City Bank was more than happy to go along with anything Mr. Parrish said.”