Rough Country: A gripping crime thriller

by T. J. Brearton

  She closed the file. “I’m very sorry about that. About your daughter.” Her gaze lingered in that way again, like she was really taking him in. “You know what they say about hair?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Short hair means control; long hair is freedom.”

  “I don’t know how free I feel.”

  Her mouth turned up at the corner. “I know; it’s bullshit.” Then Tallman grew serious again. “I won’t bother you with the personal stuff anymore, Investigator Raleigh, but I appreciate you being forthcoming with me.” She stood and gathered the paperwork on her desk. “Let’s get this over with.”

  After her own spiel, Tallman introduced him. His knees were knobs of gum as he took center stage. The back of his neck crawled with tight packs of termites. And there was that numb-lip thing again. He gripped the podium and faced the dozen cameras trained on him.

  Ten minutes later, it was over, and he couldn’t remember a damn thing that he’d said.

  “You did well,” Tallman told him. She seemed to pick up on his nerves. Not surprising. Was there a puddle of sweat where he’d been standing? It felt like he’d lost five pounds of water weight. Come to think of it – it was time for a drink.

  Tallman followed him to the water fountain in the hallway. “Investigator, let’s set up a time when we can talk again tomorrow…”

  He held up a finger, slurping greedily at the spout for another ten seconds.

  The White Stripes. “A Martyr For My Love For You.” Reed drove north out of Elliston toward the morgue in Plattsburgh with the sun getting low and the sweat from the press conference drying his shirt to his back. And he’d just showered and changed, too.

  Virginia Leithsceal called.

  “I sent you everything that seemed pertinent from social media,” she said. “Kasey Stevens’s Instagram goes back two years. Starts out with lots of pictures of flowers, bridges, rivers. Ends with pictures of broken swing sets and dead birds.”

  “Any people?”

  “None. And I mean none. Going back two years, there’s not a single image of a human being. Unless they’re in the distance, just a figure. Not even a selfie. I’ve never seen a teenage girl not take a single selfie to post on Instagram. And I have two teenage girls.”

  “How are they?”

  “How are… my girls? They’re good. Track meet tonight, both of them.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Thank you. Okay, so Andy Zurn is good for the paternity. He’s the victim’s biological father.”

  “Correct.”

  “So, check this out: Daryl Snow is Andy Zurn’s brother-in-law.”

  “Wait… how’s that work?”

  “Well, Reed, two people get married…”

  “With the churches and the rice and everything, you mean.”

  “Andrew Zurn married Katherine Snow, Daryl’s sister,” Virginia explained.

  He grunted. “Still having trouble.”

  “Andrew Zurn is Ida Stevens’s ex. But they never married. Their daughter, Kasey, doesn’t even have his name. Took Ida’s name – Stevens. Okay, now Andrew Zurn goes off to live his life, and Ida Stevens goes off to live hers. Andrew Zurn ends up marrying a woman named Katherine Snow. Katherine Snow becomes Katherine Zurn. And Ida Stevens, she’s shacked up with Katherine Zurn’s brother, Daryl. They’re living in sin, though, is my understanding. No bling-bling wedding ring.” Virginia paused. “I don’t know, Reed – is it a shallow gene pool up there or what?”

  “It might be.”

  They talked another minute about the case, and after he hung up, he felt a pang of loneliness. It might’ve been the first time she’d called him by his first name. He liked Virginia. She was down to earth, not a pretentious bone in her body. She was also a colleague and off-limits, as far as that was concerned. And who knew if she was even interested?

  Since Jessica, there had been no one. Not really. No one he cared about anyway, just a couple of episodes he later regretted. Finding a bar where no one would know him, getting drunker than he should have, pretending he was someone other than a man who’d lost a child. What else were you going to do, though? Meet on Tinder? Hi, I’m Reed Raleigh. My little girl disappeared while I was huddled under deck, waiting to see if this was the moment we went to war with Iran. My wife left me. My son barely talks to me. Want to get laid?

  He drove north on I-87 and tried to slough the loneliness. It usually went away after a few minutes.

  At least it was a nice little patch of scenery in through here – a glassy, pristine lake, a steep mountain. After that, cow fields spreading out in the eventide.

  He thought about Kasey Stevens’s Instagram posts: sad images, Virginia said, things like isolated bridges and dead flowers, birds that’d dropped from the sky.

  But maybe that wasn’t so unusual – we had two lives now, online and off. Oftentimes the digital life was carefully curated to convey success and good times, the real life choked with the same hardships as anyone else. But a teen might go the other way: put on a happy face at school, then let out all the darkness on the internet, like black ink into space.

  Maybe Kasey was drawn to the darker things because they reflected what was going on inside her.

  And then there was Tyson Wheeler, who’d shown up at the crime scene looking as bewildered as anyone else, and then when cops came knocking on his door, Tyson Wheeler picked up a gun, wounded an investigator, and then set fire to the place with a match and gasoline.

  In fact, the kid had procured enough gasoline, Chuck Dearing had ultimately found, to take the whole place down in a hurry. Two five-gallon plastic containers, and a three-gallon gas can. One plastic container dumped in the kitchen, one in the living room. Then he had gone upstairs and emptied the metal can. He’d been up there as the fire ate through the second-story floorboards; he’d crashed down to the main floor, where the flames engulfed him.

  An incredibly painful way to go. An incredibly willful way to go.

  Tyson had owned a gun – if he was so bent on suicide, why was that not enough? Was he afraid it wouldn’t be sufficient? Or was it because he’d been hiding something in the house?

  Kasey Stevens was laid out on her back, pale with tints of blue and green, a privacy cloth across her groin. Terri Shepard snapped off her gloves and moved to the large sink to wash up. “No signs of rape.”

  Reed didn’t ask; it was like Shepard could read his thoughts. Maybe it was just a case of a pathologist used to the same questions.

  “Her hymen is not intact,” Shepard said, washing. “But the condition of a hymen is inconclusive in determining virginity.” She went on, noting, “It’s a flawed assumption that a hymen could only be torn due to sexual intercourse. So she might be a virgin, likely not, and I can’t rule it out conclusively, but rape appears unlikely. At least, in the days just before she was killed.”

  “What about the thing on her stomach?”

  Toweling off her hands, Shepard turned to Reed. “I couldn’t tell you what that is. Not my field. To me it looks like something a child might draw.”

  Reed drew closer to the body, looking at Kasey’s midsection. Now that the blood was cleaned away, the markings were clear: the first shape was a hexagon, and it was centered over the victim’s navel. A short line extended down from the bottom of the hexagon. It was crossed by two parallel lines of equal length. Finally, the bottom of the vertical line ended in a jagged line, almost like a W, connected to the vertical line by its center peak.

  Reed took a picture with his phone. “What about how it was made?” he asked. “What type of instrument did the cutting?”

  Shepard walked to a table full of instruments and lifted a small scalpel. “This,” she said, rolling it between her fingers. “Or something just like it.” She set it back and joined Reed beside the body, pointing. “These are very precise incisions. At first I thought maybe, you know, razor blade, something like a box cutter – that’s when it was messy to look at. Cleaned up, you can see how de
licate these cuts are. And they’re subcutaneous, just enough to get down to the muscle. But I’m not seeing any bruising, very little force was applied, and the edges are smooth. So it was a sharp, precise instrument that did this. And a steady hand.”

  “How about an X-Acto knife? Is that what they’re called? Like an arts and crafts thing? You use it for matte cutting or something.”

  Shepard was nodding. “A hobby knife. I would say no. Those are for edge-cutting – like you said, for picture framing. And it’s a triangular blade with a flat edge.” She returned to the tray and picked up the same tool. “This lancet, or scalpel, has a rounded tip. I should say, a curved cutting edge with an unsharpened back edge.” She pressed her finger to the back to the blade to demonstrate. “This is a number 10. This is for skin and muscle incisions. In fact, its most common use is for abdominal incisions. You get your appendix out, this is what they’ll use.”

  He pointed. “Is there only one handle that comes with that?”

  “No – well, the fitment size works with a type of handle. A few models within the type. This one is B3, 3, then there’s 3 Graduated, 3 Long, or also a 5, 7, or 9…”

  “Hang on.” He was writing.

  “I’ll be putting all of this in my report…”

  “Yeah, but then you’d miss out on my company.”

  She was quiet a moment, unsmiling. “You want to have this information if and when you interview people.”

  “I do. So which type is that? Or which model of that type?”

  “The one I’m holding is your basic 3,” Shepard said.

  “Can you make a determination whether…?”

  She was already shaking her head. “I can’t, not from studying the incisions.”

  “A guess?”

  “I can guess, yes.”

  He waited.

  “Probably a 3 Long,” she said. “That would give the… the person making the incision a good grip. These were made posthumously, but still, you’re down on the ground, not up on a table, and maybe holding a light to see by, since it was dark – that’s just going to give them the best chance of clean, even incisions. Again, all in my report.”

  “And how even are these? Like, the same depth all the way through and around?”

  “Pretty much. Very, very minor variations. Millimeters.”

  Reed put his notebook away and looked from the carved abdomen into Terri Shepard’s light hazel eyes. “You think this is someone with some skill? Some experience? You said steady hands…”

  She turned from him and slowly set the lancet back with the other tools, then took a breath before answering. “I’ll say this – those marks look like they were made by someone very experienced with that tool, with making incisions. Someone steady. Someone, at the very least, cool and calm.”

  Reed let that sink in: someone who’d strangled Kasey Stevens to death – the strength and willpower of that – yet someone who’d been relaxed and precise enough to carve neatly connecting shapes into her stomach moments later. She was a thin girl, very little body fat, so maybe the flat surface made it easier. But still, the contrast suggested a methodical mind, maybe a depraved or psychotic mind.

  He tried picturing it: Tyson Wheeler is alone with Kasey, they walked down into Mandalay Park together, cross the river, and head up the slope on the hiking trail. Less than a quarter mile of the way in, Tyson grabs her by the neck.

  He was a football player and nearly five feet ten, probably a hundred and sixty-five pounds. A big kid. Kasey was a little more than half his weight, and half a foot shorter. And maybe, as an athlete, Tyson’s body was trained to maintain an even pulse rate under stress. Maybe, as a psychopath, he transitioned into artist mode easily enough and had that unwavering hand to leave his mark.

  Reed looked down again. “Is it a hieroglyph? No, right? It looks a little bit like the symbol for a virus, doesn’t it?”

  She moved beside him. “I was terrible in art class. I have no mind for the abstract. So like I said, I couldn’t tell you. To me, they just look like incisions. Purposeless incisions just below the diaphragm.” Without touching the skin, she traced a finger along the length of the symbol and then across. “It’s ninety-two millimeters long. Fifty-three wide.”

  “And the belly button is neatly inside that hexagon…”

  “It’s very… well, I guess I would say it’s thought out.”

  Reed leaned down, peering even closer. The bacteria working through the victim’s body gave off a musty, almost mothball-like smell. He tried ignoring it. “Where’s the uterus? About how close is this?”

  “It’s lower – the uterus is down here.” Shepard pointed to several places. “Uterus, ovaries, cervix down here.”

  “So what’s right underneath the bulk of the symbol? Stomach…?”

  She nodded. “Right under there, stomach, liver above that, kidneys in the back.”

  He eased away – the odors were starting to bother him after all. Shepard seemed anxious to move on, anyway. “I’ve got a lot of autolytic activity happening, internal organs are deteriorating – I’ve got to get going with my internal. What else can I do for you?”

  He shifted attention to the dead girl’s neck. “What can you tell me here?”

  “Fatal strangulation. Edema, erythema, petechiae, abrasions and contusions.”

  “Abrasions?”

  “From the decedent’s own fingernails.” Shepard cleared her throat. “She tried to claw her attacker’s hands off her, dug into her own neck here. The angle, the direction of the abrasions – these are both linear and curvilinear – this is her own doing. But, of course, I’ve sampled everything for DNA.”

  Reed pointed out some blotches on either side of the victim’s neck. “But you have these finger pad contusions…”

  Shepard’s eyes lingered on him a moment before shifting back to the body. “Yes. All photo-docked and swabbed for skin cells from the perpetrator. We’ll be extracting DNA from these cells. I’ve evaluated for injuries on the head, face, neck, chest, and documented the injuries of the anterior, posterior, and lateral aspects of the face, chin, and neck. I’ve assessed and will diagram the pinpoint hemorrhages on the skin and mucous membranes of the sclera, conjunctivae, lips, palate, ears and scalp.”

  Shepard looked up, then beyond him, to the other body with them in the large sterile room: the shape of Tyson Wheeler under the white sheet. “And I’ve got to move on to him after I’m done with her.” She used the back of her hand to push aside a wisp of hair on her forehead.

  Reed looked between the exposed body of Kasey Stevens and the covered body of her boyfriend, Tyson. Well. Ex-boyfriend.

  Shepard, as if reading his thoughts a second time, said, “There’s a reason they call it IPV.”

  She meant intimate partner violence. Statistically, strangulations occurred between people who were familiar with each other – and often intimate – more than anything else. Strangling was a crime of passion. A crime of anger, hurt, betrayal.

  Reed considered the markings on Kasey’s stomach. “But do you strangle someone and then take out your lancet with your 3-type handle and calmly carve that little guy?”

  Shepard snapped a fresh pair of gloves from a box of them beside Kasey’s body. “That’s your job, Investigator Raleigh.” After a breath, she added, “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “I’m glad to hear what you think,” he said.

  They stood around another minute until Shepard was working quietly, and he thanked her and left.

  He called Chuck Dearing on his way to the parking lot. “You find any scalpels lying around the Wheeler house?”

  “No. But you’ll be the first to know about it. This is going to take days.”

  “I hear you. We’re talking stainless steel. Might show up.”

  “Like I said, you’ll be the first.”

  “All right.”

  Reed climbed into the van and headed to the next stop, thinking a little about Terri Shepherd. She was tough, a se
rious person. Maybe it was how she coped with the job. Or maybe he just wasn’t that funny.

  Andy Zurn’s home was one unit among cheap tract housing, with lots of plastic kid toys strewn about. Zurn was number 42, but no one answered the door. Reed checked the windows, wedged a business card in the door, then walked back to the car.

  He watched a couple of teens with a vaping device. They saw him and moved further away, blowing huge bolls of vapor as they went.

  Tallman called, wanting to know what the medical examiner had to say.

  “She’s looking for skin cells from the contusions around the victim’s neck. Then she’ll test those.” Reed climbed into the van.

  “Which will only give us Tyson Wheeler if he’s in the system…”

  “Which he’s not,” Reed said, shutting the door. “Never been arrested.”

  “And we can’t get prints from him now…”

  “Because they’re burned off.”

  Tallman fell silent. Reed could sense her mind working. She wanted more than circumstantial evidence; she wanted physical proof.

  “Keep me posted,” she said.

  After ending the call, he felt low. He needed to eat. He found a Stewart’s Shop, had a turkey sandwich and a Coke, felt a little better. Then he headed back south toward Elliston. Time to find a motel. Maybe some people considered it already locked, Tyson Wheeler the killer, but he didn’t. He had a feeling he was going to be here for a little while; this thing had all the signs.

  This case was going to get deep.

  8

  The garden of earthly delights

  “Hold still,” the artist said. The tattoo gun made a high rattling sound beneath the screech and growl of heavy metal music. He dipped his head for a closer look as he made the cut and shot ink into the skin of his subject.

  The subject kept trying to look at his arm, and it was making him move. Fuck, with these young customers, they just couldn’t sit still.

  “I’m almost done,” the artist said, trying to be patient.