Not many biting, Ezzy. Too damn hot.” Burl Mundy flapped open a brown paper sack and dropped a bag of Fritos and a Peanut Pattie into it.
“You’re probably right, but I needed something to do.”
“Ain’t you adjusted to retirement yet?”
“Don’t think I ever will.”
“I know what you mean. I’ve been running this bait shop here at the point practically all my life. They’ll carry me out of here feetfirst.”
“I’ll need some of those crickets,” Ezzy said. “And put a couple of soda pops in here.” He set a portable cooler on the cloudy glass countertop.
“How ’bout a coupla beers instead?”
“No way. I gotta go home tonight.”
Mundy chuckled. “Cora’s still against drinking, huh?”
“Baptist to the bone.” Ezzy paid in cash. “That ought to cover the gas, too.” He’d pumped fuel into the motor of his small bass boat before coming inside. He picked up his sack of snacks, the carton of crickets he’d bought for bait, and the cooler, which now contained two Dr Peppers. “Thanks, Burl.”
“Happy fishing, Ezzy.” Before Ezzy got through the door, Burl had readjusted his oscillating fan and returned to his recliner and a well-thumbed Louis L’Amour paperback.
Ezzy set his purchases in the bottom of his boat, where he had already stowed his fishing gear. It wasn’t expensive or sophisticated equipment; he was an indifferent fisherman. Because emergencies arose on every day of the year and at all hours, scheduling leisure activities was impossible for a county sheriff in a poor county. Ezzy’s office had always been understaffed and over budget. Consequently, for fifty years he’d been overworked and on call twenty-four, seven, three-hundred-sixty-five.
Even if his demanding schedule had allowed him more time for recreation, he doubted he would have indulged in fishing, golfing, hunting, or any of the hobbies that other men lived for. He just flat wasn’t interested. Nothing had engrossed him more than his work. He had loved it. His life had revolved around it. Even when asleep, he had thought about it.
Today, as he trolled the river, he yearned to be working still.
The spring had been uncustomarily dry, so the water level was low, the current sluggish. The river seemed in no hurry to empty into the Gulf waters a few hundred miles south. Sunlight turned the still surface into a glaring mirror that put his RayBans to the test.
Where the river narrowed, tree branches formed a shady canopy. Those patches of momentary coolness were welcome. There was no breeze. Not a leaf stirred. Plants along the banks had wilted in the oppressive heat, making the landscape look forlorn. Turtles and water snakes were detectable only by their heads barely breaking the surface of the murky waters near the shore. They were too listless to swim. Even the cicadas were halfhearted in their music-making.
Ezzy’s shirt was soaked with perspiration by the time he angled his craft toward the riverbank. Stepping from the boat, he pulled it into the tall, dry reeds. He hadn’t even had to search for the spot. It was as familiar to him as his own face. Actually, he had spent much more time exploring this terrain than he’d ever spent looking at himself.
Over the past twenty-two years, he had lost count of the number of times he had come here alone. Like a pilgrim to a shrine, he faithfully returned. He didn’t examine this compulsion of his too closely, afraid that he would see that it was a sick preoccupation and that only a man possessed would continue it.
But he came anyway, begging the goddamn place to give up its secret.
Many times while here he had even got down on his knees. Not to pray, but to crawl along the ground, inspecting it a fraction of an inch at a time, imploring it to divulge even the slightest hint of what had happened to Patricia McCorkle.
This insignificant plot on the planet had become the center of Sheriff Ezra Hardge’s universe.
That’s why Cora had hated the McCorkle case so much. She cursed it for the toll it had taken on him, first in terms of the time he devoted to it. He had pursued every avenue of jurisprudence to bring to justice those he believed were responsible for the girl’s death. Then, when it became obvious that that goal would elude him, he had lapsed into a depression that had almost destroyed their marriage.
Cora threatened to leave him and take the kids if he didn’t snap out of it. He snapped out of it. Or pretended to. The daily grind of his job kept him occupied most of the time. But when he should have been free to relax and enjoy his family, he continued to brood over the unresolved case.
The case had kept him from being a good father to his children. Cora had reared them with little influence or interference from him. He barely remembered their childhoods, and then only the troubled times. The worst was when their son had experimented with drugs. Thank God his usage had been discovered in time to save it from becoming a life-altering problem. Now married with two daughters, he was a high school principal, a pillar of his community.
Their daughter, two years younger than her brother, got out of Blewer as soon as she graduated high school. She went to college to find a husband she considered worthy of her, and did. She married a stockbroker from Dallas. Childless and glad to be, she was president of half a dozen societies and clubs and spent her days organizing luncheons and fund-raising galas. Ezzy hated the life she had made for herself with that stuffy, snobby butthole she was married to. But she seemed happy, and Ezzy supposed that was what counted.
He claimed no credit for how well the children had turned out. It belonged to Cora. Left to him, they would have been human disasters.
His obsession with Patsy McCorkle’s death had been a strain on his home life for the past twenty-two years, and it still was. Cora was giddy about the freedom his retirement allowed them. But Ezzy knew that he would never be free as long as this case remained open. To most folks it was ancient history. No one remembered or cared. But he did. Even if he had deluded himself into believing he could let it go, the news of Carl Herbold’s escape two days ago had shattered that delusion.
He’d never lied to his wife, and he didn’t intend to start now. Many times lying would have made things easier and more harmonious, but Ezzy felt that deception had no place in a marriage. Besides, Cora could see straight through the most innocent fib.
She probably knew he wasn’t coming out on this stifling afternoon to fish.
Leaving the gear and the box of live crickets in the hull, he lifted the cooler and the sack from the boat and carried them with him to the deadfall. God only knew how long it had been here or what natural occurrence had caused the tree to fall. The trunk was covered in lichen and vines. Insects had hollowed it out, but it still supported Ezzy’s weight as he sat down. He opened one of the Dr Peppers and took a long drink. He began to eat the corn chips with the same level of detachment.
Because every time he stared at the spot where Patsy McCorkle had taken her last breath, he recalled the shock of seeing her body the morning after she died.
“Has anybody touched her?”
That was all he could think to say to the young, pale, and shaken deputy who had been the first law enforcement officer on the scene after a fisherman had made the gruesome discovery.
“No, sir, Ezzy.”
“Not even the guy who found her?”
“You kiddin’? He was scared shitless. Didn’t even come ashore. His boat was drifting past. He saw her lying here and beat it back to Mundy’s Point to call us. I know better than to contaminate a crime scene. I’ve secured the area.”
The deputy must have picked up the lingo on a TV cop show, because Ezzy was certain he had never used that terminology. Not too many of their crime scenes had to be cordoned off to prevent evidence contamination.
Mostly they did routine patrols and maintained general law and order. They were called to stop fights that broke out in the beer joints, or to settle a dispute between feuding family members, or to lock up a drunk who had become disorderly and potentially destructive.
There were few outbreaks of violence that left victims dead, but on those rare occasions, the motivation was clear-cut. Armed robbery. Assault with a deadly weapon. Wife beating. The perpetrator usually had motivation that, if not justifiable or legal, was at least apparent.
Senseless crimes that were committed for no other reason except outright meanness occurred somewhere else. In big cities. In urban ghettos. They were unheard of in Blewer County, Texas. So neither the deputy nor Ezzy, who was already a seasoned officer of the law, had ever seen anything as disturbing as this.
In an area of trampled grass, she was lying facedown. Literally. Her head wasn’t even turned to one side. One arm was folded beneath her. The other lay along her side, palm up, fingers curled slightly inward. Her legs were spread. She was wearing a pair of sandals. Nothing else. It was summertime, so she was tanned except for a strip of white across the middle of her back, and her buttocks.
To Ezzy it seemed indecent for them to be staring down at her naked body. They were acting in an official capacity, but even so, they were as guilty as her murderer—Ezzy had immediately assumed that she had met with foul play—of stripping this young woman of all dignity and respect.
“It’s bad for us that it rained so hard last night,” the deputy remarked, noting, as Ezzy had, the pool of rainwater that had collected in the small of the girl’s back. “That probably washed away a lot of evidence.”
“We’ll have to work with what we’ve got.”
“Yes, sir.” The deputy blotted his moist upper lip with a folded handkerchief. “You think she was murdered?”
“It doesn’t look like natural causes, does it, Deputy?”
A blue jay squawked angrily in the tree overhead, bringing Ezzy back into the present. He stuffed the empty Fritos package into the sack and chased their saltiness with the teeth-aching sweetness of the Peanut Pattie. Nibbling the pink, sugary candy, he stood and walked over to the spot where Patsy McCorkle had lain.
“Lord o’ mercy. What’ve we got here, Ezzy?”
Startled, Ezzy glanced around, almost expecting old Harvey Stroud to materialize out of the surrounding forest. The coroner had been dead for fifteen years, and retired two years before that, but his voice was as real to Ezzy this morning as it had been when Stroud had knelt down beside Patsy McCorkle’s corpse and slipped on his eyeglasses for a better look.
Ezzy asked, “Did you bring your camera?”
“That fellow from the Banner is coming out right behind me.”
Ezzy had hoped to contain news of this until he’d had time to ask some preliminary questions of Patsy’s close friends. He also wanted to allow the McCorkles time to absorb their shock and prepare for the onslaught of speculation their daughter’s death would generate. But since Stroud had called in the newspaper’s photographer, it would be the topic of conversation all over town by lunchtime.
“Can you tell anything yet, Harvey?”
“Don’t rush me. I just got here.” Without touching the body, he studied it from several angles, intent on his task. Finally he made a verbal observation. “There’s a bruise on her neck.” He pointed to the purplish mark with the tip of a Bic.
“Strangulation?”
“Maybe.”
“Was she raped?”
“Possibly. That residue there on her thighs looks like semen.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah.”
The photographer arrived, eager as a beaver to take his pictures until confronted with the grim reality of the girl’s corpse. He lost his breakfast Honeybun in the bushes, then, sitting with his head between his knees, repeatedly assured them that this wasn’t the first time he’d seen a naked woman—only the first time he’d seen one dead. It took a while before he had recovered sufficiently to take Stroud’s required photos.
Parked a short distance away from the body was a car registered to Patsy. Near it Ezzy found a pile of clothes. Using a pair of tweezers to pick up each article, he examined it before carefully placing it in a labeled plastic bag. There were a blouse and skirt, a brassiere, and a pair of panties. They were rain-soaked, but from what Ezzy could tell there were no rips in the cloth or missing buttons, which would indicate that the garments had been forcibly removed. They warranted further examination, of course.
Both the driver and passenger doors of the car were standing open. From that he deduced that someone had accompanied her here. The empty liquor bottles, one on the floorboard of the car, one lying in the mud nearby, suggested a party atmosphere.
“How’re her fingernails, Harvey?”
“Polished red. None broken, torn, or bleeding. Doesn’t appear to be any tissue under them. ’Course I’ll clean them in the lab.” The coroner also pointed out that there was no bruising on her wrists or ankles, nothing to indicate that she had been bound or gagged, or that a struggle had taken place.
Clearly Patsy McCorkle had felt comfortable about coming here with her companion and hadn’t expected to die.
Hearing his radio activate, Ezzy immediately returned to his patrol car and spoke into the hand mike. “Yeah, Jim?”
“The McCorkle girl was at the Wagon Wheel last night,” Deputy Jim Clark reported.
Cora and her group of teetotalers had been trying to vote the county dry for years, but that was one election that brought out the drinkers. Their proposed ordinance always failed miserably. They had, however, succeeded in prohibiting the sale of liquor within the township proper. Consequently, package stores and taverns lined both sides of the state highway just outside the city limits. The Wagon Wheel was one such club.
“Who’d you talk to there?”
“The guy who owns it, name of Parker Gee. He was tending bar last night. Says Patsy McCorkle was there for several hours and left around midnight.”
“Alone?”
“With the Herbold brothers.”