The crows was the giveaway. I could see ’em hangin’ up in the dead tops of the willows linin’ the drainage ditch long before I spotted Mars Boone’s truck. They was waitin’ for Mars to clear out an’ let ’em go back to feedin’. Mars’s truck was alongside the ditch, an’ he was standin’ with his back to it. He looked a bit green, under his farmer’s tan, ’bout ready to pass out. He pointed past hisself, to what was interestin’ the crows. I got out to take a look.
Personally, dead bodies don’t bother me ’less it’s someone I know. This one, I couldn’t tell if I knew—somebody’d blowed his head off. Someone didn’t want us to ID the body. I looked long enough to get a idea of what’d happened. Someone’d dumped the body—or maybe brought it live—into the ditch, then blowed off the lower half of its face with a shotgun. Then he—or she, let’s not be sexist—covered up the remains with a old blanket an’ a piece of cardboard, prob’ly to keep the crows from findin’ it ’fore the maggots done their work. The killer hadn’t figured on coyotes, or dogs—whatever—something’d dragged the blanket off to get at the free lunch underneath. The coverings looked pretty much like what some folks carry in their trunks, an’ that pretty much let Mars off the hook. Like most farmers, he carries a shovel to bury roadkill. If he’d done it, he’d have buried the evidence.
I returned to where he was waitin’ with his back to the scene. If the shovel argument wasn’t enough to clear him, his puke-green color would’ve. I got my hip flask outta the squad an’ shoved it at him.
“Here, Mars.”
“I don’t drink.”
“This is medicinal. Don’t want you passin’ out ’fore I get a statement.”
He took the flask an’ had a swig. I watched his eyes bug as it went down. He wheezed, but his face went a shade closer to livin’ color.
“Lemme use your phone,” I said.
He didn’t even ask why, when I had a radio—just give it to me. I called Martha, to give her the news, then the state boys. Sergeant Underhill answered.
“This is Deputy Sheriff Deters,” I said. “I’m afraid I got another body.”
“This is getting to be a trend, isn’t it, Deputy?”
“It ain’t really local. An’ I got no control over interstate commerce.”
“Which isn’t local, victim or perp?”
“Neither, I’d say. Looks like yet another case of fly dumpin’.”
“Not toxic, just wasted?”
I groaned. He axed for directions an’ said he’d be along directly.
While we waited, I got a statement from Mars. He confirmed what I suspected. He’d been out drivin’ around his farm, mindin’ his own business, when he spotted the crows. An’ he’d stopped an’ got his shovel out, plannin’ to deprive the varmints of their road pizza.
Even though it smelled God-awful an’ was crawlin’ with maggots, our second victim didn’t take half as long to collect—not as many pieces. The state cops helped me get it in a body bag an’ lift that into the borrowed hearse.
Usually I don’t go to autopsies, but for this guy I figured I could make a exception. One of Doc’s grad students helped me unload. Doc was already gowned an’ gloved, an’ ready to go when we got to the lab.
“You tryin’ to set a speed record for autopsies, Doc?” I axed him.
“You trying to set some kind of record for number of homicides in Boone County, Homer?”
“I axed first.”
“We’re having a graduation open house here in a couple of weeks. I don’t want the place smelling of overripe carrion. That odor is very difficult to get out.”
“Yeah.”
Just ’cause Doc is fast, don’t mean he wasn’t thorough. He took samples of the critters, which he sent off to the entomology lab with one of the students who looked ready to pass out. I took pi’tures of the remains, front an’ back, fore Doc an’ the two remainin’ kids undressed the body. Doc had one of ’em hang up the clothes to dry while he went over the corpse for any trace evidence—hairs, fibers, gravel, excetera—he could find. It all went into little numbered paper envelopes for the state crime lab, an’ Doc noted every sample an’ specimen on his tape recorder. When he was pretty well satisfied he’d got everythin’ there was to find, they washed the rest of the wildlife down the sink an’ cleaned up the victim. I took more pi’tures, an’ Doc took a bunch of X-rays before openin’ up.
He started off with his standard line: “I have before me the body of a well developed, well nourished, white male who appears to be between forty and sixty years of age …”
That left Roger Devon out.
“Can’t you narrow it down a decade or so, Doc?”
“Sorry. It depends on how well he took care of himself. Since we don’t know, I can’t say. I can tell you, that apart from the face and hands, there isn’t too much damage that was caused by the killer. But there’s your cause of death.” He pointed to a couple of stab wounds in the victim’s neck and throat. “He bled to death. The killer probably just used the shotgun to obliterate his identity.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It looked to me like he was killed somewhere else an’ dumped.”
“Very likely.” He poked around what was left of the head. “I can’t be positive, because there’s so much missing, but my guess is, this guy didn’t have any teeth.”
“That’d explain why we couldn’t find ’em.”
The rest of the autopsy was pretty standard. I had to hang around to the end, ’cause I had to take the body back with me—Doc insisted. The victim’s clothes were dry by the time we had their owner back in the hearse. We sorted all the little envelopes by type of evidence, an’ started a chain of custody sheet for the hair an’ fibers, another for trace evidence, an’ one for shotgun pellets, excetera. Doc signed for the tissue samples he was keepin’—for further study—an’ we sent forms up to the entomology department for the maggots. I took charge of the film, promisin’ to send Doc a set of prints.
By the time I dropped off the clothes an’ envelopes at the state crime lab, dropped the body—”Headless” as I was beginnin’ to call him—at the funeral parlor, an’ got the film developed, it was supper time. It occurred to me I hadn’t had lunch, but I took the pi’tures back to my office an’ locked them in the safe before headin’ for the Truck Stop.
I had to pass the Boones’s farm on the way to supper. It was botherin’ me so much that the perpetrator had got away with hidin’ Headless’s identity, that I turned off an’ went back to the crime scene. I got out my road-kill shovel an’ started diggin’ through the dirt in the ditch where the body’d been. I was hopin’ we’d missed somethin’ that would identify Headless. We hadn’t. So I walked around the spot in a widenin’ spiral. It was my lucky day or mebbe the angle of the sun was just right. ’Bout sixteen feet from where Mars found the body, right where it must’ve been blowed by the shotgun blast, I spotted a pinkie finger. It was curled an’ dried like a hunk of old beef jerky, but I didn’t care. It had to belong to Headless—his was the only body out here missin’ parts. An’ I was happy as a possum in a pantry to have somethin’ with a fingerprint on it. I planted my shovel where its shadow’d mark the spot, an’ went back for my camera.