The woods across the street from the church were thick with mosquitoes and biting flies that swarmed around me and Bree as we made the hike into the old quarry. Though it was muggy and hot, we were glad we’d taken Naomi’s advice and put on long pants and long-sleeved shirts and doused ourselves with bug repellent.
We each carried a knapsack, and between the two we had several water bottles, a measuring tape, a camera, zip-lock bags, files with pictures of the crime scene, police diagrams, and copies of the notes Detectives Frost and Carmichael had taken when Rashawn Turnbull’s body was found.
The overgrown trail wound through stands of stinging nettles and brush choked with kudzu. There was no wind. The air was oppressively humid, and the whine of insects was enough to drive us crazy by the time we crossed the stream. The path followed the waterway through a shaded, man-made gap in the limestone wall, ten, maybe fifteen feet wide and forty feet high. The creek spilled over its banks passing through the gap, making a large section of the ground mossy and slippery, and we had to support each other until we were out the other side and into the sunbaked quarry.
Bree looked back through the gap. “The killer supposedly brought Rashawn through there, but I can’t see him dragging the boy in.”
I nodded. “He’d have fallen. They both would have fallen.”
“Any notes about that moss and slime in there being torn up?”
“Not that I saw. Then again, it rained late that night. Hard.”
“It wouldn’t matter,” Bree insisted. “I don’t think Rashawn was dragged in. He went along, which means he knew his killer.”
The police thought so too. It was in the indictment.
“I’ll buy it,” I said. “What else?”
Bree smiled. “I’ll let you know when I see it.”
We moved closer to the stack of rock slabs, stopped where we had perspective. I got out the crime scene photographs, glanced at the sky for strength, and then divorced myself from being a father, a husband, a human being. It’s the only way I can get beyond the things I have to witness and do my job.
But when I saw the first picture, a shudder went through me. The small, almost naked body lay facedown, straddling the top stone, wrists bound behind his back with a canvas belt. The arms appeared dislocated. His jeans were bunched around his right ankle, and jagged bone stuck out of the skin of the lower left leg. The head was so battered and swollen it was unrecognizable as a boy’s.
“God help me,” Bree said, and she looked away. “Who does something like this to a poor little guy like that?”
“Someone with a lot of pent-up rage,” I said, looking toward the stack of rocks.
“Which the prosecution says was Stefan’s reaction to Rashawn rejecting him,” Bree said.
“I don’t buy that,” I said. “This level of viciousness suggests pathological hatred or sadistic insanity, not a fit of revenge.”
We stood there forty feet from the stack and forced ourselves to go through the photographs. They ran the gamut from close-ups of various pieces of evidence in the order they were discovered to a dozen photos of Rashawn’s brutalized body, including his sawed neck.
In the pictures, the surface of the slab around Rashawn was pale pink, blood diluted by rain. It had spilled down over the other slabs and run out in fingers onto the stone floor. Seven feet from the stack, the blood disappeared into a debris field of baseball- to football-size chunks of limestone that ended at the creek forty-two feet away.
Rashawn’s sneakers, torn Duke Blue Devils T-shirt, and underwear were all found within a twenty-five-foot radius of the stack. So was the prosecution’s most damning piece of evidence. A photo showed a white card smeared with mud tilted down between chunks of limestone thirteen feet due east of the body; in the next photograph, the same item had been turned faceup, revealing a bloodied Starksville School District ID with a picture of my cousin Stefan Tate.