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Paul’s naked body was turning slowly at the end of a St. Isidore Hardware rope when state police troopers found him. They were not the first on the scene. Paul’s next-to-next-to final resting place was already being chronicled by a dozen teenagers, all of whom of course, had gotten the word on their tablets, laptops and smartphones, before the cops arrived.
The kids loved to spend time in what the cable TV people had started calling The Suicide Forest, the place where bodies had been found in the trees since the 1970s, and babies had been conceived during each of those decades.
“Confiscate all of those smartphones. They’ve all got cameras,” growled one trooper. “We don’t need this getting out on YouTube. This guy was one of ours. He was a cop.”
Too late. The clock was ticking on Paul’s fifteen minutes of fame. His life was about to be dissected by bloggers on the internet and pundits on cable TV. His black tongue stuck out at viewers around the world on YouTube for a day before strings were pulled and the video was deleted.
However, cable TV had already picked up the story. It wouldn’t go away until the pundits ran out of words. For the second time.
“Friend of Tim Sheldon’s?” asked one investigator as the medical examiner’s team cut down the body and unwrapped a medium-sized body bag from its plastic container.
“They go back to high school,” answered Chief Lumpy. “It could be a suicide.”
“And maybe not. If you were going to kill yourself why go out into the woods to do it? Why not stay at home?” said the investigator.
“No visible trauma,” said a Medical Examiner team member. “I don’t think he was shot, stabbed or beaten.”
“If Sheldon is going north with that girl, why would he stop off here to kill his best friend?” wondered Chief Lumpy. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Lumpy was thinking he should call Tim’s brother, John, his former best friend at the police academy. John might not be on the job anymore, but he deserved some respect.
He really should be told about his brother and the trouble that he is in, right?
Lumpy kept that thought to himself. Being known as John’s friend was not the politically correct thing to do, not anymore in St. Isidore.
“Nothing seems like it was disturbed in the vic’s house,” said a state police trooper who had just returned from the initial search of Paul’s trailer. “There wasn’t a fight.”
“It’s gotta be a suicide,” said Lumpy.
“Too coincidental,” said one of the state police investigators. “Sheldon must be involved.”
“Why? What could Sheldon be doing? Covering his tracks? Creating a diversion?”
“Maybe he killed a witness.”
“And maybe he didn’t.”
“We’ve got tire tracks going into and out of the property,” said a new investigator on the scene. “Looks like the vehicle was about the size of Sheldon’s truck.”
“Maybe he did it,” admitted Lumpy. “But for the life of me I can’t imagine why. Why waste the time?”
The trooper’s Blackberry buzzed.
He said, “Explosion. 117 Houser Street. The victim’s house. The girl’s house. Bree’s house.”