BY NOON HARMONY FARMS was swarming with cops. A regular convention of blue-suiters and bad-tie-wearers. This didn’t include me or Remy, who always looked ready for the cover of Southern Cop Weekly. I could imagine next month’s issue, Remy with her pockets overflowing with blue crime scene gloves, and me, a confused look on my mug, wondering if I’d killed the killer.
“So you didn’t think to call us first?” Detective Abe Kaplan glared at Remy. “Before y’all went strolling through our crime scene?”
Abe is an odd-looking guy. He’s six foot one with curly hair that doesn’t grow properly in places. He’s half black and half Russian Jew. The combination is a warning to less-than-average-looking folks in both groups to no longer meet in dark bars.
I stepped in between him and Remy. I was Abe’s partner two years ago, and he could start an argument in an empty house. “Dooger already went over this with you, Abe, so let’s leave out the theatrics.”
“Well, what the hell we doin’ here?” Merle Berry asked. Merle is Abe’s partner. He’s heavy-set with a giant paunch and gray hair that becomes nuclear white above his ears. Merle’s accent is backwoods Georgia. A twang I’d heard more as a kid than I did nowadays.
“We need the particulars on the fire,” I said. “Who called it in? When? And who have you guys talked to so far?”
Berry hiked his pants up using one hand on his belt. “A crop duster called it in,” he said. “The old fella saw it blazin’ Sunday morn about half past five. The farmer here was gone at services.”
“You bring in the crop duster yet?” Remy asked.
“Nope,” Berry said.
Berry was old-school, and Remy might be accidentally poking the bear. I stepped in.
“What’s your take on the farmer, Merle?” I asked. “Remy and I talked to him briefly, but what did you guys get?”
“Times are tough, and he wasn’t farming that piece of land anyway,” Merle said.
“He didn’t seem too broken up about it,” Abe added.
Across the burnt field, I saw Sarah Raines, the M.E., her hands on her hips. She wore a fresh blue coverall; because of the drizzling, she’d tucked it into black rubber boots.
“How ’bout this?” Berry said. “Abe and I’ll write up any open items, put ’em in our case file, and leave it on your desk by three.”
“Great,” I said.
A crowd was starting to gather. Some folks were probably employees of the farm, reporting in late. Others, I’d guess, were citizens of Harmony. This many cops in their neighborhood rarely was good, and too often it meant we’d done something wrong.
My eyes moved back to Sarah. I was giving her space to inspect the victim. I had told Chief Dooger and her about the rope, but no one else.
I moved toward her. As I got close, I noticed the dirt near the loblolly had tiny green crystals dried into it. They shined like gold specks in beach sand, and I shot a picture with my phone.
“Doc,” I said, “you got any idea on C.O.D.?”
Sarah looked around to see if anyone was within earshot. “When I get him on the table, I can look at his neck and check the content of his lungs. See if the hanging killed him before the fire did. If he was alive when they strung him up.”
Sarah had moved the tree branches off the boy’s lower body, and I got a closer look at the rest of him.
“Is he the missing kid?” I asked.
“I think so.” She pointed at a mark on his right leg where the boy’s skin was only slightly singed. “The missing persons report mentioned a scar on his shin from skateboarding.”
Sarah crouched by the boy. “I also noticed this,” she said.
There was a section of his shorts that hadn’t burned, and using tweezers, she reached under the bottom cuff of the leg. Teased out a white tag.
“S.E.G. Uni,” I read the logo off the tag. “So the shorts are part of a uniform?”
I grabbed my phone and pulled up the website of Paragon Baptist, a Harmony high school that I visited each year for the D.A.R.E. program.
As the page loaded, I stared at shots of boys in the same blue shorts. Remy came up beside me. “Have you flipped the tag over?” she asked. “At uniformed schools, everything starts to look the same unless you put your name in it.”
Sarah twisted the tweezers so we could see the back of the label. On it was a set of initials written in ink.
K.W.
As in Kendrick Webster.
“My momma did that when I was a kid,” Remy said. “Otherwise my girlfriends would go home with my sweatshirts, and me with theirs.”
I looked down at the Amber Alert information on Kendrick. Saw the words listed under “father’s occupation.”
“Well, shit,” I said.
Because in Georgia, certain issues lit powder kegs. Race was the first, and it was already at play here. But right behind race was religion. And according to Missing Persons, Kendrick’s dad was a Baptist preacher.