Sheriff Otis Royal picked up the severed earlobe with his tweezers and studied it with his aging eyes. Thirty years of police work in his small bottomland community, full of hickbillies and born-agains, had brought more than an instance or two of backwoods bloodshed and brutality to his doorstep. He’d seen killings of every shape and size. This, however, was the first time he’d dealt with so many detached body parts. The victim on the sidewalk was short a slug’s width worth of head material, and the barfly on the street had been swatted down and torn asunder by a vehicle that was heavy and possessed an impressive amount of torque.
Dani, Otis’s his niece and one of his three deputies, looked past his shoulder at the chunk of flesh. “Is that his ear?”
“It is,” Otis said. “Part of it, anyway.”
“What’s the rest of this stuff?” Dani asked as she stepped around him and bent down to examine the bits and pieces of the dead man’s head.
“Blood, brain, and bone fragments,” Otis replied.
“Well, that’s a mess.” Dani stood up. “He must have pissed someone off.”
Otis placed the earlobe in a small evidence bag. “Whoever it was didn’t come from the bar.”
“How do you know?”
“I engaged in something called police work, little deputy. Interviewed a few bar patrons.”
Dani felt her chiseled cheeks flush. She knew her uncle didn’t mean anything by calling her “little deputy,” but she still hated it. It was even more hurtful coming from him. She had hoped, in at least his eyes, that the badge she wore would conceal her slight stature. She had a feeling if Otis would stop calling her “little deputy,” the rest of the town of Baptist Flats would, too.
“Son says it was a quiet night. Described the mood as jovial. Victim one here, Carl Williams, even bought the bar a round. Come into some good fortune, he said. Wanted to celebrate.”
“His good fortune turned on him.”
“That it did,” Otis said, pushing back his hat before he placed his hands on his hips.
“What about victim two?”
“Daryl Cartwright. Struck down by a vehicle of some sort. Truck or SUV probably, built out to have extra power by the looks of Daryl.”
Dani stepped to the edge of the sidewalk. “That’s Daryl Cartwright?”
“It is.”
“He was a few years ahead of me in school. Knew him from elementary grades.” She looked at the pieces of Daryl that were scattered in the middle of the road. “Didn’t realize there was that much to him.”
“You sprinkle a man around like that and he’ll cover a good bit of ground.”
She adjusted her gun belt as it slid past her small waist and hugged her hips. “Where do you want me to get started?”
Otis snorted and spit toward the doorway of the tavern. “Make sure Randle and Friar have the traffic under control. State police will be stopping by shortly.”
“State police? This ain’t a matter for them.”
“Double homicide lands on the state’s shoulders, little deputy. We ain’t got the resources for such a thing.”
Dani controlled her building frustration. “Can’t hardly call it a double homicide without an investigation, Uncle Otis.”
He held back a condescending smile. “You reckon the evidence points to natural causes, or something other than homicide?”
She groaned. “Not what I was saying. I’m just saying we can’t know for sure what happened. Could be that Mr. Williams shot himself and poor ol’ Daryl was struck dumb by it. He just wandered off into the street where he was plowed down by a passing motorist on his or her way home.”
Otis counted off the fallacies in her scenario. “One: If Williams shot himself, where’s the gun? Two: A man don’t buy a round in celebration of his good fortune before he kills himself. And three: Skid marks back yonder suggest our vehicle sped up before it struck down Daryl. That ain’t the normal behavior of a driver that runs over a man accidental-like.”
“Well,” she said, turning up the street, “those are things to consider, I expect. Still say we should look into it before we pass it off to the state.”
“I appreciate your enthusiasm, Dani, and I like that you want to put those two weeks of police training to use, but we got other things on our tiny plate to deal with today.”
“Such as?”
“That fella…Longwell, the politician, he’s coming through here about noon. Giving a speech over at the high school about something that don’t mean a damn thing.”
“So?”
“For whatever reason the man draws a crowd, and we gotta provide security. Didn’t you read the email I sent out last week?”
“I stopped reading your emails, Uncle Otis,” Dani said as she walked up the sidewalk. “You’re always sending me links to cat videos or some god-awful joke.”
“Those are meant to brighten your day.”
“Well, they don’t,” she said, raising her voice to compensate for the growing distance between them. “All they do is remind me how pathetic my life is when the best part of my day is watching some cat knock down a stack of pizza boxes.”
He barked out a laugh. “Forgot about that one.” Otis paused to release a string of throaty chuckles. “Damn cat.”
She approached the skid marks on the opposite side of the road and tried to picture the type of vehicle they belonged to, because she imagined that’s the sort of thing a crime scene investigator would do. She moved to the beginning of the black marks and took four steps back. Parked, she thought. Took off from a dead stop. She studied a dark spot in the drying pavement. Squatting, she ran her finger over it. The dark coloring clung to her fingertip and she sniffed it. Cigarette ashes. Her eyes shifted to the patch of grass where a cigarette butt lay.
Dani turned to see if her uncle was watching. Not surprisingly, he was chatting up Nancy Ferguson. The curvy redhead was on her way to Red Riot’s Waffle Barn to start her morning shift. As married as Otis was, he wasn’t one to pass up a flirtatious exchange with a member of the fairer sex, especially one who bounced as much as Nancy Ferguson.
Dani hurried toward the cigarette butt. She reached in her pocket, pulled out a reserve of tissues she always kept on hand, and dropped them on top of the cigarette with the intention of scooping up the evidence discreetly. She was interrupted by the hard-throttle sound of a motorcycle approaching.
She didn’t have to look to know who it was. There was only one asshole in Baptist Flats who drove something that loud and obnoxious. She placed her foot over the thin pile of tissues.
The bike pulled to a stop and CJ Bollin twisted the throttle a couple of times before he let his beast idle down. When he was done showing his ass, he cut the bike off.
“CJ,” Dani said with a look of disdain.
The rider let a broad smile spread across his bearded face as he peered over his mirrored sunglasses. “Still playing cops and robbers, I see.”
She ignored his dig. “You’re gonna have to turn your bike down Bean Street. Got a crime scene on Woodchester.”
He looked down the road. “Well, ain’t Baptist Flats getting all big city with its crime scenes and all.”
“You got business with me, CJ?”
He turned to her. “Just stopped to tell you that you look sexy in your police costume.”
“It ain’t a costume, it’s a uniform.”
“Don’t care what it is. I just know it would look extra good crumpled up on my bedroom floor.”
“You best be moving along now.”
“You get any more tattoos…”
“CJ, I will pull my gun out and shoot you, so help me…”
“I got something in my pants I can pull out and shoot you with, too.”
Dani made an effort to keep her foot on the pile of tissues and cigarette butt. “Damn it, CJ, move on out of here. Now!”
He laughed. “Hold on. I’ll be on my way, no need to get all bunched up on me.” He turned the key in the ignition. “But damn, girl, you should know not a day goes by that I don’t think about that trail of stars that runs across your hips and down to your fun area.” He hooted and grinned. “Where that trail ends is just about my favorite spot in the world.” With that, he kicked the bike to life and raced down Woodchester, gathering up pieces of Daryl Cartwright on his tires as he went.
Sheriff Royal threw up his hands and turned to Dani. The deputy acknowledged her uncle’s admonishing glare with a tilt of her head and a small shrug of her shoulders. Lucky for her, Nancy Ferguson was testing the laws of indecency and the strength of the fabric that made up her Red Riot’s T-shirt. The sheriff’s attention was quickly re-affixed to the sight of the waitress’s unnaturally sized nipples looking like two bottle caps struggling to bust free from their cotton prison.
Dani bent down, grabbed the tissues and cigarette butt, and stuffed them in her pocket. It occurred to her that she might be removing valuable evidence from a crime scene, but she was tired of being a slight girl living a tiny life in a small shit town in Tennessee. She just needed something to do that was even halfway different than what she did every other day. Solving a double homicide was just her way of giving herself a life. Besides, she was a cop. Solving crimes was what she was supposed to do.