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It wasn’t like she could have gone unnoticed, not in our little town. She was wrapped too tight to pass for one of us. The clerk at the motor lodge had called her in before I’d arrived at the station. She’d made him uneasy with all the impertinent questions she’d visited on him. Not, he was sad to learn, an unlawful offense.
She was already sitting on our rickety bench drinking our wretched coffee when I came through the door at half past eight.
“You Tatum?” she asked me like I’d damn well better be.
I nodded.
“We need to talk.”
That’s when she showed me her Bureau credentials but not the way most Feds like to show them. She didn’t press them close like maybe I’d upchucked them on her carpet. She pulled them out, flopped them open, shoved them right back in.
“About what?” I asked her.
“You found a body yesterday?”
I nodded. She was a fine looking woman who didn’t appear to have slept in about a month. She could have passed for Onyx’s sister. She was dark that way and compact but wiry and on alert like a woodland creature. If I visited the quarry with her, I doubted she would dance.
“Who told you?” I asked her.
“State police made notification.”
That sounded official enough for me. I pointed her toward my desk.
“Got a room somewhere?”
We called it the conference room, but nobody ever conferred in it. Mostly Ronnie ate lunch up there and left his sandwich scraps to rot. I walked her up the stairs and showed her in, opened a window to get the funk out. She’d lit up before I could ask her not to smoke.
“The sheriff frowns on that,” I told her.
“Guy in the hat?”
I nodded.
She dipped her ashes in one of Ronnie’s Pudding Cups, a few days ripe.
“Tell me about him.”
“The sheriff?”
“Dead guy.”
“Found him in a tree. I was out in the woods chasing a woman’s dog. The sheriff’s got this friend, and she calls us sometimes to . . .”
“Hat?” She was strictly a no nonsense kind of girl.
“Whose?”
She looked at me like I was trade school material. “Dead guy.”
“Right. Yeah. A yarmulke.”
“Nailed on?”
I nodded.
“I.D.?”
“Not yet. What did you say your name was?”
She pulled her credentials out again and slid them to me across the table.
Katherine LeComte. Special Agent.
“You work out of . . . ?"
“D.C..” Her cigarette hissed when she snuffed it out in Ronnie’s residual pudding.
“Were you around yesterday?”
“Maybe,” she told me.
“What do you carry?”
She huffed and rolled her eyes like I’d asked her to slip out of her clothes. Then she reached back and pulled her sidearm from its holster, smacked it down on the table between us. A Glock 23.
“Backup?” I asked her.
She glared at me for a quarter minute before plucking a Bersa .380 out of her of ankle holster. She swung the bore around my way before she laid it down as well.
I picked it up and sniffed it for show. I could already smell the cordite. “It was you up there, wasn’t it.” I dug the casings I’d collected out of my shirt pocket and dropped them onto the table one at a time.
“You the one throwing rocks?”
“A rock.”
“Came out of nowhere,” she told me and shrugged. “What’s a girl to do?”
“How did you know where we found him?”
“Asked around.”
“EMTs tell you?”
She shook her head. “Who the fuck plays Putt Putt anymore?”
“Why didn’t you just come to us?”
“Here now, aren’t I?”
I was getting a little dizzy from all the tit for tat. I’d been living for a while in a place where people told you nothing at all or couldn’t stop talking once they’d opened their mouths and started. Banter was something nobody local knew a thing about.
“Listen,” I told her, “if the Bureau is already looking for this guy, I’ll help you how I can or step out of the way.”
“All right then,” she said as she collected her guns. “How did you throw that damn rock?”
“A few boys at the quarry built a trebuchet. It’s a . . .”
“I know what it is.”
I was getting the distinct feeling she wasn’t the least bit polite, and I have to say I was warming to her for it. This is a courtly part of the world, and that can wear on you after a while.
“Must have flung our dead guy with it. He was way the hell up in an oak.”
“Have you got a team on the trebuchet?”
“I’m all the team we’ve got. I was going to put in a call to Richmond this morning, see if they could spare some techs, but now that you’re here . . .”
“Call Richmond,” she told me. “Let’s keep the Bureau out of it.”
I nodded. She glared.
“You mean like . . . now?”
“And get me an ashtray while you’re at it?”
Of course the sheriff waved me into his office once I’d gotten downstairs.
“Talk to me, Raymond,” the sheriff said as he perched on a corner of his desk. I’d told him a few dozen times by then that my given name was Delray, but I went ahead and talked to him nonetheless.
“Don’t know much yet. Sounds like she’s seen this sort of thing before.”
“Guy in a tree?”
I shook my head. “Hat nailed on.”
“Are they going to take it over?”
I shrugged. “And oh yeah, FBI’s smoking up there.”
“The hell she is,” the sheriff barked and went stalking up the stairs.
I called the state police in Richmond, and they hemmed and hawed and guessed they might get over sometime. The sheriff came back down and went straight to the credenza in his office. He brought over an ashtray, a big glass dish shaped like West Virginia. He didn’t tell me a thing except for, “Here.”
I made another call before I went back up, just on a hunch. There was something off about her, and I got what I expected. Then I returned to the conference room and said, “Ms. LeComte . . .”
“Kate,” she told me.
I gave her the ashtray. “Richmond says they’ll be over when they can. Knowing them, that could be next week or never. What do you know already that I don’t?”
She pulled a big brown envelope out of her massive handbag, opened the flap and shot the contents onto the tabletop. Photos mostly, eight by tens, and what looked like forensic reports.
“Your guy’s number twelve.”
She stood up so she could better arrange the photos. I found myself looking at eleven bodies, women and men both. Hats and clothes, that’s what I noticed. No madras, but all of it colorful country-clubbish leisure wear. Some of the bodies were stretched out on open ground. Two were in proper chairs. One was in the driver’s seat of a car. A porkpie on that one. One lady was propped on a settee, another at a dinette. Everything was neat and tidy. No blood to speak of. I was looking not just at malevolence but at a hell of a lot of work.
When she had them all laid out, she started with the photo on the far left, tapped it with her finger and told me, “Idaho.” Then it was Montana, Nebraska, Missouri, Texas east and west, Arizona, Louisiana, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Florida. “And now you.”
“All over the damn place,” was all I could manage.
“Always a hat of some kind. Always a nail. Always these dressy clothes.”
“How long?”
“Orofino, Idaho,” she told me and pointed at a man in a seersucker jacket. He looked to be stretched out in a flower bed. “July. 1985.”
“Time between?”
“Anywhere from two weeks to four years. The last one was Crestview, Florida. A year and a half ago.”
“Cause of death?”
“Always the same. He takes something out. A kidney. A lung. Liver. Heart. Victims bleed to death. He tidies them up. Puts them in these clothes. Nails the hat on.”
“Got a profile?”
“Usual bullshit. White male. Probably sixtyish by now. Loner. Creep. Stick up his
ass. . . .”
I was seeing only pictures of the victims. No extracted organs. No blood. I picked up the photo of the guy in the car, the one with the porkpie hat. He was behind the wheel of a powder-blue Fairlane. He looked content to be there, except for being dead.
“Crime scenes?” I asked her.
“Found one,” she told me, “ten years too late. Pecos, west Texas. Storefront basement. A lot of blood. Her.” She pointed at the woman on the settee.
“What was she missing?”
“Small intestine.”
“Find it?”
“Nope.”
“Where was the body?”
“Furniture store in Midland.”
I studied the photo of that poor, dead woman perched on a brand new settee. She looked drowsy and pasty, was wearing white gloves and stockings with a seam.
“What do you figure he does with the organs?”
“Eats them for all we know.”
That stopped me for a second. I sat back down. “My guy had a phone,” I told her.
“That’s kind of new. Just the last four. Did you get a call?”
I nodded. “Some music. A woman speaking German, I think.”
“Language tapes. Learn Spanish in six weeks, that kind of thing. The first one was French. Then Italian. Russian. Motown ringtone?”
“Marvin Gaye.”
On the bottom of the pile of forensics reports, I turned up autopsy photos I’ll long wish I hadn’t seen. They all had incisions, not butchery really but clearly not the work of a surgeon either.
“He sews them up?”
She nodded.
“Are they under when he cuts?”
She nodded again. “Ether.”
“Hard to get?”
She shook her head. “Auto parts store.” She lit a cigarette and wandered to the window. She tried to throw open a second one and looked prepared to bust it when she couldn’t. I stepped over and worked the balky latch the way I knew you had to. She was looking like a woman who could probably stand some wholesale country air.
***
I persuaded her to ride with me, got her buttoned up in my sedan and was up to speed on the two lane heading toward the quarry before I told her about the call I’d made when I’d left her and gone downstairs. Not the one to Richmond. The one to D.C.. “I know you’re on leave from the Bureau. I checked.”
She didn’t tell me anything for about a solid minute. When she finally spoke, she asked me, “Who’d you tell?”
I couldn’t imagine she could possibly miss with her Glock from there.
“Nobody,” I said. If she was crazy outright, I was in trouble. If she was obsessed, that was probably still trouble enough, but I suspected I could harness what she knew to good effect.
“So now what?” she asked me.
“What happened? They wouldn’t say much on the phone.”
“This . . . mostly,” she said.
She told me the leave was voluntary at first, that she had time due and a little money and decided to drive around the country and see where everybody had been killed. Fresh eyes. She thought it might make a difference.
“I started in Idaho and worked my way down and around and over. I got a little fixed on it, I guess. They decided I needed a break.”
“Why this case?” I asked her. “This world’s full of ugly shit.”
She lit a cigarette. I didn’t bother to acquaint her with the sheriff’s vehicular prohibitions but just drew open the ashtray, which was full of candy wrappers. She pulled the tray out and dumped them on the floor. I liked that about her. She’d sort of let the niceties drift away.
“Calm. Deliberate. Relentless. Remorseless. Tidy, as far as it goes. Total goddamn package. He’s thinking. Planning. Waiting. Careful. Taking his sweet damn time. You get to thinking if you can catch this guy you might fix things a little.”
She took a violent drag on her cigarette, shot sparks all over the place, and then flicked the butt out the window before I could say I preferred she wouldn’t.
“I already know it won’t matter,” she told me. “I’m not an idiot.”
When we rolled into the quarry, I didn’t go to the bother of paying a call on Brewster but just worked my way through the machinery and pulled around to the trebuchet.
“Good Christ,” she said before she’d even climbed out of the car. That was the only response worth having to the thing just because it was so damn big and out of place. “Isn’t that some hillbilly shit.”
She circled around it like Lomax had, admiring the jackleg handiwork before paying the bulk of her attention to the tire rubber sling. “I guess the techs might match up fibers, find a little blood or something, but do we really need proof your guy got shot from this thing?”
I shook my head and pointed to the far treetops, well beyond where the excavation ended and the deep woods took hold. “You saw where the rock hit. Found him right there.”
“This place buttoned up at night?”
“A chain.”
“Cut?”
“Wasn’t locked. Just hooked.”
“How many people does it take to shoot it?”
“Two’s better. One’ll do. You can cock it with a car.”
“Walk me through it,” she told me as she struck out toward the woods across the way.
I tried to stomp down the brambles for her like a gentleman would, but she just forged her own way through the thicket. She had one of those women’s suits on that looks like it came straight out of menswear. Battleship gray and, from the way she waded, probably tough as tin. She broke into the forest while I was still fighting the thicket.
Once I’d finally caught up with her, I recounted as much of my previous day as she could tolerate. Whenever I dithered or detoured, she’d say to me, “And then?”
“Why did you go to the quarry?” she wanted to know.
“Ronnie,” I told her. “He’d heard they had a catapult.”
We stopped at the rock we’d flung.
“I was standing right there,” she said and pointed to a spot not ten feet away.
“I would have gone for the Glock.”
“Just cleaned it or I would have. When did the phone start ringing?” she asked me.
“I was coming from there,” I told her and pointed. “And Rusty was out here somewhere. I’d followed him up the rise.”
“So you’d passed the guy already?”
“Think so.”
“How do you guess he knew to put the call in when he did?”
“Rang a lot,” I told her. “I figured he was calling all along.”
“You’d have picked it up from way the hell back there.”
I thought about it for a second. She was right.
She scanned the terrain.
“You figure he was here somewhere?”
I got that chill you get when everything turns inside out. There I was out in the woods piddling with Rusty, and I could suddenly see myself the way he’d probably seen me. Watching me pass through the forest, but watching me from where? There was high ground behind us. That made the most sense, so we both started moving there together.
“Fair cover there,” I told her and pointed out a tangle of laurels, but there were rocks a little to the west, and we headed to them instead. A waist-high boulder with a heap of scree to either side. The leaf litter behind them was churned up, but a bear or a deer could have done it.
I’d begun describing to Kate all the mess I’d seen the local fauna make when she stopped to ask, “Ever seen one field strip a cigarette?”
He’d done a good job but for that one scrap of paper laying on a leaf. We stirred the ground enough to find tobacco and a filter almost torn apart so you couldn’t tell what it was. She had those little plastic bags that proper police carry, and she plucked up the filter between two twigs and dropped it inside of one.
I could make out enough of the brand name to know it was an Iroquois, one of those cheap Indian smokes the locals had taken to when they couldn’t see paying fifty dollars for a carton of Winstons.
“Him?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “Must be people around here who’d sit in the woods all day for forty bucks?"
“People around who’d do it for a hell of a lot less.”
“That dog you were chasing, does he always come this way?”
“Pretty much.”
“Who owns him?”
I savored for a moment the introduction I was bound by duty to make. “You,” I told Special Agent LeComte, “are in for a treat."
Rita was home, of course. Where the hell else would she be? Rusty, for his part, was trying to burrow under the fence and get out, but the planks we’d put all around the thing were frustrating him for the moment. I could hear the TV. She was watching one of those gabby daytime shows where a half dozen gals get together and chew the fat about every damn thing. They were talking some sort of beauty treatment—a peel or a scrub or something—as me and the special agent mounted the porch stairs.
“What’s that smell?” Kate asked me.
I took a whiff. It was a blend of mouldering framing, unchecked mildew, and marginal personal hygiene all spiced with several decades of conscientious domestic neglect. “Pure Appalachian cracker,” I told her. “Nothing else smells like that.”
“Hope not,” she said and knocked sharply on the screen door.
Rita had to swallow, as it turned out, before she could bark at us, “What!?”
She was eating a pecan coffee cake, unsliced and undefrosted. Just gnawing on it like a rat with a wheel of cheese, from the edges in.
I heard Kate say, “Christ,” at the sight of Rita’s situation, I’ll call it. She was a big pile of woman sunk into her sofa and surrounded by all manner of household clutter and crap.
I followed Kate inside. “She’s FBI,” I told Rita. “We’ve got a few questions for you.”
“I can see from here,” Rita said, “you didn’t bring me nothing.”
Kate, for her part, was soaking in the decor like a child at her first circus. Most everything not worth saving that had passed into Rita’s life looked to be piled up or crammed somewhere in Rita’s slovenly front room. Kate swiveled slowly so she wouldn’t miss a thing. She finished up with the Sara Lee boxes shoved between the sofa cushions.
“Didn’t you tell me,” I said to Rita, “the trash man left your gate standing open?”
“Might have.”
“You have a trash man?” Kate just couldn’t help herself.
That didn’t sit too well with Rita. She started shifting around like she was thinking of fighting her way off the sofa and throttling little miss FBI with her footed cane. But Rita was too large, and the sofa was too soft. She just ended up rolling around on the cushions.
“Have a little more coffee cake, princess.”
That seemed a good time to squire Kate out the door.
“I’m calling Verle.” Rita dug up a phone from somewhere and sifted through spectacles on her side table until she found the pair she wanted.
“Two buckets next time,” I told her, which was enough to keep her from dialing. “Just tell me what you remember about Rusty getting out yesterday.”
“Trash man’s got a fool boy working for him anymore. Up and left the gate standing open, I guess.”
“Who’s your trash man?”
“Gooch.”
“Curtis or Doc?”
“Doc.”
“Junior or senior?”
“Junior, and he don’t come half the time. When you bringing my chicken?” she asked me and took a bite of coffee cake.
Kate was sniffing herself as we left the porch and crossed the scraggly yard. “I’m going to have to throw these clothes away.”
***
I knew where we ought to go, as long as we were rank already. If you navigated right, the landfill was sort of on the way back to town. It was about one o’clock by then, and I thought we might catch Doc at the dump, emptying his truck for the afternoon’s haul, and that’s just how it worked out.
He and the fool of a boy Rita had told us about were having lunch up by the shed, eating saltines and pickles with one of the guys who drove the landfill Bobcat.
He told me something. I don’t know what. I said like usual, “Yeah.” They were all giving Kate a forensic once over, about like they’d examine a cow. Up and down, side to side, eyeing her parts and pieces.
“Jesus, boys,” she finally told them, “just tell me what you want to see.”
They all spat like maybe they were part of some synchronized spitting troop. It was their way of saying, “We’ll see what we like. Don’t need no help from you.”
“You picking up Rita’s trash?” I asked Doc.
“When she don’t get too behind.”
That was the way of the world out here. People would do things for you until you hadn’t paid them in a month or three. Then they’d stop and wait and start up again when you got free with your money.
“Pick it up yesterday?”
Doc glanced at his assistant who asked him, “Rita what?”
“Woman out by White Rock,” Doc told him. “Locusts growing in her driveway. Little dog in the backyard.”
“I remember them locusts,” the assistant told him back.
“Did you maybe leave that gate standing open?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “Open when I come. Ain’t seen no damn dog. Big or little. Ain’t seen no dog at all.”
The landfill guy said a lot of something, and Doc and his guy laughed. I just nodded and told the bunch of them, “Yeah, I guess.”
We headed back to town and the station house. I parked snug to the curb.
“Tell me something,” I said to Kate as we were climbing out of the car. “What did you find out driving around, seeing where everybody had been killed?”
She didn’t even have to think about it.
“Exactly fuck all,” she told me.
“Afraid of that,” I said. “Want to get some lunch or something?”
She didn’t think about that either. “No,” she said and made off for her car.
