CHAPTER SEVEN

Deputy Wroten’s second priority was the view the body.

First, he spent nearly half an hour sequestered with Deputy Allen in Janet Ellis’s kitchen, just out of earshot, reviewing Allen’s notes, his observations and conclusions. Then, after instructing Allen to remain at the Ellis’s with Janet and Mrs. Johansson, he told Victoria, Carver, and me to meet him at the Johansson house.

“Directly there, mind you,” he added, as if throwing a bone to Allen, who looked as if he had been thoroughly reprimanded for his attitude toward and his earlier actions against Carver.

As if there was anywhere else we were likely to go.

The additional thirty or forty minutes he spent in Eric Johansson’s bedroom—closely watched by Victoria and, I must admit, somewhat less closely by me, with Carver waiting just outside the door—were in large part a repeat of what we had seen earlier that morning.

The body was unmoved, in spite of the rattling and banging we had heard while Allen had examined the room. One drawer was fully open and its contents clearly disturbed—that was most likely where he had discovered the hidden packet of drugs.

The major difference was that, since Wroten knew that Allen had photographed the body and the rest of the room, he showed no compunctions about pulling the T-shirt, now caked and stiff and rusty-red, up far enough for us all to see that the bruises, scrapes, and other wounds extended nearly to the throat.

Whoever had beaten Eric Johansson had obviously been furious about something.

“Are those stab wounds,” Victoria asked at one point, indicating several long, narrow patches of dried blood along the rib cage.

Wroten leaned further over to inspect them.

“Not sure. Could be. If they are, they’re awfully shallow to have been the cause of death. We’ll know more when Doc Anderson has a chance to look at them.”

“Where is Doctor Anderson,” I asked, suddenly aware that the coroner had been absent all morning.

“He and most of his staff are at a training session down-mountain,” Wroten said. “It’s only one day, and he figured whatever came up could wait a while.”

He shook his head and studied the wounds again.

“Guess he figured wrong. The best we can do is put the body on ice and wait until tomorrow...or the next day for the answers to some of our questions.”

“Then someone is coming to take care of....” Victoria trailed off.

“Yes, ma’am. The coroner’s van should be here in an hour or so. It’s been busy with another death—this one long-anticipated and well-documented, over at the old folks’ home in Six Pines.”

That was the closest town to Fox Creek, about twenty-five miles further down the State Highway.

“Old Mrs. Weimer?” Victoria looked saddened but not shocked.

“Yes, ma’am. She’d been fading for a couple of weeks, and we got the call at about five this morning.”

“Well,” Victoria said, “she was well along. Had to have been nearly ninety. Poor old thing. No family, not many friends left alive. She must have been terribly lonely. I should have visited her more often.

“The funeral will be here in Fox Creek, then?”

“Yes, ma’am. A couple of grandchildren from down-mountain will be coming in sometime this afternoon or tomorrow.”

“So sad.”

And then they turned their attention back to young Eric Johansson, who would never know the loneliness of outliving those closest to him, or feel the disappointment of grandchildren who remained distant...or uncaring.

“What about his thighs?” Victoria made as if to lift the torn edge of the jeans.

“I’d better do that, Miz Sears,” Wroten said, and he carefully peeled the torn flap of denim up toward the waistband, revealing even more evidence of beating and kicking.

“Must’ve gotten to him when he was on the ground. He’d have curled up to protect himself, and that would account for all of the bruises along the outside there.”

“Hmmm, yes,” Victoria said, but she wasn’t exactly looking at the thigh. She was concentrating on the upper surface of the leg, just at the knee cap and extending for a few inches above.

The skin was torn, shredded almost, raw and ragged. She leaned over so close that it looked as if she might be about to smell the wounds, but then she straightened up and half-nodded to herself.

Wroten apparently didn’t catch the small gesture.

I did but I didn’t dare ask Victoria about it yet. It looked as if she had had a thought but that it had passed almost as quickly as it came. When she glanced over at me, her eyes were calm, sad, retrospective.

“I guess that’s all we can do here,” Wroten said finally. “Next stop should probably be Land’s End.”

“I think, if you don’t mind, that it might be instructive to drop by the Neilson farm first. To get more of a chronological sense of yesterday, as it were. And it’s really just on the way, about halfway to Land’s End.”

Now it was Wroten’s turn to look as if he wanted to ask a question but didn’t quite dare. He studied Victoria for a long moment, then nodded and said, “Don’t see any harm in that.”

Downstairs, he instructed Carver, Victoria, and me—the designated driver—to follow him, and we set out for the Neilson farm. At least there was no discussion over who might or might not have to sit in the “criminal” seat in his vehicle.

It took about twenty minutes to get to the Neilson place. Normally, I would have been trying to get as much information as I could out of Victoria, but she sat stolidly in the passenger seat, not particularly withdrawn, but watching the fields as they flickered past. She surely had something on her mind, but I decided she was still working on making sense out of it. I didn’t want to interrupt her.

Carver was in the back seat, taciturn and unspeaking. I know he have felt humiliated at the way Allen had treated him in front of the rest of us, including his mother—I know I would have felt that way—and didn’t want to talk to anyone right then. I didn’t even try.

Instead, I concentrated on the road, on the back bumper of Deputy Wroten’s cruiser, on the light glinting off his taillights, on the fact that it was probably getting on to ten or eleven o’clock and I hadn’t had anything to eat except a bagel and a glass of milk.

The Neilson place was newer, more modern-looking, better kept up than either the Ellises’ or the Johanssons’. The rail fence was newly painted, the roof of the two story brick house newly shingled. Everything looked bright and shiny and polished.

We waited in the car while Deputy Wroten spoke to an elderly woman—Mrs. Neilson, perhaps?—who couldn’t seem to speak three words in a row without using her hands to wave and point. After a couple of minutes, Wroten approached the car. I rolled the window down.

“Tom Neilson’s in the field today, same one where the Johansson kid was working yesterday. I just got a knock-down-and-drag-out second-hand version of things from Tom’s mother back there”—the woman was still standing at the kitchen door, arms folded, looking like she could face down hoards of ravening Nazis if they tried to accuse her beloved son of anything—“then she said he was out there trying to get the flatbed back into working condition.

“It’s not far. Just follow me and keep close.”

It wasn’t far. It took perhaps ten minutes on graveled roads, turning left and right where fields ended and, presumably, other farmers’ fields began.

We saw Neilson and a couple of hands long before they saw us. They were grouped around a flatbed that was canted partway in an irrigation ditch, its load of neatly stacked bales holding on as firmly as if it had been dead-level. Nearby was a pickup truck, a combine, and a baler, all standing silent and empty. The field looked as if it had been about three-quarters finished before something had gone wrong with the flatbed.

Wroten got out first, spoke a few words to a man a couple of years older than me, who seemed to answer easily and without any signs of anger, then he signaled for us to join him.

“Miz Sears, you know Tom, of course.”

“Of course. His parents and I go back a long way. Good to see you, Tom.” She extended her hand.

The man removed his worn leather work glove, took her proffered hand, and shook it firmly.

“And you know Carver, I guess, since he was working out here yesterday.”

A nod passed between the two men. No need for a handshake right then.

“And this pretty lady”—had he actually said that?—“is Lynn Hanson. She’s staying the summer at the Van Etten’s place, up by Miz Sears’s.”

The man—Tom Neilson apparently—nodded and extended his hand. In spite of having probably been encased in the leather glove all morning, his hand was dry and warm, and his fingers felt strong and capable as they grasped mine. He could easily have crushed my knuckles, I realized, but he didn’t even pretend to try.

It was very much a gentleman’s handshake. I liked it.

I decided at the same time that I would probably like Mr. Neilson as well.

Wroten was already asking questions. Apparently he had not yet told Neilson—or the other hands who had clustered close by—that Johansson was dead. He was treating it like he just wanted some background on the boy. Maybe the kid had been speeding, or spraying graffiti on a wall somewhere in town. Something relatively minor but that needed to be dealt with.

Neilson answered his questions clearly and directly, without any apparent hesitation. His story matched Carver’s.

The Johansson kid had been hired as day labor and had spent most of the afternoon on the flatbed boosting and stacking the bales as they were handed up by the rest of the crew. He did an all right job, Neilson said, until about two hours before quitting time.

Then he had complained about feeling a bit feverish and achy.

“Not used to so much man-u-al labor, that kid,” one of the hands said. He was an older man, probably in his fifties, and looked as if he had spent every day of those years out in the field.

“That’s enough, Ed. He did a good enough job. Enough to earn the wage I was paying.”

The kid figured that he would do better driving the truck than wrestling the heavy bales, and the driver—another of the regular hands, named Bill—had no objections, so he had handed over the driver’s seat to the kid...who promptly drove the rig into the irrigation ditch.

That would have been bad enough, since it would have taken valuable time to pull it out. But the kid had somehow managed to mangle the front axle and, for the time being, the flatbed would be out of commission.

“It was hot, we’d been working all day, and I’ll admit it, I lost my temper. The thing with the flatbed was a stupid mistake that shouldn’t have happened. But then he tried to weasel out of being responsible for the truck, whining about how bad he felt, and I lost it. I came at him, he started toward me, Carver there stepped in between and got sucker-punched by the kid, and I let the kid have it.

“He went down, I fired him on the spot and told him to pick up his pay on the way out, and he got up, dusted off his sorry ass, and stomped away.

“End of fight. End of story.

“Except that he forgot to go by the house and get his pay. I guess I’ll have to mail it to him.”

“That’ll take some mighty fancy postage,” Wroten said.

“What?”

“Eric Johansson is dead.”

“Dead. Sometime last night”.

“How...? Was it a car accident? Or...?”

“So far all we know is that he was beaten up pretty badly. Head, face, torso, even kicked all to hell along the legs. Somebody, or somebodies did a full-out work-over on him.”

“Hey,” Neilson said, starting to take a step back, then stopping and standing his ground, “you don’t think I had anything to do with that? I gave him a good one, I told you that already, but he walked away from it and I haven’t seen him since.”

“Care to tell me where you were last night?”

“Sure. I was here until nightfall, along with the rest of the boys, working on this pile of scrap metal—that’s pretty much what it’s worth unless I can fix it. Then we all went back to the house and had a long, well-deserved dinner. Mom and I stayed up until, oh, maybe twelve-thirty, one o’clock, watching a little T.V. and trying to figure out how we were going to get the rest of the wheat harvested without that damn...without the flatbed. Then I went to bed.

“I didn’t see Johansson again after he left this field. I swear to it.”

I believed him. Not that that meant anything, of course, but there was something about him that rang true.

I think Wroten felt the same, because he gave up questioning Neilson, satisfied just to warn him to stay close in case anything else came up. Standard stuff. I’d heard it before, actually.

Just after the accident that had killed Terry and Shawn.

Funny, I could think that sentence and not get the shakes.

I looked around for Victoria. I half expected to see her standing near Deputy Wroten, taking in all of the questions and answers. Instead, she was walking around the flatbed, staring up at the bales of hay, checking out something on the ground a few feet from the truck, or standing and simply staring into space, thinking.

“Victoria,” I called.

She glanced over at me, gave me a little wave, and made her way back to the group.

“Are you finished here, Richard?”

“Yes, ma’am. And are you?”

“I think so. However, I think it might be...uh, wisdom if you were to request that Tom not move any of this equipment, not even to repair the flatbed, for a day or so, at least not until Doc Anderson has had a chance to examine the body. Would that be possible, Tom?”

Evidently she had taken Wroten’s agreement for granted, since she was looking directly at Neilson when she finished.

“I...well, I suppose so. I was going to off-load the bales to another flatbed if I could borrow one, maybe from Mitch Knowles or Evan Sanders....”

“I think that might be unwise,” Victoria said softly. “Don’t you agree, Deputy?”

“Yeah, okay. It is a death from unknown causes. Better be safe than sorry, right, Tom.”

Neilson nodded.

“Well, then, Richard,” Victoria said lightly. “Shall we on to Land’s End.”

“After me, ma’am.” Wroten made a small gesture, as if he were about to doff his hat to her.

They both smiled. It wasn’t the time or the place for an outright laugh.