Cypress Grove Part 2

"Okay. . . . So how'd the call come?" I asked.

Don Lee answered. "Kids phoned it in, out there looking for a place to park. They'll go out to a block of new houses-every few years developers put these up, but no one ever seems to move into them-and they'll back in a driveway like they belong there. Girl stops with bra at half-mast. What's wrong? Seth says. Seth McEvoy. Quarterback with the high school team, plays clarinet, honor student. What is that? Sarah says. Sarah Perkins, her family runs the local dollar store. Sarah herself's a few steps off to the side of most of us, I guess. At any rate, she points."

Our food came. Thelma dealt plates off an extended arm, stepped away and came back with a tray holding A-1 steak sauce, Tabasco, ketchup, Worcesters.h.i.+re. Seeing it, I had a rush of recognition. If we ordered iced tea, she'd ask sweetened or unsweetened.

"Y'all set, then?"

"Looks great, Thelma. Thanks."

"What she was pointing to was what looked like a scarecrow standing there at the side of the carport. Sarah says it moved-that was why she noticed. Doc Oldham says no way, the body'd been dead four, five days. So we figure something else moved."

"Field mice, most likely," Bates said. "We build subdivisions where they used to live, the mice don't know they're supposed to leave."

"Especially if provisions keep getting s.h.i.+pped in," I said.

"Right. Seth gets out of the car and goes over to look. Male, mid- to late forties, Doc figures. He's wearing two or three s.h.i.+rts, a pair of Wranglers so old the rivets are worn away. Been homesteading under the carport for a while from the look of it. Had a bedroll there, couple of sacks of belongings, an old backpack with one strap."

"He'd been chewed on some. Eyes and tongue, mostly."

"Postmortem?"

Don Lee nodded.

"Cause of death?"

"The developer had finished up the subdivision in a hurry and moved on. Yards still had these stakes set out in them, eighteen inches long, sharpened at one end. Someone pulled up one of those and drove it into his chest. Someone's seen one too many vampire movies, Doc said."

"That's not gonna be easy," Bates said. "Takes some industry."

"Broken fingernails," Don Lee went on, "maybe from the struggle, maybe from before, hard to say. Splinters in his palms. Tried to pull the stake out, we figure."

"Or keep it from going in."

"We found him pinned against some latticework, trellis kind of thing. Arms crossed above his head, wrists turned out. He'd been fastened up there with picture wire."

"So the body was repositioned once he was dead."

"Way it looks. Doc said the stake missed his heart but nipped the vena cava."

"Meaning it took him a while to die. . . . Understand that I don't mean any disrespect here, but what facilities do you have for processing a crime scene?"

"State issues us kits. Back when I started, I got sent up to the capital for a couple of months, pa.s.sed along what I could remember. Don Lee's studied up some on his own. We did the best we could. But like I told you up front, we're in over our heads here."

"I went back through the manual, did it all by the numbers," Don Lee told me. "Multiple photographs of the scene and the body. Bagged clothes and belongings, including a notebook-kind of a diary, I guess. Cellotaped a half-footprint I found at the edge of the carport. Took sc.r.a.pings, blood samples."

I looked at Bates. He shrugged. "What can I say? Me, I blundered into this. He's meant for it."

"Thing is," Don Lee said, "I can go on sc.r.a.ping, photographing and logging stuff in till kingdom come, but I still just have a bunch of bags with labels on them. All potatoes, no meat."

"Where's the forensics kit now?"

"Back at the station."

"You don't usually send them through to State?"

"No usually to it," Bates said. "Never had occasion to use one of the things before. Fact is, we weren't even sure where we'd put them."

"State said seal it, they'd pick it up when they got here."

"No identification on the body, I'm a.s.suming."

Binaural nods.

"And when you canva.s.sed, showing a photo, no one knew him, no one had seen him. Just another of America's invisible men."

Yep.

I'd finished my salad and sandwich and drunk three or four cups of coffee-Thelma kept creeping up and refilling. Altogether too fine a waitress. Don Lee's toast was crumbs on a plate and four empty jam containers with tops skinned back. Clots of yolk and a pool of runny ketchup competed on the sheriff's plate.

"What I have to ask is why you're pursuing this at all. You've got a good town here. Clean, self-contained. Obviously this guy's from outside, no one's visible father, no visible mother's son. Not a single city or PD I know, whatever size, would spend an hour on this. They'd write the report, skip it over the water into the files, move right along."

"Well, they'd be used to it, of course. We're not." Bates looked to the door, where an attractive, thirtyish woman in gray suit and lacy off-white blouse stood looking back. "Tell me that's not our State guy."

"That's not our State guy," Don Lee said.

"You know d.a.m.n well it is."

As though to confirm, she strode towards us.

"We don't trip over bodies too often 'round here," Don Lee said.

"And when we do"-this from Bates-"they don't usually have the mayor's mail in their pocket."

Chapter Six.

BASICALLY THEY DON'T get any more missing.

It wasn't a missing-persons case. In fact it was just about everything but a missing-persons case. Robbery, a.s.sault, murder. G.o.d knows what else. And that's the way it got pa.s.sed out to us: they don't get any more missing.

The Captain himself took roll call that day. Gentlemen, he said. Officers. Has there been a misunderstanding? When I asked that you pool your efforts and give your collective best, I had expected that you would understand this was to the end of finding the suspect. Instead you seem collectively to have lost him.

There was laughter, uneasy laughter of a sort we all got used to over the next few months. Little by little the laughter subsided, till finally we sat stone silent through roll call No jokes, no catcalls, none of the endless badgering that marks men thrown together in close quarters and shaky pursuits. We sat, we listened, some of us taking notes, then rose, claimed cars, and went stolidly about our business.

It had begun long before that, of course, on a Sat.u.r.day night almost two months before, when a sc.u.mbag by the name of Richards found his way into an apartment house off campus of Memphis State where ten students lived. Most of them were out on dates. The three that weren't, he attacked. Tied them down with lamp wires and went from one to the other, back and forth. He'd come in with his member hard as a rock, one of them said, put it in her, and leave. Then after a while he'd come back. Never climaxed, or seemed to gain much pleasure from it. Lot of blood on it there at the end, one of the young women said. I kept wondering if it was my blood or someone else's, what he'd done to the others.

Richards spent his childhood in a series of foster homes, a social worker called in as consultant told us later, often shut into a room and ignored, brought food when they remembered, other times beaten or abused. My heart bled.

Anyhow, although Richards had been a busy boy, with a string of store robberies, B&Es of various sorts, auto theft and a.s.sault, rape was something new for him. But, like a chicken-killing dog, he'd got the taste. And he liked it.

Over following weeks we got to know that campus well, spent more time there than its students did. Ants at a picnic and just about as inconspicuous. But the next time Richards struck, it was across town, at a dorm next to Samaritan Hospital where nurses in training lived. The hospital put them up free, they attended cla.s.ses half a day and helped take care of patients the rest, and after a year or so they got certified as LPNs. Women with poor and no prospects came up from all over the South. Richards went in there on a Friday evening about nine o'clock. Of the fifteen residents, eight were on duty, helping cover the evening s.h.i.+ft as nurses although legally they weren't. Five more had gone out together for pizza and a movie. They're the ones who called it in when they got back home around midnight and found Mary Elizabeth Walker (Mobile, Alabama) and Sue Ann Simmons (Tupelo, Mississippi) strapped to their beds with duct tape. There was so much tape, one of them said, they looked like mummies, or coc.o.o.ns. Mary Elizabeth stared at the wall and wouldn't respond when they spoke to her. Blood was running from both v.a.g.i.n.a and a.n.u.s. Sue Simmons didn't respond either. She was dead.

We got on to Richards the usual way, through an informer. This informer lived in the neighborhood, often wound up in some of the same diners, poolrooms and bars as Richards, and almost certainly carried some grudge against him. Once we had this, still with nothing but hearsay and suspicion to take to market, we bird-dogged Richards in solid s.h.i.+fts, staking out his apartment from unmarked cars. For two days nothing happened. We learned a lot: that he kept unpredictable hours, had no visitors, and thrived exclusively on carry-out hamburgers. On the third day, he disappeared.

We went in with a judge's order on the fourth day and everything was just as it had been the times we'd gone in without, clothes scattered about, toiletries in place, bottle or two of prescription drugs in the bathroom, piles of mustard, salt and pepper packets on the kitchenette counter by a pool of loose change. He was gone, purely gone. Evaporated. Vanished. No one ever heard from or of him again.

That was the first one.

"A vigilante," someone said at roll call.

"The position of this department," the Captain said, "is that it's an isolated incident. That is also your position."

I'd have to pull records to check, and of course I can't, but it seems maybe two, three months went by before the next one.

These s.h.i.+theads were hitting mom-and-pop stores all over the city, pistol-whipping whoever was behind the counter, mom, pop or one of numerous kids, when they objected or proved too slow at scooping up money. The perps were easy to mark. There were always three. One never spoke. He lurked on the fringes, carried a steel baseball bat over his shoulder, and moved in only when the others had got the goods and left. Then he'd swing his bat, smas.h.i.+ng hips, knees, wrists and ankles.

Again and as usual, confidential information came up the line from one of the city's bottom feeders. Three guys who'd always had trouble putting together the price of a draft beer of late had been seen with hands wrapped around the dewy necks of imports. One of them, the informant said, was truly spooky. Never spoke, smiled a lot, sat perfectly still. Always wore a baseball cap, Yankees one day. Dodgers the next, Orioles, Rangers. Must have one h.e.l.l of a collection.

Like a lot of their breed, these guys started out doing occasional hits, then, when they got away with it repeatedly, and got used to the benefits as well, started making it a regular thing. That, along with informants, is what broke most of these cases for us. Soon these guys were surfacing every Friday night.

We knew where they were staying, in a swayback, half-abandoned apartment complex out in south Memphis, near Crump and Mississippi, kind of place where plywood's been nailed up to make small rooms out of large and where to sit on the toilet you have to draw up your knees to fit them jigsaw like into the s.p.a.ce between sink and door. But we still had to catch these guys with pants down. Every squad car went out with a list of mom-and-pop convenience stores in central Memphis that hadn't been hit. We circled them like sharks.

One Friday, then another, went by without these guys showing at the crib. Hadn't been around the bars either, our informant said when his contact tracked him down. No one had seen them. No one ever saw them again.

"Comes from inside the department," scuttleb.u.t.t had it in locker rooms and lounges, "who else would know."

Couple more, at least.

Someone who was offing cabdrivers. He'd hit late at night when drivers were inclined to take just about any fare they could get, he'd direct them to the city's fringes and leave them there with their heads bashed in. The department pulled hundreds of pages of copies of log sheets and dispatcher's records. We'd just begun heavy cruising of areas from which calls had come in the past when, abruptly, the killings stopped.

Next, a series of suspected arsons in upscale housing developments under construction. Two of those developments, then three, went up in flame. At the third, an elderly couple had moved in prematurely, before construction was completed. They went up in flame, too. Then it all stopped.

What the h.e.l.l, the Captain said, sentiments echoed by many others, by the press, for instance, repet.i.tively and at great length, is going on here?

We never really knew. But almost a year later, on an anonymous tip, in the woods just across the Mississippi line we found six shallow graves side by side, each topped by a wooden plaque into which had been burned a smiling skull and crossbones.

Chapter Seven.

"GET YOU SOMETHING? Coffee? Pie?"

"No thanks, Sheriff."

Introducing herself, spelling the last name, Valerie Bjorn had settled in beside Don Lee.

"You new up at State?"

"Over a year now."

"Can't help noticing you're out of uniform."

"Out of-oh. I'm not a trooper, Sheriff. I'm attorney for the barracks. Commander Bailey asked if I'd mind picking up the evidence kit."

"State's paying top dollar for messengers these days, then."

She smiled. "I live here, Sheriff. Well, not here exactly. Not far out of town, though."

"The old Ames place."

"I moved in two months ago."

"Heard someone bought it. That house's been empty a long time. Few rungs down from fixer-up would be my guess."

"I'm doing most of the work myself. My grandfather was a builder, the kind that back in his day handled everything himself, plumbing, electric, carpentry. He raised me. I started crawling under houses when I was eight or nine."

"And haven't quit yet," I said.

"I thought I had. But we're so often wrong about such things, aren't we? Not that I get much chance to crawl and so on, between my own work and what I do for the barracks. Hope you don't mind my tracking you down, Sheriff. I saw your Jeep outside."

"Not at all, Miss Bjorn."

"Val. Please."

Suddenly Thelma was at the booth saying, "Here, let me clear some room," scooping up plates and laying them along her left arm. "Get you anything else, boys? Ma'am?" Their eyes met briefly. "Some more coffee? Just made a fresh pot."

"Gettin' too late for this old man," Bates said. "Prob'ly be up through Tuesday or so, as it is."

Don Lee and I also declined.

"I'm fine," Val said. "But thank you."

"We have the check?" Bates said. Thelma turned back and shook her head. He shook his.

"How long we been doing this, Thelma? Four, five years now?"