Another Man's Ground--A Mystery, page 4
Hank didn’t want to depend on Vern’s pickup to get to the grove of trees, and he did want to get as close to the Kinney property line as possible.
“I’m going to get reimbursed for the gas, right?”
“Yeah, course. And if you get your uniform dirty, I’ll even pay for the dry cleaning.”
Sam rolled his eyes.
“Turn here.”
The Bronco rattled up to the Miles place, a traditional farmhouse with a wraparound porch and a second floor with dormer windows. It had seen better days—several shutters hung off their window frames by only one hinge, the porch sagged at the corners, and the chimney perched on the left side of the roof looked less than secure.
No one answered the door. Hank frowned and turned around on the porch. Sam stood at the bottom of the steps, looking out at the view. The farmhouse sat on a hill, and Miles land rolled out behind it in a riot of undulating greenery. It was stunningly beautiful.
Sam yawned and shrugged. Local boy, Hank thought with a shake of his head. He was heading down the steps when the chain saws started up.
They both turned toward the sound, which was coming from the same direction Vern had taken Hank in two weeks before. Sam grinned, and they climbed into the Bronco and took off down the dirt track toward the noise.
The SUV’s already stiff ride became positively bone-jarring as they got deeper into the woods. The track was more torn up than it had been, and the going was slow. Sam was having a ball, downshifting and revving the engine. Hank wasn’t. Finally, his thirty-eight-year-old back couldn’t take any more.
“I’ll get out and walk,” he said. Sam laughed and pulled away with a spine-crunching lurch.
Hank started to follow the track as it headed right, but then stopped as he heard a tree come crashing down to his left. The track must curve around before turning back toward the slippery elms, he thought as he changed direction and struck out through the vegetation, which, despite snagging on his jeans and windbreaker, was a whole lot easier to walk through than the dirt track had been to drive on.
Five minutes later, he entered a clearing that had not been there fourteen days earlier. It was filled with Vern’s truck, a wood chipper, several large cans of gas, and numerous thirty-three-gallon black garbage bags overflowing with bark strips.
The slippery elms that had stood naked now no longer stood at all. They lay scattered around like giant discarded toothpicks. Behind a stand of pines, he heard a yell and then another one came crashing down. Good grief. Was Vern going to cut the whole damn place down? He cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled over the sound of several chain saws.
Vern gave a start and then put down the ax he was holding and trotted over to where Hank stood at the edge of all the activity.
“What are you doing, Vern?”
Vern took off his baseball cap and mopped a very sweaty brow.
“Whew. Sure warmed up out here today. Sorry you came all the way back here. You shoulda called first. I would have met you up at the house.”
“Yeah…” Hank said. “Sure … anyway, what’s going on? You’re cutting them all down?”
“Well, yeah. They were going to die anyway, after that much stripping. So I figured I’d cut ’em and strip the whole tree. At least make some money off them.”
“That’s an interest—”
“Why don’t you come on back up to the house. I can get you a glass of sweet tea.” Vern started to steer him toward the pickup. Which was still attached to the wood chipper. Which was currently in use. Hank pointed to the man feeding a barkless elm limb into the machine.
“Oh, shit—er, goodness. Yes. Well, maybe we can walk.” Vern tried to turn Hank back the way he’d come. Hank, not inclined to do so, stayed put. He was about to start speaking again when the Bronco roared into the clearing in a cloud of exhaust and dust.
Everyone turned to stare as Sam’s SUV shuddered to a stop, and he climbed out. He had hitched up his gun belt and taken one step toward Hank when the man at the wood chipper let out a cry. Like a bird in mortal danger, he kept calling even as he dropped the tree limb and took off into the woods. His flock followed. Every man ran—in whatever direction he could. All of them yelling and stumbling and wide-eyed with fear as they took flight.
Sam froze. Vern groaned. And Hank laughed. And laughed. And laughed.
“Adiós, mis amigos.”
CHAPTER
5
Sam, resplendent in his deputy uniform, spun around in confusion, looking in the dozen different directions the men had fled.
“What the hell?”
Hank ignored him and turned to Vern.
“Well, Mr. Miles, did you find yourself some cheap labor?”
Vern groaned again. Then he stuttered some, and dug the toe of his boot in the dirt, and scratched his jaw. Hank was looking forward to hearing the story he came up with.
Sam walked over and turned off the wood chipper. Silence dropped down on the little clearing instantly. Hank waited patiently. He knew the verbose Vern would feel obligated to fill it if it lasted long enough.
Finally, Vern stopped toeing the dirt and took a deep breath. He opened his mouth, and a terrified shriek split the quiet.
All three men whipped around toward the sound, which came from the direction of the creek. It ended as suddenly as it began. Hank and Sam took several steps toward it. Vern took several in the other direction.
Then it started again, less surprised but more urgent. This time, it was recognizable as a man screaming for help in Spanish. Hank and Sam took off at a dead run. They splashed through the creek and scrambled up the short but steep bank on the other side. The shrieks grew louder as they made their way deeper into the woods. Then Sam, whose youthful agility and speed had him about ten yards ahead of Hank, suddenly sank into the earth.
His huge feet disappeared and the rest of him started to follow. He threw himself back toward solid ground, but his forward momentum continued to carry him down and away. Hank dove.
As if he were sliding into home plate, Hank skidded forward on his belly with his arms stretched out in front of him. He grabbed Sam’s wrist and stopped his deputy’s fall. He held on tightly as he crawled backward, dragging the thankfully skinny deputy with him.
They collapsed against each other as they reached solid ground. All Hank could hear was the sound of their raspy breathing. Wait—the screamer.
“¿Oye? ¿Dónde estás?”Hank called out.
“Sirs? Sirs, I am here. Please…” The voice broke off in a sob. It came from just beyond and well below where Sam had started to sink into the ground.
The two men looked at each other. Sam had regained his normal breathing. Hank was still fighting for his. Between gasps, he told Sam they would circle around together, testing where the sink began to see how close they could get to the poor bastard in the ground.
“We’ll be together, so that way, if you go in again, I can pull you out,” he said.
Sam took a look at his boss’s more substantial frame and sighed. They both knew he’d be the easier one to pull back from the edge. As they began to move to the right of the sink, Hank could hear his thoughts clear as day. Maybe if you laid off the Pecan Delights, asshole, you’d be able to do more than stand back in the safe zone.
They slowly made their way around, Hank calling reassuringly in Spanish to the man, who had fallen silent except for the occasional sob. The hole, now that they weren’t running full tilt, was clearly visible as a tear in the ground, about five feet wide and fifteen feet long. The laborer had clearly gone in on the long left side. Freshly mangled earth slid down the hole from that direction. They had approached from the southern tip of the gap, and torn it even longer with Sam’s rescue.
Sam grabbed a fallen tree branch and poked at the ground before risking each step. They kept three or four yards from the hole. Anything closer and the branch sank quickly into the earth. They weren’t close enough to see down into the narrow opening.
They had made it about forty-five degrees around what they figured was the circumference of the hole when Sam’s stick hit rock. He walked rapidly another quarter of the way around the gap before the branch began sinking into the earth again.
“Okay,” Sam said. “This part is solid. I think it goes all the way to the edge, kinda like a cliff.”
He returned to where Hank was standing. They both crept forward, Sam’s stick rapping a safe passage against the Ozark limestone. When they got within a few feet, they both knelt and crawled the rest of the way. The ground was solid under them until their fingers curled around the lip of the cliff. Relatively sure their perch was secure, they looked over the edge.
The stench sent them back again. Sam reeled backward and vomited. Hank sank back on his knees and bowed his head, like he was praying. Which he was. Please, God, let it be an animal …
But he knew it wasn’t. The smell of decay and rot had that overlay of putrid fruitiness that meant only one thing. He took a deep breath of the clean air at the top and leaned over again.
The inmigrante stood at the narrow bottom of a twenty-foot-deep fissure, in the middle of a decomposing human chest cavity. He was covered with gore and flies. He must have landed directly on the corpse, breaking through the weakened skin and releasing built-up gases and bodily fluids. Hank rolled away from the edge and gasped for air.
“What is … oh, God. Is that what I think it is?” Sam’s voice was thin and rough. He was still balanced on his haunches.
“Yeah.” Hank’s voice sounded almost as bad.
“Por favor…”
“Oh, man, we gotta get that guy out of there.” Sam rose unsteadily to his feet.
It was a potential crime scene. They needed to get the techs out here and some kind of hoist so they could get the guy up without damaging any more evidence. Hank hesitated. Sam glared at him.
“Dude, everything’s already screwed up,” he said loudly, pointing to the opposite side of the gap, where the inmigrante’s fall had sent a large cascade of dirt into the fissure. “Nothing’s going to be able to be preserved anyway.”
Hank raised an eyebrow. His deputy rarely yelled, and he’d never before called his boss “dude.” But he was, as usual, right on the money.
“Okay,” Hank said. “You’re right.” He looked around. “Where’s your branch?”
Sam grabbed it and they quickly decided it was not long enough to reach down to the inmigrante. They fanned out through the woods, looking for a better one while carefully placing each step they took. Neither one wanted the forest floor to open up beneath them. Finally, Hank found a sturdy tree limb and dragged it back to the hole. He yelled directions in Spanish, and the inmigrante got as close to the rock-wall side of the fissure as possible.
They lowered the tree limb and the man stretched as high as he could, which was still twelve inches too short. Hank sighed and waved Sam away. He stretched out on his stomach and leaned out over the edge, extending the branch’s reach. The man swayed and grabbed. And missed. Hank’s shoulders were starting to ache. He stretched farther and the man tried again.
Hank felt more than saw him succeed, as the man’s weight made his own body slide even farther over the edge. He started to inch back, grunting and swearing. As soon as he’d gotten far enough back, Sam grabbed on to the limb as well, and together they pulled the man out of hell.
* * *
With him came globs of putrid gore and a cloud of flies. He crawled away from the hole on hands and knees until he got to a large hickory tree, where he collapsed with dry heaves. Hank hauled himself away from the gap as well, and tried to force his shoulders back into their normal position. Sam walked a short distance away and battled his own stomach again. For a while, the only sounds were the feasting flies and the wretched breathing of the small huddled form under the tree. They approached the inmigrante, who was mumbling what sounded like the Lord’s Prayer.
Hank pulled his windbreaker up so it covered his nose and knelt down next to the man, who was small and wiry and probably in his late teens. He spoke calmly, and the rapid praying began to slow. Eventually, the kid raised his head and looked at them. He nodded at Hank.
“What’d you say?” asked Sam, who did not speak Spanish.
“I told him that we’re going to take him to town, but we’re not going to arrest him. And I said that right now, you’re going to walk him down to the creek so he can wash off as much of that … grossness … as he can.”
Sam nodded. The teen looked at him apprehensively and tensed as he stood. Hank shot a look at Sam.
“Oh, um, yeah. Hello. Um. Hola.” He pasted a smile on his face and gestured encouragingly in the direction of the creek. The kid didn’t move. Sam pointed again and got the same result. Then he put his hand on his holstered gun. That did it. The kid jumped slightly and then darted off, followed by his swarm of flies and one annoyed, queasy deputy.
Hank moved just as quickly in the opposite direction, heading deeper into the woods and away from the hole. Once he was beyond the reach of the flies and the smell, which had by now traveled up and out of the fissure into the surrounding air, he called in the incident. Human remains—unknown cause of death, unknown place of death, unknown gender.
“Well, what do you know?” asked Sheila.
“I know I’m going to need both Alice and Kurt. They’ve got respirators with their evidence-collection gear, right? And also some winches and pulleys to get down in the hole. Oh, and Sheila—I also know I’m going to need a search warrant. Name of Kinney. We’ve crossed the creek.”
Sheila burst out laughing. “Well, there’s no question about it now. Even if they didn’t have anything to do with it, we got to have access to the property.” She paused for breath. “Leave it to you to get your way anyhow. You are something.”
Hank smiled, but he couldn’t maintain it for long. He hung up and looked back toward the corpse hole. Then he turned in the opposite direction. It would be a bit before all those emergency personnel got this far out in the county. He might as well take advantage of the downtime. He headed deeper into the woods.
CHAPTER
6
He’d stopped at seventy-five. There were even more stripped slippery elms than that. Certainly enough to have caught the attention of their owner, even if he never ventured too far out onto his acreage.
So why did Jasper Kinney not care? He seemed like the type of man who wouldn’t take kindly to trespassing, let alone thievery. Which meant that either he was stripping the trees himself and there was no crime, or he needed to hide something on his land more than he needed to report a theft. Hank knew which possibility he’d bet on.
Kinney could easily have been hiding that rotting corpse. And even with it dumped in such a well-concealed spot, it still would have been risky to allow the law on his property to look at some stupid trees.
But now … Hank smiled. A wonderful, fortuitous accident would open up a section of the forbidden Kinney real estate to him. He couldn’t wait to see the look on the old man’s face. It wouldn’t be long. Sheila had picked him up in a marked patrol car and slapped a signed search warrant in his hand. They took the winding roads from the Miles property to the Kinney driveway looking like a parade. Hank was done with polite. He had three cruisers following Sheila’s car, each holding two deputies. Let that old pillar of creosote think about pulling a shotgun on him now.
The cars drove up to the gate. Hank left two deputies with the vehicles, and the rest of them scaled the barrier and trudged up the lane. They fanned out behind Hank and stood at ease as he walked to the door with Sheila right behind him. They’d just reached the porch steps when Deputy Pimental gave a short whistle. They turned to see Kinney coming around the side of the house. He dropped the tip of the shovel he was carrying into the ground and casually leaned on the handle.
“You got a lot of people with you this time,” he said.
Hank changed direction and walked toward the old man. “Yes, I do. I also have a search warrant. We need to search your property.”
Creosote reached into his shirt pocket for a pack of Marlboros, smacked the package, and pulled one out. He slowly extracted a lighter from the pocket of his jeans and lit the cigarette, never taking his eyes from Hank’s face.
Hank forced himself to look as relaxed as Kinney did. He hooked his thumbs on his belt and calmly waited. Kinney blew streams of smoke out his nostrils, and said, “A judge in this county granted you a warrant to look at my trees? Well, well.”
Hank shook his head. “No. That is not why we’re here. Deputy Turley—”
He moved to the side, and Sheila stepped forward with the paperwork. She held it out. Kinney stared at her and then turned back to Hank.
“So if it isn’t my trees, what does bring you and your boys here?”
“A body has been discovered on your land. We need access to investigate.”
Creosote’s scarred eyebrow lifted. He blew more smoke and said nothing. Hank had to admit he was impressed.
“Do you know anything about it?”
“No.”
He could feel Sheila tensing next to him, but she kept perfectly still, the hand holding the warrant now down by her side.
“When was the last time you were out along the creek that borders the Miles property?” he asked.
Kinney shrugged. The average person would have asked if that was where the body was found, or if it had been identified. Kinney was clearly not an average person.
“We need to know the easiest way out to that section of your land. You’ll need to take us.”
Kinney took another drag. “No.”
“Excuse me?”
“You must know where it is, since you say you got a warrant and all. Get out there yourself.”
Interesting. That was certainly one way to play this, but definitely not what Hank had expected.
Hank turned to Sheila. “Deputy Turley, please serve the warrant.”
Sheila stepped toward Kinney, who did not acknowledge her. She got as close as she could without touching him, rolled up the warrant, and stuck it in the shirt pocket that didn’t hold the cigarettes. As she backed away, Hank wondered how they would find their way to the scene from this direction without making fools of themselves. His eyes fell on Bill Ramsdell, an earnest middle-aged deputy who had three sons and had just asked for time off to attend the Boy Scout Jamboree.
