A Living Grave (2 page)

How many paths were there that lead to murdered little girls?

I sucked it up. There had been more than a few dead bodies in my life. Some even children. I had been on the investigative team in Iraq when those soldiers—Americans—had killed a family, then raped, killed, and burned the body of a fourteen-year-old girl. People talk about the stress of war driving good soldiers to do bad things. It's crap. It drives bad soldiers to do terrible things. That's what happened to this girl, Angela Briscoe. Someone bad did something horrible to her. I could make it stop.

A few minutes later I was standing over her body again. This time I looked at her, really looked. I had no camera with me so I pulled out my pad and pen and started writing and making a diagram. Photos fix things in the mind; the notes and drawings I make for myself keep things more fluid. They let me recall what I felt at the time, the truth of the moment more than the truth of the scene.

I had noted before that her legs were together, but this time I took note there were no clothes separate from the body. Specifically underclothes.

“Look away,” I told Clare. He did, and I noticed he turned completely away without making any attempt to see what I was doing.

What I did was to grab a fallen branch and break off the smaller twigs and leaves until I had a long, crooked stick. I used the stick so I could stay back from the body and lift the girl's skirt. Her panties were where they should be. She probably hadn't been raped. She was wearing a white T-shirt printed with the phrase
All Girl All Awesome
. The blood covering the top half of the shirt showed clearly the outline of a bra that was in place.

I wrote in my book some more, telling myself all the whys about my belief that there was no sexual assault. Scribbling quickly, I drew out her hand and noted where something had been chewing at her fingers. There were tracks of bird's feet on the arm too. Probably a crow had walked through her blood and then perched on the arm to peck at the fingers.

“You can turn around if you want,” I told Clare.

“I'd just as soon not,” he answered. When he spoke you could hear a thickness to his voice that had not been there before. My estimation of him went up a few points.

“I have a granddaughter about her age,” he added.

I wrote it down that he said
her
and not
that
. Then I noted he had no visible blood and he had called it in and waited maybe an hour for someone to show up. At the bottom of that little column I wrote,
Clarence Bolin, not very likely
.

“When I get home, I'm gonna call her. I get annoyed sometimes, thinkin' that she oughta call me. I'm her grandpa, after all. I don't think I'll worry much about that anymore.”

He still had his back to me and I heard him blow his nose. I'm pretty sure he didn't have a handkerchief. In my little notebook I circled the word
not
in the last sentence I had written.

“I know your Uncle Orson,” he said. “Been fishing with him more times than I can remember.”

I crouched to be close to the ground and kept poking around the body with my stick, then sketching things in the pad. Clare's talk was actually soothing to hear. Normal, even though he was doing it to keep his mind off of something not normal in his life at all.

“Your daddy too. Way back when.”

I think I nodded, reacting more to the sound than his words. Tossing my stick aside, I stood, then circled the body. Each time I stopped I added to my sketches. I had to force myself to look into the face. Into where the face had been. I sketched. Then I looked away. I sketched her hair. Then I looked away.

“There are monsters in the woods,” Clare said, his back still to me. I was listening then. “It used to be a joke. When I was a kid, people talked about Momo, the Missouri monster. It was like a local Bigfoot. But the real monsters are people, aren't they?”

I didn't answer him.

“Perverts.” He spit the word out. “Monsters that do that to children. There isn't hate big enough for them nor a hell deep enough. This will rile some people up. He lives in one of those piece-of-crap mobile homes in that big development off of F Highway. You know, over by the McKenna farm.”

“Who does?” I had stopped writing and was paying very close attention to Mr. Bolin at that point.

“The guy. The rapist.”

“Turn around and look at me, Clare.” He did. “Tell me what, and who, you are talking about.”

“He's on the sex-offender site.”

I let my breath out slowly.

Clare went on talking. “One of those Web sites with the names and addresses of all the kiddie guys. He's listed on it. Lives just a few miles from here.”

I hated those listings. Someone thought it would be a good idea to let everyone know where the sex offenders lived. Problem was in some places you were prosecuted as a sex offender if you stepped into the woods to urinate because toilets in the park were broken. Most of the bad ones, the ones you really had to worry about, didn't hang around with a big neon sign pointing at them. I'd check the guy out but it already felt like a waste of time.

“Clare,” I said, “I don't think this girl has been sexually assaulted.”

“No?” he asked. I could see the certainty drain out of his face. It wasn't pretty. That's the thing about certainty: It makes everything easier. When it goes, you're left with a wide-open landscape of horrible possibilities and it's hard to find any comfort in doubt. It seemed to hit Clare pretty hard. “Who . . .” he started, then faded out. Then he drew up his breath again. “Who would do something like this unless it was for . . . ?”

“I don't know,” I told him. “I'm going to find out.” I tried to sound certain.

“I hope so,” he said. “But I don't see how.”

“There's always something. Evidence or witnesses. Usually criminals do something stupid or they'll be like your sex offender. Part of the system. I'll check him out and anyone else in the area who stands apart from the crowd. Anyone new who might have been hanging around the girl or even around here.”

Clare was starting to look a little deflated and sick. He swallowed hard and looked back off into the green again. The grip on his fishing pole had turned to a hard white. As much as I wanted to ask him what was wrong, I didn't. He wanted to say something; that was clear. I wasn't going to push.

I looked away to give him some thinking room. When I did, I noticed something that had escaped me before.

The word was freshly carved in ragged letters on the trunk of a white oak.

“This mean anything to you?” I asked.

Clare came closer but kept a wary distance. He had changed in the last few moments. Change was something good in witnesses; it means a connection; it means they know something or they think they know something. Whatever it was that Clare knew bothered him. I didn't have any doubt it bothered him enough to spill it. The question was how much line he would take before letting himself be reeled in.

He was looking hard at the carving. Harder than it probably deserved. I almost asked him if it was my badge or my big ass that was making him uneasy. He wasn't ready to have the mood lightened up.

“No. Kids carve all kinds of shit on the trees around here,” he said.

“Sure,” I agreed and I ran my fingers over the lettering. “But why
Leech
?”

“Who knows?”

“It's an odd word. Capitalized like a name.”

“What about bikers?” he asked.

“What about them?” I kept my gaze and my fingers on the carved letters.

“You think bikers could do something like this? If there were any around?”

“Oh, there're always some around. Some good ones and some bad ones—mostly they all try to look bad. Makes them hard to weed out, but if I have a reason, I'll sure look into anyone who needs looking into.”

Clare looked away, casting his gaze to the creek bank and up the little trail that ran alongside it. Then he looked at me and quickly looked back to his feet. “Okay if I get on out of here?”

“Thought you were going fishing.” I nodded to the rod he still carried in his hand.

“Not with all the cops that'll be around here. Who needs that?”

I almost said “the little girl there,” but stopped myself. It would have been needlessly cruel in more than one way. Shaking my head, I went back to stand close to the body, maybe a little possessively. “No. I'll need you to stick around for a while.”

The girl was close enough to me now that I could feel her presence without looking. Death has a gravity and Angela Briscoe was pulling at me. Even so, I didn't move any closer. I didn't want to cause any contamination to the scene. Each step I took in proximity to the girl was where I had carefully stepped before.

I looked at Clare and caught him looking at the girl. He was trying to see a face where there was just red and splinters of white. Even her corn-silk hair was fanned out away from the face as though in surprise at the violence that had erased it.

Clare walked toward the creek bank and the sound of running water.

I had to pull myself away from the girl too, or orbit her tragedy forever.

It was full summer and everything along the riverbank was green and dappled yellow with sunlight. Within the banks were flat stones and smooth-tumbled gravel from black to white with colorful scatterings of pink and molted greens. The water that ran over it was so clear, if it were not for the ripples, it would be invisible. There was an empty space in the mud where a stone had lain, half in and half out of the water. At the edge of the space were the marks of fingers where the stone had been lifted. Small fingers.

Water tinkled where the shallow flow ran over stones.

“Why were you up here?” I asked Clare.

“Like I said,” he raised up his pole to reinforce his point. “I was sucker grabbin' .”

I nodded and then reached up to push aside a strand of hair that had fallen with the movement. For the sake of my pale skin, I usually keep my hair under a hat when outdoors. No matter how hard I try though, every summer my nose burns and my hair goes from a deep reddish brown to summer red. Unconsciously, my finger found the scar that started in my left eyebrow and followed the crescent of the orbital bone. It was a small scar. Small wasn't the same as meaningless. As soon as I realized, I pulled my hand away. It was a bad habit. The slight discoloration barely showed to anyone but me. When I touched it, though, when I was aware of touching it, the ridge of skin seemed like a jagged, red wall I had yet to climb over. No one else has climbed over it, either. A couple have tried. Only a couple. Both had made the mistake of saying it gave me “character.” It was as much of my character as they ever got to see.

When I lost myself in thought, or when there was a puzzle, I had the habit of touching the scar like a little talisman. Just then I was puzzling about sucker grabbing. Sucker were big, carp-like fish. Bottom feeders, they were hard to catch on a bait hook. They're mostly caught by weighting a line with a big treble hook and dropping it into a congregation of fish. Then you jerk the line and grab them with the naked hook.

I carefully stepped back from the water, checking the ground for any other evidence of the girl's last moments, and then started hiking downstream.

“Follow me,” I told the old man. He did, but he set his own path and pace. Slow.

The woods were thick with wild grapevine and poison ivy running under the mantle of oak, walnut, and hawthorn. The ground was lumpy with softball-sized hedge apples. Along the bank, just skirting its edge, was a path. Bare dirt littered with cigarette butts, beer, and soda cans.

Down in the streambed, the water deepened. Here it had eroded more than gravel. Large, flat slabs of sandstone were all along and under the water. They were the remains of an ancient shallow sea that now defined the shape of a spring-fed stream. Here the water was silent. Another two hundred yards down, the cold flow dumped into the deeper, swifter water of Bear Creek.

“I mean, why were you up there?” I almost had to shout to be heard, Clare had fallen so far behind.

“What?” he hollered back.

As I stood waiting on the old guy, I caught myself fingering the scar again. There's another reason it's a bad habit. Every time I touch it, even when I don't realize it at the time—
especially
if I don't realize it—I get pissed off. That little scar is kind of a trigger. When things don't add up or they start to churn in my head just a little too much, I reach up and pull it.

“Get your old ass down here, Clare.” This time I did shout. I was getting tired of the waiting game with him. And I'm usually such a patient person.

As he picked his way through the path, I was rubbing the rubbery pucker of skin around my eye and thinking, not for the first time, how everyone seemed to have lies that had to be worked out of them. Watching Clare work his way forward, like if he moved slowly enough I would forget about him, made my dark mood churn.

“Now, I want to know why you were up there,” I said emphatically, “where the water's way too shallow for sucker grabbing. And not down here at this pool, where I can see at least thirty fish just waiting on you to pull them out.”

Clare opened his mouth to speak, then seemed to think better of it. There was something there. It was impossible to miss. I decided he just needed a little more pressure at his back.