Barking at the Moon Page 2

  She resisted the impulse to slap the boy upside that thick-as-a-brick head and raise a knot a calf could suck on. He was seventeen years old and thought he was immortal. Cause and effect were foreign concepts to a hormone-addled mind. She shuddered to think what could have happened. The velocity of detonation is greater than a thousand yards per second, and he’d have been right on top of the explosion, directly at Ground Zero. Christ! We’d have been taking two dead bodies out of that pond, one in pieces you could fit in a matchbox. Closed casket funeral for sure, damn it.

  “Dynamiting fish is illegal, Buddy,” she said, summoning her most authoritative tone. “Possessing dynamite without a license is very illegal. I could call the feds and they’d throw your sorry ass in prison. Do you want your poor mama to have to visit you in Edgewater Correctional? Maybe them federal boys or Homeland Security decide you’re a terrorist and you get sent to Guantanamo Bay, which ain’t no vacation spot, believe me. You won’t be fishing out there in Cuba, son. That there’s stone-cold hard time. You want to squat in a cell with terrorists for five years or better, no contact with family? No? Then tell me, where’d the explosives come from? Who’d you buy the dynamite from?”

  He still looked sullen. Annalee prodded him with a finger. “Go on, son. Tell the truth and shame the devil. That’s the only thing you can do. The water in Shit Creek’s rising and you’re about over your head.”

  Buddy crossed his arms over his chest and shuffled his feet again.

  She tried to reach him. “Did somebody sell the stuff to you? One of them illegal fireworks vendors, maybe? Give me a name, a location. I give you my word the DA will grant you immunity from prosecution in exchange for your testimony.”

  She waited for an answer. It was after July Fourth, but fireworks sellers slipped over the state line almost every weekend in summer to hawk cheap, volatile, overseas-manufactured merchandise at flea markets and gun shows. Sometimes they had dynamite too, obtainable if one knew the right questions to ask and had the money to pay for it.

  “Not from a fireworks guy. Got the stuff from Papaw,” Buddy finally mumbled.

  Annalee hid her surprise. Obadiah Nowland was a stubborn old coot and a hell of a character, a dirt-farming survivalist who probably had enough weapons cached in his private concrete bunker to subdue a small Latin-American dictatorship. However, he was also a diehard advocate of gun responsibility. Obadiah would have never given dynamite to an inexperienced youngster, especially his only grandson, on whom he doted.

  “You mean you took it without your Grandpa Nowland’s permission,” Annalee stated flatly, the only explanation that made sense.

  Buddy’s flush deepened. “Don’t tell on me,” he whined. “Daddy’ll have a cow.”

  “And Grandpa Nowland will probably have triplets, one after the other.” Annalee held up a finger to Buddy and turned when she heard a sloshing sound. Noah was wading back to shore without the body in tow. His expression was grim. She called out to him, “Hey, what’s the news, deputy? Got an ID on the DB?”

  Noah didn’t answer at once. He had taken off his duty belt, shoes and socks prior to wading into the pond. His tan uniform trousers were wet to mid-thigh and stuck to his legs. He brushed past a clump of sweet flags growing in a fringe near the pond’s edge, his bare feet squelching through the wet clay mud. The sun picked out faint reddish highlights in his blond hair but also cast his eyes into shadow. An oddity of the light hollowed his cheeks in deepest shade as well, lending his face a disquieting skull-like aspect.

  Premonition prickled the skin on the back of her neck. Something wicked this way comes. She listened to her instincts. She said to Buddy, “Go sit in the patrol car, son.” The boy opened his mouth. She added quickly, “Don’t make me tell you twice.”

  Once Buddy was safely in the backseat of the patrol car, out of possible harm’s way, Annalee shut the door and switched her attention to Noah. “Well? Who is it?” Her gut clenched in anticipation of bad news.

  “It’s Reverend Lassiter.”

  “Oh, God save us.” Annalee pushed her bangs off her sweaty forehead and wished she hadn’t gotten out of bed that morning. The fallout was going to be nasty. She could feel it in her bones. “That’s all we need. You know, I really hoped he’d run off to Tijuana with the offering money and the church secretary. Please tell me he got drunk, accidentally fell in the pond and drowned.”

  “No such luck.” Noah’s frown deepened. “He was shot in the throat.”

  Annalee leaned a hip against the side of the car, ignoring Buddy’s tentative rap on the window while she considered the murdered man, Reverend John Delano Lassiter.

  He was an evangelical preacher, leader of the Church of the Honey in the Rock with a congregation of about two dozen of the wealthiest citizens in Daredevil County. Lassiter had disappeared about a week earlier. It seemed their missing person’s case had become a homicide. She went through the current investigation in her mind, gathering details and making mental notes. She had put together a list of possible suspects by the time a dusty white van bumped off the blacktop and rolled to a halt on a patch of reasonably dry ground.

  Annalee smiled when a silver-haired, dark-skinned woman hopped out of the van. “Hey, Doc,” she said, waving a greeting. “Looks like murder.”

  Dr. Betty Vernon shaded her eyes with a hand, peering at the pond and the floating corpse tangled in water weeds. “I thought that was my call to make, Sheriff.”

  Annalee thought Doc Vernon was good people, even if the woman was a transplant from Up North. “Be my guest. The scene’s kind of wet, though.”

  “I’m not made out of sugar, Sheriff” was Betty’s tart reply. “I won’t melt.” Despite her words, the medical examiner took a pair of dark-green neoprene, boot-foot chest waders out of the van, stepping into them before entering the pond.

  Retrieving the body from the water was tricky, but Betty managed it with her assistant’s help. In the meantime, Annalee contacted Minnie Hawkins at the sheriff’s office and told her to get Obadiah Nowland or Obadiah Junior down to Yellow Jacket Pond and to also request the Georgia State Police to dispatch a diver to search the pond for evidence. She avoided stating the victim’s name, well aware of some people in the area with scanners who had nothing better to do all day than monitor radio traffic. The category included journalists. She wanted to keep the press out of the investigation as much as possible, especially in the early days when they could ill afford media interference.

  Lassiter’s disappearance had already become a statewide news item, thanks to a public campaign engineered by the reverend’s devoted follower, Abner Cutshall, who owned the Daredevil Trumpet and the Huntswell Star. In addition, Cutshall was a big noise in the county seat, a very wealthy man not opposed to passing out greenback handshakes to political and religious causes that jibed with his personal philosophy. The man had serious connections and plenty of juice at the highest levels of local government.

  She knew the minute Cutshall found out about Lassiter’s death he would start pestering the governor, the mayor of Huntswell, the county commissioner, the chief of public safety and anybody else he could influence to put pressure on the investigation.

  It ain’t what you know, it’s who you know, Annalee thought, hating politics-as-usual. It seemed that half her time was wasted on placating and reassuring politicians who appeared determined to drive her around the bend. Some days, she forgot why she had wanted to be elected sheriff, then she remembered her father.

  By the time Jefferson’s body was found in the forest, insects had eaten his eyes. She would never forget the shock of the discovery, a slam to the gut that still reverberated six months later. Her father’s eyeless face was an image that returned to her dreams with haunting regularity.

  Betty came over, snapping off her disturbingly purple nitrile gloves. The sharp sound brought Annalee out of her musing. “GSW to the throat,” Betty reported. “The extent of the damage is consistent with a close contact shotgun shooting. I’ll ne
ed to open him for the official COD, but let’s say initially that death was caused by hemorrhagic shock due to injury of the external carotid artery. He bled out. Whether he was still alive when he went into the water, I can’t say yet. Wait for the autopsy, which I’ll schedule for tomorrow.”

  “I’d like to take a peek at the victim,” Annalee said.

  “Be my guest.” Betty waved a hand at the medical examiner’s van. “By the way, if you find a suspect shotgun, I can test for tissue and blood in the barrel.”

  “You think there might be blowback?”

  “Absolutely. I’d say from the dermal inclusion of gunpowder around the wound margin that the killer held the shotgun less than a foot away from the victim.”

  “Thanks, Doc.”

  Stooped over inside the van, Annalee zipped open the body bag and took her time examining the victim. In life, she recalled, John Lassiter had been a fleshy fellow, tall and paunchy, with big callused hands and big square teeth that reminded her of tombstones crowded together in his jaw. Stripped of his clothing as well as his dignity, his naked flesh bloated with putrefaction, he didn’t resemble the dynamic, charismatic, loud-spoken preacher who had entranced some folks and antagonized others.

  Like the Skinners, she thought. Lassiter had a definite grudge against the Skinners. For some unknown reason, the man had regularly denounced the family from his pulpit, calling them irredeemable sinners and worse, or so she had heard from a private source. The church’s membership was highly exclusive. No one who owned a net worth under seven figures need apply. She’d never attended a meeting herself, but rumors and hearsay were rife.

  Had the Skinners decided to wipe out Lassiter’s intolerance with blood? At this point, she couldn’t say for certain. It was a possibility. In the hills, men might shrug off an insult—but the grudge would never be forgotten—or they might lash out in violence leading to more violence. Unto the seventh generation, as the Good Book says.

  She checked the throat wound that looked like a second mouth, the ragged lips bleached pale by prolonged immersion in the water. The gunpowder tattoo stood out. The wound wasn’t centered, but off to one side and at an angle, piercing the carotid artery as Betty had said. Pond dirt peppered the skin, which had a greasy sheen. A gleam of jellied white shone from beneath the victim’s lowered eyelids. She had the uncomfortable sensation that the dead man was watching her and she was being judged and found wanting.

  Annalee turned to the medical examiner, who stood just outside the van, and asked a silent question with a raised brow: through and through? When Betty nodded, she donned gloves and carefully raised the victim’s head to look at the massive exit wound that left the top of the spine exposed, the vertebrae alabaster against the darker muscle area.

  “Are you sure this is the crime scene and not a body dump?” Betty asked.

  “No idea yet. CSU’s on the way.” Annalee didn’t see any other injuries on Lassiter’s body except a few bloodless nicks on his shins and calves. She indicated the wounds. “Any idea what caused these?”

  “Snapping turtle?” Betty suggested, shrugging. “Fish? Outboard motor? It’ll be in the autopsy report. You about done?”

  “Time of death?”

  “The skin of the hands and the fingernails has only started to separate, so I’d estimate time of death at about a week, but I won’t know for sure—”

  “Until the autopsy. Yep, you’re coming in loud and clear.” Annalee removed the gloves and clambered out of the van, allowing the assistant—she could never remember the young man’s name, so she called him “Igor” in the privacy of her mind—to enter in her wake and shut the rear doors.

  Betty walked down to the pond’s edge to take water temperature readings, balancing carefully in the slick mud.

  Noah beckoned to Annalee. He stood beside a couple of young ash trees, frowning down at the grass. She joined him, following his line of sight to the ground. The grass was scuffed and in one spot had been torn apart to reveal bare earth the color of rusty iron. Someone had excavated a hole approximately twelve inches in diameter and about six inches deep. She believed there might be dried blood mixed with the lumps of clay.

  “Okay, this looks like the principal crime scene,” she said. “Let’s cordon it off and wait for CSU to get here.”

  Registering movement in the corner of her eye, she turned and caught a ghostly shape lurking about a hundred yards away beneath a stand of pines. To her surprise, the image resolved into a wolf, one of the rare blond-furred breed only to be found in Malingering Deep. She had no idea what the animal was doing so far from its usual habitat.

  The wolf’s pale fur stood out in sharp contrast to the pine trees’ rough, red-brown bark. The wolf wasn’t trying to hide but seemed to be deliberately putting itself in view. It pointed a sharp muzzle in her direction. She knew she was being watched and shivered as the hair on the back of her neck tried to bristle. Before she could call Noah’s attention to the oddity, the wolf turned tail and vanished, leaving her with a strangely bereft feeling.

  Another vehicle arrived at the scene, parking near the medical examiner’s van. Annalee dismissed the wolf as unimportant and squinted in the vehicle’s direction, determining it was not the Crime Scene Unit or the state police diver, but Obadiah Nowland, Jr., Buddy’s father. He was a big man, bull-necked and broad-shouldered from twenty years of working at the slaughterhouse in Ogee, jointing carcasses and hauling sides of beef.

  Nowland caught sight of Buddy sitting in the back of the patrol car. His face screwed into a scowl made even more hideous by the vascular birthmark staining his right temple and eyelid like a splash of spilled wine.

  Annalee nodded at Noah, trusting him to set up the perimeter while she hastened to speak to Nowland before he lost his temper and started shouting. She had neither the time nor the inclination to put up with a grown man’s hissy fit. “Your son was dynamiting fish,” she said, preempting whatever accusation or demand he had been about to make.

  Nowland’s mouth snapped closed. He glared at her. The man had been loud in his objections to a female sheriff. Fortunately for her election campaign, he hadn’t possessed much influence beyond a few like-minded friends.

  Relishing the opportunity to lecture a vocal opponent and all around asshole, Annalee went on, “We both know possession of dynamite without a proper license could get you, your father, and Buddy into serious trouble with the FBI and Homeland Security.”

  “Now, Sheriff, Buddy’s just a boy, he don’t know no better,” Nowland said. He sounded confident for a change. Beads of perspiration glittered at his thinning hairline.

  “That may be, but the law’s the law.” Annalee had him firmly by the short hairs and they each knew it. She let him sweat a long moment before she tilted her head and gave him a small, tight smile. “Look, Junior, I don’t want to have to arrest you or Buddy or Grandpa Nowland. That’s too much paperwork. I surely don’t want to involve the feds, who don’t do a damned bit of good for man or beast. So here’s what we’re going to do—I am going to let y’all off with a strong warning. I am going to put you down for a five hundred dollar contribution to the Police Benevolent Society. I am going to assume that Grandpa Nowland moves his stash of dynamite where Buddy can’t get at it, because if I catch the boy again, he is going to jail. And since you don’t want me to execute a search warrant on your property, don’t let me hear tell of any more dynamite explosions anywhere in Daredevil County.”

  He swallowed hard, gave her a fish-eyed look like he couldn’t believe she was showing him mercy and finally put on an aw-shucks grin that didn’t fool her one minute. Underneath, she knew he was seething. “Why, thank you,” he said. “That’s mighty good of you, Sheriff. I do appreciate your kindness to my family. I’m much obliged.”

  “Don’t forget that donation,” she said dryly. “I’ll send you a reminder in the mail. You can take your boy home now, and if I was you, I’d give him a good dose of what-for.”

  Nowland cut a glan
ce toward his son, whose dismayed face was pressed against the window of the patrol car. His expression turned to stone. “Boy’s so dumb, if brains was gas, he wouldn’t have enough to drive a piss-ant’s go-cart around a Cheerio. Believe me, when I’m done with the boy, he’s gonna be mighty damned sorry. I guarantee he won’t forget the difference between dynamite and a fishing pole any time soon, Sheriff.”

  Annalee stood aside and allowed the man to fetch his son.

  The CSU van finally made an appearance. The team began processing the crime scene in earnest. At the area of disturbed earth, an investigator took samples from the hole, spading through the iron-oxide clay with as much delicate care as an archaeologist at a dig site.

  Annalee happened to be present when the investigator discovered what he believed might be human tissue—specifically, brain matter and fragments of bone.

  The picture of the crime was becoming clearer in her mind. She decided that unless further evidence proved her wrong, her working hypothesis would be that Lassiter had been lying on the ground, the killer standing over him, pressing the shotgun to his throat. Afterward, the killer had dragged Lassiter’s body to the pond and returned to remove shotgun pellets that had penetrated the earth.

  Collaring another investigator, she directed the woman to search a stand of nearby trees at ground level, checking for high-velocity blood splatter, stray pellets and gunpowder residue. The entire scene within a thousand-yard radius would need to be searched for discarded cartridges or stray wadding, not to mention footprints and other evidence.

  It wasn’t until after noon that the state-police diver arrived. By then, Annalee’s stomach was gurgling loudly in protest at having missed breakfast. Fortunately, the diver came bearing a bag of jelly donuts, which he shared with fairly good grace.

  Noah directed the search of the pond from the rowboat while Annalee assisted the crime scene investigators in taking the scores of pictures and measurements so dear to a forensic analyst’s heart. Betty and her assistant departed, taking the body to the county morgue in Huntswell. Ten minutes after the ME’s departure, a Jeep painted in black-and-white zebra stripes skidded off the road and into the grass, the wheels chewing up turf and throwing gobbets of mud against the patrol car’s door.