by A. J. Thomas
“Why?” the ranger asked.
“Until I get a coroner’s report on this, I’m going to treat the cuts on his arm as suspicious.”
“Cuts? Are there signs of a struggle or something?”
“Don’t know,” Doug admitted. He pulled the rope free from his harness, gave three sharp tugs, then let the rope drop as the men on the upper trail began to pull the rope back up. “I think they’re just a sign that someone had a birthday. Beyond that, well, I’d like to find out.”
“Huh?”
The older of the two paramedics smirked and raised both of the corpse’s arms so the letters were clear. Doug tossed his harness aside and knelt to go through the man’s pockets, hoping to find an ID.
“The left arm says HAPPY, the right says BIRTHDAY,” Doug recited with a grimace. He pulled out an empty packet of cheap cigarettes.
“That’s fucked up.” Despite the situation, the younger paramedic’s tone suggested that he was amused.
Doug pulled the strap over the man’s legs loose and rolled him over, then checked his back pockets. He found a thin wallet in one and pulled it out. Inside, he found a few one-dollar bills, a coupon for more cigarettes, and a state ID. It wasn't a license, but a state inmate ID, given to convicts leaving prison for probation or parole. “Hayes,” he said, reading the name aloud. “Peter Eugene Hayes.”
“You’re kidding.” The forest ranger leaned over his shoulder. “We wasted a whole day for some ex-con?”
Doug shrugged and slid the ID back into the wallet. When one of the paramedics held out a large ziplock bag, he dropped the wallet and the empty pack of cigarettes into it. “There was nothing else,” he said levelly. “How long would you say he’s been up there?”
“Six, maybe seven days,” said one of the paramedics. “There’s still blood pooling in his feet.”
“Couldn’t have been much longer,” the forest ranger agreed. “The trail was snow packed until mid-April.”
Doug glanced up at the mountains towering above them. The snow line, the point where the snow seldom ever melted, was only a thousand feet above them, but there were still traces of snow and ice even down here along the creek and it was nearly June.
“Fucker’s lucky he didn’t freeze to death, coming up here dressed like that,” said the ranger, somehow keeping a straight face.
Doug laughed despite himself. It was either that or pick a fight with another member of the search-and-rescue team, and he wasn't likely to maintain his ample supply of volunteers if he did. He bent down and began undoing the straps that held the body to the stretcher. One of the paramedics had laid out a black body bag, and the two of them hoisted the body into the bag with a professional, cold efficiency. Doug refused to look away from the milky purple eyes, frozen open and sunken into the bloated flesh at the same time. He kept his eyes on the body until the black plastic was zipped over the man’s head.
“Call down to the trailhead, let her know we’re on our way,” Doug instructed.
The forest ranger flipped open his cell phone and nodded. After a moment, he touched Doug’s elbow. “Signal cut out. I’ll try again as we get closer.”
Navigating the stretcher down the thin trail was an arduous task, and it took them two hours, taking turns carrying it from the front and back, when the hike up usually took about thirty minutes. Doug had handed off the front of the stretcher and moved ahead of the others as soon as the trailhead came into view. There was a harassed-looking woman in a US Forest Service uniform, trying very hard not to talk to a man in a suit. Another man hovered near the pair, occasionally fiddling with a tangle of camera equipment that had been set out on the hood of a white Subaru. The logo of one of the local TV stations was painted on the door of the Subaru.
The five other members of the search-and-rescue team, who had been up on the trail above the canyon and lowered the stretcher and the body, had already made it down. They were standing in a close huddle around the bumper and open back doors of the ambulance. From their body language, it was obvious they were all tired and nervous.
As soon as Doug stepped off the trail, the man in the suit snapped his fingers at the cameraman and hurried over. The man looked Doug up and down and pulled out a notebook. “Any idea who the climber was, then? Was he found over the reservation line?”
Doug shut his mouth and mulled over both of those questions. He pressed his lips tight together and glared at the young intern. How the hell did orders not to say anything turn into telling a reporter they were retrieving a dead male climber? It was standard procedure not to disclose the details surrounding a local death until the victim’s family could be notified. No one deserved to find out that their loved ones were dead by reading about it in the paper. The intern dropped her gaze to the ground.
“I’m afraid we can’t release any information at this time,” Doug said automatically.
“Is this a matter that the tribal police are going to be investigating?”
“Tribal police?” Doug tried his best to look honestly perplexed. He made a show of pulling his badge off his belt, examining it carefully, and holding it out to the man. “Baker County Sheriff’s Department,” he read aloud, tracing the gold letters with his finger, as if reading to a child. “We have no jurisdiction on the Flathead reservation.”
“Oh,” the reporter said, laughing, “I just kind of figured….”
Doug stared directly into the man’s eyes without smiling. He fought every cultural rule that urged him to keep his face down, every childhood memory that told him it was rude to look someone in the eyes. He was well aware that he was the only member of the Baker County Sheriff’s Department who wasn’t white. The reservation, the home of the combined Salish and Kootenai tribes, was to the south, bordered by the city of Missoula to the south and mountain ranges on the east and west. The Missoula Police didn’t tend to employ many tribal members, either. Even Doug had to admit the man’s assumption was a safe bet.
Doug, unfortunately, had paid enough attention during his sociology classes to know it wasn’t worth getting angry over. The relationship between the tribe and the outside world was a tangled mess of racial stereotypes, a culture suspicious of education and ambition, and a cycle of learned helplessness that kept most of the men his age on the reservation stuck between seasonal construction jobs and binge drinking. This idiot reporter was stupid enough to remind him of all of it, but that didn’t make him responsible for any of it. He felt angry anyway.
The laughter wilted under Doug’s glare. “Look, I am sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
Doug folded his arms across his chest and smiled. “I’m afraid I don’t understand. Was I supposed to take your assumption that I am employed by the tribal police to be an insult? Because your apology tells me you considered it an insult, or you assumed I would.”
“Well, no, I just….” The reporter stuttered out another half apology and then shrank from Doug’s stare. “I’m not making this better, am I?” The reported offered him a good-natured smile.
“No. Feel free to follow up with the sheriff’s department this coming week. By then we’ll have had a chance to notify the victim’s next of kin.” He heard the others coming up behind him. Doug folded his arms across his chest and stood as tall as he could to try to block the reporter’s view of the stretcher.
“Right.” The reporter nodded, closed his notebook, and hurried toward the Subaru. Despite Doug’s best attempt at glaring the cameraman into submission, the man continued to film for a few seconds before following his coworker.
After the body was loaded into the ambulance, Doug watched the flashing lights until they were out of sight, and then he headed toward his truck. He pulled a cooler out of the backseat, pulled a bottle of water out for himself, and tossed the rest to the remaining members of the search-and-rescue team. When he handed a bottle to the forest ranger, he held tight to the bottle for a moment and leaned in close. “Do us all a favor?”
“Hm?”
“Do
n’t give that intern a reference for anything except a job as a tour guide.”
“Everybody makes mistakes, Doug….”
Doug took a deep breath and nodded once. “Whatever. I’m going to head back into town, see if I can get an address or emergency-contact info on this guy from his DOC record and then get to work on the report. Thanks for not dropping me!” Doug hopped into his truck, waved at the rest of the crew as he pulled away, and drove north toward the town of Elkin. He shook his head and forced the image of those dead eyes out of his head. This was not the way he’d planned to spend his weekend.
Three hours later Doug found himself wishing he could be back on the wall of the canyon, dangling in his harness and dealing with a half-rotted corpse. He changed into the spare suit he kept in the department locker room, checked in with the duty officer, and then began trying to track down any next of kin. Looking through the ex-con’s records with the Department of Corrections was unsettling. The man’s most recent booking photo was striking. Doug was stunned by how much a week of decay had bloated and warped the man’s features. He had an angular, almost feminine face and sad eyes that were so blue Doug figured they were probably colored contacts. He stared at those eyes for a long time, trying to replace the dead purple eyes of the man’s corpse with those crystal baby blues.
It didn’t work.
Peter Eugene Hayes had a history of physical and sexual violence in California dating back nearly two decades. At seventeen, the man had been charged with molesting a twelve-year-old boy. Somehow, he had avoided prison, most likely because he was a minor. At twenty-three, he was convicted of raping a ten-year-old boy. A plea bargain had gotten him ten years in prison, and he’d been released after six years. The moment he was off probation in California, he’d moved to Elkin. Doug wasn’t sure how he’d never run into the man over the last few years. A series of drug- and alcohol-related charges had landed him in and out of jail or prison at regular intervals ever since, but Doug couldn’t recall ever seeing him in the jail. Most recently, a Missoula court had sentenced him to eight months in prison for a DUI. He had only been out for about six weeks.
What was most disturbing to Doug was that there hadn’t been any additional child abuse charges levied against the man. Child molesters, in Doug’s experience, did not stop molesting children just because they went to prison. When they got out, they inevitably did it again. Unless they didn’t get out alive. Doug had talked to enough correction officers to know that life in prison was absolute hell for anyone accused of raping a child, and many of them did end up getting killed. That was one reason why Doug had never considered working inside a prison or jail. He didn’t want to have to be the man standing between a mob of rioting criminals and a monster he would be glad to throw to their mercy.
The man’s sex-offender registration hadn’t been updated when he returned to Elkin. It listed him as living in a halfway house in Missoula. The inmate records didn’t have any contact information for his next of kin, so Doug had to call the man’s probation officer. The probation officer was hung over when he answered the phone, and hadn’t bothered to check in with Hayes at all during the week and a half since he died, which just made Doug’s mood worse.
He got an address, though. It was a small, run-down Victorian house on the edge of town. The house looked to be nearly a hundred years old, with real wood siding that had seen much better days. It might have been green, it might have been black, but it was so cracked and faded no one could say what the original color really had been. It had once had white trim; now it had cracked gray trim.
The front door was locked, but a large manila envelope was taped to the door with packing tape. He found the key to the house taped to the outside of the envelope. Out of habit, Doug put on a pair of rubber gloves and pulled the entire envelope off the door. He opened the envelope and found a piece of lined notebook paper that had been folded in thirds and taped shut. The name Christopher Malcolm Hayes was written on the paper, but there was no address or phone number. Doug used his car keys to cut through the tape and open the sheet of paper.
A few words were scribbled in fading pencil on the notepaper. Doug read the short note aloud. “Well, little brother, I’d say I’m sorry, but you’d just accuse me of lying. It’s amazing how things come back around again. I tried to do the right thing this time, I really did, but it all fell apart. This is the only gift I can give you to try and make things right, and I knew you wouldn’t come otherwise. There’s a new Man of God, and I think you’re old enough to stop running. It isn’t fair to ask you to deal with the mess I’m leaving behind, but I can’t think of anyone else who would understand. Go to the bluffs west of town, you’ll see. Stop running and you’ll see.” Doug turned the note over. There was only the name—no address, no phone number, no nothing. Unless you counted cryptic narcissistic suicidal bullshit, but that was par for the course. “Well, fuck.”
The only other thing inside the manila envelope was a single sheet of printed parchment paper that turned out to be a fill-in-the-blanks style will, signed and notarized. Doug scanned the will quickly, looking for names and addresses in the disposition of property. Everything, including the house, was bequeathed to the same Christopher Malcolm Hayes. The will didn’t list a phone number or address for the man, either. Doug replaced the will, scribbled the name on a notebook, and then slipped the will and the note back into the envelope. He pried the key out from the pocket of tape that held it secure.
As soon as he opened the door, the smell drove him back down the steps. There were all kinds of horrible smells associated with police work, but Doug had been stuck dealing with stolen bicycles for so long now that he had repressed his memories of most of them.
He covered his mouth and nose with his suit jacket and hurried up the steps again, determined to slam the door shut. Before the door swung closed, though, two skinny calico cats bolted out the door, across the yard, and into the bushes. At least that explained part of the smell, he thought miserably. He watched them go, then locked the door again and took the key and the envelope back to his car. He had a name, at least, so he could return to the station and try and find a phone number to go with it. If he couldn’t find anything, he’d have to come back, but he wasn’t going back inside this house until he had a chance to steal one of the tins of menthol gel the jail used to help officers cope with all of the interesting smells they encountered when pat searching suspects.
It was already close to seven, and the sun was beginning to set behind the glacial mountains surrounding the small town. This suicide had taken up his entire day. It was Saturday, and it was supposed to be the last day of his weekend. He’d only been planning to hike today, anyway, but he had just put in a full ten hours of overtime. The man’s next of kin had the right to know as soon as possible, but Doug didn’t intend to let some child molester’s suicide ruin his evening too. He would find him tomorrow. If he couldn't find this Christopher Malcolm Hayes, he would deal with the coroner’s paperwork for the county to dispose of the remains on Monday.
Doug rubbed his hands over his face, exhausted. Every time he shut his eyes, he saw that bloated skin and that long blond hair again. He had a feeling he was going to be seeing that image for quite some time after he shut his eyes.
Late the next Friday, Christopher finally found himself sitting at his own desk, one of nearly thirty desks crowded into the district homicide office, staring at the closed glass door with Captain Jenkins’s nameplate on it. It had taken five days for him to convince himself to talk to his supervisor about the dead feeling in his hand. During those five days, he had been tactlessly ignoring call after call from work. He had arrived well before the normal shift change, hoping to catch the man before he left for the day, but the shift briefing had already lasted twenty minutes longer than scheduled.
The extra time gave him a chance to catch up with the rest of his division, and to grab the stack of notes and messages covering every single inch of his desk. He had a feeling he had Ray t
o thank for the fact they were plastered over the entire desktop, rather than stacked in his in-box. Only Ray would devote time to turning his desk into a Post-it note jigsaw puzzle. Some of the notes were from the guys who had taken over his cases, some messages from informants that he would have to respond to personally, and eight notes just said to call right away. The same out-of-state number was on each of those eight notes, but he didn’t recognize it.
“Hayes is back!” One of his fellow homicide detectives called from the hallway. “Are you back?”
“Not yet. Just checking in. I’ve got to teach Delgado a bit of creativity.” He fanned out the notes and messages. “He could have at least tried for a mosaic or something. Or a few little origami animals. He managed paper cranes once, when Sanchez was out on maternity leave.”
“I remember that one! It’s good to see you up and moving around. We figured it’d be another six weeks before we saw your face again.”
“Ha!” One of the detectives at a desk across from Christopher snickered. “He figured it would be six weeks. I figured you’d jump out of the ambulance and run that bastard into the ground.”
The newcomer nodded. “Some people did put money on that,” he admitted.
Christopher shrugged. “Delgado told you that the bullet was kryptonite, didn’t he? That crap leaves me weak as a kitten.”
“Yeah, yeah. Just hurry up and get back to work. Without you holding his leash, Delgado is bouncing off the fucking walls. Somehow he rigged the copier so it only prints pictures of his ass, no matter what you put in it.”
That made him smile. He would have to ask Ray how he’d managed that one. “You think I’m eager to get back to babysitting him?”
Christopher jumped off his desk as three lieutenants filed out of Captain Jenkins’s office. He took a deep breath and waited for them to pass, then headed in before he could lose his resolve. His stomach twisted as his supervisor stared at him. For the millionth time since he made detective, he wished he had been assigned to one of those movie-style captains who shouted and smacked the table to try to be intimidating. Captain Jenkins was one of those rare people who had mastered how to communicate and intimidate people with silence. From the little that showed on the man’s face, Christopher could tell something had him worried.
