Fourth Person No More

by John Gastineau

  At first glance, the bodies looked like stick-figure code, arms thrown over each other and legs akimbo. Seeing the pattern required a closer look.

  They were lined up close together on the floor perpendicular to a plaid couch and situated like pan pipes, according to height. A long, low coffee table was turned to one side, apparently pivoted away from its normal position in front of the couch to make room. There was a gap between the three and the table, a space wide enough for another body. At the top of that space, lying at the foot of the couch as though tossed there, was a sodden, stringy mound of something that looked like the head of a wet mop.

  They were not babies, but certainly they were not adults or even teenagers. From the patterns and shapes of the clothing, it looked like two boys and a girl, but in that light and at that moment, I could not say for sure.

  An elliptical shadow radiated out around the bodies across a light-colored carpet, but as I looked closer I realized that it was darker than the other shadows and that the light outside could not have drawn it. Darker still were the shadows above the shoulders of each body.

  I took one cautious step forward and leaned in closer to see. The children had been put on the floor face down. The backs of their heads were gone, and one or two black, ragged holes had been chewed in the clothes on each of their backs.

  The face of the one in the center was turned slightly. In the middle of that dark halo, light gleamed off the milky white of a half-closed eye.

  I reared back. It was close, humid, in there, and I had breathed through my nose. A sweetish, raspy smell, blood and meat over gunpowder, that made me shudder, clear my throat, and think about scotch.

  Turns out, I had not lied to Moze. I had seen the aftermath of assassination before, in a couple of South Side crack houses after bad dope deals and in a hooch a couple of lifetimes before that after Phoenix crept through.

  Never children, though. Never children. Sweet Jesus, indeed.

  I could have left then. I had enough to launch the story, and Moze was outside yelling what was taking so long. But I had not seen all.

  With a pen, I tried the light switch, but it did not work, and I was careful to return it to its original position. Dark spots peppered the paneling in the living room up to shoulder height. I thought at first they were bullet or pellet holes, but I resisted the temptation to put my finger to one when it looked moist. It made me stop and consider again the spots and streaks on the picture window above the couch. They were, I realized, on the inside, not out.

  On the table in the dining area were two glasses of milk, two partially eaten apples, a coffee cup, scissors, paste, and pieces of construction paper. Even in the faint light, I could make out the outlines of a witch’s pointed hat and a pumpkin.

  A siren was approaching, but there was an orange glow behind me, so I looked. To the left of the door, a hall ran the length of the double-wide past a bedroom and a bathroom to a bigger bedroom at the end.

  The bedrooms were black. In the bathroom, though, a flashlight capped by an orange jack-o-lantern face had been left on. It was standing on end on the toilet tank aimed toward the ceiling. In the bowl, someone had left the core of a red apple and what looked like a .22 rifle. The barrel was bent, hooked up into the trap. The water was yellow. It was time to go.

  I was making notes on the pad as I emerged. It’s a tricky business walking and writing at the same time, especially in the dark. After years in this business, I have mastered it, but it takes all my concentration, so when I looked up, I thought I had lost touch with reality.

  There was Moze, like some squat wood gnome, stringing yellow ribbon from tree to tree around the perimeter of the yard—police tape to keep out gawkers.

  As he hugged a sapling to wrap tape, Moze looked nervously from me to the sound of the siren. He was nearly frantic when he said, “God damn it, Clay. Leave.”

  Clearly, it was a plea, so I did.

  Going far was hardly an option. A person of my build may travel gracefully and with good humor, but on foot, not lightly or far.

  There was the fact, too, that I did not want to. A drunk is, by definition, self-indulgent, and a fat drunk is the worst. Moze was naive to think I was going to walk away from this one. Or any other one, for that matter.

  I sauntered out past the police line and down the drive to the road about thirty yards or so, checked over my shoulder that Moze was as distracted as I knew he would be, and ducked into the woods. With my back against a tree, I could see both approaches, the drive, and a corner of the trailer up to the door. It was a little cold, but this was the way I liked it. No chitchat with sources, no interference or influence with the way things would go. Just see without being seen. Pure observation.

  When I was a kid, I kept my marbles in a milk bottle. To play, I’d turn the bottle over. At first, you’d get only one or two out before they jammed. You’d have to shake the bottle, maybe stick a finger up its neck, to make more come out. But once they started to flow, momentum would carry them out in a stream. That is how the “authorities” arrived. Call Moze the first marble.

  A state police trooper was next, arriving in fury, all siren and lights. Troopers drive big, white, bulbous Chevies that taper to each end. A hundred yards down the road from my vantage point, he threw the screaming dumpling into a power slide and blocked the road.

  I could not see the trooper, but I assumed he got out of the squad because for ten minutes I listened to his radio squawk. Lots of air traffic and no procedure, the voices talking over each other.

  To my right, a set of headlights crunched gravel as it rolled up slowly forward. The car stopped well short of the drive.

  In one movement, a tall, athletically built trooper unwound himself like a cat from behind the wheel to pivot and stand with one foot in the door of his squad. I had to duck when he used his spot to sweep the area 180 degrees around the front of the squad.

  When he was done, he placed himself between the car’s headlights and, silhouetted, he began walking forward. A flashlight beam bounced from one side of the road to the other in time to measured and methodical steps.

  At the drive, he whipped the beam up at the trailer. When the beam landed on Moze’s squad, he said, “Shit.”

  The trooper continued to walk and look for tracks on the road. The other trooper met him coming from the other direction.

  “Anything?” The driver of the screaming dumpling turned out to be she. Even after a professional lifetime of dealing with cops, I admit to having difficulty immediately entertaining the possibility.

  “No,” he said. “There’s a mountie there already.”

  “Not a county mountie,” she said sarcastically.

  She directed her flashlight beam up into the woods and again I ducked. Then she aimed the beam across the road. It fell on a wire fence and behind that a field of what looked to be bean stubble.

  “Hey, what do you think?”

  On the cool night, I could hear a mile. She sounded edgy, eager.

  There was a long pause.

  “Maybe we ought to wait,” he said. “For the eyes and the techs.”

  “Yeah.” But she didn’t sound happy about it. “Want to go check out the stiffs?”

  “Is this your first time?”

  “Yeah,” she said, a little defensively.

  I thought he was going to tell her she didn’t want to see the bodies, but this was a different generation.

  “You don’t do anything at one of these until somebody tells you to,” he said.

  A horn blast interrupted their conversation. Behind the man’s squad, a van had appeared. From it jumped techs, another form of worker bee, two men and a woman in dark jumpsuits and nylon jackets with ISP written on the back in reflective letters.

  One began photographing the scene, slicing the darkness with a strobe and the curt whine of a motor drive. The second tu
rned on floods and followed the first with a video camera. The third got in the squad and pulled it forward to a point past the drive. Then, he brought the van up.

  As he did so, the sheriff arrived. Woodrow Modine drives an unmarked Chrysler. If it weren’t for the five or six antennae that bristle off the trunk and back window, the two-tone brown paint job, and the red lenses where the bright headlights should be, you might not know his ride was a police car.

  He pulled it up to the drive and got out to stand impassively in his open door. He chose not to turn off the red flashers. It played hell with the photos and video. All three techs spun and started to shout back at him, but they cut it off abruptly when they saw who it was.

  I was tempted to go talk to Wood when I remembered the dilemma it would put Moze in. It was just as well because Detective Sgt. McConegal of the state police’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation appeared out of the darkness behind Wood. McConegal is the district’s head “eye.” I for BCI, I for investigator, I for irascible. Sgt. McConegal and I have, upon occasion, debated finer points of the public’s right to know.

  “Well, Woody,” McConegal said. He was fulsome as if they hadn’t seen each other in years.

  “Your crew,” Wood tilted his head toward the techs, “have forgotten their manners.”

  The two men stood for a time looking at each other. Wood is on the outer envelope of middle age. He is not very tall, he is nearly bald, and his face is rounded and lumpy, as though carved from a potato. It’s a benign face that makes it easy to ignore the broad, muscular chest, flat belly, and thick wrists that come with it. McConegal is the opposite, mid-thirties, tall, thin, sharp-featured. Wood wore his trademark chocolate-brown, polyester jumpsuit and cowboy boots. McConegal had on a tie and sport coat.

  “Woody,” McConegal said finally, “you know I got to hear it.”

  One of the techs had raised a flood lamp on a pole secured to a bracket on the back of the van. She trained it on the driveway, but it spilled over, washing out the shadows in the faces of both men. Wood closed his eyes and sighed.

  “Woodrow, shit. There’re three getting cold. Tell him and be done with it.”

  Potter Crandall, the Austin County prosecuting attorney, stepped into the pool of light. He wore a baby-blue, porkpie hat and a rumpled, tan, trench coat open over a brown suit without tie. His glasses, as usual, had slipped and caught on the flare of his pug nose. He was sixty-two years old, more often than not rheumy-eyed and gruff, and, outside of the courtroom, entirely profane. Like Wood, his appearance was deceptive. First-time adversaries frequently mistake him for a rube.

  The state police have the most money of any police agency in the state. As a result, they have the best training, the best equipment, and the best pay. As a result of that, they usually employ the smartest and most highly motivated cops. But the home-rule statute prohibits them from intervening in an investigation without an invitation from local officials.

  Pride might have made him reluctant, but Wood knew he was just postponing the inevitable. He pulled himself up to attention.

  “Sgt. McConegal,” he said, “the people of Austin County would appreciate the assistance of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation in this matter.”

  “The Bureau?” said McConegal. “Is that all you want? How about the rest of the agency?”

  “Larry, Christ.” Crandall jammed his hands in the pockets of his trench coat and looked away, embarrassed.

  “Right,” McConegal said. He pointed a finger at Crandall. “You heard it.” He aimed the finger back over his shoulder at the tech adjusting the flood. “Riley, you heard it?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Riley, the tech.

  Crandall pulled a cigar from inside his suit coat and absently began to peel away the wrapper as he looked over his glasses from Wood to McConegal.

  “Larry,” he said, “in exactly five seconds, I’m going to put fire to this stogie and ruin your goddamned crime scene. Why don’t you fucking proceed.”

  They trudged up the drive side by side, Crandall in between. A few minutes later, an ambulance arrived, followed by Poteet, an undertaker who also served as coroner, driving his hearse. Only in small towns does one find such economies of function.

  The gawkers were stealthier. Like apparitions, shadowy in the dim light, they began to appear, in twos and threes, along the fence in the bean field across the road from the drive.

  They looked to be mostly neighbors who were drawn to the commotion by the lights, the sirens, or the telephone and who came across the fields by foot when they found the roads blocked. There were women and men of a variety of ages; a few held sleepy children. Most wore the denim, boots, and billboard caps advertising seed, feed, or fertilizer that identified them as farmers, but there were others in camo or sweats and a few in nightclothes wrapped in blankets.

  These people were not urban gawkers. They craned their necks and whispered among themselves, but their interest was not the bald, buck-naked sort that embarrasses and angers young cops and firefighters. Nor did these folks exhibit the familiarity and cynicism that reduces the grisliest scene to mere street theater. They did not shout at the cops, they did not rag the techs, and they did not contend with each other to see who could tell the most morbid joke. Instead, they stood quietly and respectfully, so much so that the cops did not notice them at first.

  The flood of cops continued unabated. From the state, there were blue troopers in uniform and eyes in plain clothes. From the county, six more brown deputies appeared, the entire department, and two or three off-duty town cops.

  I counted twenty-seven in all milling around, waiting for someone to put them to work. It made me antsy. Sooner or later, someone would tell them to spread out at arm’s length and search the woods around the trailer. I couldn’t imagine that one rotund reporter would fall through the sieve.

  Little Sheba saved me. Tall and loose-limbed, she burst out of the shadows down the road into the pool drawn by the flood lights. She had thrown a car coat over her harem outfit. Her eyes were so wide they pulled the black almonds she’d penciled around them into circles. She trotted two or three steps, then slowed, fought the urge, trotted again. The gait made a belt of coins at her waist jingle like a tambourine.

  When Little Sheba turned up the drive, the woman trooper called, “Hey, no, you, wait.” Three other cops closed ranks across the drive like a picket fence and blocked her.

  An entourage followed. Akmed, the eunuch, a short guy in a white T-shirt, gold vest, and blue harem pants, walked out of the dark after Sheba. Unlike her, he walked at a steady pace, but he resolutely held his eyes on the ground until one of the troopers put a hand on the guy’s arm, drew him to a stop, and gently removed a cardboard and tinfoil scimitar from his belt. The guy looked up then, blinked, and smiled shyly at the trooper, who began talking to him quietly.

  The clowns, one man, one woman, each clutched in the other’s arms, came behind Akmed. Earlier in the evening, they had probably worn neon wigs and black derbies. Those were gone by the time they arrived, and their red, rubber noses hung from strings around their necks. Only huge, grotesquely incongruent, red-and-white smiles remained painted across their lower faces.

  They stopped at the first cop they came to and said something anxiously. The cop took the woman gently by the elbow and escorted them up the drive.

  While the cops and the gawkers focused their attention on Little Sheba and the entourage, I picked my way through the woods toward the road. Wood had emerged from the trailer and was walking down the drive toward them. Behind him, troopers were starting to bring out the bodies.

  It only took one trooper on each end of a black body bag they were so light. Troopers tend to be young and strong, and these guys did not move with the clumsy stumble that goes with carrying dead weight. Still, they traveled only at a ceremonial pace, as though their burdens were fragile, down the narrow stairs of the double-wide
across the yard toward the ambulance and hearse.

  Looking between the shoulders of the cops who blocked her, Little Sheba watched the procession. She nodded her head, counting. I could see it coming, so I was ready. When the third bag appeared, she screamed and went down. I popped out.

  No one saw me. I emerged from the woods a short distance down the road from the gawkers, and all eyes were on Wood. He was helping Little Sheba to her feet and putting a consoling arm around her shoulders. He carefully turned her by the shoulders toward the trailer and motioned back to the other cops to bring the rest of her party forward.

  It was time do some work. I had decided it was best to go benign with this crowd. I put my hands in my pockets and sauntered up.

  “Who’s that?” I said casually across the fence row to the first gawker I came to.

  He was straight out of American Gothic, a tall, balding, older man with a long, grooved face. And his radar was up. He looked back over my shoulder and then at me for a long moment.

  “Po-lice?” he said, drawing out the first syllable.

  “Mirror-Press,” I said.

  He turned his back to me. I shrugged and smiled ruefully for the others to see; no hard feelings. But their attention was on the trailer.

  Wood had escorted Little Sheba up to the ambulance and was directing her to look at what was inside. He delicately held her wrist and elbow while she leaned in. She jerked erect and paused. Then she said something to Wood and turned her face into his shoulder.

  Akmed had come up behind her. He peered around into the ambulance, froze, then hung his head. He put a hand on Little Sheba’s back, but she did not turn from Wood or reach back to Akmed.

  “That poor thing,” said a short, plump, older woman further up in the crowd.

  “Know her?” I asked, moving forward on the road toward her. She did not turn, but spoke from out of a white, dandelion cloud of hair.