“Eric might have known the same things. I’m sure Carver would have mentioned it the first time they worked together”—and Carver nodded slightly in affirmation—“but he chose to ignore that. He chose to make a statement in the clothing he wore.
“And in the end, that was a mistake that he couldn’t rectify.”
Greta seemed wordless.
I think part of her wanted to reject everything that Victoria had just said, wanted to believe that Eric had been absolutely blameless. But I also think that, deep within her heart and her mind, she was relieved. She had tried her best. She had given him the best home she knew how. She had tried to make him accept the responsibilities of becoming an adult.
And he had chosen to ignore her values and her life.
This time, Greta patted Victoria gently on the hand.
There was no need for a formal ‘thank you’ between two old friends.
Her loss would pain her, perhaps for the rest of her life, but her loss would at least be bearable.
I knew how that felt.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The morgue in Fox Creek—as I discovered shortly thereafter—is nothing much. There’s a reception area and an examination room, complete with a polished metal table and the requisite refrigeration equipment, adjoining the sheriff’s substation and, conveniently enough, right across the street from Doc Anderson’s office.
It doesn’t get much business, but there are sufficient deaths-by-old-age, deaths-by-unavoidable-accidents, deaths-by-reckless-or-drunk-driving and so on to justify having it available when it is needed.
Today it was needed.
Death-by-snakebite-following-a-vicious-beating might not be a common occurrence, but there was Eric Johansson waiting on the table for us when we arrived, courtesy of one of the deputies from next door.
“Don’t you need to check in on your prisoners before we do this?” I wasn’t sure about the necessary protocols, never having been involved simultaneously in an investigation into a questionable death and several cases of aggravated assault and battery.
“Garton’s the only one actually staying with us at the moment,” Wroten said. “The others are on their way down-mountain for processing. We don’t have the personnel or the accommodations to handle that many at one time. I’m not too interested in the others at the moment anyway.”
“Not inter....” I think I started to sputter.
“Well, that’s not quite the best way to put it I suppose,” Wroten said. “What I meant is that Garton was the ringleader. I bet anything that if Doc Anderson can match the bruises on Johansson’s chest and thighs to anything specific, it will be to the steel caps on a pair of boots that my men took off Garton before they locked him up and that are now in an evidence bag that will, I hope, keep them from stinking up the locked file drawer in my back room. The others are in some ways peripheral. Garton’s the main suspect. And he’s right where I want him.”
“Thanks to Victoria,” I added.
“Exactly, thanks to you, ma’am.”
“Well, Richard dear, we all have to do our part to keep the streets safe, don’t we.” She smiled.
The three of us were about to see what could be discovered from Eric Johansson’s mute corpse.
Carver had elected to remain at home with his mother and Mrs. Johansson.
“I’ve done enough,” he said when Wroten asked him if he would like to be in on the denouement. “I don’t think you need me there, and I know that I don’t want to be there.”
So that left just us. The Three Musketeers.
As it were.
Inside the examination room, things got serious.
The body was laid out on the table in the center of the room, covered by a crisp, white sheet. Wroten peeled the sheet away from the head.
It looked, if anything, even worse than it had that morning when we had first seen it. The bruises seemed too vivid to be real, the skin too white, the deep circles around the eyes too dark—they made it look as if his eyes were already beginning to deteriorate and shrivel back into the skull, although I was quite sure it was far too early for that.
The skin was icy to the touch. The body had been in the refrigeration unit most of the afternoon, although nothing else had been done to it. I could see by the edge of a T-shirt at the neck that it was still clothed as it had been when we found it.
“Would you give me a hand?” Wroten indicated where the sheet was hanging over the far side of the table.
I didn’t want to. But then, I didn’t want to make Victoria do it either, so I nodded.
We folded the sheet back until it lay neatly just below the feet.
Whoever had placed the body in the cooler had straightened the legs. The arms were tight alongside the ribcage. And there were no crusting patches of blood beneath the body. Otherwise it looked much the way it had—presumably—when Carver went in to wake Eric Johansson up early that morning.
“Now,” Wroten said. “Can you take me through your thought processes? Show me what convinced you that Johansson had not been murdered?”
“Curiously enough,” Victoria said, “I think the first thing was that I didn’t want it to be a murder. As soon as I knew that Carver had found the body, I wanted to be certain that it wouldn’t create difficulties for him. I knew that he could not have murdered anyone.”
“Exoneration by wishful thinking,” Wroten murmured. “I’m going to have to remember that one.”
“Anyway, besides that, a number of things struck me. The first was the extent and the severity of the wounds and bruising. If some of those marks across the chest had proven to be relatively deep stab wounds, then perhaps enough internal damage might have been done to cause death.
“But since Eric...I suppose it would be easier, less personal now, to say, the victim had been conscious for some time—perhaps several hours—after the beating and had been at least partially responsive when Carver helped him into bed, that made it seem less likely that the beating had been fatal.”
“Come on now, Vic...Miz Sears.”
“Really, Richard dear, it’s just us chickens now. Victoria is fine.”
“Well, you know as well as I do that beatings don’t always kill right away. The victim might linger for hours, days, with severe internal injury and bleeding.
“Of course, but that was just one of several things I noted this morning.
“Another was the condition of the right knee, at least as far as I could see.”
She reached out and pulled back the loose piece of material, revealing the battered, torn-up flesh.
“Notice that the knee itself is badly swollen and discolored. The scrapes and tears are mostly limited to this spot”—she pointed with a steady finger to an area that extended from an inch or so above the knee cap upward for another four or five inches. “Here the flesh looks abraded, roughened. I suspect that if the victim were still alive, it would be oozing and bleeding.”
“Okay,” Wroten said. “Garton and the others knocked him to his knees, then he tried to maneuver away from them, scraping his....” He stopped suddenly and stared at the body.
“What’s wrong?” I couldn’t see what the problem was.
“What’s wrong is that if Johansson had been trying to escape while on his knees, the damage would be on or below the kneecap, not above it.” Wroten tugged the lower edge of the torn jeans slightly, just enough to reveal that, sure enough, the skin there was abraded as well.
“Mrs. Hanson....”
“Lynn. That’s good enough for me as well.”
“Lynn, then. I think there’s a magnifying glass in that cabinet. Would you please hand it to me?”
There was. And I did.
He studied the area below the knee cap, then the area above.
When he handed the glass to Victoria, he said, “You’re right. They’re different.”
She examined the same spot, then handed the glass to me.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to look that closely at the d
amaged tissue but I did.
It was mostly a conglomeration of reddish and purplish tissue set against the dead white flesh. But there was something more.
“Is that gravel?”
“Very good, Lynn dear. Yes, it is.”
“When Johansson was on his knees, bits of gravel embedded themselves into his flesh. It must have hurt like he...like Hades, but by that time I gather that he was too far gone and in too much pain elsewhere to notice it.”
“You are probably right. Lynn dear, now look at the area above the knee.”
I did.
The scrapes and abrasions looked slightly different, although I couldn’t quite put my finger on what the difference was. But I could tell that there were no little grains of rock jammed into the flesh. There was, however, something else.
Something thin, almost translucent under the bright examination lights, something that looked yellowish, organic, like....
“Broken bits of hay. Or straw. Whichever it the right word.”
“Actually, either word works. The thing is the same. Only the purpose differs,” Victoria said.
“Hay is for eating, straw is for sleeping,” Wroten added with a grin.
“But either way, you’re right, Lynn dear. This wound has bits of hay—maybe we need words like stray or haw, except they’ve already been spoken for—ground into it. I couldn’t quite tell for sure this morning, but with the magnifying glass, it is unmistakable.”
“Hence,” Wroten said, with the air of a particularly bright student asserting that, yes, two plus two does equal four, “the victim had been boosting bales with this knee.”
“And not the other,” Victoria added. If it hadn’t been her speaking, I would have said that she demonstrated the air of an even brighter student asserting that, beyond that, two plus two could equal seven hundred and eighty six, if looked at properly. “Look.”
Wroten pulled the denim up where it was torn across the left knee. “Good thing that fashion calls for symmetrical raggedness.”
He studied the exposed skin.
“Nothing. No scrapes, no abrasions, nothing.”
He pulled the denim flap down.
“But below the knee, the left leg looks like the right leg, scraped and torn. And I’d bet that if we checked, we’d find gravel bits there.”
He let the flap of denim fall. “But we can leave that to Doc Anderson to discover. We’re not interested in the beating. Just the ultimate cause of death.”
“All right, Victoria,” I said, holding up my hand and counting off on my fingers. “First, you didn’t want it to be murder. Second, he might not have been beaten severely enough to cause death, at least not within an hour or two. Three, he had been boosting hay bales with his right knee.
“I still don’t see how that led you to snakebite.”
“Well, remember that Carver was certain that Eric had been drinking. He told us that the boy was hard to understand; that he was unsteady on his feet, wobbly, so much so that Carver had difficulty getting him up the stairs later; that he was breathing oddly in the car; that he had almost passed out by the time they got back to the Johansson place and was asleep as soon as Carver got him into bed—all of those are clear symptoms of inebriation. Usually.
“We also know now that Eric had vomited at least once.”
“Another indication that he was drunk,” Wroten added.
“Yes, normally. But several other markers were missing. There was none of the characteristic flushing about the face.”
“But the victim had been dead several hours by then, and there was the massive bruising on his head from the beating.” I could see the direction Victoria wanted to go but I couldn’t follow her there yet.
“I’ll grant that there might be some ambiguity about the flushing. But when we examined the victim this morning, merely hours after he died in what would seem to be a state of extreme drunkenness, there was no reek of alcohol on his lips. None on his clothing. None anywhere in the room.”
“But.... Oh, you’re right. I didn’t even think of that. Carver was so certain that I just assumed....”
“There, there,” Victoria said, patting my hand where it rested on the examination table, “other than that you did very well today.”
“So that gives us point number four: all of the symptoms we ascribed to drunkenness could be attributed to snakebite. Everything pointed to his being drunk except one piece of evidence, which would have inevitably been present if he had been drinking.” Wroten was summing up this time.
Victoria: four. Skeptics: zero.
“Then at Land’s End later this morning, Mr. Rafferty confirmed my suspicions when he noted that, in spite of behaving as if he were drunk, including nearly passing out and having problems concentrating, even when threatened by Garton with a beating, he had nothing to drink. If he was fired by Tom Neilson late in the afternoon and showed up at Land’s End early in the evening, when did he have time to get that drunk, and where would he have done it. I’m quite certain that when you examine his car, which is still parked at the bar, is it not, you will find no evidence of a—what’s the appropriate word here—a bender.”
“I’ve already checked out the car. I did it while you two ladies were sitting in the bar. One empty beer can in the back between the seats. Nothing more.”
“So he hadn’t been drinking that night. Number five.” I held up all five fingers.
“Is that it, Victoria?” Wroten seemed satisfied with her conclusions thus far.
“It was enough for me to be fairly certain. And then, as we were driving back to Tom Neilson’s farm, I made it a point to count the road kill.”
“The flat-frogs,” I said with a little giggle. “And the mashed-mice. Oh, and the squished-shrews.”
Victoria stared at me.
“I made those up as we were driving. I thought they fit.”
“Yes,” she said smiling. “The flat-frogs and the mashed-mice and the...uh, squished-shrews. There were more than usual for this time of year, which meant that there would probably be more predators than usual as well—and that means, unfortunately, that the probabilities of there being rattlesnakes in the Neilson fields was proportionally high. Shall we call it corroborating evidence? Not enough to convict, but with the other five points, it certainly helped.”
“So all that remained,” Wroten said, “was to find the snake. You have to admit, you were lucky with that one. If there hadn’t been the accident with the truck, you would never have found it.”
“Not really. Eric reported feeling ill just after he had helped stack bales in the flatbed, so he took over as driver. No reason not to. He wouldn’t be in traffic or anything like that, just driving down the rows of wheat. And that would mean that the other hands could help lift and stack the bales, and the job would be done that much more quickly.
“He couldn’t have anticipated losing focus just long enough to drive into the nearby ditch. He had no idea that he been snake-bit. I’m positive that the pain from boosting all of those other bales against his naked skin would have been enough to overpower a tiny prick...and that is all that it would have taken.”
“Ahh, but the last...the damning piece of evidence. Where are the notorious fang marks, the two punctures, the vampire-like wounds that indicate rattlesnake?”
“There are not always two, Richard. Sometimes the strike is sufficiently off center for only one fang to pierce the flesh. But in this case, I think we will find something rather different”
She took up the magnifying glass again and, after adjusting the examination lamp, went over the wounded right leg carefully, inch by inch, until she said—unconsciously repeating Wroten, I hope—“Ahh.”
She straightened and handed him the glass.
“Right there.”
He studied the spot she was indicating.
“Nope, don’t see it. No puncture. Just one long scratch, like a stick or a thorn or.... That’s it, isn’t it. That scratch.”
“I think so, D
eputy Wroten. Doc Anderson will be able to tell for certain. But I think that a single fang hit the knee at an angle, tore a narrow, shallow scratch, and at the same time secreted enough poison that, since the wound was left untreated, the victim died.”
Wroten straightened.
“Care to look?”
“No,” I said. “I’m more than willing to take your word for it, especially since the two of you agree, and most especially, since Victoria just called you ‘Deputy Wroten’ instead of ‘Richard dear.’ You must be back on track.”
There wasn’t much left to do.
We covered the body with the sheet, straightening it as best we could to remove any wrinkles...the closest thing we could do at the moment to honoring the dead.
Anything more would have to wait for the funeral.
But at least we had accomplished several things.
We had demonstrated—to the satisfaction of the officer of the law in charge—the cause and circumstances of an otherwise suspicious if not mysterious death.
We had insured that a vicious hoodlum would be out of contact with the rest of humanity for a goodly time.
We had reassured a grieving grandmother that she had done everything she could have done to help her beloved grandson, a young man whom she no longer quite recognized and could no longer begin to understand.
We had upheld Victoria’s confidence in another young man, whose name and reputation had already once been wrongfully associated with a sudden death.
And we had kept that young man, that fine, upstanding young man who was now my friend, from being charged with the death of Eric Johansson.
That just about settled the case.
Except for one lingering question.
“Tell me, Victoria,” Wroten said as we left the examination room, “Just when did you decide that you were going to, and how you were going to, make certain that I would arrest Edward Garton at Land’s End today?”
“Why, whatever do you mean, Richard dear?”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
On the sidewalk outside the substation, Tom Neilson was waiting for Deputy Wroten.
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