Effigies

by Mary Anna Evans

  Faye would be damned before she’d let that happen.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Sheriff Rutland marshaled her resources with aplomb. Neshoba County couldn’t have much more than a dozen sworn officers but, in Faye’s inexpert opinion, Neely Rutland knew how to make good use of what she had. She had quickly found a well-traveled dirt track through the woods that was just barely wide enough for the SUV carrying the county’s spanking-new mobile crime lab, then she’d told an investigator to note the track’s presence in the site sketch. Perhaps Calhoun had used it to bring in a tractor to cultivate the field of contraband where he was found dead.

  Armed with powerful lights, Neely had searched for footprints herself along the track before allowing the mobile lab’s tires to obliterate any evidence. No prints were found, but Joe wasn’t surprised.

  “Mr. Calhoun wouldn’t have wanted people to see him walking out to his own private field of pot. That wide-open trail is almost as big as a road. I bet he only used it when he had to move something big, and I bet he didn’t do that any more than he had to.”

  Joe’s theory sounded good to Faye, but it led naturally to a disappointing situation. The rest of the wooded area was heavily carpeted with leaves and pine straw. Maybe, if Neely and her staff were damn good, they could find where the killer had walked, but they’d have to be damn lucky to find a spot of bare ground big enough to retain any prints. Then, they’d have to distinguish those prints from the ones Faye and Joe and the deputies had left on their way to discovering the murder site. Not to mention the ones Calhoun left while he was hunting Faye and Joe. Plus the ones he’d made on his last trip out to the marijuana field where he’d died.

  Faye and Joe sat together in matching lawn chairs that had been thoughtfully provided by the Neshoba County Sheriff’s Department. There had been a nervous heartbeat’s worth of hesitation on Neely’s face while she decided what to do with the two of them. They were witnesses, and she might need them. They were also potential sources of contamination that she didn’t dare allow near her crime scene. And her crime scene had no obvious boundaries. It could theoretically extend all the way to town and beyond, getting bigger every second that the killer was able to flee.

  Even worse, the moonless night was surely obscuring critical clues. Neely was working against time. While she waited for the sun to rise, blood was soaking into the soil and drying. Footprints were being obscured by falling leaves and by the feet of nocturnal animals. The killer was receding into the darkness, footfall by footfall, until reaching a car that could travel hundreds of miles before dawn.

  Instead of drawing lines around her crime scene prematurely, Neely had taken a logical approach to dealing with Faye and Joe. She’d had a technician thoroughly search a few square yards of ground for footprints and blood spatters and fibers and other stuff Faye couldn’t even imagine. Then, having found nothing, the technician had strung crime scene tape around the area and plunked two lawn chairs inside for the comfort of their star witnesses.

  At least they were calling them witnesses and not suspects. Faye was working hard at looking relaxed and…well, innocent. Because if somebody got the bright idea of searching Joe, the walking arsenal of stone weapons, then they were in serious trouble. Fortunately, Joe was so good-hearted that he didn’t even know how to look guilty.

  Neither do sociopaths, said the pitiless and logical voice inside Faye’s head.

  It was intellectually interesting to watch a crime scene investigation up close. The body was lit by floodlights, and a photographer was recording its condition and its surroundings. A technician searched the soil around the body, while Neely and the rest of her staff took their systematic search of the surrounding woods farther away every minute. Fatigue and disappointment were apparent in the technician’s voice when he said, “The bastard swept his prints away. The brushmarks are obvious.”

  Then he looked at Faye and Joe, and her mouth went dry. Approaching the yellow tape that enclosed them, he said, “We’ll want casts of both your prints.”

  Faye wanted to ask why, but figured that the question would make her sound guilty. She hoped Joe didn’t ask it. Fortunately, the technician delivered the answer without hearing the question.

  “If we find he missed brushing away any prints here in the clearing—or if we find any in the woods, which I guess is a long shot—then we’ll need to make sure they don’t belong to people that we know were here.”

  So they both dutifully stepped in some soft soil and waited for the tech to place a form around each of their prints. Watching him mix something gloppy in a plastic bag, Faye had asked, “Plaster of Paris?” only to see him shake his head.

  “Dental stone works better.”

  They went back to watching the photographer work, which was only slightly more interesting than watching dental stone dry.

  A flashlight beam emerged from the dark woods. Its light played briefly across Faye’s eyes, waking her from a vivid dream. She had slept, her torso leaning awkwardly against the plastic arm of the lawn chair. Joe, whose uncanny control of his physical body seemed to include the ability to be awake or asleep at will, sat alert and relaxed beside her.

  Reality was echoing Faye’s dream. She had seen herself sitting in the spot where Calhoun now lay dead, but she hadn’t been in utter darkness. The clearing had been lit by a roaring fire, as it was now being lit by the first light of dawn. In the dream, a flashlight beam just like this one had emerged from the trees surrounding the small patch of light. Such a beam must have been one of the last things Calhoun had seen, only there had been a killer holding that flashlight. Empathy for the dead man shivered through her.

  Neely flipped off the light in her hand and let it drop to her side. She didn’t look like a woman who had successfully tracked down a killer, so Faye knew that the night-long search had been unsuccessful.

  “Maybe the forensics folks will turn up something useful.” She smoothed back the frizzy brown hair that had escaped from her ponytail and looked at Faye and Joe. “Tell me again what you saw last night. And I swear I’ve forgotten why you said you were out here in the first place.”

  “We were planning to sit out here and watch the mound, like you did the night before. We didn’t know whether you were planning to do that again—”

  “Actually, I was. I just hadn’t gotten out here yet. It looks like I would have found Calhoun tearing the thing down when I did eventually arrive.”

  “Yep,” Joe said, with his usual economy of words.

  “Why, exactly, did you decide it was your job to help me do my job?”

  Joe’s answer was as quick as it was politically incorrect. “I don’t like to see a lady be a target.”

  Faye cringed at Joe’s suggestion that the sheriff might be a damsel in need of protection.

  “I wasn’t out here alone, you know. I had backup. And I would have had backup when I got here last night, too.”

  “Sure. I just figured there wasn’t any harm in having one more person keeping an eye out for you. I was out here the first night you were standing guard, too.”

  “I know. I saw you.”

  Faye had seen Joe stalk a flock of wild turkeys without catching their attention. Her admiration for Neely Rutland jumped up another notch. Admiration for the woman aside, she needed to derail this conversation. Her next obvious question for Joe would be, “Were you armed?” and Joe couldn’t afford to answer it. Not with his pockets full of stone weapons.

  Faye had always had the scientist’s love-hate relationship with intuition. She didn’t trust a conclusion that couldn’t be proved through step-by-step logic, yet she knew that she had been led to that critical first step through flashes of insight. Now, standing half-asleep in the rosy light of dawn, she knew instinctively what she needed to do.

  She needed to help Neely find the real killer, whether the sheriff wanted her help or not. She had done it before when she helped Fire Marshal Adam Strahan find the arsonist who killed her friend Carmen, but
this time the stakes were higher. The sooner Neely found out who killed Calhoun, the less time she would have to realize that Joe made an exceptionally fine suspect.

  What expertise could she offer that would speed this investigation along? It occurred to her that she knew a lot more about stone tools than any run-of-the-mill crime lab employee would.

  “Your lab probably hasn’t dealt with stone weapons all that much,” she blurted out, thinking as she talked. “It seems like it’d be important to know whether the murder weapon was ancient, or whether it was recently made.”

  “I didn’t think you could get that information out of a chunk of rock. I thought you could only use carbon-dating on something that has been alive—like wood or bone.”

  Nobody ever said the sheriff was dumb.

  “That’s true, but there are other ways to date artifacts,” Faye said. “If I had a stone tool that I suspected was prehistoric, the first thing I’d do is look for some evidence of use-wear, so I could see if it matched known prehistoric uses. Use-wear specialists can tell whether a tool has been attached to a haft so it could be used as a knife. They can tell by impact fractures whether it was attached to an arrow and shot with a bow. They can tell if the edge has been reshaped because it got dull. Most of that stuff you have to measure in a lab, because it’s microscopic. But some of it you can see with the naked eye. Sickle sheen is one of those things.”

  “I can’t let you do any of those things with my evidence right now, but I’m listening. What’s ‘sickle sheen’?”

  “The edge of a tool that was used to cut grassy plants—which would include early domesticated crops—looks almost like it’s been polished. The silica in the plants is abrasive and, over time, it polishes the tool’s edge into a sheen that’s easy to see, when you know what to look for. Why don’t you stop by our work site tomorrow? We can talk about use-wear, and I can show you what sickle sheen looks like. I can show you some tools without any sheen at all, too, just for comparison. If the murder weapon has sickle sheen, then it’s pretty safe to say that the killer found an old tool and used it.”

  “Which will tell us just about nothing. There’s hardly a house around here without an arrowhead collection.”

  “Some information is better than none,” Faye pointed out.

  Neely nodded to concede her point. “I’ll stop by the site, but it might not be tomorrow. I need to walk these woods in the daylight and see if any important clues were hiding in the dark. I don’t see that a little bit of sickle sheen will help me find a killer, but information is always a good thing.”

  “You can have any information that Joe and I have got. But do you need us any more? We might be able to get a little sleep before work if we head back to the hotel right now.”

  Neely dismissed them with a nod, and told them that the technician who’d taken the footprint impressions would show them back to their car. Faye walked directly in his footsteps, to avoid introducing still more prints to Neely’s list of problems. She walked casually, trying to look like an innocent woman who was in no hurry to get out of the sheriff’s sight. She willed Joe to do the same, though her biggest concern was that no one should hear the stone weapons in his pockets clicking together as he walked.

  Faye went directly from the murder scene to the work trailer parked beside the Nails’ house. She wanted to separate Joe from any incriminating evidence and she wanted to do it immediately.

  Unlocking the trailer door, she flipped on the air conditioner. The resulting blast stirred the dust coating every horizontal surface in the archaeologists’ workspace. Well, except for Chuck’s work table. Faye knew from personal observation that he wiped it down six times a day.

  “Empty your pockets.”

  Joe did as he was told. When he was finished, a fearsome collection of multicolored stone was arrayed on the table. A palm-sized spear point that looked like it was from the Middle Woodland period, except Joe had made it himself. Two tiny projectile points. A single-edged tool uncomfortably like the one that had sliced Calhoun’s neck. A sharpened piece of deer antler. An unchipped piece of rock that was probably destined to become something deadly.

  Faye couldn’t decide whether Joe was the least dangerous man on Earth or the most dangerous man on Earth.

  “We need to hide these things in plain sight,” she said. “If Sheriff Rutland asks to see them, we’ll show them to her, but we don’t want to call her attention to your special skills.”

  “Why would she…you don’t think she thinks I killed Mr. Calhoun, do you, Faye?”

  “I don’t know what she thinks, but you and I both know you’ve got the skills.” She swiped her hand across the table, raking Joe’s treasures into an empty storage box, then she set it on a shelf alongside dozens of identical boxes. After labeling the box and writing the identifying number in her field notebook, she tossed the notebook into a desk drawer and said. “Remember, Joe. Leave the deadly weapons at work.”

  Joe looked bereft.

  “Okay, how’s this: Leave the deadly weapons at work, for the time being.”

  “I’m not the only one that carries this stuff around.”

  Faye scanned the surface of Chuck’s work table, which was covered with neat piles of ancient weapons and the razor-sharp flakes that were the by-product of their manufacture. If she had to pick the most dangerous person she’d met in Neshoba County, she’d have to name Chuck. He was the kind of scientist who chose to study inanimate objects precisely because they weren’t people. She didn’t think Chuck liked people and their inexplicable ways all that much. She wondered where he’d been when Calhoun was killed.

  Picturing the detachment in Chuck’s eyes, she remembered someone else whose glance had chilled her. Preston Silver. He knew Calhoun, to be sure, but Faye had the feeling that a man with those eyes wouldn’t hesitate to kill someone who crossed him.

  The Gift of Kowi Anukasha

  As told by Mrs. Frances Nail

  To us Choctaws, the Mississippi forests are alive with magical beings. We know of shapechanging spirits who can read men’s thoughts. Some of us have heard the womanish cry of Kashehotapalo, half-deer and half-man. If you should ever hear him, remember this: Kashehotapalo will not hurt you, but he delights in the frightening power of his own voice.

  Kowi Anukasha, an old, old spirit with the tiny body of a child, can give the greatest gift—the gift of choice. He watches for lost children, stealing them away to his own house where three ancient spirits wait with gifts.

  The first spirit always offers the child a knife. If he takes it, he will grow into a bad man. Perhaps he will even kill his friends.

  The second spirit extends a handful of herbs. This looks like a good gift to most folks, because everybody knows that herbs can heal. But it is dangerous to forget that herbs can also kill. Most times, the child reaches out a hand and takes the poisonous herbs, forever losing the power to help or heal others.

  The third spirit holds out healing herbs, and the child who waits for this good gift will become a great doctor, trusted by his entire tribe.

  Wise Choctaws know that few children have the wisdom to wait for a good gift, so few will grow into the leaders their people need. But Kowi Anukasha will always be looking for wisdom and patience, so that he can reward them with knowledge.

  This is true.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Sunday

  Day 3 of the Neshoba County Fair

  It had seemed so reasonable when she agreed to work on a Sunday. Faye’s workweek had begun late on Thursday afternoon. She and her colleagues had lost half of Friday to their confrontation with Mr. Calhoun. They’d happily accepted Dr. Mailer’s offer to let them frolic at the Fair on company time. Ordinarily, Faye would feel fresh as a daisy after such light service. Of course, she’d been willing to pay her boss back by working today.

  But that was before she’d been chased by a tractor, and it was before she stumbled onto a brutally murdered man. It was before she’d sat up all night, wondering
whether she and Joe were prime suspects. Faye didn’t want to work today. She wanted to sleep like she’d been drugged.

  As she brushed her teeth over the bathroom sink, elbow-to-elbow with Toneisha, a knock sounded at their door. Sheriff Rutland was standing there, looking far less bleary-eyed and rumpled than Faye felt after only an hour of sleep.

  “Since the murder occurred right across the street from you archaeologists’ work site, and since there was no love lost between you people and the murder victim, I’m trying to establish alibis. Just to be complete. I know where you were, Faye. Why don’t you have some breakfast downstairs while I talk to your roommate?”

  Faye found her colleagues downstairs eating sweet rolls and comparing notes. The sheriff had already questioned them all, and she’d found that their alibis were uniformly frail. Mailer was alone in his hotel room. So was Chuck. Oka Hofobi was home with his parents, which wasn’t actually much of an alibi, since the odds that his parents would allow him to remain alibi-free were nil. Toneisha and Bodie had been drinking in the room Bodie shared with Joe.

  Toneisha and the sheriff entered the room. Both women stopped for a cup of coffee before settling down at the table next to Faye.

  “I have never in my life heard such a flimsy set of alibis. Couldn’t just one of you manage to be in a public place so that someone you never met could be a witness?” Neely asked.

  “Wouldn’t guilty people have great alibis, since they can plan ahead?” Bodie asked.

  “Usually. Except for the stupid ones. But you people aren’t stupid, so let’s move on. Anybody got any ideas they want to share?”

  “Did Calhoun do much damage to the mound before he died?” Chuck asked, cementing Faye’s opinion of where his priorities lay.