The detective thought for a minute. 'Can't really blame 'em,' he went on. 'People were crazy for that little girl. It wouldn't have been Christian to leave her in the muck getting gnawed on by snapping turtles.'
Christianity had nothing to do with this case, Cowart thought. It is all evil. But he said, 'So, they fucked up?'
'Yeah.' The detective looked at him. I don't want to see that in the paper. I mean, you can point out the scene was a mess. But I don't want to see "Detective Wilcox said the crime scene was fucked up…" but yeah, that's right, it was.'
Cowart watched the detective slip into the waders. He remembered another Hawkins maxim: If you look close enough, the scene will tell you everything. But Wilcox and Brown had had no scene. They had had no evidence that wasn't contaminated. So they'd had to get the other thing that would get them into a court of law: a confession.
The detective tightened his straps and waved to Cowart. 'Come on, city boy. Let me show you a real good dying place.'
He stepped off into the woods, his waders rustling against the shrub brush as he walked.
The place where Joanie Shriver had died was dark and enclosed by tangled vines and weeds, with overhanging branches that blocked out the sun like a cave made by nature. It was a small rise, perhaps ten feet above the edge of the swamp, which lurked with black water and mud, stretching away from the forest. Cowart's hands and face were scratched from pushing thorns out of his path. They had traveled a bare fifty yards from the car, but it had been a difficult trip. He was sweating hard, perspiration dripping into his eyes and stinging them. As he stood in the small clearing, he thought it seemed diseased somehow. For a terrible instant, he pictured his own daughter there, and he caught his breath. Find a tough question, he insisted to himself looking at the detective. Something to break the clammy hold his imagination had thrust on him.
'How could he haul some kid kicking and screaming through that?' Cowart said slowly.
'We figured she was unconscious. Deadweight.'
'How come?'
'No defensive wounds on the hands or arms…' He held up his arms, crossing them in front of his face, demonstrating. 'Like she was fighting against that knife. No sign that she fought back at all, like skin under her fingernails. There was a pretty large contusion on the side of her head. Pathologist figured she was knocked out pretty early. I suppose that was some comfort. At least she didn't know much about what was happening to her.'
Wilcox walked over to a tree trunk and pointed down. 'This is where we found her clothes. Crazy thing was, they were all folded up nice and polite.'
He walked a few steps away, back into the center of the clearing. He looked up as if trying to see through the overhang to the sky, shook his head, then motioned to Cowart. 'This is where we found the major blood residue. Killed her right here.'
'How come no murder weapon was ever discovered?'
The detective shrugged. 'Look around you. We went all over the area. Used a metal detector. Nothing. Either he threw it away someplace else, or I don't know. Look, you could walk down to the edge of the swamp, take a knife and just stick it straight down in the mud ten, twelve inches and we'd never find it. Not unless you stepped on the damn thing.'
The detective continued to walk through the clearing. 'There was a little blood trail leading right along here. The autopsy showed that the rape was premortem. About half the cuts were, too. But a bunch were afterwards. Kinda like he went crazy when she was dead, just cutting and slashing. Anyway, after he was finished, he dragged her down here and dumped her in the water.'
He pointed to the swamp edge. 'He pushed her down, got her under those roots there. You couldn't see her unless you were right on top of her. He'd tossed some loose brush on top. We were lucky to find her as quick as we did. Hell, we were lucky to find her at all. The guys would have gone right past her, 'cept one of them had his hat knocked off by a low branch. When he reached out to grab the hat, he spotted her down there. Just damn-fool blind luck, really.'
'But what about his clothing, wouldn't there be some sign? Like blood or hair or something?'
'We tossed his house pretty good after the confession. But we didn't come up with nothing.'
'Same for the car. There had to be something.'
'When we picked the son of a bitch up, he was just finishing cleaning out that car. Scrubbed it down real fine. There was a section cut out of the rug on the passenger's side, too. That was long gone. Anyway, the damn car was shining like it was brand-new. We didn't find anything.' The detective rubbed his forehead, then looked at the sweat on his fingers. 'We don't have the same kind of forensic capability that your big-city guys have, anyway. I mean, we aren't in the dark ages or anything, but lab work up here is slow and not altogether reliable. There may have been something that a real pro could have found with one of those FBI spectrographs. We didn't. We tried hard, but we didn't come up with nothing.'
He paused. 'Well, actually, we found one thing, but it didn't help none.'
'What was that?'
'A single pubic hair. Trouble was, it didn't match up with Joanie Shriver's. But it wasn't Ferguson's neither.'
Cowart shook his head. He could feel the heat, the closeness of the air suffocating him. 'If he confessed, why didn't he tell you where the clothes were? Why didn't he tell you where he hid the knife? What's the point of a confession unless you get all the details straight?'
Wilcox glared at Cowart, reddening. He started to say something, but then chewed back his words, leaving the questions hanging in the still, hot air of the clearing. 'Let's go,' he said. He turned and started to make his way out of the location, not looking back to see if Cowart was following. 'We got someplace we gotta be.'
Cowart took one last lingering look at the murder site. He wanted to sear it into his memory. Feeling a mixture of excitement and disgust, he trailed after the detective.
The detective pulled the unmarked car to a stop in front of a small house more or less like all the other houses in that block. It was single-storey, white, cinder block, with a well-cropped lawn and an attached garage. A red-brick walkway led down to the sidewalk. Cowart could see a patio area stretching around the back, a black kettle grill on one side. A tall pine tree shaded half the house from the day's heat, throwing a large shadow across the front. He did not know where they were or why they had stopped, so he turned away from the house and looked at the detective.
'Your next interview, Wilcox said. He had been quiet since they'd left the crime scene and now a tinge of harshness had crept into his voice. 'If you're up for it.'