He lifted his head just enough to see. The car was barely ten yards in front of him, idling, a beast hungry in the darkness. He pushed his cheek down hard into the dirt and tried not to breathe. A moment passed, and then another.
The transmission snicked softly as the driver shifted into another gear, and then the tires squealed softly, turning on the asphalt. He lifted his head. The car was backing into a turn. Headlamps came on, sweeping across the field on the other side of the highway, and the car roared back toward Grand Point.
He stood in time to see the vague shapes of bubble lights on the roof. Reems, or another of Milner’s men, wanted to make sure he was gone.
He went back to his car.
EIGHTEEN
The Peering County Democrat’s offices were above the True Value Hardware, across the highway from the courthouse.
‘Good morning,’ he said to the sour-faced woman at the gray metal desk. ‘I’m Jonah Ridl, of the Chicago Sun-Times.’ Eying the other gray desk in the small room, fortunately vacant, he added the lie: ‘My office called?’
‘Never heard of you,’ the woman snapped.
She was barely in her thirties, but already her face had hardened with the squinting eyes and deep frown lines of a woman angry at being lied to for decades. There was also the possibility she’d sensed that he’d slept in his car on a farm road a safe mile past the outskirts of Peering County, and shaved by a stream.
He pulled out his wallet, brimming with bits of paper. ‘I’m to meet with ah, ah…’ He made a show of fumbling through the scraps of old notes.
‘Horace Wiggins, our publisher,’ the woman said impatiently. ‘He’s the only other one who works here.’
Ridl smiled with what he hoped looked like gratitude. ‘Yes. Mr Wiggins, of course. It’s about the murders.’
‘Can’t help you now. Horace is out, photographing the funeral.’
‘Betty Jo Dean is being buried so soon?’ he asked, faking surprise at what Reems had told him the night before. ‘I figured the police would want her body for at least another day.’
‘Doc said it was best.’
‘Yes, of course. That would be Doctor Romulus Farmont? I’m here to speak to him as well.’
‘I could swear I’ve seen you before. In town, earlier than today.’
‘I must have an evil twin,’ he said.
‘At the Hacienda, last night,’ she said, with the certainty of a woman who’s never been wrong. About anything. Ever.
‘That’s a lovely brooch,’ he said, trying to ingratiate himself with her by feigning interest in the enormous cut-glass abomination that hung on her bird-like chest like a fallen window sash.
A slight smile twitched at the frown lines guarding her mouth. ‘Anyway, Horace is not here,’ she said, less harshly.
He took the chance. ‘I was supposed to see the crime scene photographs.’
‘Says who?’
‘Said my office. They arranged it with Mr Wiggins.’
‘I don’t know anything about that. Besides, there’s only the one.’
‘Pardon me?’
‘Horace brought in only the one picture.’
‘You saw it, then?’
‘Wasn’t supposed to, but I did. Horrible.’ She fingered the weight of the glass brooch.
‘Badly decomposed, I heard.’
‘I couldn’t see that, for the leaves, but then I only looked for an instant.’
‘Leaves?’
‘There were leaves all over her head, completely covering it up. I suppose that’s just as well – spares the family from seeing.’
‘I’m only here for the day. I don’t suppose you…’ He let the plea dangle like the glass on the plain of her chest.
She glanced at the door nervously and stood up. ‘You must promise to tell no one I showed you, because you should really wait for Horace.’
‘Not a word,’ Ridl said.
She walked to the other desk, took an eight-by-ten black-and-white picture from an envelope, and brought it back to Ridl.
‘Mr Wiggins doesn’t shoot in color?’ No one shot crime scene photos in black and white anymore.
‘Not this time.’
At first, all he saw were leaves, just as she’d said. But then he made out an upper torso, lying chest down on the ground, and the top half of a pair of white panties, partially covered by the folded dark slacks Reems had mentioned at his press briefing. The girl’s patterned blouse had been tugged up, exposing her skin up to the back strap of her white bra. The upper portion of her right arm and her elbow were also visible; the rest of the arm and all of her head were hidden under the cover of leaves.
The photo looked arranged, as though the profusion of leaves had been meant to obscure any meaningful details.
‘You’re sure this is the only photo?’ Ridl asked.
‘Horace said any more would only distress the family unnecessarily.’
Ridl stopped himself from telling the lame-headed woman that crime scene photos were not given as keepsakes to the victim’s family. ‘I can’t see any decomposition,’ he said.
‘Doc Farmont wouldn’t be wrong about such a thing, nor would Bud Wiley. If they say it was there, it’s there.’
‘There’s no bloating at her back or on the part of the arm that’s visible. Bodies bloat up after death, especially in heat like we’ve been having.’
‘That’s a question for the doc.’
‘And supposedly, the excessive decomposition is why they hurried to bury her today?’
‘No supposedly about it,’ she said, bristling. ‘You best talk to Doc and Bud if you want to learn more.’
He thanked the woman, gave another smile to the brooch on her chest and went down the stairs.
Too much was wrong. The cops were making too little of too many bullets fired into Pribilski’s crotch. Too much evidence had been destroyed, through trampling and mowing and washing. The cops were too insistent that Betty Jo Dean had lain a long time along the Devil’s Backbone, when too many searchers would attest to that not being true. Betty Jo Dean was being hustled too quickly into the ground. And the one photo taken of Betty Jo Dean’s corpse smacked too much of being staged to obscure anything meaningful at the discovery site.
Perhaps most of all, though, Sheriff Delbert Milner might have gotten too sick after seeing the most sought-after corpse in his county.
He looked across to the row of phone booths in front of the courthouse. A telephone directory dangled below the stainless steel shelf in the closest one.
He walked across the highway.
NINETEEN
The directory had listed Delbert Milner as living on the western outskirts of Grand Point. It was a tidy beige brick ranch house brightened by green shutters, set on an expansive, freshly mowed corner lot. Carefully trimmed yews and a long row of purple and white flowers ran along the front.
Ordinarily, it would have looked like a happy house, but today a red-and-white Cadillac ambulance was backed crooked in the driveway, and a Peering County sheriff’s car had been left at a haphazard angle out on the street. Both had their lights flashing.
A young sheriff’s deputy stood stiffly outside the front door. He was holding his wide-brimmed hat in front of him, as though he were in church. Or at a funeral.
The top was up on Ridl’s convertible, but it wouldn’t buy him invisibility. The deputies knew his car. He parked three houses back, behind a brand-new Ford F-150 pickup truck, and had just slumped low behind the steering wheel when a second sheriff’s car raced up and slammed to a stop in the middle of the street, next to the first cruiser. A haggard-looking, middle-aged woman in a white nurse’s uniform got out of the back and ran through the front door the deputy had hurriedly jerked open. An instant later, it must have been her who screamed.
The deputy who’d driven the nurse looked out his window at Ridl’s car. Ridl recognized him. It was the tall cop he’d seen on Poor Farm Road on his first day in town – one of the pair who’d ticketed him for illegal parking and then for missing a rear license plate. The cop was speaking into his radio handset.