Robert turned to the coroner. "Would you excuse us for a sec?" he asked. "I want to talk to my brother alone."
The other man nodded and began walking slowly back toward the cars.
Robert looked at Rich for a moment but said nothing. His gaze was troubled. "Is he down--?" Rich began. Robert nodded.
Rich moved closer, standing at the top of the arroyo and looking toward the bottom. His heart began thump "Iesus " he breathed. ing in his chest.. ,
There was nothing left of Manuel Tortes but a skeleton covered with skin.
He stared, unable to look away. Even from here, even from this angle, he could see the wrinkled parchment appearance of the man's face, the way his teeth, protruding between dark deflated lips, looked overlarge in his now shrunken head, the way his nose had collapsed in on itself, a crater between hard-bone cheeks. There were round black holes in the sockets where the old man's eyes had been.
Goose bumps popped up on Rich's arms. Manuel Tortes was sell clothed, wearing faded jeans and a greas Tshirt, but his shoes had fallen off, his pants were partially pulled down, and the thin covering of dried crinkled skin which now outlined the infrastructure of his waist and lower legs was clearly visible. i:'
Around the body, in an almost deliberate semicircle, were dead animals, similarly drained, similarly dried: a crow, a hawk, two jackrabbits, a roadrunner.
"What is this?" Rich asked. "How did this happen?" Robert shook his head, looking toward the two deputies standing by the cruiser. He had not glanced into the arroyo once, Rich noticed, not since he'd arrived.
"I don't know," he said. "I don't know what's going on here. Even Brad's never heard tell of anything like this."
Rich found that he, too, was having a hard time looking back into the arroyo. He kept his eyes on his brother. "Who discovered the body?"
"I did. I saw the Jeep parked there, no one around, and I came over to check it out. I was driving the Bronco and had no radio, so when I saw Manuel down there, I hauled ass back to the station, called Brad, called you, and came back here with Ted and Steve."
"You haven't gone down there yet? .... Robert shook his head. "We have to be careful. There might be footprints. We don't want to disturb anything. We'll walk along the cliff a ways and find another way down."
Rich turned away from his brother and looked to his right, to where the arroyo curved away from town. He had not come here for a long time, but as children he and Robert and their friends had played here often, converting crevices into caves, laying boards across outcroppings of rock to make forts and hideouts. They had thought the arroyo private, had assumed that they had discovered it, and no one else knew about it.
It had been their secret place, where they'd hidden from enemies and adults and imaginary antagonists.
He could not remember the last time he'd been here, but as he looked down the length of the gully it seemed different to him. It was now permanently tainted by the presence of death. Of course, he was viewing the scene with adult eyes now, seeing the dead man as an incursion of evil into what had once been a childhood paradise. As kids, he was sure that they would have had no problem adjusting to the idea of the corpse, would, in fact, have concocted some elaborate adventure story to explain its existence, a story that would have made their hideaway seem that much more forbidden and exciting.
What had they known then, though? Nothing. They'd been children. They would not have understood the implications of what had happened, would not have been any more frightened by this dried husk of a man and the dead animals surrounding him than they would have been by a gruesome horror story told around the campfire.
He was scared now, though. And the chill which had come upon him when he'd first looked into the arroyo had not lifted. He turned again toward his brother. "Is this a murder or is this a natural death?"
"A 'natural death'?"
"You know what I mean. Did he just die out here and get, you know, dehydrated or something?"
"I saw him working yesterday when I drove by the garage."
Rich shivered. "Then how could this have happened? How could this physically have been done?"
Robert took a deep breath. "Remember a few years back when we had those rumors of witches and satanists meeting out here? There were supposedly people in robes chanting when the moon was full?"
"But nothing ever came of it. You never found anything. Hell, you never even found anyone who'd seen the chanters. It was all friend-of-a-friend stuff."
"Yeah, but maybe this is connected. I mean, Jesus, look at him." He motioned toward the body. "This is not your average everyday murder."
"There are no 'average everyday murders." This is the first murder you've ever handled."
"And I'm scared shitless. I admit it. I don't know who I'm supposed to inform, how I'm supposed to begin the investigation. What if I screw up? I called Brad, he's here, he'll take the body and do an autopsy. I'll tell Manuel's wife. But do I have to tell the state police? Do I have to report this to the county supervisors? What is the chain of command here? What's the procedure? Who's going to know if I'm doing a decent job of investigation or poking the pooch?"
"Call Pee Wee. He'll know what to do. He's bound to have come across something like this."
"Something like this?" Robert shook his head. ""I don't think so."
"I don't mean something exactly like this, I mean a murder. He was chief for thirty years. I think he's handled murders before." Rich glanced again into the arroyo, his eye drawn to the shriveled bony body and its halo of empty animals. "I don't think anyone's come across something like this."
"I don't think so either." The breeze kicked up again, ruffling Robert's thinning hair. He said nothing for a moment. ""What do you think happened here?" he asked
Rich blinked against the warm wind, still felt cold. He cleared his throat. "I don't know," he said. "It's... it's not like something real. It's like something out of a damn movie, you know?"
Robert nodded. "I know." He spit, then ground the wet spot into the sand with the toe of his boot. He motioned toward the deputies and the coroner. "Come on," he said. "It's getting late. We've dicked around enough here. It's time to go down."
Rich nodded, saying nothing.
The two of them walked in silence toward the cars.
Brad Woods had performed autopsies on a lot of bodies in his time. Men and women who had died of old age, children who had succumbed to illness, even victims of mining accidents and car crashes. Some had been more heartbreaking than others, some had been more gruesome than others, but all had been within the range of normalcy. None of the bodies had ever scared him.
Until now.
He stared down at the form of Manuel Torres, laid out on the table in the center of the room. Naked, the old man's body looked even more inhuman than it had when enveloped within the too-large clothes. Lying on the sand, Manuel had seemed so shriveled and shrunken that he'd resembled a predatory stick insect that had crawled into the clothing of a human being. But here, on the table in the cold glare of the operating lights, the unbelievable distortion of the ordinary was even more frightening. Now Brad could clearly see that the in sectile limbs of the body were severely attenuated human arms and legs, that the sunken body cavity and strangely shriveled genitals were the products of acute emaciation, that the fright-mask face was the result of dehydration without decay.
He reached out and poked a tentative finger into the body's stomach region. He could feel the dryness even through the gloves, and in the silence of the room, against only the low hum of the lights, the skin made a Sound like that of a newspaper being crumpled.
He pulled back, nervous despite himself. The old man's bones were broken in several spots, his rib cage crushed, and in these places the skin had cracked open. None of the dermal layers had retained enough moisture to maintain flexibility. No blood had escaped from any of the openings.