Hunting Season Read online

  “Jesus, Mary ’n’ Joseph,” the sheriff muttered.

  “I’ve photographed pretty much everything,” Anna said.

  “Glad somebody knows what they’re doing.” Jones’s voice was mild but his black irises, set in slightly yellowed eyes, had gotten shiny, as if they’d grown hot enough to spark. Jones carried a lot of anger. That he had it under control only made it the more formidable.

  “I’ll check around back,” André said. His smooth face showed nothing. Perhaps there was a hint of disdain in the flare of the nostril or in the curve of the lip. Perhaps Anna only imagined it because he looked too fine for everyday use.

  “Gloves,” the sheriff reminded him.

  Gates nodded, a small tight movement that could be seen as either respect or insubordination, depending on what side of the bed one had gotten out of that morning.

  “I’ll be jiggered!” The words erupted from the direction the coroner had taken. Anna went to Polly’s room, the sheriff at her shoulder.

  The coroner had pulled on latex gloves but hadn’t taken responsibility for his other extremities. His tasseled shoes were executing an odd little two-step in the tracks in the dust on the floor.

  “What you got, Gil?” Jones asked.

  “It’s Doyce Barnette, Raymond’s brother. I figured he’d get himself killed one day. Doyce never could tell ‘come here’ from ‘sic ’em.’ I figured he’d run his truck into a bridge abutment or fall off a roof. Now who’d bother to go and kill poor ol’ Doyce?”

  Despite the less-than-flattering eulogy, the coroner seemed genuinely upset. Anna liked him a shade better than she had.

  Jones didn’t say anything, but he pulled off his hat. Stepping neatly onto the rug, cognizant of the crime scene, he looked at the body. “Doyce all right. I better go on over after and break it to Raymond. A shame. There was never any harm in Doyce.”

  “That’s a fact,” the coroner said. “Rest of the family’s mean as a whole nest of snakes, but I never heard anything but stupid against Doyce. I’m pronouncing him dead. I got to get out of here. I’m showing a house at ten-thirty.” The moment of sentiment was over.

  “What do you figure killed him?” the sheriff asked.

  “I’m not saying, but you gotta figure he didn’t come in here in his underdrawers and choke to death on a piece of venison. Homicide. Can’t tell how long he’s been dead. Less than twelve hours at a guesstimate.” He prodded the dead man’s jaw with a forefinger. “Hard as a rock. Full rigor. Closer than that I’m not going. The doctors with their doodads’ll have to work it out. Let me know how the autopsy comes out.” He left at a trot, the pitter-patter of his little feet retreating down the steps.

  “Gil’s a good enough coroner,” Sheriff Jones said evenly. “He’s just not big on the amenities.” He took a pair of latex gloves from a leather snap pocket on his gun belt and pulled them on, careful to keep their powdery insides away from his spotless uniform. “You’ve got photos of the body, I take it?”

  Anna said she did and Jones stepped carefully into the stir of dust Gil Franklin had left in the tracks on the planks by the bed and bent over the corpse. “Poor old Doyce. Let’s see if you can tell us anything.”

  With delicacy and an innate respect, he began examining the body. Anna hovered nearby, feeling, in red frock and lipstick, like a ghoulish matron.

  The marvels of modem science had made in-depth studies of the body on site passé. Too much fiddling by officers on scene was more likely to contaminate trace evidence than uncover a truth. The sheriff was looking for situational evidence, proof of cause and effect that would be lost when the body was moved from where it had been found.

  “Quilt’s rucked up,” he said, pointing to the coverlet bunched under the locked and rigid knees.

  “Dragged,” Anna said and told him of the track on the back porch. “But not all the way. Carried to the inn, then dragged through it.”

  “Doyce wasn’t just fluffy, he was fat. Well over two hundred pounds. Dead weight, what do you figure? Two, three strong men to carry him? Did you check for tire tracks? Maybe he got drove up out back.”

  “We’ll look,” Anna said.

  John Brown Brown was coming down from headquarters in Tupelo, a three-hour drive if one broke the speed limit the whole way and didn’t run into traffic in Jackson. The section of the Trace that would eventually link Anna’s district on the southern end with the rest of the parkway was yet to be finished. At Clinton those northbound had to leave the false wilderness of the wooded two-lane road for the high-speed, commerce-choked freeways through Mississippi’s capital city.

  Chief Ranger Brown wanted to see the body in situ, but the day was warm and getting warmer. “Poor ol’ Doyce,” as Anna was coming to think of him, a title at least a hair more respectable than “the walrus,” would be getting ripe fast.

  “We use Stephen Hayne at the Mississippi Mortuary in Rankin County for autopsies,” Anna said. “If that works for you, I’ll get an ambulance sent down for poor—for Mr. Barnette.”

  The sheriff shot her a hard look, seeing if she mocked the dead. Evidently she appeared innocent of that trespass, and he softened. “Hayne is good.” He stepped back from the bed and said, “Doggone it, this is looking ugly.” His gaze wandered around the small Spartan room as if he hoped he’d find something to ameliorate the darkness of his thoughts. Nothing presented itself. “What do you make of the bruises, the chafing in the groin area, the state of semi-nudity?”

  The sheriff was embarrassed. A possible sex crime, particularly one involving the male of the species, had caused his comfort level to collapse. Had he been ten years old, Anna suspected he’d have resorted to crude remarks and inane giggles to distance himself. A careful man, cloaked in the dignity of office, he’d opted instead for stilted formality and averted eyes.

  Anna had a wicked desire to shock him just because she could. She contained her sophomoric urges. “The guy’s obviously been restrained: straps, belts, ropes, whatever. My guess is straps. The bruise marks are wide and, but for the inner thighs, the skin’s not broken. From the color of the bruising I’d guess the restraints were tight, brutally tight. No defensive marks or wounds. He must have agreed to the bondage. At least at first.”

  Jones’s face was blank, his eyes fixed to the left and above Anna’s right ear as if he listened to a siren singing on her shoulder. Either he was thinking deep thoughts or he’d had a small stroke.

  Annoyed, Anna said sharply, “What do you know about Doyce Barnette?”

  He didn’t answer right away but the frozen look melted. Had Anna been a superstitious woman she might have said his soul came back into his body, such was the change from mindlessness to mindfulness in the man’s eyes.

  “Bondage,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “Now that’s a word we don’t want to go throwing around down in this part of the country.”

  “Because of the whole slavery thing?” Anna asked, knowing she sounded about as sensitive and ethnically diverse as a hitching post.

  Jones looked startled, then laughed. A big cackle, like that of a gargantuan hen with a whole clutch of new eggs, made the windows of Grandma Polly’s room rattle with the ghosts of better times.

  “No. No,” he said, a rill of liquid merriment still running beneath the words. “We got the Internet, satellite TV and the Playboy Channel. New evils for the new millennia. Bondage means bondage, sadomasochism and the like. We start tossing that around amongst our conservative churchgoers and poor ol’—and Doyce’s family will take a heck of a beating. A heck of a beating,” he repeated in case Anna didn’t get it the first time. “And whatever Doyce got himself into, there’s no need us going on about it now he’s dead.”

  Anna must have looked unconvinced, though she was merely pondering the ramifications this omission might have on the investigation.

  The sheriff went on to say, “His mother’s still living, you know. Ninety-three and still goes to church every Sunday and lives in the house where sh
e was married.”

  “I don’t feel any compunction to noise the details about as yet, sheriff,” Anna said carefully.

  Jones smiled. “Call me Clintus. This may be a long investigation.”

  “Clintus,” Anna agreed, liking the man both for his laughter and his concern for old women.

  “Speaking of conservative churchgoers, take a look at this.” She led him to the antique writing desk and pointed at the verse circled in red ink.

  “Sins against His righteous laws,” Clintus read the second line aloud.

  “You think maybe one of the righteous took against Doyce’s extracurricular activities?” Anna asked.

  “Ugly,” the sheriff repeated and whistled long and low. “This couldn’t have been circled some other time, maybe have nothing to do with Doyce and all?” he asked hopefully.

  “I don’t think so.”

  Both were silent for a moment, paying homage to confusion. Then Anna remembered the question that had gone unanswered. “You were going to tell me what you know about Doyce Barnette.”

  “I was, was I?” he returned but there was a twinkle, like a ripple in ink, in his dark eyes so Anna waited.

  The room was growing crowded, the bloated corpse on the bed swelling in some non-corporeal way, pushing air from the confined space. Anna led the way out onto the porch and breathed easier for it. A bench, painted the same bright blue as the shutters and doors, was set under the window into the central room. She sat, not because she thought the story of Doyce Barnette would be a long one, but because she was paying the price of feminine allure: the snazzy red-and-black pumps were hurting her feet.

  After first checking to make sure the paint would not flake off onto his uniform, Clintus Jones leaned against a post. The sun had climbed high enough so that the porch was shaded. A gentle breeze blew in from the southeast, dry and warm and sharp with the scent of pine. For an instant Anna was back in Colorado on an Indian summer day. The moment passed and, with it, the peculiar ache remembering the mountains always engendered.

  “There’s not a lot to know about Doyce,” Clintus began. “I never had much dealings with the man either professionally or personally. We don’t move in the same circles and, since I been with the sheriff’s department, he’s never run afoul of the law. But because this is a small town I can give you an idea—gossip I guess. No, more than that. Down here, with all of us living in the same spot more or less for umpty-ump generations, you get what you might call an ambient knowledge about folks. Nobody says. It’s not written down. You just know your own folks.” He looked at Anna to see if she was following his line of thought.

  She tried to look intelligent. As for the knowing your own folks, she’d have to take his word. Anna lived a transient life, first in the theater with Zach, then in the National Park Service. People were from all over, most just passing through to someplace they thought would be better. Nobody had any “folks,” just a series of acquaintances.

  “Ambient knowledge,” Anna echoed to get Clintus going again.

  “Right. Doyce. His mama owns the old family homestead that backs up against the Trace that-a-way.” He pointed west by northwest, indicating a line through Eric Chamberlain’s kitchen garden and the trees beyond. “Big place. Nice. Lake. About three hundred acres. From the talk, there’d been near ten times that, but it got squandered and whittled down over the years. There’s a house on the place, built right after the Civil War. Doyce lived there with his mama. There was some kind of disability paycheck he got and his brother helped them out some. Doyce never worked long as I’ve known. Likeable sort. Not real smart. Sucker to any modern-day carpetbagger with a get-rich-quick scheme. Got along with his neighbors. Liked to hunt and fish, played a little cards. Pretty much like a hundred other Natchez boys,” Clintus said. Anna raised her eyebrows, an oblique reference to the strap-marked, underwear clad body inside.

  Clintus shrugged, a beefy heave of wide shoulders. “Goes to show you what ambient knowledge is worth, I guess.”

  The ambulance came. The body was removed. It was getting on noon. André Gates and the sheriff were waiting for Anna in the parking lot. It had been decided she and Clintus would break the bad news to Doyce’s younger brother, Raymond, and let him decide whether or not to tell “Mama” she’d outlived one of her sons. A chatter of visitors, led by Shelly Rabine, was trickling up the path from the visitors center, and still Anna was loathe to tear herself away from the old stand.

  Doyce Barnette’s shade did not haunt the simple structure. Bizarre as his death was, the old stand had probably known stranger. So many years and so many lives had weathered the boards, a modem ghost apparently just beaded up and rolled like rain off treated lumber.

  There was no more to see, nor was Anna nagged by a sense of having missed something. It was the Garden of Gethsemane that kept her hovering around Polly’s room. The book itself had been gathered into evidence, a rectangle of dust-free oak left where it had lain open for so long. She remained near the desk hoping for inspiration, if not answers. The verse, circled in red ink was so ... so what? Anna looked around the simple, honest room with its spare utilitarian furnishings.

  Cheesy. Circling the verse was superfluous, high handed, melodramatic, de classé. Anna laughed aloud as she pondered the crime of bad taste in conjunction with murder. Personal human tragedy aside, though she’d not admit it in polite society with over-population causing every aspect of the earth to groan under the collective weight of Homo sapiens, perhaps bad taste—or at least bad judgment—was the more destructive of the two.

  Personal human tragedy aside. That was the rub. And, until she was one hundred percent certain she was not a member of the human race, she would care. At least enough to do her job.

  “Those sheriffy guys are getting antsy,” Shelly said, her head poking in the doorway. “Besides, I’ve got visitors.”

  Bad news could wait. Anna left Clintus and André in her office with placatory Coca-Colas from the machine in the maintenance shop while she drove the Rambler back to her house in Rocky Springs and exchanged it and her clothes for those more befitting an on-duty National Park Service law-enforcement ranger. In boots and gun and forest-green tie, Anna felt better able to face the world.

  Taco, the loopy golden retriever she had inherited, leaped around on his three remaining legs with the same annoying energy he’d shown when he’d possessed the requisite four. Since he’d sacrificed the limb to save her life, Anna had felt she owed the great drooling beast and had taken to letting him patrol with her on the paper-thin pretext she was training him as a drug dog. The upside was, though he’d sniffed out nothing but a bit of beef jerky in a hitchhiker’s front pocket, with Taco along compliance was a breeze. A three-legged ambassador from men’s best friends tended to disarm hostile motorists. They still grumbled and argued over their speeding tickets but in a more subdued fashion. It was almost as if they didn’t want to appear to be total assholes in front of the dog.

  The downside was every time she put on her uniform, Taco thought he was going somewhere and became a grinning bounding idiot that filled her with guilt whenever she left him behind.

  Clintus and Anna dropped André off at the sheriff’s department in Natchez. He insisted he had work to do, but Anna suspected it was more that he didn’t like riding three to a car with him in the cage in back. Appearing cool was probably fairly high on André Gates’s priority list.

  An hour and a half had been wasted while Anna had run north forty miles to change clothes. It was well after noon when they headed for Raymond Barnette’s place of business. Clintus drove, leaving Anna free to study the town of Natchez.

  The last city on the Trace, it had historically been the main port for goods rafted down the Mississippi River from the interior of the country. It was there the Kentucks and other traders exchanged their products for gold and started the long walk upriver and home. The trade goods were loaded on ships and taken downriver to the sea.

  Modern-day Natchez was an unse
ttling mix of an affluent past and a struggling present. The interior of the town was crusted with antebellum mansions surrounded by live oaks that not so much towered over as embraced the property. New construction farther out along the highway degenerated into smaller, poorer homes, then the seemingly inevitable litter of Wendy’s, Taco Bells and car dealerships. The directions they’d gotten from Clintus’s secretary said Barnette’s was situated between a Jiffy Lube and a Merchants and Planters Bank on the southern edge of the city limits.

  Raymond Barnette was an undertaker by trade. According to Clintus, he was known behind his back by the nickname “Digger.” Anna became familiar with his long face and toothy smile some miles before they pulled under the pillared portico at Barnette’s Funeral Home. Driven into front lawns throughout suburban Natchez were color posters on wooden stakes sporting the grinning visage of the mortician. “Barnette for Sheriff. The last word in honesty,” was lettered across the bottom of the cardboard, white on patriotic blue.

  “The competition?” Anna asked as they passed a particularly prominent display.

  Jones grunted. “He’s put his signs out way early. Way early.” He was silent for a minute, as if fighting the desire to say something bad about somebody. The bad won. “The last word is right. I think Digger’s last honest word was in nineteen eighty-nine when he’d had a few too many and admitted he got along better with the dead than the living.”

  “Well, he ought to get along with his brother just fine now,” Anna said callously.

  Jones shot her a sideways look, but she thought a hint of humor glinted through his careful exterior. “It’d be a first,” he admitted.

  “Don’t you have to have some kind of law-enforcement background to be a sheriff?” Anna asked.

  “No. Purely an elected position. Law enforcement helps, but it isn’t a requirement. Raymond was an MP in the army. He did an eight- or twelve-year hitch—I don’t remember which—in the seventies. He’s been leaning hard on that. ‘A return to discipline.’”