Parker hadn’t liked the look on Naylor’s face. It suggested that trouble had not only arrived but was unpacking its bags for a long stay, and might well find a way to involve him, if it hadn’t already. He glanced at the damaged knuckles of his right hand. He should have kept driving, he thought, and never left the highway for Burdon County.
Patricia Hartley, like the town of Cargill itself, was a dead end.
The girl lay naked on her back among dwarf sumac, her arms and legs splayed. Her body bore evidence of multiple piercings from a blade. A partially stripped branch had been jammed into her mouth and forced down her throat, while a second was buried deep enough in her vagina to have hit bone. Griffin surmised this without the benefit of an X-ray, because Estella Jackson had been violated in a similar way, and probably Patricia Hartley as well, although the worst of her injuries had not featured in any newspaper or autopsy reports and were therefore the subject of base rumor and conjecture. Jurel Cade, meanwhile, had warned all those with knowledge of the facts to keep their mouths shut, even around husbands and wives, fathers and mothers.
Like Jackson and Hartley, the girl was black, and probably no more than sixteen or seventeen years old. Griffin didn’t recognize her, even allowing for the disfigurement caused by the branch in her mouth, but then he couldn’t have named more than a handful of the colored kids around town, and then only the ones who had crossed his path for the wrong reasons. But no child deserved this, no matter her color, her disposition, or her place in the hierarchy of the county.
He asked Kel Knight who had found her.
‘Tilon Ward.’
‘What was he doing out here?’
‘Claims he was heading into the Ouachita to check on his raccoon traps.’
‘Before five in the morning?’
‘He said something about early birds.’
Tilon Ward purportedly lived on welfare, but like many such individuals, he found ways to supplement his income. One of them was hunting, both in and out of season. The other, it was strongly suspected, involved the production and distribution of methamphetamine, which sold for about $100 per gram in Little Rock, Fayetteville, and Fort Smith. Here in Cargill, locals got a discount, because good deals made good neighbors. Ward wasn’t a bad guy as suspected meth manufacturers went, but that didn’t make him a good one. Residents of the state were currently being sentenced at three times the national rate for methamphetamine offenses, which wasn’t a statistic to make anyone proud. Even the dealers didn’t need the kind of attention those figures would inevitably attract. Griffin had tried speaking informally to Ward about his activities in an effort to encourage a reconsideration of his life choices, but hadn’t got anywhere. Eventually, he knew, Ward would end up dead or behind bars, and neither of those solutions to the problem he represented would give Griffin any pleasure.
There was history between them, these two.
‘You want to talk to him?’ said Knight.
‘In a few minutes. Did he call 911?’
‘No, he got in touch with the station house direct.’
‘Huh,’ said Griffin. That was another thing about Ward: he wasn’t dumb, and didn’t allow wax to build up in his ears. He was fully aware of the tensions in the region, and the whispers about Patricia Hartley. Ward was setting down a marker by electing to inform the Cargill PD about the body, and not Jurel Cade, who was chief investigator for the county. Ward liked Griffin a whole lot better than he did Jurel Cade, and perhaps trusted him to do what was right by the town – although what that might be, Griffin himself had yet to determine. All he knew for sure was that he now had a second body with which to contend – or even a third, depending on how one counted Estella Jackson, and there was only so long a man could allow such a state of affairs to continue.
‘What about clothing or possessions?’ he asked.
‘Nothing nearby,’ said Knight, ‘but we’ll wait for better light before we start the search.’
Griffin forced himself to look again at the girl’s body, but without anger or sorrow. They would serve no purpose here.
‘We won’t find anything, not unless he was careless, and this doesn’t look like the work of a careless man.’
‘Indeed, it does not.’
In the beam from his flashlight, Griffin could see some blood on the ground between the dead girl’s legs, and some more around her mouth, but not a lot of it. She’d likely been killed elsewhere, and the branches inserted after her death. The latter was a small mercy. She’d endured enough pain at the end.
‘Any idea who she is?’
‘No, but I’ve sent Lorrie Colson to fetch Pettle.’
Reverend Nathan Pettle was pastor of the Cargill African Methodist Episcopal Church. He also ran an outreach program for the poor of all denominations, and was the main point of contact between the black and white communities in Cargill. Pettle was their best chance of identifying the girl quietly and quickly.
‘What about forensics?’
‘Tucker McKenzie is on his way.’
Which Griffin was glad to hear, because he had questions for McKenzie about the photographs of Patricia Hartley contained in Parker’s file.
‘Who’s at the station house?’ said Knight.
‘Naylor.’
Joshua Petrie, one of the part-time officers, was standing nearby, keeping an eye on Tilon Ward, who was sitting on the rear fender of his truck, smoking a cigarette and looking sallow, even allowing for the cocklight, as Griffin’s English grandmother used to call this time of morning. If it wasn’t for Parker, Griffin could have had Naylor here as well. Then again, it might be that Naylor was no longer guarding some drifter from New York, but a killer.
Griffin wondered how long he could get away with keeping the fact of the body’s discovery from Jurel Cade: just a few hours, probably. Loyd Holt, the coroner, wasn’t actively corrupt, but he was ineffectual, and wouldn’t be disposed to making an enemy of the sheriff’s office. His handling of the Hartley case was confirmation of that, if any were needed. Burdon was one of only three counties in the state in which coroners were appointed, rather than elected to two-year terms. In practical terms, this meant Loyd Holt served at the pleasure of the Cade family. He was their creature.
Tucker McKenzie, on the other hand, didn’t give a rat’s ass whether Jurel and his kin liked him or not, because they didn’t pay his salary, so Holt was the weak link. With some arm-twisting, he might be willing to hold off for a while on informing Jurel Cade. Holt received $2,500 a year as county coroner, and for that he was required to be on call 24/7. On the other hand, he possessed zero medical qualifications, had only been appointed because he was a chronic insomniac – which meant he was usually wide-awake when the night calls came through – and was additionally the third-best undertaker in the county.
Of three.
‘We’re not equipped to handle a killing like this,’ said Griffin. ‘We need more people, and a level of expertise that’s beyond us at our best.’
‘We could let Parker go,’ said Knight. ‘It would free up Naylor, at least.’
‘The hell we will. We don’t even know for sure who he is yet, and now we have a dead girl, and a stranger in custody who was asking questions about other dead girls.’