“Chief,” Gross said, his tone just flat enough to skirt the line of disrespect.
“Hi, Ron.”
Instead of a smile and a joke, though, Gross settled himself and clasped his hands behind his back.
“Got your new detective out here,” Norman said as he walked up. “Glad you’re not letting the grass grow under her feet.”
Somers let out a sigh. “Hi, Paul.”
“Emery,” Norman said.
“What the fuck’s got your panties in a knot?” Hazard asked.
Norman shook his head, glanced at Keller—who was taking a selfie with the cruiser in the background—and spat. Saliva darkened the reddish earth.
“All right,” Somers said. “I’m going to have you wait here while we talk to the sheriff. He wanted help with a search. We’re dealing with a probable homicide, so that means we do this by the book.”
“Christ on the cross,” Gross said. “Out here? Across how many miles of that shit?” He nodded at the field. “This is a fucking joke.”
“It’s our job,” Somers said.
“It’s an exercise in sticking our heads up our asses.”
“What was that, Officer?”
Gross looked down and tucked his thumbs in his belt.
“Where’s your new detective?” Norman asked. “Make her do it.”
Somers set himself and looked the uniformed officer in the eyes. It took almost a minute before Norman spat again and shifted his attention to the dirt drive.
Yarmark was flattening a notebook against his thigh, scribbling with a stub of pencil.
Keller was scratching his balls.
Turning, Somers jerked his head for Hazard to follow. As they headed up the hill, he said in an undertone meant only for his husband, “Don’t say anything.”
Hazard was silent for a few yards. Then he asked, “Does the rookie write down everything you say?”
“I asked you not to say anything.”
“Word for word, John. I watched him.”
Somers groaned and walked faster.
They found the sheriff a couple hundred yards behind the house, in an old-growth section of forest, mostly oak and pine. The air smelled like wet wood and moss and soil with poor drainage. Although a clear trail ran through the woods, the sheriff stood several feet off the path, where the leaf litter looked deep. Two deputies were stringing up barricade tape; Somers only knew one of them, a woman named Neecie Weiss.
Those details registered peripherally. The majority of Somers’s attention concentrated on the dead man. The body lay slightly off the trail. It was difficult to determine exactly how far the spray of blood extended because as the blood dried, it had darkened, but Somers could tell that it arced across the fallen leaves, the tree trunks, and patches of dirt.
“Arterial spray,” Hazard said quietly.
Somers nodded.
The man looked to be in his late thirties, although death could skew a visual estimate. White. Average height. On the heavy side. He had dark hair that had been badly cut—either he’d done it himself, or he’d gone somewhere cheap and quick. His clothes were stained—blood and dirt—and they looked off-the-rack, Walmart edition: a Marvel t-shirt, jeans, Skechers. No surprise; even people who owned a good chunk of land could be poor. Or thrifty. Usually, in this part of the world, both.
“Scott Krower,” the sheriff said when they reached him. Dennis Engels wore the khaki uniform and star with a degree of familiarity that never crossed the line into casualness. He was older, on the far side of fifty, and beefy. His white mustache looked freshly trimmed. Over the course of the past year, Hazard and Somers had pursued and eventually caught the man who had killed the sheriff’s son, but the loss was still printed in the older man’s face. It always would be, Somers suspected. “Know him?”
Somers shook his head. Hazard did as well.
“We got the call from the neighbor.” He pointed back in the direction of Krower’s house. “She claims she saw him from her window, but she must have been poking around. If I can’t even see her house, there’s no way she saw him from her window.”
“A neighbor?” Hazard said. “Out here, the closest neighbor is usually a mile off.”
Engels shook his head. “Barely a hundred yards east of Krower’s house. From what a couple of the old-timer deputies told me, cousins used to own the land. That’s why they built so close. Krower bought this piece about six months back and moved here with his family. Somebody planted a windbreak, though, so you don’t see the other house unless you look for it.”
“They didn’t read enough Frost,” Hazard muttered.
Engels nodded at the body. “Dr. Boyer’s on her way; she’ll be here soon enough.”
“Mind if we take a look?”
“Go ahead. Careful of the trail; you’ll see why I want Emery as a consultant on this one.”
Somers glanced at Hazard, and Hazard frowned. They moved forward together, walking single file where it was clear that the first responders had already stepped—an attempt, at least, to minimize contaminating the scene further. The deeper Somers moved into the trees, the wetter and heavier the leaf litter became. The bare earth of the trail still looked soft.
“Rain?” he asked over his shoulder.
“Almost a week solid while you boys were gone,” the sheriff called up to them. “Dried out for the most part in the last couple of days.”
“But not under the trees,” Hazard said. He pointed to the impression in the soft ground. Shoeprints. A single set that led up the path to Krower’s corpse. Glancing back, Somers spotted where the responding deputy had started walking on the trail and then realized their mistake.
“Whoever got the callout had their head on straight,” Somers said. “They saw the prints, realized they were contaminating them, and got off the trail.”
“That was Deputy Weiss,” Engels said. “She’s a good one.”
Weiss waved absently, her attention fixed on securing the barricade tape.
Somers continued toward the body. Aside from the prints on the trail itself, the ground looked undisturbed. When he glanced back, he could see clearly where the deputies, the sheriff, and now he and Hazard had walked through the undergrowth and leaf litter. He scanned the forest around them. In every other direction, the ground looked undisturbed. As though Krower had walked out here alone and—what? Killed himself?
“It’s not impossible,” Hazard said with that uncanny way he had of answering Somers’s thoughts. “We just don’t have enough information yet.”
A few more steps brought them to Krower’s body. A whiff of corruption floated up, a mixture of loose bowels and decay and men’s deodorant. Somers hunkered down and patted his pockets. Before he could cuss himself, though, Hazard passed a pair of disposable gloves over his shoulder.
“You should have been a Boy Scout,” Somers said.
“And go camping? Sure.”
“Camping is lots of fun.” Somers snapped on the gloves. “I’ll take you camping sometime. You’ll love it.”