Fox Tracks

CHAPTER 14

Sheriff Ben Sidell knelt down. He didn’t touch the corpse, waiting instead for his team to arrive. Saturday was supposed to be his day off, but his hunt day was turning into something else. Gray and Sam drove back with him, all three men leaving their horses at the trailers. While among the other riders of the hunt, all three, plus Sister and Sybil, had kept their mouths shut.

Ben parked his battered Explorer about fifty yards from the Lorillard’s cul-de-sac just in case there might be any evidence in the road. No point driving over it, pushing it farther into the snow.

“When’s the last time either of you came down this way?” he asked.

“October,” Gray replied.

“About the same for me,” said Sam. “Once the old shed disintegrated back here we have no reason to come down.”

“Occasionally we check the road to see if poachers have parked here,” said Gray. “With all the thick pines and creepers, it’s easy to hide a vehicle even in winter. Now that Sam and I both live here, though, we’ve taken care of that problem. They know we’re watching.”

“Could you hear a vehicle from the house?” asked the good-looking sheriff.

“Maybe in summer,” Sam volunteered. “In winter, everything in the house is closed up—plus I’ve usually got a fire going. Damn, whoever dumped the body and the deer probably was one of the old poachers or someone who hunted alongside them. Course, most of those old boys are gone now. Hell, they got so old if they did kill a deer they couldn’t drag it out.” Sam shook his head.

“Who in particular among these old poachers might still be alive?” asked Ben, wishing the crime team would get there.

Sam thought a bit before answering. “Well, and you probably know this, back about three years ago Art DuCharme was poaching everywhere he could. Course, he’s not old. Why he did this I don’t know. Oh, and Donny Sweigart. Donny stopped all that once he started dating Sybil, but Art, who knows?”

Puzzled, Ben asked, “Art DuCharme has thousands of acres to hunt. Why come over here to poach?”

Gray’s moustache twitched upward slightly. Good as he was, Ben was from Ohio. He missed a few deep layers at the bottom of the seven-layer cake of Southern life.

Sam looked at his brother, then the sheriff, to whom he owed a great deal. When Ben first took over the job, he could have roughed up Sam and his fellow drunks. Instead, the young sheriff tried to get them into the Salvation Army programs. He acted as though, even as low as they might be at that moment, they were still human beings.

Sam then said, “If Art could shift focus away from his still, good. Why hunt there, risk others hunting there with you? People talk. Why let anyone see where he hides stuff? Then again, if he actually poached a deer without getting caught, he wins twice. Some people always have to have their hand in.” He used an old phrase, which Ben didn’t know, but he understood the meaning.

Standing around, no longer on horseback, the cold felt colder.

The crunch of tires on snow drew their attention back up the road. Ben had specifically told his crew not to hit the sirens. The arriving vehicle parked behind his Explorer. Four officers stepped out of the county-issued SUV, two in uniform. One of the cops wearing civilian clothes was the police department photographer.

Joylon Hobbs, the chief investigator, took off his warm gloves, then wiggled his fingers into thin rubber ones. He knelt down carefully before leaning over and opening the collapsed rib cage of the deer. Now visible, the human wore a heavy wool coat.

“Pennsylvania tuxedo,” Joylon said.

“And what is that?” Gray didn’t mean to intrude, but the description piqued his curiosity, already high.

“That’s the old name for his kind of wool winter jacket,” said Joylon. “Black plaid over red. Usually hunters will wear them, or at least country hunters. The city and suburban fellas wear four-hundred-dollar Gortex stuff with all kinds of linings, zippers, reflecting tape on the camo.”

“Ah,” Gray simply replied.

The two uniformed officers, both of them somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five, were stringing up crime scene tape. After securing a perimeter, they began scouring the snow. All they found were Bombardier’s tracks and then human footprints belonging to Ben, Gray, and Sam. Anything of potential value would be under that snow. They reported back to their boss, Ben.

“We don’t usually see this,” Luke uttered laconically.

“Yeah,” Jake agreed. He looked over at the Lorillard brothers, then back at the sheriff. “Murder around here is almost always domestic violence or drugs. Luckily, we don’t have much of that, but this, smart. I mean, the killer was smart and country.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Ben chided him, but not with rancor.

“Yes, sir.” Jake straightened up.

“Your hands getting cold?” Ben asked Joylon.

“Yes, they are. Hard to tell what’s left of the body. Won’t know until we get him on a slab. With any luck, we’ll at least know how he was killed. Used to be when we found a body, which was not often—back in the seventies or eighties—we’d know them. Now there’s so many new people, we don’t.” He asked Ben, “Did you call in a retrieval vehicle?”

“I did. And I told them no siren, too. After All is full of people. No point getting them stirred up and no point dealing with curiosity seekers.”

“Why would anyone want to see this?” asked Sam, appalled at the thought.

“You’d be amazed at what people want to see,” said Joylon. “Years ago back when I first started, we had a killer from just down the road from here that was insane. No doubt about it. He strung up his cousin, whom he hated, tortured him and put his eyeballs out with a ballpoint pen. For whatever reason, a local newspaper reporter included all the grisly details of the murder in his story, and our office was flooded with requests for the pictures.” Joylon stood up, peeled off his surgical gloves, gratefully putting back on his warm, woolly ones, knitted by his wife.

“Sick,” Gray half spat.

“World’s full of strange people,” Joylon replied simply.

“Gray, Sam, I’m sorry to keep you all out here in the cold,” said Ben. “Why don’t you take my Explorer back to the trailers? I’ll have Luke and Jake drop me off when we’re finished here. Just leave the keys in the ignition. No one’s going to steal that barge.”

“Funny,” Sam mused to his brother, “no worry about theft, but we’ve got a killer out there somewhere.”

Back at the After All gathering, a few people who had noticed the Lorillard brothers’ absence asked where they’d been, to which they replied noncommitally. But most folks, happy with the hunt, with the wonderful party, continued gabbing away.

Gray finally made his way through the crowd to Sister, who raised her eyebrows in question.

He took her by the elbow, steering her clear of the other exultant hunters for a moment, never easy at such a hunt breakfast. “Sure enough, a body under a deer,” Gray told Sister. “Been there quite a while.”

“Years?” she asked.

“Months. Four, maybe five, according to Joylon. The mild winter accelerated decay. I don’t know how those guys can do that work. Turned my stomach.”

When Sybil joined them, Gray informed her of the gruesome developments on the road to nowhere.

“Ugly,” Sybil said tersely.

“You were so wise to come up to me.” Sister said, praising Sybil’s impeccable instincts to maintain order during the hunt.

“How many years have I whipped-in to you? Twelve, I think,” she answered her own question. “You taught me if something goes wrong, don’t broadcast it. If I can, fix it. If I can’t, find you.”

Gray exhaled. “I don’t think you can fix this.”

“No,” Sister responded. “Once we know cause of death and identity, if they can find that out, who knows what we might do? You know we generally assume that someone who has been murdered was an innocent victim. Then again, has it ever occurred to either of you that some people need killing?”

Both Sister’s boyfriend and her whipper-in stared at her for a long moment. Neither said a word.