The Butterfly Forest

FORTY

The man handling the dogs introduced himself as Bo Watson. He wore a faded brown Stetson, brim tainted the shade of weak coffee. A handlebar moustache draped beneath his nose, wiry sun-dried body. He had tucked his jeans inside his ostrich skin cowboy boots. Within minutes, a dozen deputies and two forensics investigators joined us along with Detective Sandberg and Sheriff Clayton. “What do we have?” the sheriff asked.

The team listened to what Swanson and I had found. The sheriff turned to Watson and said, “We got blood. Two types. One might be a deer, the other’s most likely human. Can you keep your dogs focused on the human stuff first?”

Watson nodded and moved a toothpick to the opposite side of his mouth. “Big Jim and Shiloh don’t have to be told which is which. They know we’re looking for Miss Monroe and Mr. Stewart. I don’t have to put ‘em on the right trail.” He held the dogs by their leashes, each dog whining, anxious to continue the hunt.

The sheriff turned to his deputies and Ranger Ed Crews. “Ya’ll search in areas where Deputy Swanson and Mr. O’Brien haven’t gone. Let’s keep three men behind Bo and the dogs. If these college kids are out here… we’ll find ‘em.”

The teams followed as the dogs picked up the trail with Bo Watson close behind them. Detective Sandberg turned to me. “O’Brien, we’ll lift the bullet out of the tree. Maybe there’s some DNA embedded in there.” He shook his head, eyes on the tree and slowly settling back to me. “We’re pretty versed in forensics, normal investigative techniques, but all this stuff you did with snails and butterflies, we’ll that’s a little off the page for me.”

I smiled. “Nature is an open book, and out here it’s about all we have to read.”

He scratched one of his calves. “And we have chiggers. They’re eating me up.”

The sheriff’s voice came through the radio hooked to Sandberg’s belt. “Need some folks over here. Dogs are excited.”

We headed in that direction. The dogs found something less than fifty yards from the tree with the bullet hole. They whined and circled an area covered in limbs and leaves. Deputies pulled the debris away. One of the dogs, Big Jim, sniffed and began digging in the center of what looked like fresh earth.

“Hold him back,” the sheriff said. He turned to a deputy. “You got a shovel in the truck.”

“Yes sir.”

“Get it.”

Within a minute, the team was there, each man looking at the likely grave, wearing faces etched in lines of anxiety, sketched by a collective familiarity with crime scenes.

The sheriff gave the order to dig. A muscular deputy began shoveling away dark soil. Sweat dripped from his face into the hole. The dogs sat on their haunches, uttered whines and watched. A mockingbird called out as it flew from one pine tree to the next. Police radios crackled, the noise sounded strange in the forest.

“We have something!” said the deputy digging the hole. One of the forensics investigators, glasses perched near the tip of his nose, stepped above the hole. He said, “That’s not a body.” He knelt closer, used a small brush to remove more dirt. “That’s fur. Dig around the carcass. Looks like a deer.” He stood as the deputy shoveled more sand from the opening.

The putrid odor of death seemed to catch the deputy in the throat. He winced, blew from his nose and continued digging.

Detective Sandberg shook his head. “Damn, that buck got sour quick. It’s been shot out of season. Probably killed by a poacher who didn’t want to be found with the deer and get hit with a big fine.”

“No doubt,” Ranger Ed Crews said.

“Cover that thing back up, boys,” said the sheriff, hitching his pants and turning to Bo Watson. “Dogs found a body. It just wasn’t a human body.”

Watson shook his head. “Sheriff, Big Jim doesn’t make mistakes when it comes to human scent, especially cadavers.”

“Maybe he was gettin’ a scent from the poacher who butchered the deer.”

“No, the dogs won’t be fooled like that.”

I said, “Maybe something’s buried under the deer.”

The sheriff pursed his dry lips. He grunted and looked up at me through squinting eyes. “All right, somebody get down in the hole with Johnny and lift the buck out.”

“I’ll do it,” said a younger deputy, putting on plastic gloves. He tossed a pair to the deputy who’d been digging. They scraped away the remaining dirt. One man held the deer’s hind legs, the other man held its head. “On three,” said the young deputy. “One, two three…”

They lifted the carcass from the hole and laid it to one side. Blowflies with green bodies buzzed in the humid air. The sheriff and Detective Sandberg stepped to the edge. “Sweet Jesus…” mumbled the sheriff, touching his forehead.

Detective Sandberg held his hand to his nose. “Whoever buried those bodies thought the scent of the deer would throw us off.”

Bo Watson nodded and said, “You cain’t fool these dogs. They followed the scents of both these kids. What happened here is the devil’s doing.”

I looked in the grave and saw the bodies of Molly Monroe and Mark Stewart, lying side-by-side, a stub of a cigar next to Molly’s face. I fought back bile and rage as it boiled in my gut. The noise of the police radios, murmur of the deputies, whine of the dogs, it all faded. I could only hear Molly’s voice that day in the restaurant when she looked across the table to me and said, “Have you ever held a live butterfly in the palm of your hand? I believe they like the human touch… the warmth that comes from our hands, and maybe our hearts.”