The Litter Of The Law

“Tucker, come back!” Harry called to the corgi as the dog raced across the cornfield.

Fair, in his shock, hadn’t closed the station wagon door, so all three animals had rushed out after deciding to see what was going on.

The corn rustled as the strong little dog bounded through.

The two cats also sped down a row, curiosity raging.

“Selective hearing.” Harry shook her head as she followed, starting into a corn row.

“Honey, they’ll be back. You should stay where you are, otherwise you might destroy footprints or some other kind of evidence.”

She stopped, turned to face her husband. “You’re right.”

“I’m not sure you want to see the corpse anyway.”

Harry leaned up against the Volvo. “Death really is ugly and this one is probably especially so. But, Fair, why truss someone up like a scarecrow?”

He folded his arms across his chest. “Clever, really. How many people passed by this field on Garth Road? Plenty, I bet, and still no one stopped or called the sheriff’s department. The only reason we did was because of the ruckus raised by our passengers, and then the crows caught our eye, and … well.”

As the married couple waited for the sheriff’s department to arrive, the three investigating animals reached the base of the scarecrow.

A blue-black crow perched on the straw hat looked down. “Beat it!” he squawked.

Mrs. Murphy knew she could climb the dead man’s leg if need be, so she stood on her hind legs reaching far up, feeling the cold flesh under the faux scarecrow’s pants. “I can climb up and shoo all of you away,” she threatened the birds.

A second crow in this mob, on an outstretched arm, gibed, “Go ahead. We’ll fly away, circle, and come right on back.”

The first crow opened his wings to their full span, the light picking up the blue highlights. “What do you want with this feast? Cats don’t eat carrion.”

Pewter ignored the question and asked one of her own: “Did you see the scarecrow being set up?”

The second crow spoke. “No, but he hasn’t been here long. We caught a whiff as we flew over this cornfield on our way to Shelford Farm. When we tear off a juicy piece of meat, some blood still drips.”

Few scarecrows are well dressed. Neither was this one. It wore a drab, wrinkled shirt over a red undershirt. Worn, old pants, rope for a belt, took care of his bottom half. Old work boots, the sole separated from the left one, covered his feet. The straw hat, edges frayed, hatband missing, gave the fellow the final country touch.

As blood pools in the extremities, the crows provided valuable information. The scarecrow wouldn’t show the signs of rigor mortis because the body was tied, arms outstretched, legs tied down, too. No blood was moving, the body temperature had cooled down, but this was a fresh kill, relatively.

Mrs. Murphy noticed that the eyes had been plucked out and a lot of flesh had already been eaten off his face and hands. Eventually, the crows would have torn through the clothing.

“Did you smell another human?” the tiger cat asked.

“No. The sun had been up about an hour. What we smelled was him,” the first crow reported, his olfactory powers acute, especially for blood and meat.

“Without his eyes, I can’t tell if he was strangled,” Pewter matter-of-factly announced. “They’d be bulging and bloodshot.”

“Eyes are so tasty.” A smaller crow opened his beak wide. “A real delicacy.”

“Any idea how he was killed?” asked Mrs. Murphy.

“You didn’t hear him scream, did you?” Pewter, normally not interested in much besides her own meals, was oddly thrilled at having discovered such an unusual murder.

“How could we have heard him scream?” a young crow replied. “He was dead and gone by the time we found him.”

“Eat what you can, because the sheriff is on his way. He’ll cut him down,” Mrs. Murphy advised.

Tucker sniffed the bottom of the stake, sniffed the corpse’s shoes, then picked up the diminishing odor of a set of rubber boots. Raising her nose, she sensed the smell moving away from the body, then, nose to ground, she began to track, the cats in her wake. As the three friends stuck to their trail of the pair of rubber boots, presumably those of the person who had carried the body, the crows burst out singing a song whose refrain was “Oh, those beautiful eyes, those great big beautiful eyes.” Then they burst into raucous laughter.

“Gross,” Tucker said.

“Yeah.” Pewter looked back. “Twisted. They’re really twisted.”

“It’s the killer who’s twisted,” Mrs. Murphy sensibly replied as she, too, kept her nose down.

The three followed the line until it came out to the side of the road, where there was a small stain that smelled like motor oil.

“Every third person wears rubber boots around here when it’s wet.” Tucker sat down. “But I think this is the spot where the scarcrow’s companion parked, then carried out his body from here.”

“A strong person. They don’t call it dead weight for nothing,” Mrs. Murphy noted.

“She’s red in the face,” Pewter said, referring to Harry, calling their names in the distance with increasing frustration. “We’d better go back to the wagon.”

When they got back to the Volvo, Harry scooped them up, put them in the back, and closed the door. “Curiosity killed the cat,” she huffed, unaware of the irony of Harry Haristeen making such a statement.

“Yeah, yeah.” Pewter put her paws on the window just to make a smear.

“She’s upset.” Tucker put her head on her paws.

“Pop is, too. Humans can’t face death.” Pewter was right about that.

“This is murder. Worse.” Mrs. Murphy heard cars coming closer.

“I found a head in a pumpkin, remember?” Pewter reminisced.

“We’ve heard that story a hundred times,” Tucker grumbled, heading her off. “This is just as weird. And we were first on the scene. I mean, after the crows and the killer.”

The sheriff’s car rolled up. Sheriff Rick Shaw stepped out from the driver’s side and Deputy Cynthia Cooper emerged from the other. Cooper—Harry never called her Cynthia—rented the farm next to Harry’s farm, the old Jones homeplace. The two women had become friends.

The two law enforcement officers carefully pushed through the late-maturing corn, the leaves rattling, ears full on the stalks. They looked downward as they walked but were rows away from the footprints that Tucker had found.

Harry and Fair stayed with their station wagon as instructed. They could see how carefully Rick and Cooper looked about, conferred, looked down. Then the two circled the scarecrow. The crows flew in loops around them.

One crow dive-bombed. “Leave us alone!”

Cooper ducked, then waved her hands at the noisy birds. “Damn.”

Rick, tempted to take out his sidearm and fire, did not. No need to alert the residents of Morrowdale or anyone else at this moment.

After twenty minutes, they returned.

“Do you know who it is?” Harry asked.

Cooper shook her head. “The face is pretty well gone. But he’s youngish, and had been in fairly good shape. Look, why don’t you two go on home? I’ll get a statement from you later. If there’s anything of immediate importance, tell me now. Otherwise, you’ll get caught up in the removal team, the forensic team, and, of course, the news team, as they know where we are every minute thanks to being able to listen in to all our calls.”

Tucker barked from the car. “There’s a drip of oil just up the road. And footprints in a corn row.”

“Save your breath,” Pewter, paws on the windowsill, counseled.

“They’ll find the footprints,” Mrs. Murphy said. “The humans will crawl over that cornfield and the two of them will be down at Morrowdale questioning everyone and going through the barns and sheds.”

Harry and Fair drove west down Garth Road, then turned toward Crozet, heading south. The Blue Ridge Mountains were now on their right. They passed a large cattle farm, Dunrovin, with Herefords in the pastures; they passed by rolling acres of grapes, the land dotted here and there with old farmhouses and the occasional new structure, always sited for the view.

“You okay?” Fair asked.

“Yeah. You?”

“Yeah.” They passed the apple shed now housing Chuck Pinell’s leather shop. “Yeah, but …” His voice trailed off.

“Creepy.” Harry shivered.

“People kill for lust, for love, in a fit of anger, or for money, and some because they are plain nuts,” Fair said.

“You’d need to be pretty demented to take someone you’ve just killed and tie them up as a scarecrow, especially with Halloween just around the corner,” Harry said. “Or it could be a side show designed to cover up another crime. Think about it.”

Fair couldn’t take his eyes off the road, because it was two-lane and treacherous. “I’d rather not.” As he continued, his voice was firm, for his wife was more curious than the cats. “You don’t need to think that much about it either. It was a shock. An unfortunate discovery. We can say a prayer for the victim and then go about our business.”

“Prayers are wonderful. So are results. Who speaks for an innocent victim? Until I know more, I’m assuming he’s innocent.”

Knowing he was losing the battle against his wife’s curiosity, he calmly replied, “Just leave this to Rick and Cooper.”

“Of course.”

“Boy, was that a fib.” Pewter giggled.

The others laughed with her.

Harry then said, “Whoever did it has quite the imagination.”

“The last thing this county or state needs is an imaginative killer,” said Fair, “especially if you’re one of the victims.”

“Fair, think about this: Don’t most murderers try to dispose of their victim’s bodies so no one finds them? Or if it’s a crime of anger or passion, they run away and leave it, but they don’t turn the corpse into a scarecrow or a public display. Whoever did this had time to plan it out.”

“I guess.”

“So I don’t think it’s a crime of passion.”

“Unless the killer meant to make a mockery of the corpse.” Fair braked at the stop sign at the Amoco station in Crozet. “Dammit. Now you’ve got me thinking about it. Let’s just let it all go.”

“Mmm.” Harry was already off and running.