a table with supplies. They had stacks of markers, bags and labels to hold and document any evidence. One of the techs had a bottle of luminol waiting to spray anything that looked suspiciously like blood. I thought about that bleach smell again and hoped I was right and Carl wasn’t able to wipe everything away.
Max and I stood close together, watching. My mind kept circling back to the ranch and the bodies. “You know, those little kids shot like that…” I started, but then I felt vaguely sick and instead of finishing the thought muttered, “I hate cases like this.”
Max gave me a sad look.
Just then, one of the forensic techs shouted, “There’s something you need to see back here.”
Max and I followed her voice. We walked behind the trailer and into the woods. After we passed a small corral, we saw an aging mare tied up to the side of a shed munching on what appeared to be the last of a bale of hay. Carl’s horse looked unkempt, like it had been through a war and hadn’t come out the better for it. The mare eyed us suspiciously but didn’t react, just kept eating.
We continued on and found the crime scene tech who’d called out waiting for us at the base of an oak, its fallen leaves forming a brittle, brown carpet beneath it. Not a massive tree, it stood maybe fifteen or twenty feet. Its branches stretched out in all directions, a bony circle of gnarled wood. Someone had taken rough, dark tan twine, hundreds of feet of it, and cinched it from branch to branch, tying one to the other. It looked as if someone had tried to crochet a dandelion top or a spider web onto the tree.
“What the hell—” Max started.
“No clue,” I answered.
Making it even more mysterious, tucked on a smattering of the branches, hanging by hooks and crooked arms, sitting on twigs, taped to knobby limbs, were garish wooden ornaments: skeletons and devilish-looking figurines, skulls painted white and black with menacing grins wearing sombreros, skeleton women in brightly colored frocks and mantillas.
“Día de Muertos symbols,” I whispered.
Max nodded. “You’ve seen an altar like this before? My experience is mainly limited to the occasional Mexican-American house or restaurant decorations.”
“Nothing exactly like this, not on a tree. But I saw altars all the time in Texas, especially this time of year. The Day of the Dead is celebrated at the beginning of November, just a couple of weeks ago.”
We stood and looked, thinking. “Why would he do this?” Max asked. “What does it mean?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I intend to ask him.” I wondered if it had to be Carl’s handiwork. Maybe someone else who lived in the woods had decorated the oak? I skimmed through the trees, searching for a house, a shack, a path that appeared to lead anywhere, but saw nothing.
We wove our way back to check on the search, and I noticed that the grass was worn away in front of us, as if someone routinely traveled between Carl’s trailer and the macabre tree display. It’s his, I thought. It has to be his.
Lieutenant Mueller was standing at the supply table wearing latex gloves and flipping through a black binder. He didn’t acknowledge us when we approached, seemingly absorbed in whatever he was looking at. Max and I stopped directly across from him and watched as the lieutenant turned one page then another.
Photographs. An album of photographs; stark, black-and-white images displayed in clear plastic covers. Some had a slightly grainy appearance, as if they’d been taken from a distance with a telephoto lens. In one, Laurel and Anna played with the children in the yard. In another, taken through a downstairs window, Laurel leaned over the kitchen table. In a third, she sat in a chair in the upstairs nursery, looking content and happy, while Jeremy suckled at her breast. I wondered how Carl shot that one. He had to be elevated on something to get that angle.
“Where did you find these?” I asked.
Mueller shook his head as if he’d come to, the album’s spell broken. “Inside a slit in the mattress, covered by a piece of duct tape. At first, we thought he’d repaired an old mattress. But then we found the folder pushed inside the foam, along with something else.”
“What?” Max asked.
“This,” Mueller said, as he reached over and picked up a plastic evidence bag holding a white enamel flower rimmed in gold attached to