toes barely touch the floor. Below it is a puddle of black, oily goo. Probably what’s left of the blood and organs after many years of decay. It doesn’t appear to be a hanging. The cord is around the chest and under the arms, as opposed to the neck, so that the skull lists to the left and the vacant eye sockets are cast downward, as if permanently ignoring all interlopers.
Just what Ruiz County needs—another cold case. What better place to hide your victim than a house so haunted its owners are too afraid to enter. Or, perhaps it could have been a suicide. This is a case we will happily hand over to Sheriff Castle and his boys. It’s someone else’s problem.
I close the door and turn the knob as firmly as possible.
So we have two choices. We can go to work in the bedroom with the live snake, or stay here with the quite dead human in the closet. We take the second one. Frankie manages to reach a ceiling board with the end of his crowbar and rips it down. Our lease does not give us the right to damage the house, but does anyone really care? Two of its owners are sitting out there in a truck too terrified to step through the front door. We have a job to do and I’m already tired. As Frankie begins ripping down another board, I carefully thread my way down the stairs and reopen the front door. I nod at Riley and Wendell though the rain is too thick for eye contact. I grab the ladder and take it upstairs.
When Frankie yanks down the fourth board, a box of old fruit jars comes crashing down and shatters around our feet. “Beautiful!” I yell. “There is storage up there.” Inspired, Frankie rips boards with a fury and before long a third of the bedroom ceiling has been reduced to debris, which I toss in a corner. We’re not coming back and I don’t care how we leave the place.
I position the ladder and gingerly climb through the gap in the ceiling. When I’m waist-high in the attic I scan it with my light. It’s windowless, pitch-black, cramped and musty, no more than four feet in height. For an old attic, it is surprisingly uncluttered, evidence that its owners were not consumers; evidence too that Kenny may have sealed it off over twenty years ago.
It’s impossible to stand, so Frankie and I slowly crawl on all fours. The rain is pounding the tin roof just inches above our heads. We have to scream at each other. He goes one way, I go the other, very slowly. Crawling, we fight our way through thick spiderwebs and watch every square inch for another snake. I pass a neat stack of one-by-six pine planks, probably left over from construction a hundred years ago. There is a pile of old newspapers, the top one dated March of 1965.
Frankie yells and I scurry over like a rat, the dust already caked on the knees of my jeans.
He has pulled back a shredded blanket enough to reveal three identical cardboard boxes. He points his light at a label on one and I lean in to within inches. The faded ink is handwritten, but the info is clear: Ruiz County Sheriff’s Department—Evidence File QM 14. All three boxes are sealed with a thick brown packing tape.
With my cell phone I take a dozen dark photos of the three boxes before they are moved an inch. To protect them, Kenny was smart enough to place them across three two-by-four planks to keep them off the floor in the event of rain leakage. The attic, though, seems remarkably sealed, and if it can stay dry in a deluge like this, the roof is working fine.
The boxes are not at all heavy. We gently scoot them to the opening. I go down first and Frankie hands them to me. When they are in the bedroom, I take more photos of the scene. With snakes and skeletons around, our exit is swift. The front porch is falling in and wet with rain, so we keep the boxes just inside the front door and wait for the weather to break.
43
Ruiz County is grouped with two others to form Florida’s 22nd Judicial District. The current elected prosecutor is one Patrick McCutcheon, a Seabrook lawyer with offices in the courthouse. Eighteen years ago, when McCutcheon finished law school, he took an associate’s