seen it.
“Max, can you hear me?” I shouted. When he didn’t answer, I tried again, calling out, “Max, I need you here.”
“Coming!” he answered.
I picked my way forward, still scanning the woods, but with my attention increasingly drawn straight ahead. By the time Max arrived, I stood at the base of the tree, looking up, my stomach roiling. Max moved in beside me, and we said nothing until he got on his phone and asked for his boss. A black-winged vulture swooped overhead, circling above us. As Max talked, another arrived, mimicking the first. It reminded me of our arrival at the ranch two days earlier, the vultures in the trees staring at the bodies under the bloodstained sheet.
“I need to talk to Sheriff Holmes,” Max said into his phone. A moment passed, and I assumed the sheriff responded. “Sheriff, Lieutenant Mueller is already on his way with the CSI folks, but we need Doc Wiley again, this time out at Carl Shipley’s trailer, past Old Sawyer Creek. You know where it is?”
Silence while I assumed the sheriff said that he did. The vultures were gathering, more coming, and the sight of them repulsed me. I aimed my gun, took a shot toward one, not really wanting to hit it. The gunshot rang through the woods, and the scavengers scattered.
“That was nothing,” Max said. “Chief Jefferies just discharged her weapon to scare the buzzards away.”
A brief silence, and then Max explained to the sheriff: “It’s a bizarre turn of events to be sure.” Max hesitated and cleared his throat. This was sticking in his gullet, too. “You know that tree I told you about, the one that’s all trussed up with string and covered with skulls and skeletons?” Max cleared his throat a second time. “Well, Carl Shipley is hanging from it.”
Thirty-Five
The others arrived quickly. Lieutenant Mueller, Doc, Max, and I examined the route from the house to the tree for footprints and saw some, but Mueller thought they’d all come from Carl’s boots. Still, he snapped a bunch of photos. One of his team taped off the area with the prints and mixed up materials for castings to preserve them. Meanwhile the rest of us kept working our way toward the body hanging in the tree. We were trying to determine if anyone else had walked on that path that day besides Max, me, and Carl.
“This looks interesting,” Max said, pointing out a place where a patch of grass had been uprooted. It wasn’t large, just a couple of inches wide and a few inches long. “That could be from something or someone being dragged. Don’t you think?”
“Could be,” Mueller said. “Or Carl could have dragged his toe for a couple of inches. How can you tell?”
Doc ambled over and put his hands on his hips. “You think?”
“Yeah, I do,” Mueller said. “We’ll take a cast and photograph that, but I’m not sure it really tells us anything.”
“I see what you’re saying. It’s not very deep,” Doc agreed, adjusting his glasses. “I sometimes don’t raise my foot as I should and scuff it. Of course, at my age…”
“Gentlemen, we need to focus and figure out what happened here,” I said, stating the obvious. The question we were attempting to answer was the same one we’d just put to bed on Myles Thompkins’ drowning that morning. “We need to know if this really is a suicide, or if we’ve got another homicide.”
The problem was that while we’d found a hand-printed note hanging on another tree, one just twenty feet or so away, the scene suggested a lynching. Not that we could find any signs of a struggle. The inside of his trailer didn’t look disturbed. We couldn’t find any evidence of anyone else having been in the area. On one level it didn’t seem out of the question that Carl walked out to the tree with the rope and did himself in.
“We think he killed himself because?” I asked. “What’s his motive?”
“He knew we were closing in on him. Mullins told him,” Max replied. “Maybe Carl figured his time was up, and he wanted to make amends. So, he wrote the note.”
“Sure. Could be. But explain that.” I pointed at the corpse still hanging from the tree. His skin a ghostly pale, Carl’s jaw was clenched, and his head lolled to the right at an unnatural angle. A thick foam encircled his mouth, along with blood. I guessed the latter might have happened when he bit down on his protruding