“At the house.”
“You sure those aren’t rocks?” Hackberry said, his eyes crinkling at the corners.
But his attempt to relieve Danny Boy of depression and fear was to no avail. The guilt and sorrow Danny Boy had taken with him from the previous night would probably come aborning in his dreams for many years, and all the beer in all the beer joints in Texas would not make one dent in it, Hackberry thought. “Get upwind from it,” he said to Pam.
She crossed a slough chained with red pools and layered with clusters of black butterflies sucking moisture from the sand, their wings shuddering as though they were ingesting toxin. She parked on the incline, above the collapsed rails of the corral that had been used by a one-eyed man who killed and sold mustangs for dog food. When Hackberry stepped out on the passenger side, his eyes roved over the tangles of tumbleweed and bleached wood and the remains of the man whose death may have been the most merciful moment in his life. “You ever see anything like this?” Pam said, her words clotting in her throat.
“Not exactly. Maybe close, but not exactly,” Hackberry replied.
“What are we dealing with?” she said.
“Call the coroner’s office, then get Felix and R.C. down here. I want photos of this from every angle. String as much tape as you can around the crime scene. Make sure nobody disturbs those tracks going south.”
She went to the Jeep and made the calls, then walked back down the incline, pulling on a pair of latex gloves, her upper arms ridging with muscle. Danny Boy remained in the vehicle, his head lowered. “What did he say the leader’s name was? Krill?” she said to Hackberry.
“I think that was it.”
“I’ve heard that before. It’s Spanish?”
“It’s a shrimplike creature that whales eat.”
“Funny name for a killer with an M16 strapped on his back.” When he didn’t answer, she looked at him. “You okay, boss?”
He nodded at the slope above where the victim had died.
“Jesus Christ,” she said.
“He was scalped, too.”
Then the wind changed, and a sickening gray odor blew into their faces. It was like fish roe that had dried on warm stone and the putrescence of offal and the liquid wastes poured from a bucket into a ditch behind a brothel on a Saturday night, and it made Pam Tibbs hold her wrist to her mouth and walk back up the incline, fighting to hold back the bilious surge in her stomach.
Hackberry stepped back from the site and repositioned himself so he was upwind again. But that did not change the nature of the scene or its significance. Often he wondered, as an anthropologist might, what the historical environment of the human race actually was. It wasn’t a subdivision of sprinkled lawns and three-bedroom houses inside of which the television set had become the cool fire of modern man. Could it be a vast sunbaked plain broken by mesas and parched riverbeds where the simian and the mud-slathered and the unredeemed hunted one another with sharpened sticks, where the only mercy meted out was the kind that came as a result of satiation and exhaustion?
The compulsion to kill was in the gene pool, he thought. Those who denied it were the same ones who killed through proxy. Every professional executioner, every professional soldier, knew that one of his chief duties was to
protect those he served from knowledge about themselves. Or at least those were the perceptions that governed Hackberry’s judgments about societal behavior, even though he shared them with no one.
He looked to the south. Dust or rain had smudged out the mountains, and the plain seemed to stretch endlessly into the distance, the way a snowfield could extend itself into the bottom of a blue winter sky, dipping over the edge of the earth into nothingness. Hackberry found himself swallowing, a nameless fear clutching at his viscera.
The coroner was Darl Wingate, an enigmatic single man who had been a forensic pathologist with the United States Army and CID before he retired back to the place of his birth. He was laconic, with sunken cheeks and a pencil mustache, and he often had liquor on his breath by ten A.M. He also had degrees from Johns Hopkins and Stanford. No one had ever been quite sure why he chose to spend his twilight years in a desolate place on the edge of the Great American Desert. It was certainly not because he was filled with compassion for the poor and the oppressed, although he was not a callous man. Hackberry believed that Darl Wingate was simply a pragmatist who saw no separation or difference between the various categories of the human family. In Darl’s mind, they all belonged to one long daisy chain: They were creatures who came out of the womb’s darkness and briefly saw light before their mouths were stopped with dust and their eyes sealed six feet down. As a consequence of his beliefs, he remained a witness and not a participant.
Darl placed a breath mint on his tongue and put on latex gloves and a surgeon’s mask before he approached the remains of the dead man. The day had grown warmer, the sky more gray, like the color of greasewood smoke, and gnats were rising from the sand.
“What do you think?” Hackberry asked.
“About what?” Darl said.
“What you’re looking at,” Hackberry replied, trying to repress his impatience.
“The fingers scattered up on the slope went one at a time. The toes were next. My guess is he died from shock. He was probably dead when he was scalped and taken apart, but I can’t say for sure.”
“You ever work one like this?”
“On a couple of backstreets in Bangkok. The guy who did it was a church missionary.”
“So the human race is rotten?”
“Say again?” Darl said.