Q is for Quarry (Kinsey Millhone 17)

“Most of the fingers have been chewed, but we’ll try that as soon as the coroner’s done whatever he needs to do.”

“Where’s the rest of him?”

“That’s just it. We don’t know.”

I stared at him, blinking, startled by the notion that had just popped into my head. “I might.”

Intuition is odd. After one of those gut-level leaps, you can sometimes go back and trace the trajectory—how this thought or observation and yet another idea have somehow fused at the bottom of your brain to form the insight that suddenly rockets into view. On other occasions, intuition is just that—a flash of information that reaches us without any conscious reasoning. What I remembered was the sound of plastic being flapped by the wind, and a coyote leisurely stripping flesh from what I’d assumed at the time was a recent kill. “I think he’s at the Tuley-Belle. The scavengers have been dining on him for days.”

Felicia and I sat in the car for an hour on the upwind side of the abandoned complex. By now, the odor of putrefying flesh was unmistakable, as easily identified as the smell of skunk. We waited while the coroner examined the remains. The coyotes must have picked up on the scent of blood within hours, and many of Pudgie’s facial features had apparently been ravaged. It was that aspect of his death that seemed to offend even the most cynical of the officers present. Pudgie’s troubles with the law had occurred with a frequency that had created something of a bond with many of the deputies. Granted, he was a screwup, but he was never vicious or depraved. He was simply one of those guys for whom crime came more easily than righteous effort.

Eventually, Detective Lassiter came over to the car and asked Felicia if she wanted to see the body. “He’s not in good shape, but you’re entitled to see him. I don’t want you left with any doubts about this.”

She glanced at me. “You go. I won’t look if it’s that bad.”

It was.

Pudgie’s body had been covered with a length of opaque plastic sheeting, weighted with rocks, and left in a shallow depression out behind the very building I’d toured. Even as I approached the area with Detective Lassiter, I could hear the wind pick up a corner of the plastic and flap it like a rag.

I said, “Where’d the plastic come from?”

“It was tacked across a doorway at the rear of this wing. You can still see the remnants where it was torn from the door frame.”

The glimpse I had of the body was sufficient to confirm that it was Pudgie. No surprise on that score. The cause of death was blunt-force trauma: repeated blows to the head that had fractured his skull and left a lot of brain matter exposed.

“What about the murder weapon?”

“We’re looking for that now.”

There was no immediate estimate as to time of death. That would wait until the coroner did the postmortem. Felicia had last seen him Friday night between 9:30 and 10:00 when she’d turned off the TV and had gone to bed. He might well have been killed that night, though it was unclear how he got to the Tuley-Belle. Odds were someone had picked him up in Creosote and had driven him out here—probably someone he trusted, or he wouldn’t have agreed to go. I wondered how long it had taken the coyotes to arrive, their knives and forks at the ready, bibs tucked under their little hairy chins. The hawks and crows, foxes and bobcats would have waited their turns. Nature is generous. Pudgie, in death, was a veritable feast.

The area had been secured. Anyone not directly involved was kept at a distance to preclude contamination of the scene. The coroner’s van was parked close by. Detective Lassiter had organized the deputies and they’d started a grid search, looking for additional bones and body parts as well as the murder weapon and any evidence the killer might have left behind.

Deputy Chilton, whom I’d met at the McPhees’, was one of the men combing the surrounding area. Felicia and I sat in Dolan’s car. Technically, she wasn’t required to be there at all, and I suspect the detective would have preferred that I ferry her home. At the station, while we’d waited, they’d sent a unit out to the Tuley-Belle to check my guess. The deputy had spotted Pudgie’s body and called in the report. Felicia had been given a vague accounting, enough to know it was her brother and the condition of his body poor. She’d insisted on coming. He was far beyond rescue, but she kept her vigil nonetheless.

I watched the crime scene activity as if it were a movie I’d already seen. The details sometimes varied, but the plot was always the same. I felt sick at heart. I avoided thinking about the coyotes and the sounds I’d heard on the two occasions I’d been at the Tuley-Belle. There was no doubt in my mind that he was dead by then. I couldn’t have saved him, but I might have prevented some of the mauling that came later. The fact that Pudgie was killed here lent support to my suspicion that Charisse had been killed at this location as well.