“God help me,” Bree said, and she looked away. “Who does something like this to a poor little guy like that?”
“Someone with a lot of pent-up rage,” I said, looking toward the stack of rocks.
“Which the prosecution says was Stefan’s reaction to Rashawn rejecting him,” Bree said.
“I don’t buy that,” I said. “This level of viciousness suggests pathological hatred or sadistic insanity, not a fit of revenge.”
We stood there forty feet from the stack and forced ourselves to go through the photographs. They ran the gamut from close-ups of various pieces of evidence in the order they were discovered to a dozen photos of Rashawn’s brutalized body, including his sawed neck.
In the pictures, the surface of the slab around Rashawn was pale pink, blood diluted by rain. It had spilled down over the other slabs and run out in fingers onto the stone floor. Seven feet from the stack, the blood disappeared into a debris field of baseball- to football-size chunks of limestone that ended at the creek forty-two feet away.
Rashawn’s sneakers, torn Duke Blue Devils T-shirt, and underwear were all found within a twenty-five-foot radius of the stack. So was the prosecution’s most damning piece of evidence. A photo showed a white card smeared with mud tilted down between chunks of limestone thirteen feet due east of the body; in the next photograph, the same item had been turned faceup, revealing a bloodied Starksville School District ID with a picture of my cousin Stefan Tate.
Chapter
28
In our conversation at the jail the day before, Stefan had told me that the last time he distinctly remembered having the ID was three days before the killing. He said that while coaching a tenth-grade gym class outside, he’d stuck it in the pocket of a windbreaker that he’d then placed on a bleacher. He forgot he’d put the ID in there until the next day. When he looked, he couldn’t find it.
His fiancée, Patty Converse, had been teaching a class at the same time in the same area, so as many as sixty kids had been in the vicinity of the windbreaker and the ID card. The only identifiable fingerprints on the ID, however, belonged to Stefan, who had failed to report the card missing.
My cousin’s fingerprints were also on a plastic sandwich bag found in the quarry seventeen feet east of the ID. The sandwich bag was rolled and sealed inside a larger zip-lock bag. That same sandwich bag contained drugs packaged for sale in cellophane wrappers: six grams of black-tar heroin, three grams of cocaine, and nine grams of crushed crystal methamphetamine.
My cousin had no explanation for the prints on the bag; he speculated that someone could have gone into his trash at school and retrieved a bag he’d discarded after lunch one day.
It was entirely possible but a flimsy defense. The preponderance of the evidence said Stefan was there that night.
“Let’s get closer and recheck everything,” I said. “Position of evidence, measurements, photographic angle, anything we can think of.”
“A lot can change in two months, Alex,” Bree said doubtfully as we walked up to the stack of rocks where Rashawn Turnbull had been tortured and killed. “There’s nothing here that looks remotely like blood. In fact, it’s almost like it’s been scrubbed.”
I could see what she was talking about. There were swirls and shallow gouges on the surface of the top slab and down the side, as if someone had scoured the area with an abrasive cleanser and a steel brush. Looking around, I wondered what else might have been sanitized after the police had gathered their evidence.
To further confuse things, the area was littered with broken beer and whiskey bottles, shotgun shells and .22 rifle casings, fast-food wrappers, broken plastic utensils, and several empty cans of Mountain Dew.
“All this stuff was tossed here after Rashawn’s death?” Bree asked.
I shrugged. “We’ll have to compare the photographs to what’s there now.”
“But they didn’t photograph every inch beyond the twenty-five-foot perimeter, did they?”
“Not from the looks of it,” I said. “We’ll have to do the best we can with what we’ve been given.”
I started checking measurements and comparing the pictures to the current situation. The crime scene diagrams showed the entrance gap as sixty-six and a half feet from the stack. I used a small laser range finder and noted it was closer to seventy. That was unimportant in itself, but it suggested that the rest of the forensics work might have been shoddy too.
I used the range finder again to tell me where the ID card and drugs had been found. Compared with the photographic evidence, those locations were also off by a foot or more. And many of the rocks had been overturned or moved slightly from the positions shown in the pictures.
Still, I noted the trend line created by the rock stack, the ID, and the drugs. The position of the three suggested someone leaving the stack and heading due east, toward the creek. This jibed with the police theory that the killer had escaped over the rocks, gone into the water, and then waded out of the quarry.
I continued along the trend line, noting by the pictures that no stone in the twenty-four feet between the drugs and the water had been left unturned. According to the file, police had found no more evidence along
the route, but I went all the way to the creek anyway.
Rock-bottomed and algae-bloomed, the stream was no more than eight inches deep and sixteen inches wide. It ran lazily from my left to my right into and under the bramble of brush I’d seen from the lookout earlier that morning.
I got down into the water and walked in the stream, seeing how the willows overhung it. If things hadn’t changed considerably in the past months, a man would have had to crawl through there. A woman too.
Why do that? Why use the stream at all? It’s the dead of night. Why not just go out the way you came in?