They found her body next morning. I heard a low murmuring outside, and roused from the couch to join a quiet throng streaming to where Reese and his brother officer had blockaded us the night before.
She lay in the middle of a subdivision lot across the street. The graded earth looked like it had been deliberately leveled to improve her display, naked as the day she’d been born. She was uncovered so God and everyone could see the things that had been done to her.
Weird signs and symbols were scalloped into her flesh – he’d taken his time to carve them just so. He hadn’t touched her face, probably on purpose. I judged from her frozen stare that she’d been alive through a goodly portion of it.
Her mother fainted, sagging into a boneless heap in the midst of her family. The big Indian kid Mackie took off his flannel and covered the little girl’s body with it. One tiny hand stuck out from under the shirt, palm up.
A caravan came our way: a squad car, followed by an ambulance and an Escort with a magnetized ‘Stagger Bay Coroner’ sign crookedly stuck on the driver side door.
They stopped and got out: Officer Rick Hoffman; two ambulance attendants serving meat-wagon duty; and the coroner, an older man with a doctor’s bag. They fidgeted on the far side of the flannel-covered little piece of evidence, avoiding our gazes as they looked down at the tiny body.
Hoffman and one of the meat-wagon boys started putting up yellow crime scene tape, using the surveyor’s stakes to string it on.
I approached him. “So, any theories, Officer Hoffman? Any hot leads?”
“Call me Rick. You know I don’t like having to do this. You know that,” he said, an expression of rage filling his face for a microsecond before subsiding. “You know I’m trapped, Markus. There’s more things I want to tell you, but there’s only one way out for me.”
I shook my head sternly, trying to recapture the control he’d handed me before. “There’s always choices. No one controls your life.”
“You’re the lucky one; you get to stand up. That’s why you think I can too. But you should know I only wait. That’s all I know how to do.”
“Look, you told me about Kendra so I know you’re sincere,” I said. “You can’t be the only one. You can keep making the man’s choice.”
“I could really be you? You’re sure?” he asked in a wistful voice. “I can do it, can’t I?”
I held my breath in surprised suspense, waiting to see if he was about to break open. But he sagged back into blankness and continued his work, concentrating on laying tape.
“No,” he said. “I still have to do what I’m told for now.”
The expression on his face told me I should feel sorry for him, and consider him the victim here. Poor pitiful Rick. I kind of wanted to rip his fat head off and defecate down the hole, that’s how much sympathy I wanted to feel for him.
But watching him squatting there all forlorn, I flashed back to prison and the nights I lay in my cell reading the Canon, listening to a punk’s sobs and the laughter of his playmates for the evening down the tier. Listening, but saying and doing nothing except turning the book’s pages.
Rick yanked on the last knot hard enough he snapped the anchoring surveyor’s stake in two. After studying the broken piece of wood for a few seconds, he went and got another stake.
I walked back to Big Moe but he put his hand up, so I was looking at his pale palm and spread fingers. “No disrespect, Markus, but I don’t much feel much like talking right now.”
We stood apart from each other, watching them slide the gurney into the ambulance. She’d been too small for the body bag and they had it folded in half beneath her – I could have carried it under one arm.
As the ambulance left Big Moe said, “They think they’re going to run us off, but they won’t. They’ll have to cart me away too. I won’t back down. I can’t.” Despite his sad-sack demeanor and the rap video clown suit he wore so awkwardly, I saw the steel in him.
Moe looked at me like I was an insect and said, “She’s dead because of you.”
My knees wobbled and I felt dizzy as Moe turned on his heel and headed into the Gardens, leaving me alone on that windswept development.