Unspeakable (8 page)

She probably knew he wasn't coming out on this stifling afternoon to fish. Leaving the gear and the box of live crickets in the hull, he lifted the cooler and the sack from the boat and carried them with him to the deadfall. God only knew how long it had been here or what natural occurrence had caused the tree to fall. The trunk was covered in lichen and vines. Insects had hollowed it out, but it still supported Ezzy's weight as he sat down. He opened one of the Dr Peppers and took a long drink. He began to eat the corn chips with the same level of detachment.

Because every time he stared at the spot where Patsy McCorkle had taken her last breath, he recalled the shock of seeing her body the morning after she died.

"Has anybody touched her?"

That was all he could think to say to the young, pale, and shaken deputy who had been the first law enforcement officer on the scene after a fisherman had made the gruesome discovery.

"No, sir, Ezzy."

"Not even the guy who found her?"

"You kiddin'? He was scared shitless. Didn't even come ashore. His boat was drifting past. He saw her lying here and beat it back to Mundy's Point to call us. I know better than to contaminate a crime scene. I've secured the area."

The deputy must have picked up the lingo on a TV cop show, because Ezzy was certain he had never used that terminology. Not too many of their crime scenes had to be cordoned off to prevent evidence contamination.

Mostly they did routine patrols and maintained general law and order. They were called to stop fights that broke out in the beer joints, or to settle a dispute between feuding family members, or to lock up a drunk who had become disorderly and potentially destructive. There were few outbreaks of violence that left victims dead, but on those rare occasions, the motivation was clear-cut. Armed robbery. Assault with a deadly weapon. Wife beating. The perpetrator usually had motivation that, if not justifiable or legal, was at least apparent. Senseless crimes that were committed for no other reason except outright meanness occurred somewhere else. In big cities. In urban ghettos. They were unheard of in Blewer County, Texas. So neither the deputy nor Ezzy, who was already a seasoned officer of the law, had ever seen anything as disturbing as this.

In an area of trampled grass, she was lying facedown. Literally. Her head wasn't even turned to one side. One arm was folded beneath her. The other lay along her side, palm up, fingers curled slightly inward. Her legs were spread. She was wearing a pair of sandals. Nothing else. It was summertime, so she was tanned except for a strip of white across the middle of her back, and her buttocks.

To Ezzy it seemed indecent for them to be staring down at her naked body. They were acting in an official capacity, but even so, they were as guilty as her murderer—Ezzy had immediately assumed that she had met with foul play—of stripping this young Woman of all dignity and respect.

"It's bad for us that it rained so hard last night," the deputy remarked, noting, as Ezzy had, the pool of rainwater that had collected in the small of the girl's back. "That probably washed away a lot of evidence."

"We'll have to work with what we've got."

"Yes, sir." The deputy blotted his moist upper lip with a folded handkerchief. "You think she was murdered?"

"It doesn't look like natural causes, does it, Deputy?"

A blue jay squawked angrily in the tree overhead, bringing Ezzy back into the present. He stuffed the empty Fritos package into the sack and chased their saltiness with the teeth-aching sweetness of the Peanut Pattie. Nibbling the pink, sugary candy, he stood and walked over to the spot where Patsy McCorkle had lain.

"Lord o' mercy. What've we got here, Ezzy?"

Startled, Ezzy glanced around, almost expecting old Harvey Stroud to materialize out of the surrounding forest. The coroner had been dead for fifteen years, and retired two years before that, but his voice was as real to Ezzy this morning as it had been when Stroud had knelt down beside Patsy McCorkle's corpse and slipped on his eyeglasses for a better look. Ezzy asked, "Did you bring your camera?"

"That fellow from the Banner is coming out right behind me." Ezzy had hoped to contain news of this until he'd had time to ask some preliminary questions of Patsy's close friends. He also wanted to allow the McCorkles time to absorb their shock and prepare for the onslaught of speculation their daughter's death would generate. But since Stroud had called in the newspaper's photographer, it would be the topic of conversation all over town by lunchtime.

"Can you tell anything yet, Harvey?"

"Don't rush me. I just got here." Without touching the body, he studied it from several angles, intent on his task. Finally he made a verbal observation. "There's a bruise on her neck." He pointed to the purplish mark with the tip of a Bic.

"Strangulation?"

"Maybe."

"Was she raped?"

"Possibly. That residue there on her thighs looks like semen."

"Jesus."

"Yeah."

The photographer arrived, eager as a beaver to take his pictures until confronted with the grim reality of the girl's corpse. He lost his breakfast Honeybun in the bushes, then, sitting with his head between his knees, repeatedly assured them that this wasn't the first time he'd seen a naked woman—only the first time he'd seen one dead. It took a while before he had recovered sufficiently to take Stroud's required photos.

Parked a short distance away from the body was a car registered to Patsy. Near it Ezzy found a pile of clothes. Using a pair of tweezers to pick up each article, he examined it before carefully placing it in a labeled plastic bag. There were a blouse and skirt, a brassiere, and a pair of panties. They were rain-soaked, but from what Ezzy could tell there were no rips in the cloth or missing buttons, which would indicate that the garments had been forcibly removed. They warranted further examination, of course.

Both the driver and passenger doors of the car were standing open. From that he deduced that someone had accompanied her here. The empty liquor bottles, one on the floorboard of the car, one lying in the mud nearby, suggested a party atmosphere.

"How're her fingernails, Harvey?"

"Polished red. None broken, torn, or bleeding. Doesn't appear to be any tissue under them.

'Course I'll clean them in the lab." The coroner also pointed out that there was no bruising on her wrists or ankles, nothing to indicate that she had been bound or gagged, or that a struggle had taken place.

Clearly Patsy McCorkle had felt comfortable about coming here with her companion and hadn't expected to die.

Hearing his radio activate, Ezzy immediately returned to his patrol car and spoke into the hand mike. "Yeah, Jim?"

"The McCorkle girl was at the Wagon Wheel last night," Deputy Jim Clark reported. Cora and her group of teetotalers had been trying to vote the county dry for years, but that was one election that brought out the drinkers. Their proposed ordinance always failed miserably. They had, however, succeeded in prohibiting the sale of liquor within the township proper. Consequently, package stores and taverns lined both sides of the state highway just outside the city limits. The Wagon Wheel was one such club.

"Who'd you talk to there?"

"The guy who owns it, name of Parker Gee. He was tending bar last night. Says Patsy McCorkle was there for several hours and left around midnight."

"Alone?"

"With the Herbold brothers."

CHAPTER NINE

E
mory Lomax's desk phone rang. Vexed over the interruption, he depressed the intercom button. "Who is it, Mrs. Presley?"

"EastPark Development."

That quickly changed his attitude. "I'll take it."

He was buried in paperwork, but it could wait. His future wasn't dependent on this job at the bank. This bank was laughably small-time when compared to the business deals EPD out of Houston pulled together. They could buy this chickenshit operation a hundred times over and it would still be pocket change to them.

"Hello, Glen," he said smoothly. "How're things in—"

"Hold for Mr. Connaught."

Emory frowned, disliking the secretary's brusque dismissal and the fact that his call had been relegated to an underling and hadn't come directly from Connaught himself. He was left on hold with Kenny G. music for almost three minutes before Connaught came on the line. Without any preliminary statements or pleasantries, he asked, "Lomax, did you receive the syllabus we sent you?"

"Yesterday. It looks fantasti—"

"What was Corbett's reaction?"

"I... well, I haven't shared it with him yet. As I said, I just received it myself yesterday. I haven't had time to study it." The silence on the other end of the line sent chills up Emory's spine. "But I spoke with his daughter-in-law. She's agreed to a meeting. I intend to go over all the printed material tonight. Memorize it if I have to. All forty-six pages."

If they thought he was going to spend an evening of his time plodding through all that shit about projections and phases, cost analyses and construction diagrams, they were wrong. He could swing this deal for them without having to know all the boring particulars.

"You understand where I'm coming from, Glen," he said in his most persuasive tone. "I don't want to leave Corbett any room to maneuver. Before I approach him, I want to know the material forward and backward. That way I can counter any argument he raises with a fact that'll dazzle him."

"If you're not up to this job, we'd like to know now."

Emory's heart lurched. "But I am!"

"You were a convenient choice for us because you handle Corbett's banking. You were already familiar with his finances. In other words, by using you we saved a step. But if you don't deliver you'll be replaced."

"Please, Glen. This is as important to me as it is to you."

"I doubt that. When will I hear from you?"

"Soon." Not good enough. "Very soon." Still not good enough. "Immediately after I've talked to Corbett."

"I'll be waiting."

Emory was left holding a telephone receiver as dead as a limp dick.

Uncomfortable with the analogy, he dropped the receiver back into place and spun his chair around to stare through the window that overlooked Blewer's Main Street. The bank had a second floor, but he was glad his office was on the street level. The windows were tinted so that he could see out onto the sidewalk but no one could see in. As he watched the pedestrian traffic, he amused himself by making obscene gestures to people he disliked and staring his fill at attractive women. Rarely could one walk past without checking her reflection in the darkened glass. He liked to pretend that when a cute working girl or shopper turned her head toward the glass, she was looking at him.

Yesterday, he'd seen Anna Corbett coming from a block away. As she and her kid made their way down the sidewalk, they paused to gaze into various display windows. When she talked to the kid with her hands, he'd smiled.

Emory had watched them cross the street and head toward the bank's doors, making it easy for him to ambush her in the lobby. She was a looker. Tidy, compact figure. Tight ass. Not much in the tit department, but the air-conditioning inside the bank had brought her nipples up. And to think that all that was being wasted on the old man. Everybody knew he fucked her. They had lived out there together for six years. Of course he fucked her.

From Corbett's perspective, it made sense. But why would she settle for that grouchy old codger?

Probably because she was deaf, Emory reasoned. That must be it. She thought her daddy-in-law was as good as she could expect. Emory meant to show her different.

The thought made him smile.

But the smile didn't last long. The deaf broad was a secondary conquest. First he had to deliver to EastPark Development what he had promised. He couldn't do it by being nice. He had tried that approach. His attempts to be Corbett's financial adviser and confidant had met with no success. Connaught and the others were getting impatient. Time was running out. But as long as Corbett met the scheduled payments on his loan, he could last for years. Emory feared that EastPark would hand this opportunity to someone else, or give up the project altogether and withdraw their offer. Then he would be screwed. He would be stuck in the loan department of this bank for the rest of his life working for wages.

Since it was one of few banks still family-owned and -operated, his chances of advancement were nil. The president had two sons, each as humorless as he. All were tight-asses, sticklers about time and money and customer service. None of them liked him overly much. They could just as well fire him as not.

Bottom line: He had to make that EastPark deal. He must convince Corbett to sell his ranch. But all inroads had failed. The old man wouldn't even discuss it, wouldn't even listen. What he needed was a new plan of attack. Yes. Something bold.

Bold. What a great word. When people talked about it later—and Emory was certain they would—they would say, "It never would have come about if Lomax hadn't made that bold move." "Brass balls. That's what Lomax had or he never would have done something that bold." Absently gazing through the tinted window, he willed himself to be inspired. But all he noted was a battered pickup truck cruising slowly down Main Street.