Sergeant Morin, one of the state police technicians, was opening his portable lab box and pulling out his elaborate camera equipment. “Has he been in yet?” Russ asked.
“He and I searched the area adjacent to the body. Nothing turned up. People were swarming up from the riverbank, so I made getting the tape up a priority.”
Russ nodded. “Good call. Let’s go see this guy, shall we?” He pulled on the latex gloves he had removed from his squad car.
“He was done right here and then laid out in this thing,” Lyle said, holding a wet sumac branch out of the way. “There’s a hell of a lot of blood—on the ground, on the basin, in the water.”
Russ stepped carefully in Lyle’s footsteps. When they reached the crumpled form in the watering trough, he sucked in against his teeth. “Jeez. You’re not kidding.” He squatted down slowly so as not to catch his clothing on any vegetation. “That must have been a garrote. I don’t think a knife could do that.”
“That was my take. It’ll make it harder if it is. No cut pattern to match to a knife. Just wash off a length of wire and roll it back on the spool. Whose gonna know?”
Russ stood again. The metallic smell of blood was strong enough to make his eyes water. “Yeah, but to use it, you have to be in close. Real close. Whoever did this must have been splattered with blood.” He looked at Lyle. “Anyone see anything?”
“Nothin’ yet. But it couldn’t have happened too long before he was found. A lot of that’s still wet.”
“I’ll wait for Emil’s opinion, but I have to—” Russ stopped, feeling foolish. “I mean, not Emil Dvorak…”
“Dr. Scheeler is acting as our ME. He’s the pathologist on loan from Glens Falls Hospital.”
“Until Emil gets back.”
“Right. Until he gets back.” Lyle smiled a little.
“Hey, guys,” Sergeant Morin called through the foliage. I need you to clear out for a few so’s I can get my shots.” Russ and Lyle retraced their steps slowly and deliberately, disturbing the plants as little as possible. “Thanks,” Morin said, disappearing into the leaves.
“Okay. Who found him?”
Lyle ran a hand over his bristly gray crew cut and nodded at a cluster of three trees, past the yellow tape, almost out of reach of the tungsten lights. “They did.”
He could see a woman, her face a pale oval, sitting at the base of a maple tree, squeezed in between two enormous black-and-white dogs. “You’re kidding me,” he said.
“Nope. It’s your priest all right.”
“She’s not my priest,” he said over his shoulder, striding toward Clare.
She looked up as he approached her. Her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, her skin was starkly pale, and her dark blonde hair hung lankly over her shoulders. She had an arm wrapped around one of the huge Berns, her fingers buried in its thick fur. He stopped several feet away because he didn’t trust himself to get any closer without touching her. He squatted to be at eye level. “Are you okay?” he asked.
She nodded. “Yes,” she said, as if trying out a new voice. “I’m—whatever happened, it was all over by the time I got there.”
“Can you tell me about it?”
She nodded again. Took a deep breath. “I walked the dogs down here to see the fireworks. I was coming along that way”—she pointed toward the east side of Mill Street—“when I saw the fireworks were starting. There was a gate, a little gate, just past the corner of the mill, and I pushed on it to get through faster, because I wanted to see the fireworks, and they had started, and then Gal caught the scent. They both started whining and growling, and I thought it was—I don’t know, I don’t know what I thought it was, but I went to see what was scaring them.” She clamped a hand over her mouth. Her eyes flooded with tears. “It was so…I keep thinking of this gruesome old hymn we used to sing at my grandmother’s church.” She tilted her head against the tree. “ ‘There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel’s veins,’ ” she sang, her voice a shaky thread. “ ‘And sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains…. The dying thief rejoiced to see that fountain in his day; and there have I, though vile as he, washed all my sins away.’ ”
One of the dogs whined and butted her with its head. She clutched at its hair, scrubbing her eyes with her other hand. “It used to scare me when I was a little kid.”
“I don’t blame you.” His hand twitched toward her, then stopped.
“It was that developer, Bill Ingraham, you know. I could tell, even with…”
“Yeah. I saw. Tell me about the gate. It was open?”
She took another deep breath. “Yes. It surprised me at the time, because it obviously isn’t used regularly. There wasn’t any path leading from it into the park.”
He glanced in the direction she had indicated. “Did you see anything as you came through the bushes there?”
“No. But I was mostly just trying to keep the branches from smacking me in the face. There wasn’t anyone there, if that’s what you mean.” She frowned, and he relaxed somewhat, seeing reason replace her sheer emotional reaction. “The dogs would have reacted if whoever did that had gone the way we came in. The smell of blood made them very nervous, and he must have been—” her face wavered for a moment, but she went on: “He must have had a lot of blood on his clothing.”
“That’s what we think, yeah. Did you see anything around the body? Anything that looked disturbed, out of place?”
“Oh, God, I don’t know. There could have been signs hanging in the trees and I wouldn’t have seen them.” She turned her face into one of the dog’s necks for a moment. “I probably messed up the area some. I remember thinking not to touch anything, but I kind of fell backward and…I was in a hurry to get away.” Her expression changed again, and he realized she was ashamed. “I didn’t even think of saying a prayer. All I thought of was getting my sorry self out of there. I didn’t stop running until I found someone with a phone, and even after she called it in, I didn’t want to go anywhere near…him.”
“Good,” he said firmly. “We don’t want you standing around praying at a crime scene. You did exactly the right thing. You got out, you reported it, and you helped us get here fast so we have a better chance of finding the bad guy.”
“Oh.” She looked down.
“When you were walking over here, did you pass anyone on the street? Anyone who seemed out of the ordinary maybe?”
“Anyone dripping gore like Banquo’s ghost? No.” She immediately waved her hand. “Sorry. I don’t mean to be flip. I passed a few people on Church and Main, but after I turned onto Mill Street, I didn’t see anything, not a person, not a car.”
“Okay, thanks.” He stood up, his knees complaining mightily. “You stay right here. I need to talk with Lyle and the crime-scene tech, and then we’ll see about getting you home.”
“How’s your mother?” she asked suddenly. “Did you ever get her out?”
“Safe and sound in the woman’s wing of the Washington County jail,” he said, “so I can rule her out as a suspect.”
“Russ! That’s a terrible thing to say about your own—” She let go of the dogs and stood abruptly, glancing around. “At the protest this afternoon. I heard something.” She looked up at him. “It was right after you had ordered the demonstrators to disperse. I was trying to leave, and as I was making my way through the crowd, I heard someone say, ‘He’s not gonna be a problem after tonight, is he?’ ”