"All right, Coop. All right."
Back at the parking lot, the humans and animals waited.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." Susan burst into tears as she quoted First Thessalonians, Chapter 5, Verse 21.
"What makes you think of that? It's usually Miranda who quotes the Bible."
"When I spoke to Thomas about my fears—you know, about Ned—that's what he said to me. I don't even know why I blabbed it. Not his business."
"He was wise and loving. You probably made him feel good by confiding in him."
Later, when Harry called Miranda, Miranda did, in fact, quote scripture. "Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil and canst not look on iniquity."
Gave Harry a shiver to hear the quote from Habakkuk, Chapter 1, Verse 13.
Gave Cooper and Rick a shiver when the law called back on the sample Coop had dropped off from the statue. Type O human blood.
29
Meticulously laid out on the stainless-steel table, with channels along the sides to capture any fluids should they escape the corpse, were the pieces of Brother Thomas.
Sheriff Shaw and Deputy Cooper watched Tom Yancy and his assistant, Marshall Wells, inspect the remains. Tom used long tweezers to pluck out a fiber or a bone splinter.
"What we're seeing, Rick, is consistent with animals ripping over a body." He pointed with the tweezers to part of the femur still attached to the hip socket. "The bone is cracked open, chewed. You can clearly see the teeth marks here."
"Dogs, coyotes, most all carnivores love bone marrow," Marshall said.
"What about vultures?" Rick viewed sights like Brother Thomas as a matter of course.
Didn't mean he liked it, though.
"Yes. They've been at him."
Coop remarked, "Tom, any idea if he suffered trauma before death?"
"Well, his skull is intact. Upper jaw still attached. Lower one gone. No broken bones around the shoulder. Too late to tell about the arms, of course. There's just enough left of his liver and a scrap of kidney here that I can get a sample. If he was poisoned there might be a trace, depending on the poison."
Rick cracked his knuckles. "Sorry. Bad habit."
"Not as bad as smoking." Tom reached into the body cavity to lift up a tiny piece of kidney, which Marshall snipped.
"No signs of stabbing?" Coop couldn't imagine why his body had been dragged into the ravine and stuffed between and under large rocks.
"No."
"If he'd been hit up with a hypodermic needle, something to put him down, too late for the mark?" Rick wondered.
Tom touched some fragments of one arm; the other hadn't been found. "Not much chance. If the body had been intact, possibly, Rick, because the cold helped us. Yes, we've had a few warm days, enough for him to blow up and give off scent, which brought in nature's garbage collectors, but the cold returned with a vengeance. I don't have much arm here. Most of the flesh has been chewed off. Marshall and I examined the torso, used magnifiers; no obvious puncture except for fang marks. Some of those needles barely leave a trace."
"Hmm, let's say something appears in the kidney tissues or the liver. What would be your first choice?" Rick asked.
"You mean to kill him?" Yancy put down the long tweezers on a stainless-steel tray. "First of all, Rick, he may not have been killed where he was found. That's one possibility. He could have been, say, poisoned at another location, taken to the statue, placed in a kneeling position. His body would be losing warmth and it was colder than a witch's tit; he'd freeze up in less than three hours. Not much body fat on him. I'd estimate about nine percent, given his age and what I know of his people. The Bland Wades get painfully thin starting in their sixties. He was quite thin. Of course, he could have been praying, hard as it is for me to believe, on that bitter night. He could have just let himself go. People can will themselves to die."
"No. I don't think he willed it." Rick shook his head.
"All right, then. Let's say he did go to pray" Tom Yancy shrugged. "He's lost in communion with the Lord, and someone comes up behind him. He's down on his knees. Now, if his neck were broken this would be an easy call. It's not. So either someone reached around and knocked him out with, say, chloroform, or they shot him with the same stuff the vet uses to put down old Rover when his time has come. There's always morphine and heroin, too. Or, my last thought here, he was smothered." Tom moved up toward the head and neck. "There would be bruising on the neck, even now. There isn't. But if he were smothered, at this point I wouldn't know, because the eyeballs are gone." He paused, then continued, "If someone is choked to death or smothered in a less violent way, the eyeballs are bloodshot, red." He pressed his lips together. "I don't have much to go on, but we've got pieces of a body. That's a start, and we will invite poor old Brother Thomas to tell us as much as possible."
"Any idea how long it will be before we hear from Richmond?" Rick hoped the state lab, one of the nation's best, would be quick.
Tom shook his head. "Rick, it's less than two weeks before Christmas. People are killing themselves in greater numbers than usual or they're flaming out on the highway. There's always some damned fool who drinks himself to death and the family won't believe what the county coroner tells them, so off goes John Whiskey Doe to the state's pathology lab. Christmas is a nightmare. I'll do what I can to push them along."
"You knew Brother Thomas; what did you think of him?" Coop asked.
Tom folded his arms over his lab coat. "I'd see the old fellow occasionally at the hardware store, sometimes at the huge nursery over there in Waynesboro, the one where Jimmy Binns used to do such good work. Now, that man could design anything."
Yancy mentioned a retired gentleman who had a gift for landscaping.
"Ever see him, mmm, at the bank?" Rick picked up on Coop's direction of thought.
"No. Can the brothers have personal money?" Tom wondered.
Marshall, a Catholic, said, "Depends on the order. For the Greyfriars, if the money is family money it can be in a trust. The order can't touch it, but the brother can still have use of it. Trusts and wills can be both creative and binding." He added, "Had to study the monastic orders in parochial school. Always liked the Cistercians."
"Coop, check with Susan about this, will you?" Rick turned to his favorite officer.
"Okay."
Rick returned to Tom. "I'd see him at Jeffrey Howe's nursery, Mostly Maples. You couldn't help but notice him in his gray robe with the white hood. Unfailingly pleasant."
"I never heard him even say 'darn.' " Tom gazed down on the pieces of what had been a good man. "Rick, why anyone would harm him, I don't know. That's your job. Mine is to find out what I can from what's left."
"While I'm here," Rick glanced at the large wall clock, "anything else come back on Nordy Elliott?"
"Alcohol in the bloodstream. Not above the legal limit. A healthy male. Death was straightforward."
"And painful." Coop grimaced.
"Extremely, but it was swift. One blinding pain, and I mean blinding, and it was over." Tom Yancy sighed. "Nordy wasn't on earth nearly as long as Brother Thomas, but he certainly piled up the enemies. And here's Brother Thomas, who, as far as we know, didn't have any."
"He had one," Rick said.
"A lethal one," Coop added.
30
Lips white, face purple with rage, Brother Handle strained for self-control. "He walked out of the coffin!"
"Your angina, Brother, remember your angina," Brother Andrew softly spoke as Brothers Prescott and Mark trembled on either side of him.
"Damn my angina. You put him in his coffin and you nailed shut the lid."
"I nailed shut the lid," Brother Mark squeaked.
"Well, you did a damned poor job of it." Brother Handle ran his right hand over his head, feeling his tonsure.
"Brother, this is painful and difficult for all of us, but we will get to the bottom of it." Brother Prescott, as second in command, knew how to handle the boss, but he'd never seen the boss this distressed.