Just Cause

'No' the detective replied slowly. He grinned, his even white teeth glistening. 'Just showing you how easy it was for Ferguson to take that child from civilization into the fucking jungle. Take a look around you. You think there's anybody can hear you if you scream for help? Who's gonna come along and help you out? Look at where you are, Cowart. What do you see?'

Cowart stared out the window and saw dark swamp and forest stretching around him, covering him like a shroud.

'Who do you see who's gonna help you?'

'Nobody.'

'Who do you see who's gonna help a little eleven-year-old girl?'

'Nobody.'

'You see where you are? You're in hell. It takes five minutes. That's all. And civilization is gone. This is the fucking jungle. Get the point?'

'I get the point.'

'I just wanted you to see it with Joanie Shriver's eyes.'

'I get the point.'

'All right,' the detective said, smiling again. 'That's how fast it happened. Then he took her farther in. Let's go.'

Wilcox got out of the car and went to the trunk. He got out two pairs of bulky brown rubber wading pants and tossed one pair to Cowart. 'That'll have to do.'

Cowart started to struggle into the waders. As he was doing so, he looked down. He bent down suddenly and felt the ground. Then he walked to the rear of the police cruiser and stood next to the detective. He took a deep breath, smiling to himself. All right, he thought, two can play.

'Tire tracks,' he said abruptly, pointing down at the ground with his finger.

'Say what?'

'Fucking tire tracks. Look at this dirt. If he drove her in here, there would be tire tracks. You could have matched them up with his tires. Or don't you cowboys know about such things?'

Wilcox grinned, refusing to rise to the bait. 'It was May. Dirt turns to dust.'

'Not under this cover.'

The detective paused, staring at the reporter. Then he laughed, a wry smile crossing his face. 'You ain't dumb, are you?'

Cowart didn't reply.

'Local reporters wouldn't be that sharp. No, sir.'

'Don't flatter me. Why didn't you make any tire prints?'

'Because this area was drove all over by rescue personnel and search fucking parties. That was one of the big problems we had at the start. As soon as the word hit that she'd been found, everybody tore ass out here. I mean everybody. And they trampled the shit out of the crime scene. It was a fucking mess before Tanny and I got there. Firemen, ambulance drivers, Boy Scouts, Christ, you name it. There was no control whatsoever. Nobody preserved a damn thing. So suppose we made a tire track. A footprint. A piece of ripped cloth on a bramble, something. No way to match it up. By the time we got here, and damn, we were moving as fast as we could, this place was crawling with folks. Hell, they'd even moved her body out of the location, pulled her up on the shore.'

The detective thought for a minute. 'Can't really blame 'em,' he went on. 'People were crazy for that little girl. It wouldn't have been Christian to leave her in the muck getting gnawed on by snapping turtles.'

Christianity had nothing to do with this case, Cowart thought. It is all evil. But he said, 'So, they fucked up?'

'Yeah.' The detective looked at him. I don't want to see that in the paper. I mean, you can point out the scene was a mess. But I don't want to see "Detective Wilcox said the crime scene was fucked up…" but yeah, that's right, it was.'

Cowart watched the detective slip into the waders. He remembered another Hawkins maxim: If you look close enough, the scene will tell you everything. But Wilcox and Brown had had no scene. They had had no evidence that wasn't contaminated. So they'd had to get the other thing that would get them into a court of law: a confession.

The detective tightened his straps and waved to Cowart. 'Come on, city boy. Let me show you a real good dying place.'

He stepped off into the woods, his waders rustling against the shrub brush as he walked.

The place where Joanie Shriver had died was dark and enclosed by tangled vines and weeds, with overhanging branches that blocked out the sun like a cave made by nature. It was a small rise, perhaps ten feet above the edge of the swamp, which lurked with black water and mud, stretching away from the forest. Cowart's hands and face were scratched from pushing thorns out of his path. They had traveled a bare fifty yards from the car, but it had been a difficult trip. He was sweating hard, perspiration dripping into his eyes and stinging them. As he stood in the small clearing, he thought it seemed diseased somehow. For a terrible instant, he pictured his own daughter there, and he caught his breath. Find a tough question, he insisted to himself looking at the detective. Something to break the clammy hold his imagination had thrust on him.

'How could he haul some kid kicking and screaming through that?' Cowart said slowly.

'We figured she was unconscious. Deadweight.'

'How come?'

'No defensive wounds on the hands or arms…' He held up his arms, crossing them in front of his face, demonstrating. 'Like she was fighting against that knife. No sign that she fought back at all, like skin under her fingernails. There was a pretty large contusion on the side of her head. Pathologist figured she was knocked out pretty early. I suppose that was some comfort. At least she didn't know much about what was happening to her.'

Wilcox walked over to a tree trunk and pointed down. 'This is where we found her clothes. Crazy thing was, they were all folded up nice and polite.'

He walked a few steps away, back into the center of the clearing. He looked up as if trying to see through the overhang to the sky, shook his head, then motioned to Cowart. 'This is where we found the major blood residue. Killed her right here.'

'How come no murder weapon was ever discovered?'

The detective shrugged. 'Look around you. We went all over the area. Used a metal detector. Nothing. Either he threw it away someplace else, or I don't know. Look, you could walk down to the edge of the swamp, take a knife and just stick it straight down in the mud ten, twelve inches and we'd never find it. Not unless you stepped on the damn thing.'

The detective continued to walk through the clearing. 'There was a little blood trail leading right along here. The autopsy showed that the rape was premortem. About half the cuts were, too. But a bunch were afterwards. Kinda like he went crazy when she was dead, just cutting and slashing. Anyway, after he was finished, he dragged her down here and dumped her in the water.'

He pointed to the swamp edge. 'He pushed her down, got her under those roots there. You couldn't see her unless you were right on top of her. He'd tossed some loose brush on top. We were lucky to find her as quick as we did. Hell, we were lucky to find her at all. The guys would have gone right past her, 'cept one of them had his hat knocked off by a low branch. When he reached out to grab the hat, he spotted her down there. Just damn-fool blind luck, really.'

'But what about his clothing, wouldn't there be some sign? Like blood or hair or something?'

'We tossed his house pretty good after the confession. But we didn't come up with nothing.'

'Same for the car. There had to be something.'

'When we picked the son of a bitch up, he was just finishing cleaning out that car. Scrubbed it down real fine. There was a section cut out of the rug on the passenger's side, too. That was long gone. Anyway, the damn car was shining like it was brand-new. We didn't find anything.' The detective rubbed his forehead, then looked at the sweat on his fingers. 'We don't have the same kind of forensic capability that your big-city guys have, anyway. I mean, we aren't in the dark ages or anything, but lab work up here is slow and not altogether reliable. There may have been something that a real pro could have found with one of those FBI spectrographs. We didn't. We tried hard, but we didn't come up with nothing.'