Lopez nodded.
‘Then this isn’t a suicide, Sheriff, it’s a homicide.’
Earl’s old eyes flicked up to meet hers in the rear-view mirror. ‘You shittin’ me, lady? The boy’s a suicide for sure. There’s nothing that suggests foul play in my book.’
Lopez handed the photographs to Ethan. ‘Tell me what’s wrong with the picture,’ she said.
Ethan looked at the six-by-eights one after the other. Randy dangling from the noose, his tongue swollen and poking from his mouth, his eyes half-closed and lifeless. The toppled stool three feet below him. Ethan shook his head.
‘I’m not seeing it,’ he admitted.
‘The body was cold,’ Lopez said. ‘Been there a few hours. What’s missing?’
It took only a moment for Ethan to realize what she meant. Images from his service with the marines in Iraq and Afghanistan flashed through his mind, of the shameful sight of the dead lying in the streets or in bitter, lonely caves in the mountains.
‘The body hasn’t voided,’ he said finally. ‘Randy didn’t die where he was found.’
‘That’s my boy,’ Lopez smiled.
‘Crap,’ Earl Carpenter uttered, and slapped a hand across the steering wheel, angry with himself. ‘Should’ve realized that.’
‘When a person dies their sphincter muscles give way and they void their bowels,’ Lopez said. ‘This kid had been hanging for some time but there was no residue beneath him from the moment of death.’
‘So he died elsewhere and was moved,’ Ethan said. ‘Any further clues here?’
‘None,’ Earl shook his head. ‘Whoever hanged him there was careful enough to sweep the floor, which covered their tracks but I guess also proves they were there.’
‘Exactly,’ Lopez said. ‘That was my next point: they cleaned up after themselves, which means premeditated homicide.’
‘I’d better call ahead to Grangeville,’ Earl said, and reached for the patrol car’s radio. ‘Inform them of what you guys have figured out.’
‘Can you think of any likely suspects?’ Ethan asked Earl.
‘Only Randy’s ma, Sally, who found him,’ Earl said. ‘But I don’t think she’s on the cards for this. She had three sons and loved them all. Besides, there’s no clear motive. Randy had no life insurance and no savings. The mother’s penniless and all three of her sons contributed to the upkeep of their household from their own pay checks, all of which were from menial jobs in town.’
Ethan mentally scratched a financial motive to the killing from his list.
‘So it’s a homicide disguised as a suicide, and done badly,’ Lopez said. ‘That suggests somebody inexperienced, maybe a local person who doesn’t know much about crime.’
Earl Carpenter chuckled bitterly.
‘Sure does, which means most all folk in Riggins. Our population work in local business or make the run over to McCall and Grangeville for work. Anybody wantin’ bigger cahoots in life gets out of the county altogether.’
‘Anything from forensics or the coroner’s office?’ Ethan asked.
‘Nothing much,’ Earl replied. ‘Randy died of asphyxiation by the same rope that was found around his neck, that much is for sure. So whoever did this, they had a vehicle to transport him and there was probably more than one of them. Hard to carry and hoist a body on your own.’
Ethan struggled to get his head around it.
‘So they’re dumb enough to botch the apparent suicide, yet smart enough to leave no trace of their presence at the scene or on the body? Were there any tire marks or tracks?’
‘None but my own vehicle when I arrived,’ Earl replied. ‘Which means they cleared their own trail out of there.’
‘We were told that the ranger’s body had been recovered,’ Lopez informed him. ‘Anything you guys have learned there?’
‘Oh yeah,’ Earl replied. ‘We’ll head up past Riggins to Grangeville first. I’ll let the doctors fill you in about that, because I don’t even like talking about it.’
11
Ethan stood in the clinical surroundings of the autopsy room and looked down at the corpse before him. The body was that of a young, athletic male, probably no more than thirty years old. Broad chest. Narrow waist. Long, strong legs and muscular arms. Only one thing was missing.
‘Where’s his head?’ Lopez asked, her normally olive skin pale and her eyes wide with horror.
The body of Gavin Coltz ended abruptly at his neck. A bloodied stump of bone protruded from the flesh, the remains of where his spinal column and vertebrae had been snapped off with unimaginable violence.
The consulting pathologist, Dr. Jenny Shriver, gestured to a nearby box concealed beneath a sheet of blue plastic.
‘It was found fifty feet below where he died, in the bed of a shallow creek. It’s not in good shape.’
Jenny Shriver was a middle-aged woman whose features might once have been considered attractive but had been creased by years of seeing human bodies tragically mutilated or decayed to the point of being unrecognizable. Ethan guessed that no matter how detached a person might become to death, it still left its somber imprint on their faces.
‘Did the water accelerate the rate of decay?’ Lopez asked.
‘No,’ Shriver replied. ‘The impact shattered the skull like a bag of chips under a car tire. The jaw was broken in fifteen places and both of the eyeballs had been blasted from their sockets. We weren’t able to recover them.’
Ethan looked at Gavin Coltz’s corpse. The skin was a pallid white but the upper chest was stained with huge purple bruises, each the size of Ethan’s hand and surrounded by a halo of sickly yellow skin.
‘What are those?’ he asked, gesturing to the marks.
‘Compression fractures,’ Shriver identified them. ‘Caused by blunt trauma.’
‘So he was attacked by another human and not an animal?’ Lopez suggested. ‘Somebody must have hit this guy with a truck to cause that much hemorrhage.’
Shriver did not reply, simply casting a serious gaze in Lopez’s direction before she rested one gloved hand on the body.
‘He was not attacked by a human being, Miss Lopez.’
‘What happened to him?’ Ethan asked, eager to cut to the chase. ‘We have a man locked up in a cell in Riggins under suspicion of murder who swears that he didn’t do it, and there’s still one other person missing. We need to know what we’re up against here.’
Shriver lifted her hand from the corpse, took a deep breath and gestured to the various lesions lacing the body as she spoke.
‘The victim was killed by a single blow to the head that resulted in decapitation, the neck severed between the fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae. That blow was sufficient to send the severed skull flying more than thirty feet through the air to land in the creek bed.’
Ethan ran what she had said through his head for a moment.
‘But you said that the skull landed in the creek, causing the massive damage.’
‘The impact that blew this man’s eyeballs out of their sockets was caused by the blow that killed him,’ Shriver corrected. ‘The skull hit the water below but not with enough force to cause this kind of damage. All of the major fractures were caused by that first, single, lethal impact.’
‘That’s impossible,’ Lopez said. ‘Nobody could hit a man that hard, certainly not Jesse MacCarthy.’
‘Correct,’ Shriver replied as though congratulating a schoolgirl. ‘The amount of force required to physically tear a man’s head from his shoulders via a single impact is the equivalent of being hit by a thirty-pound sledgehammer traveling at sixty miles per hour. No human being can produce that kind of physical power.’