Sharyn McCrumb - The Ballad of Frankie Silver

He locked the office and headed down the steps toward his patrol car, wondering if in his grogginess, he had forgotten some crucial point of police procedure. Oh shit, he thought, as his hand touched the car-door handle. The TBI.

He was running now. Unlock the office-his fingers seemed to have grown two sizes in as many minutes as he fumbled with the lock, swallowing the urge to kick in the door. A few more minutes wouldn’t matter. The real pros wouldn’t be there for another three hours at least, because Knoxville was 120 miles away. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. You called them out for any serious crime, because they had all the toys. The TBI had a fully trained death squad of officers who did nothing but crime scenes, and who knew how to check for fingerprints, hair and fiber evidence, bloodstains. They also had the lab to process the evidence, which meant that they would get it all anyway, so he might as well let them collect the samples themselves so that there would be no question about tainted evidence when the case came to court. When the case came to court. Spencer wouldn’t even consider the possibility of a stalemate.

He checked the county map before he made the call, because he would have to give directions to someone unfamiliar with the county back roads. He couldn’t say, “Turn left at the Evanses’ place, and go past that field where the white horse is usually grazing.” No. He located the church and the roadhouse on the map, noted down the road numbers, approximated the distances from the main road. Then he made the call.

The officer from the TBI would meet him at the crime scene in a couple of hours. Say, 3A.M. Spencer would secure the area and do the photography and the site mapping while he waited. When the sun came up, they would be better able to determine what they were dealing with. Nobody was getting any sleep that night. That much was a given.

He left the office with the taste of cold coffee still in his mouth. He found an all-night country station on the radio and turned it up as loud as he could stand it, so that the noise would keep him awake. He was hoping for happy songs that would drive away the darkness outside and the darkness to come.

One of the vacationing firemen was waiting for him at the crossroads beside the church. When he recognized the patrol car, he stepped out of the shadows of an oak tree and flagged him down. Spencer parked in the church’s gravel lot and followed the young man down the road and through the field toward the dark woods beyond.

The fireman’s name was Al Hinshaw, and he said that his buddy Neil was waiting at the site with the ranger. He explained about their hiking vacation, and how they’d stumbled over the bodies on their way back to the shelter. Hell of a way to end your vacation, he’d said, shaking his head. The trail was supposed to be a peaceful place, wasn’t it?

“It usually is,” said Spencer. Now he saw the glow of a Coleman lantern, and he knew they were within hailing distance of the crime scene. He had met Willis Blaine a couple of times, when their paths had crossed in other investigations, but he couldn’t remember anything about the man that would be fodder for small talk during the long wait for the pros from Knoxville. How’s the wife and kids, Willis? Who knew if he even had any? Spencer wasn’t much good at small talk anyway, in those days. The demands of the job seemed to overshadow all the rituals of everyday life for him, leaving him without anything ordinary to say.

Blaine did not seem interested in conversation, either. He stood up and nodded a greeting when Spencer came into the clearing. Spencer shook hands with him and with the other fireman, Neil Echols, and that ended the civilities of the evening. “I didn’t touch anything,” the ranger told him. “It’s not my jurisdiction anyhow. But I’ll stay if you want me to.”

Spencer nodded. He could tell from Willis Blaine’s tone of voice that he wasn’t trying to take over the investigation. He was extending a courtesy to a fellow officer, and Spencer would have accepted the offer, realizing with some surprise that he really didn’t want to be all alone in the woods in this terrible place waiting for help to arrive, but Alton Banner had joined them by then, so he would have company. He wasn’t afraid; he decided that the proximity of death had made him realize how little time we all had in this world not to be alone. Instead of expressing these sentiments, he said: “You go on home. I’ll call you and let you know what we find out.”

Then he went to hold the light on the bodies while Alton Banner examined them.

“Well, they’re past my help,” the old doctor declared after a moment’s silence. “You don’t need me to tell you that.”

“No, sir. But your presence makes it official.”

Spencer had written the words “Crime Scene Log” at the top of the first page of the notebook. He would record the names of every person who went in and out of the area, so that if a question arose later about a fingerprint or a bit of fiber evidence, they could check the sample against those who had been present at the scene. He took the names and addresses of the two vacationing firemen and sent them on their way. It was just possible that they had been responsible for this crime, but Willis Blaine hadn’t thought so, and neither did Spencer. The two men had seemed genuinely upset by their discovery of the bodies, and they hadn’t shown the signs of uneasiness or cockiness he’d have expected from the perpetrators. They acted, as far as he could tell, normal, under circumstances that were far from normal.

“They were killed separately,” Alton Banner remarked when the hikers had gone.

Spencer blinked. “What?”

“The bodies. There’s a difference in body temperature that suggests one has been dead an hour longer than the other. The male victim went first. He was off in the weeds. The killer probably took him there for-what? Privacy? To get him out of the way without letting the girl know what had happened to him?” The doctor shrugged. “Figuring that out is your job, I guess.” He turned the flashlight toward the second body, letting the beam play on the ropes that still bound her wrists. “The girl was tied to the tree at that point.”

“Cause of death for the male?”

“Exsanguination, suffocation. His throat is cut.” He shined the light on the male victim’s head and neck. “Windpipe is severed. Watch how you move the body when the time comes. There isn’t much holding the head on.”

“And the other one?”

“I’m coming to that. I don’t think the first victim, the male, was the primary target. The killer got him out of the way first, but that killing was fairly perfunctory. Bludgeon-ings. Defense wounds. Then the quick slash that puts an end to it. Like swatting a fly.” He pointed to the body of Emily Stanton and sighed wearily. “He took his time with her.”

Spencer nodded. He wondered how much of it she had been conscious for. At some point in unbearable pain, he’d heard, the mind simply drifts off to somewhere else. He hoped she went there quick and never came back. The blood looked black in the moonlight. “I think I’ll wait for the TBI guy,” he told the doctor. “He’ll have to take samples.”

“That’s what I’d do,” Banner agreed. “My investigation was perfunctory, but he’ll do the evidence collecting. You might as well photograph the scene while you wait. I’ll hold the light.”

Spencer willed himself not to register what he was seeing as he photographed the area-roll after roll of black-and-white 35-millimeter film, backed up by a dozen Polaroid shots. The recording of a crime scene is a methodical process closely akin to archaeology in the precision of the measurements and the use of grid markings to measure off the area. The body was “twelve o’clock” on the site map. He began photographing the body, shooting clockwise around the scene, taking every angle, every degree of rotation, until he returned again to the starting point. When he had finished photographing the scene, Spencer went back to his notebook and began to sketch the scene-pinpointing the position of the bodies, the objects nearby, and so on. Investigators were taught to be thorough. He wasn’t much of an artist, but he was diligent.