J. Bertrand: Nothing to Hide

It’s the uniform’s fault, my fall, for shining his light past my feet to the edge of the gully, flicking the beam back and forth in a skeptical circuit, saying, “Careful there, Detective,” in a cautious, solicitous tone, the same one he’d use if his frail granddaddy reached on tiptoes for a too-high shelf. Hearing the voice, I ignore the distance between the two sides of the gully, ignore the muddy banks and the buzzing mosquitoes and the ripple of ditchwater down the middle. I kick my lead leg out into space, flashlight in one hand and notebook in the other.

Nothing but net, I think, clearing the gap, but then my foot lands just short of the other side. The ground gives a little, goes all slick, and I’m aloft again, dipping backward, flailing the air until my body crashes spine-first into the mud.

I glance up into the dark pines, illuminated by moonlight and the Fenix still gripped in my hand. The damp seeps through the back of my shirt, through my pants and up against my hot skin. My gun, torqued by the fall, digs painfully into my flank. I blink a few times, taking inventory, and then the uniform’s up above me, shining his light down.

“You okay there, Detective March? I told you to watch out.”

I roll a little onto one hip, then wrench myself over to the other side of the gully. No pain at first, not until I put weight on my left leg, at which point a knife blade runs up the back of my thigh and buries itself in my lower back.

“You all right?”

I wince a little, then shake it off. “I’m fine. Now leave me be and get back over there. I don’t need your prints tracking up my scene. My own are bad enough.”

He smiles at my irritation. I have to wave my hand to get him to go. Don’t mind me, that hand says. I should have known better than to reach for the top shelf.

After surveying the ditch one last time-it’s just a couple of feet deep and maybe three and a half, four across-I straighten my holster and limp a little deeper into the woods.

Back there behind me, gathered in the parking lot under the mist-haloed streetlights, a row of cruisers cast blue and red filters over the night, along with the obligatory crime scene vans and support vehicles. Beyond the scrim of officialdom, the news crews are arriving, too, setting up their tripods and adjusting their lamps. There’s nothing for them to see but the coming and going of uniforms and plainclothes detectives. The body’s already been screened off by a tent enclosure erected on the free-throw line of the park’s covered basketball court.

Whoever dumped our John Doe, he had a sense of humor.

Between the parking lot and the court, a path runs along a sandlot where several tetherball poles stand with severed cords dangling from their top loops, the balls carried off long ago. Big lights hang under the basketball court’s corrugated roof, but according to the first officers on the scene, they’re no longer operational. To light things up, we had to bring our own equipment, something we’re accustomed to from long experience. Past the court, a cluster of lopsided picnic tables, weathered and sunbaked, separate the park from a thick perimeter of pines, and beyond them the poorly lit gully, and beyond that me.

I scratch at a fresh mosquito bite on the back of my neck, then limp through the trees a ways, testing my leg. There’s still a twinge. I wipe my waterlogged shoes against a nearby trunk, trying to scrape off the clumped mud. Then I head in deeper, tracing an imaginary line all the way from the body under the tent to here. The brush gets higher, the ground firmer, until finally I hit a tall hurricane fence half threaded with weeds. Beyond it a curving side street, with Allen Parkway in the distance.

There’s nothing out here. I pass my light over the ground once more to be certain, then hit the treetops with it just in case. Gotta think outside the box. But no one’s been back here in a while. Another false lead.

It won’t be the last.

Back under the tent, Jerry Lorenz crouches a few feet from the body, rubbing his chin in contemplation. He holds a ballpoint in the other hand, clicking out a preoccupied beat. While the photographer works, our bosses hold a confab in one corner-Captain Hedges, sweating through his summer-weight wool suit, briefs a uniformed assistant chief while my shift commander, Lt. Bascombe, nods in the background. Only the lieutenant seems to notice my arrival, giving me the slightest of nods.

As I approach the body, he comes over.

“Where you been?” he asks, not waiting for an answer. “I assume you feel okay about this?” He tilts his head doubtfully in Lorenz’s direction.

“Compared to the rest of the guys on our shift, he’s practically an old-timer.”

“Even so, I want you on top of this one, March. You feel me?”

“I’m all over it, sir.”

He gives my shoulder a pat, then pulls his big hand away, noticing for the first time that I’m caked in mud. Before he can ask, I limp over toward Lorenz.

Jerry glances up, eyebrows raised. “You find it?”

“There was nothing out there.”

“Find what?” Bascombe asks.

The hunch that led to my fall had been Jerry’s idea in the first place, so I let him explain. The body was dumped, no question about that. If the killing had taken place here, there would have been a lot more blood. But whoever made the drop took the trouble to arrange the corpse, settling it down all neat and tidy like a body in a coffin, except for one arm extending in the direction of the woods, the skinned hand shaped into a fist apart from the index finger.

“Like it was pointing,” Jerry explains. “I thought if we followed the line, we might find. .” His voice trails off. “You know. The head.”

The three of us stare down at the nude, headless corpse of a Caucasian male, several days dead-though the medical examiner has yet to render an opinion on the exact time. The gray-green pallor of the muscled trunk leads to a jagged line over the neck, all crusted and glistening. Decapitation. A fine Latinate word for distancing ourselves from the mortal shock of the sight. The cap being the head, presumably, so the literal sense is something like having your cap removed. A polite-sounding way of describing a brutal-no, a feral act.

We have a whole vocabulary for such offenses. The crushed jumper doesn’t plunge to his death from a high window, he’s defenestrated. The teenaged abductee isn’t raped and butchered, she’s simply dismembered. And this particular victim, our headless John Doe, has suffered a further indignity. It wasn’t enough to doff his cap. Whoever did this went to the trouble, starting above the wrists, of slicing through the back of the hand and peeling the skin back, revealing the now-black muscle, bone, and cartilage underneath.

What we call de-gloving.

Presumably this was to make identification harder, though once you’ve seen it, it’s hard to imagine any motive other than sick delight. Whether it was done pre- or postmortem we don’t yet know, but I hope for his sake it was after.

The early evening cyclist who called the body in, not taking a close enough look, had told the emergency dispatcher that the hands were burned. He’d been so shocked by the sight that he failed to mention the body’s lack of a head. Maybe he hadn’t even noticed.