J. Jance - Fire and Ice

“There’s been a fatality,” the detective told her, keeping his voice neutral. “We don’t know yet if it’s a homicide. That’s what we’re investigating right now.”

“My brother lives out here,” the woman said forcefully. “Tell me who’s dead. Where?”

In answer Ernie nodded slightly in Dave Hollicker’s direction. Before anyone could stop her, the woman bolted from the jeep. With an unexpected burst of speed she dodged past Ernie and sprinted toward Dave, heading straight off across the sand. Without pausing to confer, Joanna and Deb Howell leaped forward to head the woman off. Each of them managed to lay hands on an arm and together they jerked the woman to a stop.

“Let me go,” she shouted, trying to extricate herself. “What if that’s my brother over there? I saw Lester’s dog back at the gate with another cop. She wouldn’t tell me what was going on, either, but Miller wouldn’t have left Les’s side unless something was terribly wrong.”

“Our victim may very well be your brother,” Joanna agreed calmly, trying to reason with the still struggling woman. “But you can’t go there. As Detective Carpenter told you, this is a crime scene. We need to preserve it. We have to keep it the way it is in hopes of figuring out what happened.”

“Let me go!”

“No!” Joanna told her. “Not until you calm down. You can’t just go tearing off across the sand. What if the victim does turn out to be your brother? The only way we’ll be able to find out what really happened to him is by examining every detail of the crime scene so we can figure out what went on.”

As suddenly as the struggle had started, it ended. The woman dropped her arms and stopped pulling. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.”

Joanna let go of the arm she was holding. As a precaution, Debra continued to hold on to hers.

“Who are you?” Joanna asked. “What’s your name?”

The woman took a deep breath. “Margie,” she said. “My name’s Margie Savage.”

“You said you think this man-the victim-may be your brother?” Joanna asked.

“My baby brother,” Margie answered. “His name is Lester-Lester Attwood. He lives in that camper back by the gate. His truck’s there, but he’s not. I was afraid something bad had happened to him.”

“What made you think that?” Joanna asked. “Is that why you came here today?”

Margie nodded. “I work at the post office in Bowie. One of the neighbors from up the road stopped by a little while ago and told me something strange was going on up here. He said he’d seen an Animal Control truck turn in here and a cop car, too, one that took off over the dunes. I couldn’t figure out why Animal Control would be here. I know Miller’s licensed. I took care of that myself. So I headed out here on my lunch hour to see what happened. I followed the tracks and they led me right here. So what did happen? Did he come down that dune too fast and take a spill? I kept telling him to stay off that ATV, that the damned thing would be the death of him.”

That jeep doesn’t look much safer, Joanna thought, but what she said was “We don’t think what happened was an accident. That’s why Detectives Carpenter and Howell are here. They’re homicide detectives, and that man you see working over there…” She pointed at Dave. “He’s my crime scene investigator. That’s why we’re trying to preserve the crime scene-so we can examine it for clues.”

“You’re saying Lester’s been murdered?” Margie repeated the words as if she couldn’t quite believe them.

“We think murder is a distinct possibility,” Joanna answered. “As to whether or not the victim is your brother…”

Margie squared her shoulders and raised her chin. “Show him to me,” she said. “Let me see for myself. I’m not going to faint or anything. I’m a hell of a lot tougher than that.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“All right, then,” Joanna said. “Follow me. If you don’t mind, please stay on the pathway.”

Margie nodded. “I will,” she said.

With Joanna leading the way, they started off across the intervening sand by following the plastic-grid path Dave Hollicker had laid down. A full ten yards from the half-buried body, Margie came to an abrupt stop. Ernie, following behind, almost ran into her.

“It’s him,” Margie said. “That’s my brother.”

Joanna stopped, too. From where she stood, all that was visible of the body was the back of the man’s head and neck, as well as the top of his shirt collar. What looked like an ugly bruise covered the back of his neck from the top of his shirt to the bottom of his hairline.

Joanna was surprised by the certainty in Margie’s voice. “Are you sure?” Joanna asked. “You can identify him from all the way back here?”

“It’s the birthmark,” Margie said. “The one on the back of his neck.”

Joanna looked again at what she had assumed to be a recent injury. “That’s a birthmark instead of a bruise?” she asked.

Margie nodded. “The whole time we were growing up I was forever having to beat the crap out of asshole kids who teased him about it. They’d torment him and tell him the discoloration on his neck was really the mark of the devil. By the time I finished blackening their eyes, they knew all about the mark of the devil.”

She paused and gave a small snort. “When I was younger, I used to have a pretty mean left hook. I busted out Tommy Leroy’s right front tooth when I was sixteen, and it wasn’t no baby tooth, either. He was only fourteen, but he was also a good five inches taller than me. I thought his mother was gonna kill me when she found out about it, but then someone told her what he’d been doing-that Tommy and some friends of his had been picking on Lester-she changed her mind. She lit into Tommy herself and gave him a whuppin’, too. Not that any of that ever helped poor Les,” she added sadly.

For a long moment, she stood staring across the expanse of sand toward her brother’s still form. “It’s like the guy never had a chance at a decent life,” she said finally. “The cards were so stacked against him from the start that you could hardly blame him for drowning his sorrows in booze.”

With that, she turned and walked back the way they had come, deftly slipping past Ernie without once venturing off Dave Hollicker’s plastic-grid trail. By the time Margie reached the side of her jeep, she sank down on her knees next to it, buried her face in her hands, and wept. Joanna realized then that Margie Savage had put on a good front of being tough, but it was only that-a front. Joanna caught up with her in time to hear her sob, “I’m sorry, Mama,” she said. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“None of this is your fault,” Joanna said consolingly, “unless you did this. Did you?”

Margie shook her head. “But I promised our mama that I’d look after him, that I’d keep him safe. Once he sobered up, I helped him get this caretaker’s job so’s I could keep an eye on him. Now he’s dead.”

She pulled a red hankie out of the pocket of her jeans and blew her nose into it. Then she straightened her shoulders and looked back at the ATV. “They ran him down, didn’t they?” she said.

“That’s what it looks like,” Joanna agreed. “We won’t know for sure until we finish our investigation.”

“And who did it?”

“We don’t know that, either. Is there a chance your brother got involved with some unsavory characters?”

“Les has been involved with ‘unsavory characters’ all his life,” Margie replied. “He didn’t hardly know any other kind. I thought he’d left all that behind him-those kinds of friends, but maybe he had a slip.”

“A slip,” Ernie said, latching on to the sobriety lingo. “Are you saying he’d been through drug or alcohol treatment?”