J King: Angel of Death

He’s coming to find you. He expects you to be in the glade beyond, a man who feels bad for having accidentally killed a leashed dog. A man with a rifle that the editor can grab and swing against a tree to break it. That’s what he expects to do. That’s what he would write about. He rises, scarred leather soles on the smooth humus of pine. More curses grumble from him, these meant not for you but for himself, stoking his engine. He wants to be good and angry. Hunker down, now. He grabs the brittle bole of a nearby tree. He steps beyond it and keeps going.

You rise. Dead needles fall from you as if you are some monster of humus. He doesn’t even hear you, raging to himself. You follow him a couple paces.

“T-T-T-Turn around, quiet n-n-n-now, or you’ll be dd-dead as your d-dog,” you say. Your door-hinge voice is enough to spin him. His bravado is gone. He is white in the dead evening. You point the gun at his head. He holds his hands up, as if in a movie.

“Kneel!” You manage to say it without your stutter. He complies. Very good. You move up to him, getting the gun to his forehead. Your other hand fiddles with your fly, almost too slow. You’d wanted to be inside him, but this is almost as good.

He pulls away. You shoot.

His head is like a fountain as he falls back. You let him fall and strip off your coat. That’s why you had worn it. It will cover the blood on your clothes after you are finished.

The killing has not happened as I had hoped, as I had planned. You were supposed to ask him to write his own obituary before he died, so that the editor could become a published author only by writing his final words. I am distressed by your impulsiveness. Still, you do the rest. You drag both bodies away from the road and into a cornfield. Then you take the man’s wallet, and cut off his head and hands. This is hard and messy work, but you’ve done it before. You used to do it because you heard it kept the body from being identified. Of course, in such a small town, it’ll take only days instead of weeks to do a head count and figure out who’s missing, but the amputations are now part of your fantasies. You’ll carry the head and hands home inside plastic and burlap.

These arrangements also happen to serve my ends. The man’s head and hands were what he worked with as an editor, and his work was always separated from his heart, which makes this death somehow fitting. Also, he lived a life of quiet desperation and inner anguish, so a death of overt anguish and loud desperation is also ironically satisfying.

I could have done better and may even return to the event to make certain you get the obituary written, but there have been serial killer victims who have done much worse than this one.

I will be glad the day I get to kill you, Keith McFarland.

Burlington, Wisconsin had not had a murder in five years when the headless, handless body was discovered. Despite spitting sleet, the nighttime cornfield was crowded. Detective McHenry, Investigator Leland, Sergeant Banks, Medical Examiner Schmitt, the volunteer fire department, half the staff of the Gazette, a few dozen farmers, and a handful of police scanner jockeys stood in the carnival glare of the three dispatched squads.

The body had first been found by Daryl Jamison’s dogs, which had gnawed on it awhile before returning to their owner. Jamison, spooked by the sight of dogs with bloody muzzles, had gotten his brother Carl to go with him. Shotguns in hand, they had walked the fields. They’d followed the dogs’ tracks and found the body soon enough. Daryl claimed he had checked for the man’s wallet and, not finding it or any identification, gone straight away to call the police. The crime scene, though, looked as though Daryl and Carl had held a barn dance around the body, boot prints crushing every bit of soil for a twenty-foot radius. The old farmer had paced around the body, trying in vain to obliterate the tracks of his two unlicensed dogs. It hadn’t mattered. The dogs got loose while he was on the phone and were down chewing on the body when Detective McHenry arrived. To prevent further damage to the crime scene, the detective ordered nearly a quarter mile of road and farm field cordoned off.

Investigator Donna Leland volunteered to set up the roadblock and string the police line. She had seen enough of the ghastly scene. Just now, she wielded her ten pound sledge to drive the last rebar rod into the partly frozen field, and then let the muddy mallet rest in a black furrow.

As she tied the police line, someone in the crowd shone a flashlight toward her. She raised a hand before her eyes and blinked. Who’s shining that light? The old maxim was true: murderers often returned to the scenes of their crimes, wanting to relive the excitement of the moment. Some even injected themselves into their own investigations, monitoring the facts and providing false information to lead police astray. What if this is the murderer?

Leland gripped the sledge haft tightly in one hand and gestured with the other. At last, the light darted downward, becoming a short column of gray. She finished tying the yellow plastic ribbon to the last crowbar and hoisted the ten pound sledge to her shoulder. It comforted her to carry that sledge. Whatever demon had done this would think twice about coming after her, what with the sledge and her. 45. At five-foot three, Leland was too short to step over the waist-high tape, so she crouched beneath it, making sure to keep the knees of her blues out of the mud. She straightened and tucked her braid into the collar of her jacket. Cops were supposed to be short shorn, like Dobermans, with nothing to grab in a fight. Cops were also supposed to be men, at least in rural Wisconsin, though men had one extremity that begged grabbing during a fight.

With a nervous sigh, Leland trudged across the avaricious cornfield, toward the crime scene. It was a man’s world, and this was a man’s crime.

The brutality alone made it such: a dog with half its head blown off and a dog walker with grisly stumps where hands and head should be. Even in the dark, before the scene was set up, the vertebrae and severed muscles stood clear. Now, though -

Lights glared down on the body – flashlights moving fitfully in the hands of cops and cop buffs, a couple of spotlights glaring from patrol cars on the road, a kind of miner’s helmet on Francis Schmitt, the county coroner, and even the flashes of the cop photographer. The place looked almost like an operating room instead of a lonely stretch of cornfield.

Leland approached, gut turning even as her eyes grew wider, taking in every detail.

The victim had been big, probably two-hundredtwenty pounds. He wore a pair of canvas pants, a T-shirt, and no jacket, though the last day that had been warm enough for such clothes was November 29, five days ago. A leash was found attached to the collar of the dead dog, and bits of tar were stuck to the dog’s pads. Despite the boot prints of the Jamison brothers, the ditch and trees between the road and the body showed no signs that the man had been dragged, nor did his heels or clothes contain any ground-in mud. It was quite clear that this was no mere dumpsite, but also the scene of the murder.

“Mother of God.”

She was close enough now to see the dog-gnawed leg of the man, and the neck and wrist stumps. Francis was leaning beside the body and checking beneath the shirt hem. Despite what must have been massive blood loss from the severed limbs, there had been enough left in the body to create a brown line of lividity on the man’s back. Another flash went off. Leland turned away, seeing spots. Someone yelled. There was a scuffle. Her hand fell immediately to her gun before she made out what was happening.

Sergeant Banks was wrestling someone – the Burlington Gazette photographer-reporter, Blake Gaines. All she could see was the patrolman’s steel-wool hair and his muscular bulk straining against a scarecrowthin man.