Prime Witness Read Free

County Board of Supervisors now wanted to ease him from his position as the elected district attorney of Davenport County. These were people for whom opportunity knew no bounds, no sense of propriety. For my part, saying no to Mario was not in the cards. When he came to my office, he was still the kid I remembered from sand-lot ball and summer raft trips on the river. Mario had deep-set wild eyes, two large olives floating on egg whites and a countenance that seemed, even with its impending medical problems, still filled with hell. When he asked me to take a temporary assignment as special county prosecutor—just to fill in, a few months, no more, until he was out of the hospital, back on his feet—I could not say no. I now live with the consequences.
    I turn away from the bodies on the ground.
    Thirty feet away there’s a man, a face like weathered leather, the most prominent features of which are a slender arching nose and forehead furrowed deep as crevasses. He is spry and slight of build. It is this man who has called me here.
    Soaking wet, Claude Dusalt weighs perhaps 140 pounds. Of Basque ancestry, the son of a migrant sheep herder, Claude chased wandering lambs through these hills for his father as a child. For the last thirty years he has trudged the same ground for the county of Davenport, the sheriff’s chief of detectives.
    As I watch, he speaks in hushed tones to a cadre of cops, a small group now gleaning their instructions for the widening investigation. One of Claude’s assistants is dispensing a few things to this gathering, little Baggies and some clear plastic vials. These cops who are not schooled in processing the scene will gather the common elements found in the surrounding area, seed pods and other plant materials that might attach to clothing, soil samples and humus from the ground. If they are lucky, they might later find a match to these elements on a suspect’s clothing.
    Claude sees me, but makes no move in my direction, nodding instead to acknowledge my presence. A study in animation, he is busy again, this time ushering one of his cops with a video camera toward the yellow taped area and the bodies.
    With his hands Claude is motioning for specific camera angles, closeups, I think, of the bodies, articles of clothing laid out in a neat pattern by the head of each victim, pants and shirt folded as if freshly laundered, like some doting mother might lay them out for a child. Then the bizarre. Over the woman’s head the killer has stretched her panties, waistband down around her chin and neck, obscuring her face. Through the leg holes and under the crotch-band which is stretched tight over the crown of her head, he has threaded her brassiere, each cup protruding through a separate leg hole, like some grotesque set of mouse ears.
    I stand there frozen in time, thinking back to how I got into this, to my visit ten days ago with Mario in the hospital. His breathing was labored. “You won’t have to prosecute,” he assured me. “Just hold their hands during the investigation. Bless the warrants, any searches. I’ve talked to the judges,” he said. “They’re all on board.”
    He told me that he was on the mend. According to Mario he would be back in the office in ninety days, plenty of time to prep for a trial if it came to that.
    I wondered whose pipe Mario had been smoking. He looked like death heated in a microwave. Only three days out from under the surgeon’s knife, a triple bypass that had drawn every ounce of animation from his body left him pale, a gray-green ghost against the white hospital sheets.
    A thin, clear plastic tube framed his face and tousled hair, like the earplugs from a Walkman, but in this case these carried only the muted sound of forced oxygen emitted from little twin nipples, one seated firmly under each nostril. Through this I watched as a procession of bloody little bubbles inched their way from his body to the bottle, like some fluid hourglass reminding me