Spiral Read Free Page B

blood. If the death had been the result of the nail, the mess it would have caused had been left somewhere else, and the man's face meticulously cleaned.
The crime-lab technicians and medical examiner's investigator arrived at the same time, and the uniformed officers moved the crowd back even farther as the vans rolled up. The police photographer was the first to step over the tape and approach Haydon.
He glanced at the body, turned to Haydon to say something as he reached into his camera case, and then jerked his head around to the body again.
"God Almighty," he said. "What is this!”
"There's an ant tied to the string," Haydon said. He didn't know this photographer. "You'll see it when you get closer. It's up near his hairline. I want sharp close-ups."
Mooney sauntered over to speak to the coroner's investigator, an older man and a former homicide detective himself. Together they started measuring the scene as Mooney sketched the layout on the back of an envelope he had gotten off the dashboard of the car.
Haydon moved over nearer the high wall and looked at the caliche, the gates, and the driveway. The paving stones where the driveway began again inside the wall were buckled and tufts of dead grass the color of dried corn husks grew through the cracks. The drive made an immediate turn to the left about fifty feet beyond the gates, and disappeared around a corner of scorched brush and weeds. Haydon stepped to the gates, picked up a small caliche clod, and threw it into the weeds. He could hear the grasshoppers popping against the parched undergrowth. The keening insects drowned out the sounds of the city.
Backing against the wall in the narrow border of what was left of the morning shadow, Haydon faced the sunlight as he took a pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses out of his jacket pocket and put them on. While the photographer and then the coroner's investigator did their work, he looked across at the crowd.
There were three or four high school kids in the tribal dress of their particular barrio. One, a girl with a single yellow dangling earring, kept her hand over her mouth and her head turned half away from the ugly scene as though she could not bear to watch it, though her eyes never left the body as Finn did what he had to do to take the corpse's temperature. A few middle-aged women hugged themselves and talked quietly in a little wad off to one side. A redheaded delivery man whose uniform name patch said "Red" and whose bread van was parked down the block in front of Montoya's grocery popped his gum and alternated his attention between the dead Mexican and the perky nipples under the thin tank top of the girl with the yellow earring. There were a couple of older men who appeared to be regulars from La Perla bar across the street, and a barber wearing a white short-sleeved nylon smock and a cigarette tucked behind his ear.
There were four or five others, but none of them caught Hay-don's attention as individuals. They were merely "crowd," the back of a head, a blank face, a quarter profile.
When they were through, Mooney and the coroner's investigator started toward Haydon. Finn, whom everyone but Haydon called Jimbo, was probably fifteen years older than Mooney, and was his physical opposite. Tall and thin, he seemed prematurely bent with age. His octagonal rimless glasses had sunk deep into the sides of his nose, and he always had one or two white patches on his face where he had had skin cancers burned off.
"You got a nice one here, Stuart," Finn said.
"It looks like it," Haydon said. He guessed from the fidgety way Finn was pulling back his lips and repeatedly clenching his even white teeth that he was breaking in a new set of dentures. "Are you through with him?" he asked.
"All I'm gonna do."
"Then let's take a look."
The three men stepped over to the body and squatted down. Haydon leaned over and sniffed at the dead man's mouth, then turned his attention to the feet. The guy hadn't been particular about how he