Still Life With Crows Read Free

the earth, their cruel-looking ends pointing upward. At the precise middle of the clearing stood a circle of dead crows spitted on stakes. Only they weren’t stakes but Indian arrows, each topped by a flaked point. There were at least a couple dozen of the birds, maybe more, their vacant eyes staring, yellow beaks pointing inward.
    And in the center of this circle of crows lay the corpse of a woman.
    At least Sheriff Hazen thought it was a woman: her lips, nose, and ears were missing.
    The corpse lay on its back, its mouth wide open, looking like the entrance to a pink cave. It had bleached-blonde hair, a clump of it ripped away and missing; the clothes had been shredded in countless small, neat, parallel lines. There was no sense of disorder. The relationship between the head and the shoulders looked wrong: Hazen thought her neck was probably broken. But there was no bruising on the neck indicating strangulation. If it had been broken, the act had been done by a single hard twist.
    The killing, Hazen concluded, had taken place elsewhere. He could see marks in the earth going back not quite to the edge of the clearing, indicating the body had been dragged; extrapolating the line, he saw a gap in the corn rows where a stalk had been broken off. The troopers hadn’t seen it. In fact, some of the marks were being obscured by the comings and goings of the Staties themselves. He turned toward the captain to point this out. Then he stopped himself. What was wrong with him? This was not his case. Not his responsibility. When the shit hit, the fan would be blowing in someone else’s direction. The minute he opened his mouth the wind would shift his way. If he said, “Captain, you’ve destroyed evidence,” on the witness stand two months from now he’d be forced to repeat it to some asshole of a defense lawyer. Because whatever he said now would come up at the trial of the maniac who did this. And there would be a trial. A guy this crazy couldn’t get away with it for long.
    He inhaled a lungful of acrid smoke. Keep it zipped. Let them make the mistakes. It’s not your case.
    He dropped the butt, ground it beneath one foot. Yet another car was now bumping carefully along the access road, its headlights stabbing up and down through the corn. It came to a stop in the makeshift lot and a man in white got out, carrying a black bag. McHyde, the M.E.
    Sheriff Hazen watched as the man gingerly picked his way among the dry clods, not wanting to soil his wingtips. He spoke to the captain and then went over to the body. He stared at it for a moment from this angle and that, then knelt and carefully tied plastic bags around the hands and feet of the victim. Then he drew some kind of device out of his black bag—it was called an anal probe, Sheriff Hazen remembered abruptly. And now the M.E. was doing something intimate to the corpse. Measuring its temperature. Jesus. Now there was a job for you.
    Sheriff Hazen glanced up into the dark sky, but the turkey vultures were long gone. They, at least, knew when to leave well enough alone.
    The M.E. and the paramedics now began packing up the corpse for removal. A Statie was pulling up the arrows with the crows, labeling them, and packing them into refrigerated evidence lockers. And Sheriff Hazen realized he had to take a leak. All that damn coffee. But it wasn’t just that; acid was starting to boil up from his stomach. He hoped to hell his ulcer wasn’t coming back. He sure didn’t want to toss his cookies in front of these characters.
    He glanced around, made sure he was not being noticed, and slipped into the dark corn. He walked down a row, inhaling deeply, trying to get far enough away that his own piss wouldn’t be found and marked as evidence. He wouldn’t have to go far; these Staties were not showing much curiosity about anything beyond the immediate crime scene.
    He stopped just outside the circle of lights. Here, buried in the sea of corn, the murmur of the voices, the faint