The More They Disappear Read Free Page B

The crowd scattered. Some ran for water, others the woods. Most ran in circles to nowhere particular. Harlan dropped to the ground and watched Lew’s legs jangle until his massive belly—a mound rising from the cracked clay of a dry October—stilled. Lewis Mattock slumped back on his knees, a look of horror across his face. Time must have passed. When Trip Gaines, a local doctor, checked for a pulse and shook his head, Lewis wrapped one burly arm around his wife and the other around his twin daughters before shouldering them into the safety of Josephine Entwhistle’s house. Dr. Gaines laid his suit jacket over Lew’s wounded face. The smell of burnt flesh hung in the air.
    The crowd waited for someone to give the all clear, and even though no more bullets rained down, Harlan lay on the ground a long while before getting to his feet and asking people to please seek shelter inside the house and stay there until told otherwise. Most rubbernecked glances at Lew’s body as they passed. A couple retched. More than a few sobbed in fits and starts. Two other deputies, Del Parker and Frank Pryor, joined Harlan around the body. Blood had begun to pool through the weave of the doctor’s jacket, which Harlan lifted. Lew’s right eye was gone and his face had become a pulp of meat and bone and yellow flesh. The earth swallowed what blood coursed from the hollow in his skull. Harlan dropped the jacket back in place and started giving orders. He did his best to sound confident, but it had been years since he’d asked the deputies to do anything other than what Lew told him to pass along. He had Del radio Paige Lucas, the rookie out patrolling roads, and tell her to stop any suspicious vehicles. After that Del was to get the neighboring county’s dogs and search for evidence. This left Harlan with Frank, an overweight deputy with a ruddy face and a chip on his shoulder. “Head inside and get the contact information of everyone here. See if anyone noticed something unusual.” Frank shrugged before spitting on the ground and joining the crowd as they herded themselves into Josephine’s.
    Harlan marked off the area around Lew with caution tape and radioed Holly from the sheriff’s cruiser, explained to her what had happened, and asked her to send someone out from the state police, the crime lab in Frankfort, and the coroner’s office. Then he pulled out a textbook on criminal investigations from the toolbox of his truck. He hadn’t worked but a couple of murders, and Lew had always been there to guide him. The textbook was left over from a correspondence course he’d taken years before, and the mere fact that he kept it made him the best deputy in an otherwise apathetic department. He flipped to the chapter on murder investigations, found the gunshot section, and started making checkmarks as he completed each step. He started by removing the blazer from Lew’s face and snapping photographs with a point-and-click. Then he drew badly scaled sketches of the scene with a shaky hand and redrew them to keep from examining Lew up close. He wrote his account of the murder, trying to recall the details. He waited for help.
    The witnesses came out of Josephine’s one by one, hurried to their cars, and sped away, as if putting distance between themselves and Lew’s corpse would help them forget. But it wouldn’t. They would talk about it at dinner and dream about it at night and even people who hadn’t been there would claim to be haunted by the sight of Lew Mattock’s dead body.
    Harlan stared at Lew as if he might provide some guidance, and when a burly hand touched down on his shoulder, he jumped. “Jesus,” Frank said. “Relax.”
    â€œWhat are you doing?”
    Frank pinched a load of snuff and showed his bean teeth. “I’m finished.”
    â€œAlready?”
    Frank tapped his notebook. “I talked to every last person.” A