Wages of Sin Read Free

flashlight rudely pointed out the evidence and her body cast a haunting shadow on the corpse.
     
     
    Nielsen left his children with Brewster. Register still had his frightened child with him.
    The officers listened carefully as Register quietly spoke. “I saw what I thought was hair on the legs, toenails on the feet, and underwear.” He talked about the missing hands, the missing head, the charred black body with the pale white legs. “No,” he said, “I didn’t touch anything.” Neither, he said, did Ranger Brewster.
     
     
    Mancias approached the dead body. He studied its burned maroon briefs and noticed a burned T-shirt with the word “cowboy” printed across the front. There were other letters, but they were burned away.
    A four-to-six-inch piece of blackened firewood rested like a necklace in the neck or chin area—or what should have been the neck and chin area. Like the face and skull, both were missing.
    The burned right arm bent inward at the elbow toward the body. Underneath that arm, another piece of burned firewood rested against the right rib area.
    Mancias glanced to the side of the fire ring. A piece of unburned firewood, still in its plastic store-wrapping, lay just four feet away.
    The left upraised arm, which seemed to call for help, propped itself against the metal ring of the firepit. Mancias stared harder at that left arm. There were serrated cuts on its exposed bone; ligature marks appeared around the wrist area. The lack of blood indicated that the mutilation had probably occurred after the young man was dead.
    The detective’s gaze traveled back to the stomach, which was scorched, possibly from the burning shirt, and discolored, definitely by the flames.
    He again studied the underwear. Around the left genital area and right hip, the briefs were partially burned into tatters. Around the left hip, they were burned to nonexistence.
    But not a hair on the legs was burned. There was a one-inch bruise on the right leg. There appeared to be transferred blood on the left leg, but no burns. The bare feet were clean—even the soles were spotless. The toenails were perfectly clipped.
    Mancias stared at the buttocks, which rested on the large flat rock. The rock elevated the hips three or four inches above the torso, almost like the body had tried to lift itself above the fire and away from the flames. The burn marks streaked from the torso to the pelvis.
    Mancias stood and looked around the body. There was string near the right leg. Dribbles of bright blue plastic, almost like Mardi Gras beads, lay on the rock beneath the body and in the dirt beneath the left leg.
     
     
    Gage discovered a white comforter and a black, blue, and gray sleeping bag in a fifty-five-gallon trash barrel close to another picnic table, a trash barrel next to an oak tree and sixty feet from the body. Blood soaked both the comforter and sleeping bag. The amount of blood stunned Gage.
    The comforter, sleeping bag, and trash barrel were bagged for evidence by Hill.
     
     
    The media were about to swarm like fire ants in heat, and Park Ranger Michael Brewster was ordered to protect the entrance to the cove from the press, while still watching Nielsen’s children.
    He loaded the kids into Nielsen’s vehicle, drove to the entrance of Kate’s and Johnson’s coves, and blocked the entrance with the vehicle. One moment he fielded excited questions from the kids. The next moment he fielded excited questions from the media. To all, he tried to give vague answers. The kids were less persistent than the media.
    “Look, sometimes you see a sight like that and you just need someone to talk to,” said reporter after reporter. “If you want to get it off your chest, I promise, we’ll keep the cameras off and I won’t be taking notes. You’ll have someone to talk to.”
    Brewster declined.
     
     
    The sounds of night filled the winter air—raccoons roaming, owls calling, the occasional collision of tires spinning in hard dirt.