“I gave up on the damn birds,” he muttered. “She’s already dead. How much worse can it be?”
“That’s all right,” I said. “I think I’ll go have a look anyway.”
“Suit yourself,” Mac said with a shrug. “Some people are dogs for punishment.”
We had worked together long enough that he knew I wanted a cigarette, but we were both kind enough not to mention it. I waited until I was far enough down the hill to be out of sight before I lit up. I figured out of sight is out of mind and damn the smoke smell later.
Still, smoking was what I was doing when my eyes were inevitably drawn to the body. People passing car wrecks on the highway aren’t the only people guilty of rubbernecking. Cops do it, too, and at that time in my career I was enough of a newbie that seeing dead bodies was anything but routine.
I found myself staring at the dead woman—what I could see of her, at least. She lay sprawled facedown on the weedy hillside, half in and half out of the barrel. A tangle of what looked like shoulder-length blond hair spilled out over the ground. A moment later, something red caught my eye, sticking out through the layer of greasy slurry. At first I thought what I was seeing was blood spatter, but that wasn’t possible. Clearly the woman had been dead for some time. Once blood is exposed to the air, it oxidizes and goes from red to muddy brown. This was definitely red. Bright red. Scarlet. Inhaling a lungful of smoke, I moved a step or two closer to get a better look.
What I was seeing, of course, was nothing but tiny little patches of bright red nail polish glowing in the sunlight. And that was the single detail that stayed with me from that crime scene—the nail polish. Wanting to look pretty for someone, the victim had gone to the trouble of having a manicure, or else she had given herself one. Had she been going to a dance or a party, maybe? Had she been out on the town for a night of fun?
Whatever it was, when she’d done her nails, she hadn’t expected to be dead soon, or that the vivid red nail polish would be the only thing she’d be wearing when someone found her body.
“Jonas! Jonas. You really do need to wake up now.”
That’s my name—Jonas Piedmont Beaumont—but other than my mother and grandmother, both deceased now, almost no one calls me that—at least no one who actually knows me. I’m J.P., or Beau, or sweetie pie, or Mr. B. as far as Mel is concerned. I’m Dad for my kids and Grandpa for the grandkids. As a consequence, I wasn’t exactly eager to wake up and see who was yelling Jonas somewhere near my left ear.
When I opened my eyes, I saw that the person behind the very loud voice was short and very stout. I was no longer at the base of Magnolia Bluff, dealing with a dead body and a crime scene. Instead, I was in a brightly lit hospital room with someone shaking my shoulder insistently.
“There you are!”
I was momentarily confused, but the woman, another nurse in scrubs, soon set me straight.
“This is called the recovery room,” she announced with a smile. “No more sleeping. I brought you some beef broth. Would you like to try it?” She handed me a paper cup filled with steaming liquid, but my nose was still full of the smell of death. My gag reflex cut in, and I almost barfed.
“Oops,” the nurse said, taking back the cup. “Looks like it’s too soon for that, then. We’ll try the broth a little later.”
Somewhere along the way I must have fallen asleep again. It was hard to differentiate how much was dream and how much was memory, although I didn’t remember any other time when I’d had a dream that came complete with smells. I lay there for a time. While the room bustled around me, I struggled to put the pieces together. I understood that the girl who had appeared to me earlier, the one with the bright red fingernail polish, was Monica Wellington—the Girl in the Barrel—although at the time, the dead girl was a body without a name.
From my hospital bed in 2010, that case from 1973 seemed to be a very long time ago, but all of it was filed away in my memory bank. On that Sunday afternoon, it wasn’t my case right then because at the time I had been assigned to Patrol rather than Homicide.
I remembered that I had turned away from the body and stubbed out my half-finished smoke, then pocketed what was left and gone back to the patrol car, where Mac and the two boys were awaiting the arrival of reinforcements. Surprisingly enough, Dr. Howard Baker, King County’s newly appointed medical examiner, beat everyone else to the scene.
Even then, Doc Baker arrived at crime scenes reeking of cigar smoke and with a rumpled look that resembled an unmade bed. He always favored gaudy ties and tweedy jackets that never quite buttoned around his ample middle. In later years his hair would go completely white, but back then it was rapidly going from brown to gunmetal gray, and he wore it in a scraggly crew cut. Whole new generations of weather guys have to use hair gel to achieve that kind of spiky look. Doc Baker came by his naturally.
“What have we got?” he asked.
Mac stepped out of the driver’s seat to do the honors. “Down there,” he said, pointing. “That’s where the body is—in that barrel down there. These two kids claim they found the barrel farther up the hill and rolled it down to where it is now.”
Before Doc Baker could do anything other than look, Detectives Larry Powell and Watty Watkins showed up. Watty was ten years my senior. He’d been a detective for five years, but his knees were giving out, and he was angling for a desk job. Powell was ambitious. Everybody had him pegged for being on a fast track for assistant chief, but right then they were still equals, and they’d been partners for as long as I had been on the force.
Once Mac had briefed the new arrivals on the situation, Detective Powell took charge. He looked into the car where Donnie and Frankie were still waiting. “Can you show us where you found the barrel?”
Donnie or Frankie nodded. “Okay, then,” Powell said, looking down the steep hillside to the spot where the barrel had come to rest. “Mac, you and Watty take the boys up onto the bluff to show you what’s presumably the crime scene. I want you to locate it, and that’s all. We’ll need to process the scene, and I don’t want it disturbed by a bunch of people tramping around in it. After that, Watty can take the boys’ statements and then drop them off at home. In the meantime, Officer Beaumont, you’re with me.”
Powell probably picked the Beaumont part off my name badge. Even so, I was still new enough on the job that I was gratified to think one of the Homicide guys knew me by name. As soon as Mac and Watty drove off and we started down the hill, Powell clarified the situation and put me in my place.
“Watty’s knees are giving him hell,” he muttered. “Climbing up and down something this steep would kill him.”
At the time, the idea of my ever having bad knees myself was inconceivable, but if Watty’s failing joints gave me a chance to work with Larry Powell, one of Homicide’s hotshots, who was I to complain? After all, that was where I hoped I’d be going eventually—to Homicide. When it came time to make the move, having someone like Powell in my corner wouldn’t hurt a bit.
So I trotted down the hillside after him, determined to make myself useful. Minutes earlier the circling flock of crows had been the only visible scavengers at the scene. That had changed. The crows were now duking it out with an equally noisy flock of seagulls, but the flies had turned up as well. Somewhere in the fly world, the dinner bell had rung, and the troops had arrived en masse for the promised feast. A black cloud of them had appeared from out of nowhere. They swarmed around the barrel and its spilled contents.
With his evil-smelling stogie gripped between his teeth, Doc Baker waded into the mess to do his preliminary assessment. Once Powell and I came to a standstill behind him, I reached for my half-smoked cigarette.